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Comment by 8organicbits | Hacker News Reader

There's a conflict between Bitcoin as a public ledger, privacy, and money laundering.

With a bank you can have anti-money laundering and bank secrecy. Transaction are known by the bank, can be subject to subpoena or automatic reporting, but are non-public.

If you want privacy on Bitcoin you need to do things that look a lot like money laundering. Governments banning money laundering isn't a surprise. The value of Bitcoin, if transactions are fully public and attributable to pseudonyms, is questionable.

In some ways, the problem Bitcoin has is that it is inflexible. Governments want to change the rules in finance from time to time, traditional finance adapts.

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> There's a conflict between Bitcoin as a public ledger, privacy, and money laundering

There is, to be fair, a legitimate debate to be had about dismantling our anti-money laundering infrastructure.

No, there really isn't. Money laundering has been a huge problem enabling all sorts of crimes and issues. There is no debate to be had on the benefits of prohibiting it, and you have to be very deep in the Silicon Valley rabbit hole to think even 5% of the population of any nation would support doing away with those rules.

> there really isn't. Money laundering has been a huge problem enabling all sorts of crimes and issues

To be clear, I think there should be limits. I also think a lot of AML is theatrical.

Where it’s not is where large volumes can be moved. Less emphasis on cash. More on offshore accounts, tumblers and high-volume wallets.

Except that money laundering is allowable for some, but not all.

Don't pretend the AML rules are enforced fairly and evenly.

Again: something being imperfect doesn't make it bad. Fix the imperfect enforcement, don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Essentially decentralisation sounds nice, but doesnt work in practice.

Bitcoin, tor, bittorrent are all perfect examples of decentralization simply not working in practice

I can't tell if you are being sarcastic. Obviously Bitcoin doesn't "work" for any purpose. But in contrast, Tor obviously works. Here are constantly updating HTTP response dumps from the Tor hidden service ecosystem: https://rnsaffn.com/zg4/ (NSFW) There is a lot happening inside the Tor network.

It's been terrible that BitTorrent doesn't work anymore. I can only download 10TB of all the movies and TV shows our family has ever wanted spanning 60 years. It has to run off this massive server in the closest as big as our cat! Sucks our grandma can't access it from across the country via Tailscale and a bit of DNS abuse.

Most governments aren't decentralized in their structure, which causes the "problem". If you have private entities that coordinate with each other it works quite well, but the world is very used to big centralized governments that "solve" all their problems.

And, so what? You've posted a whole load of nothing.

It's a pretty direct response to your claim that "decentralisation sounds nice, but doesn't work in practice". Decentralization has worked in practice many times in many ways.

Also, you can have reputability AND decentralization, that's actually a fundamental component of how any Blockchain system works. When you mine a block you sign it to ensure nobody else can resubmit your work and take credit.

Did you hear about the Internet?

The internet for the average person has converged to a handful of products and services.

Your point being?

People prefer centralised stuff since it takes care a lot of stuff for them. They dont actually care all that much about technology that yield decentralised outcomes. I know that may be difficult for many here to comperehend.

People prefer centralized services until they enshittify, after which people move to the next thing, thanks to the decentralization.

Google, Meta and so on are not dying.

So whats your point fella?

It might be slow for the megacorps, which don't even try to follow laws, but

> Google

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719

> Meta

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30186326

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44210689

> Apple

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11034071

And

Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA (ostechnix.com)

1021 points by marcodiego 58 days ago | 620 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44580682

> people move to the next thing, thanks to the decentralization

This does not quite follow. Care to explain more? What I observe in practice is that people move from one centralized service to the next centralized service (e.g., X->BlueSky) but rarely from centralized to decentralized.

Most services aren't decentralized, but the Internet itself is decentralized, which allows to set up these independent services that can compete with each other.

Crime is pretty heavily regulated on the Internet, has been for years. If that regulation had been impossible, it would not have been allowed to grow, and would have been shut down / banned.

You should check out I2P.

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