Re:Publication of Cryptocurrency Enforcement Framework
by lxdesk on Thursday October 08, 2020 @04:25PM
(#24723526)
It's a fantasy to think that authoritarian governments actually succeed at this. Every one of them ends up with an underground market despite tremendous repression. Even literal prisons have one. At best, such governments have flare-ups of the condition where they murder in great numbers for a time to send everyone into terror, but in time they tire of it and calm down. The market pops right back up like a weed.
The analogy you should be looking at is the printing press, because it broadened the scope of such markets; what a person of higher literacy communicates is illegible to the lower. And such is true of a system of account that renders a larger scope of transactions illegible. The possession of great wealth itself is a concept that assumes a top-down vision of value; the phenomenon of being robbed for cryptocurrency is mostly reflective of the new being imitative of the old. But if they're all tokens, and anyone can make them - well, then, that means we increasingly don't have a man at the top. If the scrip you pay your police doesn't buy them anything at the market, they aren't going to be very motivated to take out fingernails for you.
One man, can tell the KGB, to extract fingernails until the money moves or is no longer capable of moving.
> There is no state, as yet, that can wield unlimited violence throughout the same scope as the uncensored internet.
So a sufficiently motivated state censors the internet. EZPZ. Half the world's already doing it.
Your problem isn't the money, your problem is a tyrannical government. It can and will do whatever it takes, and by virtue of being a large group of people vs. you and your, well, fingernails, no amount of math is going to resolve this situation in your favor. The only thing you can actually do to improve your situation is topple the government. And once you do that, you don't need crypto, do you?