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> > Your fancy blockchain is not going to help you if you order something with Bitcoin and no package arrives. > That problem already has solutions The soluti

• mothballed 11mo ago
  Of course it's possible with crypto, it just means you can only deal with people with a known physical presence if you want any prayer of getting it back. A judge can order a lien or seizure of their assets. I presume people that deal in crypto still want a car, a place to stay, some nice chairs or maybe to stay out of a cage when a judge determines they are willfully avoiding a court order to pay the money back. Of course if they have no tangible assets or the entire operation is out of jurisdiction then that's an issue, but for a random joe are you really that worse off than trying to get the Chinese government to refund you for that knockoff you bought on aliexpress?
  • ninkendo 11mo ago
    As a random Joe I use a credit card like everyone else. And if the item doesn’t arrive, Amex gives me a refund. Because it can do that, and it has a fraud department. Of course, Amex deals with small instances of fraud all the time and has built that into the cost, and that’s why I or the merchant pay for the privilege. For larger things, like actual large international theft, the government absolutely does step in and seize assets. None of this is possible with crypto, despite what you say. You can’t seize assets if the destination wallet key is only in someone’s head. You can wrench attack them, but that’s the only option. You better not torture too hard because once the key is gone, the coins are unrecoverable. The only way it’s possible for there to be recourse even if the scammer is noncompliant, is for there to be a fiat money system. The only way around this is for there to be protections on top of crypto, which is antithetical to it: sure, you can have exchanges where the exchange gets a copy of every key, in case of government order, but then you’re talking the same government orders you’re trying to avoid. You can have the government order everyone to consider certain wallets “stolen” and compel everyone to not accept them, but that’s more government interaction that crypto was entirely designed to avoid. You can either have decentralized currency, or government protection, but not both.
    • AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
      > You can wrench attack them, but that’s the only option. That's not the only option for a government. You don't need those specific coins, you only need anything of value. Their car, their house, the wages their employer would have paid them, anything else they'd already bought with the money, etc. And they're criminals, they're going to jail, and they're staying there a lot longer if they don't give back the money, which has a way of making non-compliant people more compliant without hitting them with a wrench. > The only way it’s possible for there to be recourse even if the scammer is noncompliant, is for there to be a fiat money system. That doesn't give you recourse either because they can spend the money right away. Which transaction are you going to reverse if they use it to buy a physical commodity or foreign asset? Then the scammer has the asset, not the money, so the only thing a fiat money system can do is cause the victim to be the innocent asset seller instead of the potentially negligent or actually in on it person claiming to be the original victim.
• kikimora 11mo ago
  >The solution to that problem is "the court orders the bank to send the funds back to my account" I see this as a very naive statement. A big story in Russia - popular singer sold her appartment, then told court she was scammed to sell appartment and have sent all money to scammers. Appartment returned to the singer, court suggested the buyer to get money from unidentified scammers. So much for court orders :))) Poor buyer has lost > $1M. There are over 3000 similar cases all across Russia. Appartment sellers get their apartments back in court without compensating buyers. This madness is going to be resolved someday, next will appear immediately. Another story - a prosecutor's office tells that largest pasta producer in Russia was actually illegally bought from the government some 20 years ago. Boom, entire business goes to government (to prosecutor friends, really). I can go on and on, there are literally hundreds such stories just in Russia just in the past couple of years. The point is - having certain independence from the government is good. For the majority of world population (China, Middle Wast, all Africa) government is not a friend but either an unpredictable force of nature or a foe.
  • ninkendo 11mo ago
    > >The solution to that problem is "the court orders the bank to send the funds back to my account" > I see this as a very naive statement. [words] Ok, you clearly have a lower opinion on the ability of your government to help than I do, but it doesn’t matter one bit: credit card chargebacks, escrow, and fraud departments exist and work every day without requiring a perfect government. It doesn’t matter at all that there exists cases of government abuse. What does matter, is that crypto was designed to avoid needing any of the above, and with it, you have absolutely no recourse whatsoever if things go wrong. The only recourse you have is the government you’re supposedly trying to distance yourself from. Imagine if the same house buyer bought the house from the scammer using crypto: There would be zero ability, even in principle, to get anything back. Those coins are gone. Even a perfect government with unlimited power could not recover them. I’m sorry your country has shit courts and never helps you. Mine does. My credit card company’s fraud department does.
    • kikimora 11mo ago
      >credit card chargebacks, escrow, and fraud departments exist and work every day without requiring a perfect government Nope, chargebacks in Russia do not work the way they do in US, not even close. The reason - government does not represent consumers, it represent bank owners. Also primary reason why scams in Russia are so widespread (and why internet is so cheap) is telecoms freely selling personal data (again, government representing telecoms). Majority of world population live under a shitty government. Primary method a government uses to control population is monetary. First thing happening to a blogger opposing war in Russia is foreign agent status primarily limiting their ability to make money advertising. Government prints money to fund stupid war slowly extracting from population via inflation. Think of China or Iran where the only asset one can invest is real estate. In Iran leaders seriously discussing moving capital to a new city because they ruined local ecology. In China property prices aren’t doing well primary because of government mismanagement. This puts life savings of millions at risk without reasonable hedge. Coming back to Russia - devaluation in 1991, then again in 1998, then again in 2008, then in 2014, then expropriating private pension funds, then the war with western countries making it very hard to move assets out of the country while also freezing assets of tens of thousands Russians in EuroClear. How am I supposed to save for retirement? Having alternative monetary system is the hedge from a shitty government. If stock market tokenization ever happens I expect a huge influx of funds into US/EU markets from people of China, India and Russia in an attempt to save their life savings from government greed and stupidity. In this context your point about irreversibility is a desirable property making system independent from a shitty government. Don’t get me wrong, I’m well aware of all crypto shortcomings and would love to have something in between current chaos and more orderly system. A smart contract is a shitty alternative to a good government but a decent alternative to a shitty government. At the end of the day I don’t need sorry, I need a solution.