What these personal choice fundamentalists forget is that lying is wrong. And when you lie about what you are going to do with someone's money, that's a form of theft, e.g. fraud.
Checks and balances and all that: elect better representatives.
And till now, you had no other option.
But it looks like things are changing with regards to finance.
Because now, it is going to be much more difficult for the government to regulate your financial activities.
The "way things are" is changing, and changing for the better.
Don't like it? Then the government can send in its men with guns and attempt to stop it.
The technology is getting better and better, though. So it will soon become extremely difficult for those men with guns to do anything at all with your untraceable, untraceable, and unstoppable financial activities.
May the best group win. The government will need all the luck it can get.
These restrictions violate people's basic rights and are to the material detriment of society at large. The more of a regulatory burden is placed on an industry, the more dysfunctional, bureaucratic and nepotistic it is.
As for all other rights, those are determined by the government that is democratically voted in. If most people, via their elected representatives, decide that you shouldn't be allowed to speed, or smoke crack, and it's not constitutionally guaranteed, then it's not a basic right and it's not your right at all. Maybe moral right, but that depends on highly subjective morals and might therefore still get you into legal trouble.
Best course of action is probably to find a country with a legal framework that matches your morals. If there's no such country, perhaps the time for these ideas hasn't come and you want to lobby for them to be recognized as basic rights, since right now they're obviously not.
We're intelligent human beings. We should be able to arrive at some kind of consensus on what our moral rights our, through rational discourse. That's what I'm trying to do right now. My argument starts with what "the law" means:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/enforci...
In the commonly used sense of the term, the scope of morals by far exceeds what you'll get even reasonable people to agree upon. "Rational discourse" means that you need enough of an uncontroversial set of base facts that either party is willing to work with. I don't think we have enough of those to derive a single valid system of morals without injecting other, subjective, more controversial opinions in the process.
Say, you have a basic statement such as "All people should be equal", something that most can agree with. By itself, this isn't actionable, and won't determine how to handle a situation unambiguously. You could come up with a libertarian doctrine that all people should be given the same treatment regardless of their background or current situation, or you could come up with a socialist doctrine that disadvantaged people should get extra support to balance out unequal origins and misfortune. Or anything in between. None of these can be rationally discarded, because there's not enough source data to come to any conclusion to begin with. If you attempt to expand the set of source data, you will find many who disagree with you. That's why it's subjective.
That said, trying to distill what basic facts we do have, so that they can be worked with in a constructive fashion, is a commendable goal. Good luck!
Making it illegal to offer a digital token for sale to other consenting adults, without approval from a central authority, is unconscionable.
Before endorsing yet another law that restricts our right to engage in voluntary interactions, consider this: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/enforci...
Or do you also intend to claim that the poor should be allowed to die on the streets as punishment for not being rich?
On that note, it's interesting that the first 'War on Drugs' used taxes on private transactions as its avenue to prohibition. Since the government at the time didn't have the Constitutional authority (this is before the Supreme Court was utterly corrupted by politics) to outright ban drugs, what it did instead is require that all targeted drugs pay a stamp tax, and then simply refuse to issue the stamp. This shows the prohibitive nature of taxes on private transactions.
It's possible to veer off-topic in a substantive way. Some of the more interesting HN comments have been spawned that way.
Whether subsequent comments will be high-quality depends on the topic and the amount of energy thrown into the conversation, but fresh perspectives are good as long as people are introducing them productively.
Threads like this shouldn't be auto-collapsed. One of the main reasons people write quality responses in an off-topic conversation is because it will be seen. Take away the eyeballs and you take away the quality.
It would be better to just link to the argument somewhere else than derailing this one.
Because not everyone agrees with that position.
For what it's worth, I think the majority will fail to produce a profit. That's okay. A high failure rate is fine in an emerging industry. Venture capitalists can easily tolerate 90% failure rates for example.
Every con artist in history has claimed that their mark knew what they were getting into.