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Comment by mpyne | Hacker News Reader

The key point is "claimed power over". Had those currencies become significant and used in interstate commerce the government may well have started enforcing their power to regulate it.

Any medium of exchange can theoretically be used as currency (e.g. cartons of cigarettes in prison, or cans of chewing tobacco on a submerged submarine on its third month of patrol).

Whether the government pays attention to it or not will depend on whether that type of currency starts to act as coinage or as a medium of interstate commerce, but just because the government doesn't deign to notice cowrie shells being used for trade doesn't mean they don't have the power to regulate it.

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> Had those currencies become significant and used in interstate commerce

They were. The government's reaction to the popularity of the Bechtler coins was to open two mints in North Carolina, not to "regulate" Bechtler's coins.

Which was still the government's choice. I chose a turkey flatbread sub at Subway yesterday. I might still choose meatball should I go next week.

I shouldn't need to to explain this to you, but there's a vast difference between what you choose for lunch and how a government exercises arbitrary power.

The point, I believe, is that the argument that the government has no legitimate power to regulate (non-government-issued-currency X) because in the past it chose not to regulate (non-government-issued-currency Y) in the same manner, despite several express Constitutional grants of power that speak to relevant powers of government is, well, completely bunk.

The government does not lose enumerated powers, or the ability to apply them in a particular manner, because it chose not to apply them in that manner at one time in the past in a similar circumstance.

You can, of course, make the argument that, power aside, the government should not use its enumerated powers in the way in question and should instead act as it did in the past case, but that takes more than waving your hand in the direction of the past case and asserting that it exists and therefore the restraint the government exercised then must be repeated, it takes actually making the case that that decision would be correct in the present circumstances.

Once government claims and exercises powers, be they legitimate or not, it's pretty much impossible to get government to scale back. History is a good guide as to the eventual fate of governments and nations that allow arbritary power to expand without limits.

Generation to generation, the natural tendency of a relative minority is to seek and maintain influence over the many. This is reflected in the continued advance of the power of the State over the rights and liberties of its citizens. Unlike our own political vocabulary, The Greeks had terms for this particular dynamic: hoi polloi and hoi oligoi.

> You can, of course, make the argument that, power aside, the government should not use its enumerated powers in the way in question and should instead act as it did in the past case

My larger argument is more fundamental. If power is asserted over rights often enough, there will be few, if any, actual rights left.

> My larger argument is more fundamental. If power is asserted over rights often enough, there will be few, if any, actual rights left.

Perhaps. But in this case you're not speaking of any actual 'right' that people had in the first place, so there's no right that would be eroded by SEC action here.

To be honest, I find it hard to take your opinion seriously after you equated your choices for lunch with the exercise of government power.

Why? dragonwriter managed to immediately pick up on what I meant. Would my opinion have been more plausible if I used 13-letter words and quoted Steinbeck instead?

If that "larger argument" is your point, how does it relate to the present issue specifically? How is he ruling here -- that bitcoin is "money" as that term is relevant to the Exchange Act of 1934 and thus sales of investments for bitcoins are subject to the Act, an "assertion of power" that erodes rights?

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