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I'm not sure what your argument is. Prevent people from circumventing ridiculous local monetary controls - artificial currency pegs at 10x the value of the curr

I'm not sure what your argument is. Prevent people from circumventing ridiculous local monetary controls - artificial currency pegs at 10x the value of the currency - because any money they have might be "criminal"? You could also just define criminality as having money, and dispense with the pretense of legality, as has been done so many times in Russia. This is the despotism that normally results where there is no outlet for capital. Although it's true, after a certain number of years in some places, everyone does become a criminal if you treat them this way; that should be obvious.

throwaway290 4y ago
You can't fix this with technology. If the government declares having money as illegal the only solution is to change the government. Otherwise these technical loopholes only help that government in the first place. Lack of laundering controls is how Russian dirty money create nice global lifestyle for Putin's henchmen and friends. If they were truly locked in, one would think twice before joining that gang. > because any money they have might be "criminal" Non-criminal money would be a minuscule percentage of the total because, the same way you use to change $500 for the lulz would be used in an organized way to move millions extracted with violence and theft by Russian government and other criminals.
- noduerme 4y ago
  Hmm. It seems to me that laws and technology have failed to stop that gang. I'm not sure that stopping evil oligarchs - when you cannot - is a good argument for preventing smaller people from saving their money.
  - throwaway290 4y ago
    > It seems to me that laws and technology have failed to stop that gang Laws and sanctions actually hurt them. Law-immune technology is their enabler. If I could choose between a way to send money to my family in Russia the same way that sustains those criminals and not having that way but knowing that putin's gang is being starved of money, I'd choose the latter because the first option is a dead end. > I'm not sure that stopping evil oligarchs - when you cannot - is a good argument for preventing smaller people from saving their money. The theoretical benefit promised to the "smaller people" is far outweighed by the harm it does sustaining those dictatorships, both to the same smaller people and the world. A few honest hundred bucks here and there does not justify millions that prop the regime and kill more people. Sorry if this is inconvenient truth but cryptocoins are helping that regime much more than they are helping people that have to endure it.
    - noduerme 4y ago
      > The theoretical benefit promised to the "smaller people" is far outweighed by the harm it does sustaining those dictatorships I have to disagree, as I am a small businessman and I have seen how liberating crypto was for people in small countries. Let me ask you this: What is worse for ordinary people: rich criminals stealing through Bitcoins? Or rich criminals running a country and banning your use of your own money? If you think Putin or his catamites are surviving on BTC exchange, you're crazy. Berlin is still paying Euros for his fucking oil and gas. The argument that free means of exchange should be wiped out because they are used by criminals, is the argument that has been used by criminals for hundreds of years to steal from everyone else.
      - throwaway290 4y ago
        > Berlin is still paying Euros for his fucking oil and gas. Realize he is also vehemently losing tanks and people right now and supply of money is critical for this sort of fun. Then try to imagine being putin or one of his friends and spending those euros anywhere without the magic of crypto dark market. Good luck! Those guys are not above any working way of financing their activities, especially now that the west is suddenly less easy to transact with, and they have perfectly crypto savvy people working for them. For the record, the "zlato" in Bitzlato (one of the largest players at localbitcoins) is Russian for "gold", and the guy running it was Russian operating from China. I'm sorry if it sounds dark and shatters your dreams of legally unencumbered entrepreneurship but it's just the way it is.
        noduerme 4y ago
        No, this is one way of laundering money, but it is the same as cash. If Bitcoin doesn't exist, you don't think they can carry Euros over the border to China in a truck? Next day those get spent at some Louis Vuitton store in Paris. The Ruble they're paying the soldiers with isn't being propped up with Bitcoin.
        throwaway290 4y ago
- michaelscott 4y ago
  Apologies for saying it this way but this is a very naive take. How long did it take for the Vietnam to resolve in the 50s - 70s? How long did the Berlin Wall take to come down, or the Soviet Union to collapse? What about apartheid in South Africa? How long before Ukraine's population can live normally again? "Change the government" is a process that even in the best cases takes decades to resolve. Children are born and grow to adulthood in these chaotic situations, and that's normally with outside pressure applied. No the tech won't resolve the core problem, but it will allow people to get bread and milk from within a hostile system until that core problem is resolved.
  - noduerme 4y ago
    >> but it will allow people to get bread and milk from within a hostile system until that core problem is resolved ...my grandparents were naturalized citizens of Argentina and dealt with the same exact situations in the 1930s and 40s. The government got much, much worse before it got remotely better. Mostly due to the passions of people easily swayed by populists slogans about changing the government.
