You don't think cryptocurrency is a social solution?

To your implication- what's legal and what's right are orthogonal concerns. Individuals decide which to follow based on their own principles.

No, it’s a technological problem. The social solution is to make what you’re trying to do legal. And yeah you’re free to do whatever you want so long as you’re willing to pay the consequences such as fines and jail time.

Writing code collaboratively and convincing thousands of people to run nodes replicating your slow database is a social act -- I'd even call it a political act.

Not sure why you think technology is outside the context of our society. This stuff isn't built by elves.

I mean sure, to an extent everything involves society. However, what I'm suggesting is that instead of tackling the problem at hand (that you want drugs to be legal) you're suggesting creating tools that make funding anything impossible to stop.

You're not solving the actual problem by going out and convincing society you're right (and you are, the Portuguese model shows that full decriminalization and even legalization lead to much better outcomes and no material increase in usage).

You're convincing people to deploy magic bean producing power wasters that just happen to let you buy drugs. It doesn't help mitigate or undo the harm foisted upon the millions in US prisons who got there because they wanted drugs. It doesn't help bring about the downfall of the cartels. If anything, it props those things up.

> Writing code collaboratively and convincing thousands of people to run nodes replicating your slow database is a social act -- I'd even call it a political act.

Yes, in and of itself it is.

The social act is deploying a slow database, which in turn provides technological workarounds to the actual social issues (like drug policy) that should be tackled head-on.

So then should we forget about easily accessible encryption, since it's a social problem if your government spies on your data and not a technological one? That's not a very "defense in depth" approach.

Our democracy is purposely designed to allow such checks and balances through mechanisms like the fifth amendment. It is an important part of what makes our democracy strong and prevents lawmakers from throwing people in prison at their whim.

Cryptography is a tool that enables applications. Cryptocurrency is an application of cryptography.

While I don't believe this myself, I could see a logically consistent case for supporting the development of ciphers and banning something like TrueCrypt. It's not about the technology, it's about how you choose to use it.