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> If these governments actually represented the will of the people, the people would not be using bitcoin to send money home. Or smoking weed for that matter.

by lottin 5y ago

> If these governments actually represented the will of the people, the people would not be using bitcoin to send money home. Or smoking weed for that matter. This is not how it works. If a significant number of people oppose a certain regulation, a public debate will ensue, and sometimes the general mindset with regards to the issue will shift and then the regulation will change accordingly. This is how democracy works. If you think that capital controls should not exist, feel free to make a case against such controls, but you will have to do a little better than "oh, look, it's a mess, let's get rid of capital controls". Nobody is going to take you seriously unless you present a convincing argument, and coming up with a convincing argument would require, for a start, an understanding of the reasons behind current regulations with regards to capital controls.

betwixthewires 5y ago
> This is not how it works. That's exactly how it works. That's not how you want it to work, but that's how it plays out in practice. You might want to ideally live in a world where a frictionless public debate occurs and people assess the value of a law and decide democratically whether to follow it, and then follow it whether they like it or nor and adhere to the rule of majority, and ideally I'd agree a democracy should work like this. But how it actually works is people disobey laws they don't like. People smoke weed if they want to, regardless of the legality. That is how it works. And the reason is because changing laws is not in practice frictionless and the result of majority sentiment. There's inertia, there's entrenched interest, there are deliberate roadblocks to the will of the people put in place by the powerful. Democracy doesn't work as well as you are imagining it should, and people deal with that by giving up on it just a little and making decisions for themselves. The only convincing argument I require is that if people want to use it they will. I don't need your permission, and frankly I don't care if people take me seriously. I understand this means that democracy will fall apart, but if democracy were working for people as the sales pitch said it would it wouldn't be falling apart in the first place.

by lottin 5y ago

betwixthewires 5y ago

> This is not how it works. That's exactly how it works. That's not how you want it to work, but that's how it plays out in practice. You might want to ideally live in a world where a frictionless public debate occurs and people assess the value of a law and decide democratically whether to follow it, and then follow it whether they like it or nor and adhere to the rule of majority, and ideally I'd agree a democracy should work like this. But how it actually works is people disobey laws they don't like. People smoke weed if they want to, regardless of the legality. That is how it works. And the reason is because changing laws is not in practice frictionless and the result of majority sentiment. There's inertia, there's entrenched interest, there are deliberate roadblocks to the will of the people put in place by the powerful. Democracy doesn't work as well as you are imagining it should, and people deal with that by giving up on it just a little and making decisions for themselves. The only convincing argument I require is that if people want to use it they will. I don't need your permission, and frankly I don't care if people take me seriously. I understand this means that democracy will fall apart, but if democracy were working for people as the sales pitch said it would it wouldn't be falling apart in the first place.