    - throwaway290 4y ago
      Do a thought experiment and understand that if there was crypto at that time to prop up the bad government it would never get better. (And before you start, don't equate crypto with cash. Cash that scales without physical and geographical boundaries is not cash anymore, any lessons you can draw from cash being used throughout humanity's history won't apply.)
      - noduerme 4y ago
        I'm not sure I get the point. You mean international crypto flowing in to prop up a bad government? There was plenty of crypto going into Ukraine during the Maidan revolution and since from Russia; unless you believe there was more coming from America, I don't see how the form of money transfer would be a decisive factor. Many Argentines believe that in the 1940s it was Nazi gold transported by submarine that held up the Perón. Does that justify seizing gold from some family's safe deposit box halfway around the world?
- leidenfrost 4y ago
  > If the government declares having money as illegal the only solution is to change the government. I see people from developed nations talking about "changing the government" like we are one french revolution away from prosperity. There are two problems with that: - The people need to fight the military. It's not like it's the XIX century where you can face a army with some weapons and horses. Go fight a tank and some drones. - More often than not, power vacuums are filled with an even more ruthless government that wants to exploit the same corrupt dynamics like the previous one, but for them and their cronies and not the previous government ones.
  - throwaway290 4y ago
    > Go fight a tank and some drones. And by pushing for crypto you are helping them obtain those tanks and drones. What now? > More often than not, power vacuums are filled with an even more ruthless government That's why democracy is important
    - leidenfrost 4y ago
      > And by pushing for crypto you are helping them obtain those tanks and drones. What now? Governments have access to many more mechanisms of wealth transfer and commerce than any average person does. The only special thing about crypto is that it's also available to the general public. > That's why democracy is important And who is gonna enforce democracy? Remember, we are talking about a new governing body that came to power after kicking out the previous one. And governments "elected" that way tend to be less democratic that governments chosen by the standard process of democratic elections. Kicking out a government resembles a coup scenario, and if the next government doesn't want to be democratic, you are SOL.
      - noduerme 4y ago
        >The only special thing about crypto is that it's also available to the general public. >And who is gonna enforce democracy? This is the most important, sane comment I've heard all night. Far too many here are arguing for a police state. What's especially ugly is that they don't even realize they're arguing for one.
- noduerme 4y ago
  >> Non-criminal money would be a minuscule percentage of the total because, the same way you use to change $500 for the lulz would be used in an organized way to move millions extracted with violence and theft by Russian government and other criminals. I want to respond to this point because it is a key difference between the societies governed by oligarchy (extremely rich criminals, no middle class, 99% poor) versus those that still have a middle class. You are right that in Russia, $500 for lulz is nothing compared to the money flows of the criminals. It is commonly assumed by most Russians I know that the American and European world also operates on this principle, and that law enforcement here simply does what the money tells them to do. This is actually not true, at least not close to the extent that it is true in gangster-run countries. Law enforcement in America and Europe does what the middle class wants them to do. This means that they do interdict extremely wealthy criminals from time to time, and ultimately our society is not governed by them. In any case, the largest flows of money in Europe and America are legitimate business flows; things like cocaine and prostitution, organized crime are miniscule compared to the profits of legal drug companies - whose owners are the American middle class shareholder, farmers in Kansas.
  - runnerup 4y ago
    > whose owners are the American middle class shareholder, farmers in Kansas. The top 10% of Americans own 90% of the shares. If by middle class you mean “above the labor class, below the ruling class”, then I … still dont agree because the 0.1% ruling class still own a disproportionately huge % of those shares! Also farmers are disproportionately immigrant labor who have no wealth and own no shares. Bill Gates owns 7% of all USA farmland but I wouldn’t call him a farmer.
    - floor2 4y ago
      > Also farmers are disproportionately immigrant labor Huh, this statement is so weird to me that it was a "lightbulb moment" about what words mean to different people online. I wonder how much misunderstanding this causes. I'm guessing your background is urban and coastal? I'd love it if you'd share, I'm genuinely curious. I would never use the word "farmer" if I was talking about an immigrant laborer picking fruit or whatever. I'd call them migrant laborers or pickers or farm workers. In the standard dialect of people in the 90% of America designated "flyover country", they'd would use the word "farmer" to mean the people who own and operate farms. Generally a middle-class, small-business-owner type person. Likely educated in some mixture of agriculture, business, finance, real estate. They're highly financially savvy, as they have to manage selling futures vs taking the spot price for their crops balanced against storage costs, land rental agreements, machinery leases or repairs, tax and crop insurance complexities, not to mention the science of how to optimize yield on their specific land. Calling the laborers "farmers" is like calling an uber driver a tech worker, at least in the dialect of English I speak.
