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Sorry, this is a lot of nonsense. Any government that has the ability to prevent dissidents from paying for stuff also has the ability to employ much more brut
by lottin 3y ago
Sorry, this is a lot of nonsense. Any government that has the ability to prevent dissidents from paying for stuff also has the ability to employ much more brutal and effective methods of quashing dissidence.
- anigbrowl 3y agoThey have to find you first, which is quite labor-intensive compared to just tracking and/or halting a person's financial transaction ability.
- lottin 3y agoReally? Did you read that somewhere?
- spaceman_2020 3y agoWhat's more scalable - querying a database and hitting "delete" on the payment channels of 100,000 people at a political rally, or hunting them down one-by-one across an entire country? You're applying this to individuals. Which is never the real threat to any regime. It's always large groups of people.
- lottin 3y agoI think you're living in techno-fantasy land. "Deleting" people on a database achieves nothing. Look at how authoritarian governments actually work in the real world. An authoritarian government would simply arrest the leader of the opposition on made up charges, and then they would throw them in the jail. They don't have to go after everybody who disagrees with the government. They just go after a few of them, and this is more than enough to discourage the rest.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoAnd your solution is to make it even easier for them to do all of the above by eliminating any way to transact privately?
- standardUser 3y agoNot really. Elaborate black markets exist and thrive all over the world. Maybe in the most brutally restrictive regimes they can truly ban something people want. But the rule across most societies is: ban something people want, then an unregulated black market will fill the void, regardless of laws, and will probably bring otherwise avoidable violence.
- lottin 3y agoYeah, I agree... that's what I'm saying, it's ineffective.
- imtringued 3y agoIf black markets are your backup strategy then all countries would have to abolish their paper currency at the same time because nothing prevents you from paying with dollars, yen or euros in a foreign country.
- latchkey 3y agohttps://tuoitrenews.vn/news/business/20181026/owner-of-vietnam-gold-shop-fined-for-dollar-exchange-mulls-lawsuit-against-authorities/47384.html https://tuoitrenews.vn/news/business/20181026/owner-of-vietn...
- spaceman_2020 3y agoIf you travel around the central Asian "stans", especially Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan - you'll notice that a surprisingly large number of people, especially older people, have gold teeth. They didn't do this as a fashion statement - being able to escape with whatever gold you could carry was a means of survival against a brutal communist regime. My own great grandparents escaped during the partition of my country by bartering my great grandmother's gold bangles and earrings for safe passage. The government can and will try to quash dissidence. That doesn't mean you have to make it completely easy for them and hand over complete control on a silver platter.
- walterbell 3y ago> methods of quashing dissidence Some countries have constitutions, armed citizens, some police who believe in the rule of law, and would like to maintain at least an appearance of due process.