I'm a crypto user, I'm a former Ethereum miner, I've read white papers, I've paid with things with crypto....and I'm disenchanted with it. Crypto seems to be great for three things: money laundering, tax evasion, and capital flight. Now, I'm not necessarily totally against those things as I think AML is excessive these days, I have a healthy distrust of government, and I value my privacy, but if you're not interested in doing those things then I struggle to see why crypto would be your go to solution for any problem. Can you name a problem which crypto has actually helped solve other than those? We've had billions of investment dollars and thousands of talented people enter this space and as far as I know basically nothing of real value has emerged as a result. I would love to be proven wrong though.

> Corrupt governments like Canada can't just shut down your crypto wallet because they don't like you peacefully protesting against them.

Really?

> As of Sunday, the national police force said in a statement, 219 “financial products” had been frozen, 253 Bitcoin addresses related to protesters and organizers had been given to virtual currency exchange operators, and a bank had frozen 3.8 million Canadian dollars held by a payment processor. [1]

> Corrupt governments like Canada

I'm also curious as to the definition of "corruption" you're choosing to use here, as it seems to be totally foreign to the one I understand the one I'm able to find definitions for online.

You're free to go to the ballot box to vote in a different set of politicians or petition for reforms to be passed. The emergency act powers are certainly controversial & we can have a debate about whether those powers are overbroad but I don't see how that's corruption (in which case the PATRIOT Act and the TSA are corruption but then that word loses all meaning). We can have debates about the ability for law enforcement to ruin your life without the legal system even getting involved. That's still not corruption by any definition I can find. To my knowledge, the balances of these accounts weren't transferred anywhere. The government did this to disperse the protests that were phenomenally more disruptive to the Canadian economy than the BLM protests were to the US economy in a drastically less violent response than what the BLM protestors saw from Washington DC (& all around the country).

Generally the definition of corruption I'm familiar with is members of the government making decisions that aren't in the best interest of the people they are governing but instead enrich themselves or their allies or otherwise wielding their power for self-interest goals, particularly through subterfuge and dishonesty. The goal of the government to be good stewards of the public good and for the public to have faith that they're doing that. Democracy depends on full information about the goings on of those in the government being available to voters. That's why subterfuge is generally a key component of corruption.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/world/americas/canada-pro...

I don't want to change your mind or argue with you, but I don't want to share a country with you either.

If your account got frozen it's because while you were idling your truck in downtown Ottawa protesting mandates that have already been mostly lifted you were being funded by suspicious folks abroad.

Deflationary currencies are Ponzi scams because anyone with a brain knows that it will never function as a currency with that property and all that is left is a speculative bubble. Blame Michael Saylor and other crypto evangelists for preaching that it is property like gold that you hold onto forever and borrow against for access to currencies. He wants property that he can create derivatives with to leverage in finance.

> Deflationary currencies are Ponzi scams because anyone with a brain knows that it will never function as a currency with that property and all that is left is a speculative bubble

The gold standard was the basis for the international monetary system from the 1870s to 1971 with some brief interruptions. Before that, other commodities were used as the underpinnings of the monetary system for as long as humanity has utilized currency. These are all deflationary currencies. In fact, inflationary currencies are a relatively recent invention. The one notable feature it has is that depressions don't seem to exist (instead being converted to bad recessions). That being said, it has only 50 years of history behind it so who knows how stable it is in the longer term.

I'm a huge crypto skeptic because the cost/benefit isn't there for the amount of pollution it creates and the amount of crime it enables, not because it's a deflationary currency.

> The gold standard was the basis for the international monetary system from the 1870s to 1971 with some brief interruptions. Before that, other commodities were used as the underpinnings of the monetary system for as long as humanity has utilized currency. These are all deflationary currencies.

In what world is gold deflationary? The supply of available gold generally increases. The difference is that the expansion of the supply of gold is less flexible and harder to control.

Gold is also vunerable to supply shocks. For those weak on history, I suggest learning about the effects on global currencies due to the european pillaging of the Americas for precious metals.

Also, nothing prevents cryptocurrencies from having a mint rate that makes them inflationary. You don't really see that much because all "currency-like" projects with cryptocurrencies are still fundementally about inflating a speculative bubble to get early adopters rich.

As seen in the past, the production of gold could not keep up with the need for liquidity and was at least vastly less inflationary relative to modern currencies, which again isn't a useful property for the currency of a nation state.

> These are all deflationary currencies.

Complete nonsense. A currency is an asset, and an asset is neither deflationary nor inflationary, since these terms refer to its price, which is determined by the market and is therefore not an intrinsic characteristic of the asset.

The bean counters at the SEC and various AG offices, while not being friends of mine, are nowhere close to "the worst people in the country." Nor are the main street investors who've been burnt and now see it for what it is.

Trump and Clinton have both been vocally opposed, for starters. Clinton even said something to the effect of it being an existential threat to their power.

"...but I don't share the government's concerns about things like laundering."

I get that you, personally, aren't concerned about money laundering... But can you at least understand, in principle, why governments are concerned about money laundering?

He may be alluding to the fact that money laundering is easier to get away with using regular trace-less cash than through an immutable public ledger where your criminal activity is stored in perpetuity.

That would be a remarkable inversion of the standard Bitcoin argument: for years, the argument was that Bitcoin was more anonymous, and that the government simply had no business determining the legitimacy of transactions.

(The factuality of these claims is not being offered or challenged; only the observation that the justification seems to have completely flipped.)

That depends on the scale. At a small scale, cash works best for laundering, but it is hard to scale and doesn't work remotely.

Money laundering is a place where scale matters. Having the anonymity of cash creates privacy at the individual level but it's scaling issues are actually a feature that limit abuse.

Their concern is of no value.

You are being scammed.

That may be true, but I was also getting scammed in the old system where the people with the most money can just issue themselves more on a whim, devaluing my money.

I don't see how the richest people being able to just create a new shitcoin on a whim and scam people is a lot better, really.

I guess because it's easier to avoid the shitcoins than the inflating dollar.