- ivanhoe 4y ago
  As someone who grew up in a country where hundreds of millions of $$$ were stolen from the people by the government officials, and than transported illegally out of the country - I can tell you you're very naive about how openly these high-level international crime deals are done. What they did was simply load the money in an airplane and fly them to a small, corrupted country (Cyprus in this case) where the banks and the local government were in the deal for a cut. No need for bitcoins or any other technology that leaves easy to follow traces. Just paid everyone a cut, probably someone in the West too, since country was under UN sanctions at the time. And money was never recovered, nor anyone got prosecuted for it, of course.
  - throwaway290 4y ago
    As a Russian I can tell you and everyone else drawing parallels with the past forget there were no sanctions at the scale as currently applied to putin and there were no crypto at the time. If there were strict sanctions in place, they would not be able to fly to cyprus as you say. And if there was crypto, they would be far more efficient at doing what you describe because they don't even need to pay for the planes and a bunch of people to move cash (people who steal it and can leak the information). And people called me naive in this thread. The real or faked naivety of crypto pushers is what knows no limits...
    - subsistence234 4y ago
      >And if there was crypto, they would be far more efficient at doing what you describe because they don't even need to pay for the planes They would however need to find people that can sell bitcoins to them. Let's say a corrupt dictatorship wants to turn their $1T of criminal/stolen assets into BTC. How are they gonna do that?
      - throwaway290 4y ago
        > They would however need to find people that can sell bitcoins to them. I hope you don't think they'd go around writing "zdrastvuite zis is putin can you sell some bitcoins" with strong slavic accent :) > Let's say a corrupt dictatorship wants to turn their $1T of criminal/stolen assets into BTC. How are they gonna do that? Give somebody ruble in exchange for bitcoins. Maybe even have a handy russian in charge of a crypto exchange (that's probably what got localbitcoins shut down in the first place). Remember how they made it impossible to store or withdraw lots of foreign currency? I bet it helps demand for ruble. Pegging ruble exchange rate probably helps too, remember how after rising to more than 100 rub somehow dollar is now worth 60 rub (only in Russia of course, good luck selling ruble anywhere else).
woodruffw 4y ago
I think their argument was against naïveté, nothing more: it seems like Bitcoin served a useful and valuable purpose here, and that that purpose also likely facilitated international money laundering in a way that most people would normally be opposed to. In other words: the medicine comes with side effects, and old-timey imagery of abuelitas trading their US bills for Bitcoin is probably less realistic (although more palatable) than the reality that the GP was likely a useful stooge in a criminal enterprise.
- pavlov 4y ago
  That's exactly it (and thank you for putting it better than I probably would have). I don't want to be callous towards the abuelitas and students and remote-working developers and so forth. I understand that their local currency regime is unfair and having such limited access to the global system is frustrating. I just don't think Bitcoin-type solutions are really solving anything because they start from an ideological free-for-all that works for maybe five minutes until the criminals take notice and rush in, and then it's a slow descent into a haphazardly patched system that ends up re-enacting the worst abandoned ideas of the old financial system along the way. I'm all for a better designed system that takes this reality into account and doesn't pretend that libertarianism will surely work if only Everybody Does It Right This Time (the same cycle as with communism).
  - noduerme 4y ago
    Even if you do manage to "change the government" in your country to prevent all financial crime and enable all legitimate business people to trade without graft or fear of criminals, I don't see how you can possibly accomplish doing that in some other country where things have been on the same cycle of graft and corruption for 150 years. Do you think that before Bitcoin, criminals had no access to the international banking system? My family's gold tooth fillings in a swiss bank vault would like a word. You believe you smash graft by smashing the means, but you don't stop it. It's the same with Americans who think that by banning firearms, they'll stop criminals from shooting people. Quite the opposite is the result. Ban guns, and you end up with an unfree society and the criminals have all the weapons. Ban cash and ban crypto, and you end up with an unfree society in which the ruling class are the criminals, and they have all the levers to control and steal the wealth of individuals. Look, I'm not making this up. Check out the litany of polities that restricted the movement of money (or the ownership of firearms) in the 20th Century. They can be ranked on this axis alone as a reasonable proxy for their degree of totalitarianism. Let's say from the outright banning of money under Pol Pot up to the Cultural Revolution under Mao, Stalin simply deporting millions of people who had any money at all... And guns are just a sideshow. Money is the individual's only defense against the State, and against the state of nature that exists in the vacuum where the State does not exist.

