I see this exact argument -- almost word-for-word -- applied to guns.
I don't presume to know anything about you personally, nor about your political opinions, but I've encountered many west-coast, left-leaning, tech-industry professionals support $TECH on the basis of individual responsibility, whilst simultaneously opposing guns due to their potential for misuse.
What this tells me is that the "X isn't good or bad, it just depends on who's using it" argument is weak. It's weak in the sense that it doesn't capture the nuances that might make someone support bitcoin, but not guns.
(Again, I don't presume to know your thoughts on gun-ownership. I'm making a more general point.)
RATs, malware, spam, ransomware, scareware, worms, all this existed in the largest scale possible before the advent of crypto currency.
Doxing, messing with people, leaking sensitive files, pictures and other media, has existed on massive scale before crypto currencies.
It's the scale of the internet itself, and the amount of money involved, and the fragility of connected systems, that has lead to the increase.
I'll grant that cryptocurrency adds even more of this badness. It's definitively increased the number of bad actors. But this is not the driving cause.
Their 'obvious role' is only a role for some actors. Not everyone is financially motivated.
It's also easily measurable, the revenue of a ransomware-as-a-service group (this exists) is an easy jaw-dropping number to display.
But that number does not capture the damage done by actors not financially motivated. Hell _the_ largest and _most_ devastating attack ever was not financially motivated at all. I'm of course talking about NotPetya. Whose damage and impact easily dwarfs that of the financially motivated ransomware groups.
What I'm getting at (albeit awkwardly), is that I wish your argument included some notion of threshold. At what point do you consider the potential for misuse to be so extreme that the technology should be banned? If you don't address this point, you sound unreasonable to many.
Banning things doesn't stop criminals from using them. It doesn't even stop many otherwise law-abiding people. Many of the people who support banning guns are able to recognize that banning drugs doesn't stop people from using drugs and banning abortions doesn't stop people from getting abortions, so why should banning guns stop shootings?
If you want to stop people from doing something, you need to figure out why they're doing it and remove the reason that causes them to do it. The existence of guns doesn't cause people to shoot up schools. Likewise the existence of Bitcoin doesn't cause people to blackmail. If it's not the cause, then removing it can't remove the effect.
You’re confusing “root cause” with “causal”. Guns do “cause” murder insofar as they facilitate the act of killing. The same argument can be made for Bitcoin facilitating blackmail.
Whether or not banning either technology is a worthwhile trade off is debatable, but an effectively enforced ban is unambiguously effective.
Just about any object can facilitate the act of killing. A car, a bowling ball, a swimming pool. Do these things cause murders too? That's not how causation works.
A car can facilitate going to the store. Does the car cause you to go to the store? Of course not. You go to buy the thing you needed. The car is just a means.
Simply put: an effective crackdown on guns, cars, snowballs, scissors, and Bitcoin can absolutely reduce the associated downsides. The question isn’t “is it effective”. The question is “is it worth it”.
If your basement is flooding from a burst pipe, maybe you can "reduce the associated downsides" by bailing it out. This doesn't fix the problem though, does it? You're actually prolonging and exacerbating the issue by not turning off the water from the source.
Temporary band-aids that address the symptom rather than the disease are not effective in the long run. They also often come with secondary effects and unintended consequences that create additional problems.
I suppose you're also against NPT? Or do nukes gain sentience in your world?
Governments voluntarily agreeing to reduce their weapons is also the same as forcibly forbidding people from using a useful technology. Top notch analysis.
> Governments voluntarily agreeing to reduce their weapons is also the same as forcibly forbidding people from using a useful technology. Top notch analysis.
Governments "forcibly forbid" their citizens from developing nuclear weapons. Similarly so for things far less dangerous than nukes because, you know, "less dangerous than a nuke" isn't exactly synonymous with "safe". I can't top your "top-notch analysis" though, so this will be my last reply.
Cars can be used to run people over, better forbid those. A hammer can cave someone's head in, better forbid that. People can drown in water, better forbid that too. After all, we wouldn't want to be inconsistent.
It's not like we would ever consider using any kind of judgement and conclude that the benefits outweigh the risks for some things. That's just silly.
We simply need data to be as well protected as the criminals can protect their financial transactions.
Sure there is, make Bitcoin illegal. (Edit: Okay, I obviously meant cryptocurrencies, not just Bitcoin...)
> and we'd still want it anyway.
"We" might not span as many people as you'd hope.
By the way there's dozens of other cryptocurrencies now. EDIT: just did a check, apparently there's thousands...
Considering the billions(?) of dollars of damage that it has inflicted so far and the sheer number of lives it has ruined in the process... and the fact that probably >99.99% of people in the world would not attribute their "liberty" to anything related to Bitcoin... and that neither the regulation of money nor "liberty" were invented in 2009... yeah, it very much is...
Bitcoin absolutely has legitimate uses, as I'm sure you know, but that's not really pertinent to the issue that the government doesn't get to tell free men what they may or may not do because someone else committed a crime. "Freedom creates opportunities for bad guys" is not an argument against freedom.
What world you live in?! In the one I know, the government absolutely does tell and has told people what they may or may not do with all sorts of things, including with financial instruments.
> You're arguing that it harms too many people, but I really don't care; it could have harmed ten thousand times the number of people and that wouldn't matter.
Wow!
Generally people at least pretend to care about other people and get a little concerned when it looks like their ideologies might burn the world to the ground, but I suppose it's quite... admirable(?) that you're absolutely brutally honest that you don't care about others...
Projects like bitcoin are not a negative thing for regular citizens, the benefits outweighs the cons. You proposed earlier to make it illegal however, which means you're not okay with some persons having the option to control their currency in the digital space. Such opinions are the reason why bitcoin appeared in the first place, and why cryptography will probably be for a long time a beneficial tool to protect people, along with governments.
I didn't say I don't care about others. I do value liberty higher than life, however. I don't think a cryptocurrency will "burn the world to the ground"...
Governments are allowed to stop people from harming each other - enforce pollution controls, chase down criminals, etc. They aren't allowed to tell someone he can't use bitcoin because too many bad guys use it too.
Doesn't the ledger (blockchain) keep track?
For more serious observers:
Bitcoin is "pseudoanonymous", right? Am I wrong in assuming that state level actors would have the juice to deanon transactions? Like we suspect NSA and others have hacked tor?
Naive me guesses bad guys launder bitcoin thru banks beyond the reach of interpol and other agencies. That seems like a thin, easily pierced veil by any sufficiently motivated state level player.
I've watched some videos about money laundering for noob audiences like me. Based on some of the strategies explained, another notion occurs to me: use a herd of smurfs to launder the bitcoin into physical assets.
Edit: Judging from the responses, "blind to" may have been overly charitable.