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A comment on El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender after failed experiment. Parent comment

Re:El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender after failed... by archagon on Monday February 03, 2025 @08:32PM (#42926270)
That’s all well and good until innocent people get caught in the net. How many thousands of young people are worth incarcerating indefinitely and without legal recourse for the benefit of society at large? Would you throw your own child into the pit if it meant that the happiness and safety of your town was ensured? In the extreme, why not just make every crime carry a death penalty? Would that society be perfect by your measure?

(And that’s before we start dissecting the bribery and corruption of those who wield this power.)

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Re:El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender after failed... by starspangled on Monday February 03, 2025 @08:38PM (#42926339)
> That’s all well and good until innocent people get caught in the net.

Is your position that no innocent people were convicted of crimes before the reforms, or that innocent people do not get caught in the crimes that have been reduced so dramatically?

> How many thousands of young people are worth incarcerating indefinitely and without legal recourse for the benefit of society?

And how many young people are not killed or maimed or dragged into a life of crime indefinitely and without recourse in the alternative?

As I said, I acknowledge the issues with it, but no social policy is perfect and all social policy is a balance. You can't pull out "human rights" as a trump card to say Bukele's policies are bad or worse than before. Because you are confining and defining human rights in a very narrow specific way, and that does not account for many other rights of many other classes of people.

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Re:El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender after failed... by csomar on Monday February 03, 2025 @11:21PM (#42927898)
> How many thousands of young people are worth incarcerating indefinitely and without legal recourse for the benefit of society at large?

You can actually do the math for that. If the number of innocent people harmed by the gangs is more than the number of innocent people caught in the legal cross-fire then it is worth it.

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Re:El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender after failed... by EA-3167 on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @10:25AM (#42933503)
That assumes a lot, most importantly that the harm is limited to "innocent person in prison" rather than, "Government has the power to throw anyone it wants into prison, effectively disappearing them." The history of these sort of measures is a history of a slide into something worse than whatever was being solved in the first place.
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