throwaway290 4y ago

You can't fix this with technology. If the government declares having money as illegal the only solution is to change the government. Otherwise these technical loopholes only help that government in the first place. Lack of laundering controls is how Russian dirty money create nice global lifestyle for Putin's henchmen and friends. If they were truly locked in, one would think twice before joining that gang. > because any money they have might be "criminal" Non-criminal money would be a minuscule percentage of the total because, the same way you use to change $500 for the lulz would be used in an organized way to move millions extracted with violence and theft by Russian government and other criminals.

noduerme 4y ago
Hmm. It seems to me that laws and technology have failed to stop that gang. I'm not sure that stopping evil oligarchs - when you cannot - is a good argument for preventing smaller people from saving their money.
- throwaway290 4y ago
  > It seems to me that laws and technology have failed to stop that gang Laws and sanctions actually hurt them. Law-immune technology is their enabler. If I could choose between a way to send money to my family in Russia the same way that sustains those criminals and not having that way but knowing that putin's gang is being starved of money, I'd choose the latter because the first option is a dead end. > I'm not sure that stopping evil oligarchs - when you cannot - is a good argument for preventing smaller people from saving their money. The theoretical benefit promised to the "smaller people" is far outweighed by the harm it does sustaining those dictatorships, both to the same smaller people and the world. A few honest hundred bucks here and there does not justify millions that prop the regime and kill more people. Sorry if this is inconvenient truth but cryptocoins are helping that regime much more than they are helping people that have to endure it.
  - noduerme 4y ago
    > The theoretical benefit promised to the "smaller people" is far outweighed by the harm it does sustaining those dictatorships I have to disagree, as I am a small businessman and I have seen how liberating crypto was for people in small countries. Let me ask you this: What is worse for ordinary people: rich criminals stealing through Bitcoins? Or rich criminals running a country and banning your use of your own money? If you think Putin or his catamites are surviving on BTC exchange, you're crazy. Berlin is still paying Euros for his fucking oil and gas. The argument that free means of exchange should be wiped out because they are used by criminals, is the argument that has been used by criminals for hundreds of years to steal from everyone else.
    - throwaway290 4y ago
      > Berlin is still paying Euros for his fucking oil and gas. Realize he is also vehemently losing tanks and people right now and supply of money is critical for this sort of fun. Then try to imagine being putin or one of his friends and spending those euros anywhere without the magic of crypto dark market. Good luck! Those guys are not above any working way of financing their activities, especially now that the west is suddenly less easy to transact with, and they have perfectly crypto savvy people working for them. For the record, the "zlato" in Bitzlato (one of the largest players at localbitcoins) is Russian for "gold", and the guy running it was Russian operating from China. I'm sorry if it sounds dark and shatters your dreams of legally unencumbered entrepreneurship but it's just the way it is.
      - noduerme 4y ago
        No, this is one way of laundering money, but it is the same as cash. If Bitcoin doesn't exist, you don't think they can carry Euros over the border to China in a truck? Next day those get spent at some Louis Vuitton store in Paris. The Ruble they're paying the soldiers with isn't being propped up with Bitcoin.
        throwaway290 4y ago
michaelscott 4y ago
Apologies for saying it this way but this is a very naive take. How long did it take for the Vietnam to resolve in the 50s - 70s? How long did the Berlin Wall take to come down, or the Soviet Union to collapse? What about apartheid in South Africa? How long before Ukraine's population can live normally again? "Change the government" is a process that even in the best cases takes decades to resolve. Children are born and grow to adulthood in these chaotic situations, and that's normally with outside pressure applied. No the tech won't resolve the core problem, but it will allow people to get bread and milk from within a hostile system until that core problem is resolved.
- noduerme 4y ago
  >> but it will allow people to get bread and milk from within a hostile system until that core problem is resolved ...my grandparents were naturalized citizens of Argentina and dealt with the same exact situations in the 1930s and 40s. The government got much, much worse before it got remotely better. Mostly due to the passions of people easily swayed by populists slogans about changing the government.
  - throwaway290 4y ago
    Do a thought experiment and understand that if there was crypto at that time to prop up the bad government it would never get better. (And before you start, don't equate crypto with cash. Cash that scales without physical and geographical boundaries is not cash anymore, any lessons you can draw from cash being used throughout humanity's history won't apply.)
