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Comment by narrator | Hacker News Reader

You bitcoin guys think you can push buttons on your computer and code around the system. So naive.

Sorry to be a pessimist, but they can just say anyone transferring bitcoin to another party without going through a KYC compliant intermediary is money laundering and then send the swat team out to whatever ip they can track down via NSA whatever. Game. Set. Match. Banks win as usual, all done. They'll take it down just like Pirate Bay, etc.

Can someone tell me how people think the cryptonerds can win here? I'll be over here munching on my popcorn thank you.

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They'll take it down just like Pirate Bay, etc.

I think you have unintentionally predicted exactly what will happen.

Sure, you're not going to completely squash it but it will then be considered a "dirty" service and only be used for illegal activities. No U.S. business will ever touch it again.

The recent shutdown of Liberty Reserve, another digital currency favored by criminals, shows the extent to which the U.S authorities are willing to go in cases like this. Nowhere on earth is safe if you are running/facilitating a multi-billion dollar money laundering operation.

Unless your a large bank "too big to fail"... Or give any serious punishment to for money laundering.

Are you trolling? The Pirate Bay is doing better than ever.

But it's not a legitimate method of obtaining (a lot of) data. The only legitimate uses I for BT I've used are WOW updates and maybe getting Linux distros.

The Pirate Bay may still be up, but it's a shady corner of the internet.

If businesses can't legitimately use BC, it doesn't matter if I can still do shady things with it.

The world's black market is huge. The world is bigger than just U.S. If Bitcoin is banned from U.S., it won't be stopped anyway. Like war on drugs, war on Bitcoin will only raise its price.

At the same time, every person even in the government or banking sector, would love to keep his earnings and bribes in a secure highly-liquid asset Bitcoin is.

The war on Bitcoin won't be about forbidding usage, but about seizing bitcoins from mortals to rulers. And eventually it will displace fiat currencies and take out a lot of artificial power that is created via money printing. Then this war will be over and people can back to daily peaceful life and work. (Yes, wars will become completely unsustainable due to lack of debt-based funding.)

It's peer to peer, they'd have to take down the internet to stop it.

Bitcoin is only valuable because it can be converted into real tangible goods. If government makes it hard to impossible to convert bitcoins into goods, its value will plummet overnight.

Piratebay isn't down?

>You book guys think you can just push levers on a printing press and write around the Vatican. So naive.

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