Hacker News Reader

Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

Talk about bad press for Bitcoin. Silk Road is probably the number one reason regular Joe's would ever hear them mentioned.

View on HN

To be realistic though, bitcoin is mostly used for gambling and drugs. Depending on your philosophy, the freedom it enables is far more important than what it's used for.

You pose an interesting philosophical quandary. If the freedom it enables is simply the freedom to gamble illegally and trade illicit goods, is that important...?

Do people make the argument that freedom is simply intrinsically good? Or do they argue, like with bittorrent, that the possible occasional positive uses outweigh the more common, primarily negative uses ?

I think the idea is that prohibitions against any value exchange are purely evil or misguided, so they should be routed around.

Wait, what? There are no transactions that should be blocked? Preventing the sale of napalm to a triple-arsonist is evil?

I know I'm being a little extreme, but again- what!?!

Wait, what? There are no transactions that should be blocked?

I'll be a little bit extreme here and agree that there are no voluntary transactions, made between consenting adults, that should be blocked. Any use of force (or threat of force) to try and achieve some social or political end is evil, IMO. Even if the "end" is a noble one, like preventing arson. It's the act of the arsonist which is evil, and intervening to prevent him/her from torching someone else's property is just self defense, which I would consider acceptable.

But, then again, I'm a radical anarcho-capitalist / voluntaryist, so I'm a bit biased.

How can you be radical if you feel "a bit biased"? I am radical voluntaryist myself because it's the only way to figure out what is right or wrong, what works and what doesn't. Whenever you have coercion, you cannot have study of human choices (that is, economics and ethics). It is as simple as that. If one wants to be coercive and violent - it's their choice, but it is illogical to claim that it's for someone's good. Because the only way to know anything about good is when you put your guns down and apply reason.

Am I being a bit biased with this idea? Can anybody study human choices by not giving them choices?

How can you be radical if you feel "a bit biased"?

I just mean, biased relative to what you might call "the mainstream". Luckily I give about half a shit about what "the mainstream" think.

You use an extreme example as a red herring. There are very few aggressive napalm-obsessive maniacs (outside the military agencies), but there are tons of regular folks who do no harm to anybody, but are constantly threatened by quirks in the laws. Do you know for 100% sure that you have paid all your taxes and filled all the forms correctly and never misspelled or accidentally lied in some gov. paper? So that if someone would want your ass, they would never find anything in your history against you? With such amount of laws, regulations, police abuse and complex expensive judicial system, you can never feel safe. So please don't think that some abstract triple-arsonist is your biggest threat. Your biggest threat is IRS. When your govt wants to kill some arabs, they will force you to pay for that and you cannot unsubscribe. And then you, not the govt will receive terrorist bombings in response.

And while I don't think that taking drugs is a good idea, I don't think paying for fighting them should be compulsory on the part of general population outgunned by the police and brainwashed in public schools.

He was speaking in clear absolutes, so I think an extreme example is a perfectly valid way to open.

Ok, correction: I think ethics is akin to medicine or nutrition. It really helps if you consistently apply it everywhere in order to prevent extreme scenarios. And when they occur, and ethics do not help, it's not a failure of ethics, but your failure to use ethics to avoid situation when someone actually threatens you with a nuke.

To say that general rule "do not use violence" does not work in extreme cases, is like saying that medicine is useless because it cannot make you perfectly healthy when you have a heart attack. But it is useful because it helps you to prevent heart attack in the first place. And if you ignored the knowledge and now having a heart attack, then how can you say that it is useless?

Why would a triple arsonist be walking around free?

If someone sets fire to 3 buildings I expect them to be in prison.

It depends on the people...

I think that the black markets are just the first adopters. After that, bitcoin will enable low-cost payment and payout processing and money transfer automation for everyone in the world. This is a great thing.

Somebody help me out here: Isn't Silk Road also the number one reason Regular Joe would use bitcoin?

Silk Road is a burden. Most serious Boitcoin discussion forums and chat channels will ban you for mentioning it. We're trying to change how cash transactions work, not help teens go to rave parties.

That doesn't mean it's not true though, right?

I mean, help me along with this. Bitcoin is like cash, but you need to use a computer. If I'm already using a computer, there are many reasons I might prefer to use another payment system: Traceability, reversibility, confirmability, et cetera. These are generally very useful features that translate directly into me paying less for stuff.

It seems to me like for most people, the only real advantage to cash is that it is anonymous, and the only reason most people need anonymity is if what they're buying is actually illegal, and for most people that means drugs.

So if I'm an average guy with a job, a mortgage, and a credit card, if I pay my taxes, and stop for pedestrians, and I like to drop acid occasionally, what am I going to use bitcoin for?

Some people don't like having everything they do tracked, just on principle.

Also, drugs aren't the only black market trade.

Sure, but when there's an economic incentive to having things tracked most people put up with it. I'm not saying drugs are the only thing anyone would use bitcoin for, just the most likely thing for the average person to.

I think the cash economy is much larger than people just buying drugs.

Estimates of the size of shadow economies are between 14% and 22% of GDP in the developed world. [1] I'm just guessing that's significantly larger than the drug trade.

I disagree about the privacy issues as well, in some countries in Europe people still remember governments using records to round people up.

[1] http://www.voxeu.org/article/shadow-economies-around-world-m...

chirp chirp

Yeah, I guess I shouldn't expect a huge response to this one :P

The only "good press" Bitcoin could get is if a major government started accepting it for tax payments, which is less likely than Chris Dodd being investigated for bribery.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com