Even that I'm not sold on. You could argue that it gives incentives for the rich and powerful to maintain the status quo since their own riches become out of reach from the corrupt government.
Meanwhile the commoners are still very much under threat since most of their assets will be physical (their house, their clothes, their belongings, their bodies etc...).
The idea that cryptocurrencies are empowering the poor makes about as much sense to me as trickle down economics. If you are in a position to benefit from Bitcoin it means that you already have a significant amount of disposable income you can convert into bitcoin and afford to "HODL" in your wallet for a while. "Being able to transfer money across political boundaries without censorship" is completely irrelevant if you're a poor farmer in Buthan or an elderly shoemaker in rural Pakistan. Transfer what money, to whom and for what purpose?
This whole concept is just social-washing cryptocurrencies to obfuscate that it's profoundly libertarian (the USA flavor) at the core. If you consider that the government is always the enemy and it can't be fixed and should instead be thoroughly destroyed, then and only then do cryptocurrencies make sense. It's not about good vs. bad government, it's about no government.
Certainly not. As I keep telling people here, cryptos are property, not currency. Why should governments be in the business of telling people what type of property they can and can't own?
A coin is nothing but a couple of large numbers that are easy to multiply together but very difficult to factor...that's it. If the people of earth want to assign large fiat currency values to complicated key-pairs, then why shouldn't they have the right to do that?
Of course crypto-traders need government...like we need libraries and schools and police and all that, just like everyone else, right?
Uh what? That's like the second biggest thing the government does after, you know, army.
You can't own a dead lobster shorter than 6 3/4 inches in the United States without committing a felony, even if the lobster met its untimely end without your assistance.
Of course that's what the government should be in the business of doing otherwise we'd likely all be dead, and separately, there wouldn't be any more lobsters.
Private property right go back to the Magna Carta and form the basis of the US Constitution and it's Bill of Rights.
If you believe it's governments duty to control all property rights than your a Marxist and to be honest, I have no interest in debating you.
Bitcoin is regressive and would be harmful to the economy if it obtained widespread adoption, and therefore, the government has the right to curtail its use and ownership.
I mean, maybe you're claiming that I can't transfer the property, but that I have the right to own the property as long as the government approves of where it's going. Sure. That certainly reduces people's willingness to assign a large fiat currency value to my pantry.
You're registering your wallets with your government and that's about it. Bitcoin is fully transparent, so government can track every transaction and if you're doing transaction to some non-verified wallet, you have to explain it to your government.
I would argue that bitcoins are even easier to track than bank accounts.
What government can't do is to steal your money or block your access to your money.
Gov: “Here is our wallet blacklist feed. If you transact with these wallets, you go to jail.”
On the plus side, FinCEN can automate currency transaction report generation and monitoring on a public distributed ledger.
Me: "I'm already in Africa, find me, losers"
"No thanks. We're in America and have $20M of assets and 50 employees and we'd rather not lose it all and go to jail."
You should read about US sanctions, that's actually pretty close to the truth. Living outside of US jurisdiction means... living in Russia, AFAIK.
You can make it illegal to use Bitcoin, but it was designed to make it practically impossible to enforce such a ban.
"If you transact with these blacklisted wallets, your wallet also automatically becomes blacklisted, and if we find you then you go to jail. As an exception - if you receive any amount of BTC from a blacklisted walled, you have 7 days to send the same amount (or greater) to [this government wallet] and that will erase all your legal liability and make your wallet whitelisted again. We can even automate the process for you if you trust us enough to give us your wallet keys. Alternatively, register email/phone numbers with us and we'll notify you when your wallet is blacklisted, and tell you how much BTC you should pay us"
> We can even automate the process for you if you trust us enough to give us your wallet keys.
Haha seriously? Your solution is that people give their private keys to the government? You must have no experience with crypto or what it's about it all. Nor really experience with how the government works and how often it gets corrupt. A corrupt clerk now is a small nuissance, a corrupt clerk in your proposed scenario means that thousands of addresses get stolen of all of their tokens. There is zero chance that this scenario will ever be implemented in any meaningful way.
If you completely ignore how big corporations and ultrarich are able to hide their assets behind shell corporations and various other structures, then yes maybe your vision is correct. But that it not what happens in reality.
In reality right now the rich can hide whatever they can, and the poor have no recourse against frivolous seizures, lawsuits etc. What crypto does is levels the playing field.
(Roads and rubbish can easily by taxed by usage, from the people who clearly use those services, but there are other central commons that should be taxed on state or federal level.)
What happens if you are disabled in a horrible negligent accident or defrauded in some conventional transaction and defendant hides all assets and transactions in BTC?
I can't imagine a long term equilibrium where [Americans, at least] store trillions and trillions of dollars in BTC without substantial additional regulation.
Edit: for those in relatively more corrupt, tenuous circumstances then BTC is a net positive, of course.