    - noduerme 4y ago
      I'm not sure I get the point. You mean international crypto flowing in to prop up a bad government? There was plenty of crypto going into Ukraine during the Maidan revolution and since from Russia; unless you believe there was more coming from America, I don't see how the form of money transfer would be a decisive factor. Many Argentines believe that in the 1940s it was Nazi gold transported by submarine that held up the Perón. Does that justify seizing gold from some family's safe deposit box halfway around the world?
leidenfrost 4y ago
> If the government declares having money as illegal the only solution is to change the government. I see people from developed nations talking about "changing the government" like we are one french revolution away from prosperity. There are two problems with that: - The people need to fight the military. It's not like it's the XIX century where you can face a army with some weapons and horses. Go fight a tank and some drones. - More often than not, power vacuums are filled with an even more ruthless government that wants to exploit the same corrupt dynamics like the previous one, but for them and their cronies and not the previous government ones.
- throwaway290 4y ago
  > Go fight a tank and some drones. And by pushing for crypto you are helping them obtain those tanks and drones. What now? > More often than not, power vacuums are filled with an even more ruthless government That's why democracy is important
  - leidenfrost 4y ago
    > And by pushing for crypto you are helping them obtain those tanks and drones. What now? Governments have access to many more mechanisms of wealth transfer and commerce than any average person does. The only special thing about crypto is that it's also available to the general public. > That's why democracy is important And who is gonna enforce democracy? Remember, we are talking about a new governing body that came to power after kicking out the previous one. And governments "elected" that way tend to be less democratic that governments chosen by the standard process of democratic elections. Kicking out a government resembles a coup scenario, and if the next government doesn't want to be democratic, you are SOL.
    - noduerme 4y ago
      >The only special thing about crypto is that it's also available to the general public. >And who is gonna enforce democracy? This is the most important, sane comment I've heard all night. Far too many here are arguing for a police state. What's especially ugly is that they don't even realize they're arguing for one.
noduerme 4y ago
>> Non-criminal money would be a minuscule percentage of the total because, the same way you use to change $500 for the lulz would be used in an organized way to move millions extracted with violence and theft by Russian government and other criminals. I want to respond to this point because it is a key difference between the societies governed by oligarchy (extremely rich criminals, no middle class, 99% poor) versus those that still have a middle class. You are right that in Russia, $500 for lulz is nothing compared to the money flows of the criminals. It is commonly assumed by most Russians I know that the American and European world also operates on this principle, and that law enforcement here simply does what the money tells them to do. This is actually not true, at least not close to the extent that it is true in gangster-run countries. Law enforcement in America and Europe does what the middle class wants them to do. This means that they do interdict extremely wealthy criminals from time to time, and ultimately our society is not governed by them. In any case, the largest flows of money in Europe and America are legitimate business flows; things like cocaine and prostitution, organized crime are miniscule compared to the profits of legal drug companies - whose owners are the American middle class shareholder, farmers in Kansas.
- runnerup 4y ago
  > whose owners are the American middle class shareholder, farmers in Kansas. The top 10% of Americans own 90% of the shares. If by middle class you mean “above the labor class, below the ruling class”, then I … still dont agree because the 0.1% ruling class still own a disproportionately huge % of those shares! Also farmers are disproportionately immigrant labor who have no wealth and own no shares. Bill Gates owns 7% of all USA farmland but I wouldn’t call him a farmer.
  - floor2 4y ago
    > Also farmers are disproportionately immigrant labor Huh, this statement is so weird to me that it was a "lightbulb moment" about what words mean to different people online. I wonder how much misunderstanding this causes. I'm guessing your background is urban and coastal? I'd love it if you'd share, I'm genuinely curious. I would never use the word "farmer" if I was talking about an immigrant laborer picking fruit or whatever. I'd call them migrant laborers or pickers or farm workers. In the standard dialect of people in the 90% of America designated "flyover country", they'd would use the word "farmer" to mean the people who own and operate farms. Generally a middle-class, small-business-owner type person. Likely educated in some mixture of agriculture, business, finance, real estate. They're highly financially savvy, as they have to manage selling futures vs taking the spot price for their crops balanced against storage costs, land rental agreements, machinery leases or repairs, tax and crop insurance complexities, not to mention the science of how to optimize yield on their specific land. Calling the laborers "farmers" is like calling an uber driver a tech worker, at least in the dialect of English I speak.
ivanhoe 4y ago
As someone who grew up in a country where hundreds of millions of $$$ were stolen from the people by the government officials, and than transported illegally out of the country - I can tell you you're very naive about how openly these high-level international crime deals are done. What they did was simply load the money in an airplane and fly them to a small, corrupted country (Cyprus in this case) where the banks and the local government were in the deal for a cut. No need for bitcoins or any other technology that leaves easy to follow traces. Just paid everyone a cut, probably someone in the West too, since country was under UN sanctions at the time. And money was never recovered, nor anyone got prosecuted for it, of course.
