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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 t

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?
    - throwaway290 4y ago
      > You mean international crypto flowing in to prop up a bad government? No. I mean laundering. That's what started this subthread. Using dirty money to get clean money, goods and services where otherwise it would be difficult to do in a sneaky untraceable way. I don't understand the analogy with Argentina and the point about crypto in Ukraine, feel free to explain, but only if it's not something orthogonal but an actual counter argument to me saying that whatever legitimate uses you see small people have for untraceable dark market of crypto dictators use it 1000x more perpetuating themselves and making the very same small people suffer more long term and corrupting the world.
throwaway290 4y ago
Naive? Where did I say it'd be easy? I said that's the only way. These technical workarounds only prop up and help the bad government, which crypto fans vehemently ignore.
- michaelscott 4y ago
  I'm not sure how citizens using crypto to buy bread and milk helps prop up bad governments? To be clear, in the kinds of governments I'm talking about here the people at the top are entirely and completely insulated from the day-to-day struggles of their population. Most will have offshore accounts hidden in various shady or neutral jurisdictions that will ensure they live out the rest of their days without issue (see Zimbabwe, Nazi Germany, or recently Sri Lanka). They could even wipe out large swathes of their population completely and it would still do nothing to destabilise the government (again, see Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Khmer Rouge, the list goes on)
  - throwaway290 4y ago
    > I'm not sure how citizens using crypto to buy bread and milk helps prop up bad governments? I can tell you real people there aren't buying bread and milk with it. But anyway, the same mechanism you imagine being used for buying bread and milk can be and probably is used to buy war drones. Actually it's much easier to give cash in exchange for bread and milk than bother with crypto but it's much more difficult to get a large amount of cash from Russia to Iran intact than to send them some crypto

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?
  - throwaway290 4y ago
    > You mean international crypto flowing in to prop up a bad government? No. I mean laundering. That's what started this subthread. Using dirty money to get clean money, goods and services where otherwise it would be difficult to do in a sneaky untraceable way. I don't understand the analogy with Argentina and the point about crypto in Ukraine, feel free to explain, but only if it's not something orthogonal but an actual counter argument to me saying that whatever legitimate uses you see small people have for untraceable dark market of crypto dictators use it 1000x more perpetuating themselves and making the very same small people suffer more long term and corrupting the world.

throwaway290 4y ago

Naive? Where did I say it'd be easy? I said that's the only way. These technical workarounds only prop up and help the bad government, which crypto fans vehemently ignore.

michaelscott 4y ago
I'm not sure how citizens using crypto to buy bread and milk helps prop up bad governments? To be clear, in the kinds of governments I'm talking about here the people at the top are entirely and completely insulated from the day-to-day struggles of their population. Most will have offshore accounts hidden in various shady or neutral jurisdictions that will ensure they live out the rest of their days without issue (see Zimbabwe, Nazi Germany, or recently Sri Lanka). They could even wipe out large swathes of their population completely and it would still do nothing to destabilise the government (again, see Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Khmer Rouge, the list goes on)
- throwaway290 4y ago
  > I'm not sure how citizens using crypto to buy bread and milk helps prop up bad governments? I can tell you real people there aren't buying bread and milk with it. But anyway, the same mechanism you imagine being used for buying bread and milk can be and probably is used to buy war drones. Actually it's much easier to give cash in exchange for bread and milk than bother with crypto but it's much more difficult to get a large amount of cash from Russia to Iran intact than to send them some crypto