The dark hints about how any government may become oppressive is a red herring. The issue isn’t that bitcoin isn’t needed because my government isn’t currently oppressive, it’s that bitcoin’s utility in the face of an oppressive government is wildly exaggerated.

You are attributing magic powers to bitcoins that they do not have. Black markets are not invulnerable to government crackdowns because they are digital. On the contrary, digital networks are in many ways easier to control centrally than distributed underground physical networks.

This especially bad for Bitcoin since unlike cash they’d get your full history and quickly deanonymize everyone you know.

Is it still as easy? Probably not, I'm not up to date. Could people who have done that get in trouble for that in the future (thanks to bitcoins long memory)? possibly, if their opsec wasn't top notch and even if it was top-notch but they were unlucky enough to use a mixer that cooperates with the chinese government.

And Erdogan's turkey is also a great example; While the "coup" was happening, it was possible, even easy, to move money out of the country using bitcoin (not so fiat money). Quite a few people left the country afterwards, and many were arrested regardless of phone app. I don't know how many of them took their wealth with them in bitcoin, but they had much easier time doing that than any other way. at the time

But if you have managed to acquire bitcoin, e.g. before a government crackdown, or some other way through help from people in other countries, it still provides the "cross border value store" function that gold cannot by virtue of being hard to move.

> There’s nothing to stop an oppressive government from preventing its people from buying bitcoin the same as they prevent them from buying pounds and wiring them to British banks.

There's also nothing to stop an oppressive government from killing its people (and some do). But oppressive is not binary, and people have used bitcoin to "smuggle" money out of (at least) Venezuela and China, despite capital controls and government crackdown, in ways that they weren't able to do with british pounds (and which would have been much harder and riskier with physical gold).

> You are attributing magic powers to bitcoins that they do not have. Black markets are not invulnerable to government crackdowns because they are digital. On the contrary, digital networks are in many ways easier to control centrally than distributed underground physical networks.

I am not attributing any magic powers. I am observing the reality as it happens now ; governments crack down on digital networks and black markets but it's much, much harder for them to shut down than bank transfers.

To stop bank transfers, all you need to do these days as a government is click the right button. To take down the Silk Road, the US government took many months and a lot of work; an oppressive regime might have done that more quickly and swiftly, but it would still have taken considerably more effort than shutting down wire transfers. The special feature cryptocurrencies have is ease of carrying across borders .

> The dark hints about how any government may become oppressive is a red herring. The issue isn’t that bitcoin isn’t needed because my government isn’t currently oppressive, it’s that bitcoins utility in the face of an oppressive government is wildly exaggerated.

Oppressive is not binary. Cypriots were (perhaps still are) subjected to very strict capital controls, with no attempt to crackdown on bitcoin.

I am not lamenting the downfall of Silk Road - I think it should have been shut down. I was pointing out that "an oppressive government can do everything" is a weak argument, because we have experience showing the limit and effort needed.

All I am saying that bitcoin has some of the same uses that gold has, albeit in an easier-to-carry-across-border and harder-to-confiscate way -- which was a response to G-G-..-G-P saying "bitcoin has found no use".

Now, "illegal" is a problematic word, because it is a technical definition that changes with time and location. It is now legal to own gold in the US, and it was legal in the 1920's but it was illegal to do so in the 1930s. Gold was confiscated, and (since USD was still denominated in gold at the time), it's value in USD was doubled overnight, or rather, the value of USD in gold was halved overnight.

It is still illegal for an unmarried couple to kiss, perhaps even hold hands in public, in the Saudi Arabia.

The technical legality of owning gold in this case is an interesting discussion, but I am interested in the properties and implications of an un-confiscatable store of value, which in some (limited) ways cryptocurrencies are. It keeps governments in check in a way that fiat currency cannot.

Unless you believe every single government anywhere in the world is, at all times, always "just" and "right" and "good" (for whatever definitions of those adjectives), then it is a good that some "illegal" acts in some places and some times have mitigations. And at this point in time, bitcoin provides these mitigations for the people of venezuela and iran, and has provided them earlier for the people of china.