here in argentina uber was very illegal for several years and people used the fuck out of it

in the usa heroin and meth are super illegal and people are using the fuck out of them

many 80s pc video games only survive in a playable form because of a very illegal system of organized copyright infringement that removed copy protection mechanisms; people used the fuck out of that too

in the usa gay sex was super illegal until, in many locations, 20 years ago. guess what gay people did

"if it's illegal people just won't use it" is clearly not correct; i think it's what dave chappelle would describe as an extremely white thought

the problem is if the design of the system provides law enforcement a bottleneck they can use for leverage against righteous lawbreakers

All those things are enjoyable and have no legal alternative. A chat application would have.

uber cab is not especially enjoyable, and the legal alternatives (for riders) include taxis and remises (not to mention buses, trains, bicycles, private cars, private motorcycles, and electric scooters; buenos aires is pretty dense and public transport is pretty good)

uber was just better

the legal alternative to pirating games was to buy them, geez

the legal alternative to gay sex was heterosexual sex, which many people actually preferred; possibly you haven't heard, but it's a more popular alternative even today

you're right about heroin and meth though, so, one out of four i guess

Did you forget about alcohol, nicotine, caffeine? Totally legal addictive alternatives.

arguably caffeine and alcohol are even less adequate as a replacement for heroin than a bicycle is as a replacement for uber cab

i mean if the objective is just 'euphoria' (as opposed to avoiding opiate withdrawal or having a 60-hour-long orgy) there are a lot of ways you can get it: hyperventilation, falling in love, roller coasters, exercise, praying, etc., and i thought about saying this, but i think that this really is a pretty weak counterargument to dtech's claim that heroin and meth have no legal alternatives; they're pretty much right about that

Only Uber had an alternative, the rest you either didn't address or are incorrect

> the legal alternative to gay sex was heterosexual sex

Unless you're subscribing to a unscientific "people choose to be gay" philosophy, having sex with a gender you're not attracted to is not at all an alternative.

> the legal alternative to pirating games was to buy them

You mentioned surviving today, currently a lot of those games cannot be bought legally, which is what I meant with no alternative. Back then also a lot of people didn't pirate, and a lot of people who did did so because they had little money. I would count that situation as having no available alternative.

We were discussing a hypothetical chat application which currently are offered for free, so money is not an issue there.

This draws a false dichotomy between "people use X" and "nobody uses X." There's actually a sliding scale of how many people use X. When a thing is illegal, fewer people will use it and the people who do use it will be at risk. If we thing a thing is important and that people should be able to use it, it's bad if that thing is illegal. There's a reason why people fought so hard decriminalize gay sex—not because laws against gay sex made it impossible, but because those laws were nevertheless really bad for gay people.

i don't agree that i subscribe to that dichotomy

i think it is incorrect for precisely the reason you state

It is fairly easy to argue that people have more gay sex now that gay marriages are legal.

plausibly, and plausibly making private communication illegal would result in less private communication successfully taking place, but it certainly wouldn't result in private communication dwindling to an insignificant activity, which is the most charitable interpretation i could come up with for the obviously absurd claim i was rebutting, 'if it's illegal people just won't use it'

> It's (technologically) relatively easy to create a private, censorship-resistant distributed system, but if it's illegal people just won't use it.

Ask a Gen-Xer about Napster and Bittorrent sometime.

Bittorrent still exists. Plenty Gen-Zers use it too.

Thank you for illustrating the point!

Gen-Xer here: Napster was never made illegal

Napster lost several lawsuits in the US and filed for bankruptcy

But Napster the brand was sold to Roxio and continued operations

it's still active today

https://www.napster.com/

Anyway, in retrospective, Napster times were fun, university networks were clogged by students downloading music all day long and, at least in my country, many people bought a dial up internet connection just to use it.

But it had serious unexpected consequences, it gave birth to new generations of listeners that do not buy music, because they never had to, and the musicians are now paid virtually nothing for the music they create, while majors still make a lot of money, which isn't exactly what we hoped for when we hated on Metallica for suing Napster.

People were not using it because it was illegal, people were using it because it was cool. It was mostly young people.

Chats are a different beast, if they were ever made illegal, a lot of people would stop using them, because they would disappear from app stores and a prominent smartphone manufacturer we all know would probably delete the app remotely from the users' devices and report to the authorities whoever would dear to sideload it.

I feel sometimes a little bit conflicted about those years when I see my musician friends touring over and over because selling records and make a living of it it's not a thing anymore, and now I buy a lot more music than I did in the past (which was already a decent amount), directly from artists when I can.

People were also using it to discover new music. Most radio stations in the US are owned by a couple of large corporations who play the same bland stuff nationwide. Most of my CD collection comes from artists I discovered back then.

"never made illegal" but "lost everal lawsuits", got it

Civil court in America is just as powerful as criminal and only requires a preponderance of evidence standard be met.

it wasn't illegal in my country so...

anyway, Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. lost a lot of lawsuits, I believe they are still not illegal.

Once a decentralized system becomes sufficiently ubiquitous, banning it becomes tantamount to imposing economic sanctions on yourself. That's basically what happened with the internet. That might have just been a fluke, but it would be awesome if we could somehow manage to create more systems like that.

The problem is that when political elites are faced between the choice of ruling an impoverished population and losing power, they will always choose the former.

It is necessary both to try to get rid of bad laws and to encourage, facilitate, and protect mass civil disobedience.