- throwaway290 4y ago
  As a Russian I can tell you and everyone else drawing parallels with the past forget there were no sanctions at the scale as currently applied to putin and there were no crypto at the time. If there were strict sanctions in place, they would not be able to fly to cyprus as you say. And if there was crypto, they would be far more efficient at doing what you describe because they don't even need to pay for the planes and a bunch of people to move cash (people who steal it and can leak the information). And people called me naive in this thread. The real or faked naivety of crypto pushers is what knows no limits...
  - subsistence234 4y ago
    >And if there was crypto, they would be far more efficient at doing what you describe because they don't even need to pay for the planes They would however need to find people that can sell bitcoins to them. Let's say a corrupt dictatorship wants to turn their $1T of criminal/stolen assets into BTC. How are they gonna do that?
    - throwaway290 4y ago
      > They would however need to find people that can sell bitcoins to them. I hope you don't think they'd go around writing "zdrastvuite zis is putin can you sell some bitcoins" with strong slavic accent :) > Let's say a corrupt dictatorship wants to turn their $1T of criminal/stolen assets into BTC. How are they gonna do that? Give somebody ruble in exchange for bitcoins. Maybe even have a handy russian in charge of a crypto exchange (that's probably what got localbitcoins shut down in the first place). Remember how they made it impossible to store or withdraw lots of foreign currency? I bet it helps demand for ruble. Pegging ruble exchange rate probably helps too, remember how after rising to more than 100 rub somehow dollar is now worth 60 rub (only in Russia of course, good luck selling ruble anywhere else).

woodruffw 4y ago

I think their argument was against naïveté, nothing more: it seems like Bitcoin served a useful and valuable purpose here, and that that purpose also likely facilitated international money laundering in a way that most people would normally be opposed to. In other words: the medicine comes with side effects, and old-timey imagery of abuelitas trading their US bills for Bitcoin is probably less realistic (although more palatable) than the reality that the GP was likely a useful stooge in a criminal enterprise.

pavlov 4y ago
That's exactly it (and thank you for putting it better than I probably would have). I don't want to be callous towards the abuelitas and students and remote-working developers and so forth. I understand that their local currency regime is unfair and having such limited access to the global system is frustrating. I just don't think Bitcoin-type solutions are really solving anything because they start from an ideological free-for-all that works for maybe five minutes until the criminals take notice and rush in, and then it's a slow descent into a haphazardly patched system that ends up re-enacting the worst abandoned ideas of the old financial system along the way. I'm all for a better designed system that takes this reality into account and doesn't pretend that libertarianism will surely work if only Everybody Does It Right This Time (the same cycle as with communism).
- noduerme 4y ago
  Even if you do manage to "change the government" in your country to prevent all financial crime and enable all legitimate business people to trade without graft or fear of criminals, I don't see how you can possibly accomplish doing that in some other country where things have been on the same cycle of graft and corruption for 150 years. Do you think that before Bitcoin, criminals had no access to the international banking system? My family's gold tooth fillings in a swiss bank vault would like a word. You believe you smash graft by smashing the means, but you don't stop it. It's the same with Americans who think that by banning firearms, they'll stop criminals from shooting people. Quite the opposite is the result. Ban guns, and you end up with an unfree society and the criminals have all the weapons. Ban cash and ban crypto, and you end up with an unfree society in which the ruling class are the criminals, and they have all the levers to control and steal the wealth of individuals. Look, I'm not making this up. Check out the litany of polities that restricted the movement of money (or the ownership of firearms) in the 20th Century. They can be ranked on this axis alone as a reasonable proxy for their degree of totalitarianism. Let's say from the outright banning of money under Pol Pot up to the Cultural Revolution under Mao, Stalin simply deporting millions of people who had any money at all... And guns are just a sideshow. Money is the individual's only defense against the State, and against the state of nature that exists in the vacuum where the State does not exist.