In other news, the government has declared by decree that you can't move objects outside of an arbitrarily defined border that a piece of paper says is someone's "house", and then exchange those objects for different pieces of paper that the very same government has declared has value.

abstracting these things to sound silly doesn't move you outside the realm of well established norms regarding the government's role in mediating property rights through force.

what I wrote above is in a totally different ballpark - and we should expect to see government laws that pop up that do in fact attempt to regulate digit memorization or multiplication.

Yeah, it would be, if done to pursue ends that the law has deemed criminal. This isn't the gotcha you might think it is, because no one is going to bat an eye at your attempt to boil the nuance of a law out in an effort to expose some underlying paradox that only matters on a technical level. I'm not saying that the law will be wise, or efficacious, or even really pertinent, just that we already have ways of reconciling what you may perceive as being an intractable problem. Like, laws against theft don't mean that any action where I take something of yours without express permission is theft, like a genuine intent with the context that it was needed to safely handle an immediate hazard to life or limb.

That example is admittedly weak, but do you see where I'm going with that?

I see where you are going, but I'm not arguing that the government won't be willing or able to enforce what transactions are permissible if they can prove the multiplication involved was used to facilitate an exchange.

What I am saying is that governments who are passing laws not to regulate transactions, but to prevent the use of cryptocurrencies in general, will fail due to a first principles analysis of what they'll be trying to do.

The downvotes you are getting is for not reading the article.

Your comment is not on-topic.

I read the article. Why is what I wrote not on-topic?

I tend to think the government will find its attempts to rein in crypto will just feed into the anti-fragility of the whole thing, and the result will be increasingly nonsensical attempts to stomp it out up until capitulation.

And yes, this leads to a prediction that some very technologically illiterate legislators will probably draft rules that are semantically equivalent to what I wrote.

The title is simply incorrect and clickbait, so it should be changed. I think that is a quite relevant point

if the employees in charge of writing this legislation understood bitcoin enough to even consider that it would be impressive

but they don't, in the same way they don't understand cookies, databases or stock exchanges

none of this stops them legislating though...

To build on this; Is code equivalent to speech? Is Bitcoin free speech?

Probably not, and no.

You must be joking.

https://www.eff.org/cases/bernstein-v-us-dept-justice?elqTra...