The Rise and Fall in Bitcoin Value

more personal attack. We can see your fear of truth in those.

democracy is a goal. Just like anarchy, or communism, it has never been reached, and can’t be.
Because the reality is too complex, for a simple solution to exist.
Just like the propaganda is too high, for BTC to not be a scam.

What we have right now is corporate governance with the “manufactured consent” of the populace. Better than most monarchies, but not anything close to governance by the people themselves. We get farther away from democracy every year. Nobody even wants it - because then they would have to discuss difficult issues with people that disagree with themselves.

Well that is probably true for the US and a lot of other representative democracies. But there are still countries that have what I consider a real democracy. Switzerland for example.

That is just an illusion. They will be aware of the transparency of all of this and just use other means to transact. It’s just the normal people who sacrifice their privacy, not the criminals. But the criminals will have a nice stash of data to chose their targets because of the lack of privacy.

But hey, I’m just a Bitcoin crackpot, what do I know. Good luck

I am not impressed with this argument that we need to do extra stuff in order to catch criminals. This idea that our financial activities need to be monitored in order to prevent crime cannot be valid. Rules like this might catch a few criminals, but the organized criminals always figure out a way around any system, once they know how it works. It is also a red herring, because our current financial activities are not closely monitored and criminals can easily navigate the current rules. Why would a new technology need to meet even loftier goals of surveillance than what we currently have? The argument makes no sense.

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Where I live, if the police pull you over or enter your home and discover that you have cash there, they can just take it for themselves. It is considered totally legal. I have reasons to not want the government meddling in my financial activities, even though it has been a long, long time since I have done anything illegal.

This idea is bad. The good idea, is your financial activities need to be retro actively trackable - not tracked. Like all your activities.
Of course this power must be restricted so common people can’t use it. So only with a mandate from a judge.
This is a requirement for a democracy : there is no democracy without an independent justice. There is no justice without power.

There is a difference between monitoring your activities and stealing your cash.

I’m not sure what the hell is wrong with you if you think about a crime right away. Projection. Regular people have a right for privacy. It really sounds like you haven’t thought about this problem ever.

We are already at a stage where you are basically under mass surveillance all the time. This data can just be collected until one day it may become useful for nefarious reasons. Even thing that seem harmless may end up biting you in the ass.

In such a world, the very moment you attempt to enter in a position of power because you have political ambitions or if you make a career jump in an important company, you will automatically be a target for the people with the data. They have years of seemingly harmless data they can scan for the little nuggets you thought no one knew about. Doesn’t even have to be illegal, embarrassing may be enough, or threatening to destroy a partnership, endanger your position in power or an important deal… etc.

We don’t have to make this surveillance infrastructure even more efficient. It’s not a problem for the shop to be surveilled and feed their data to the authorities for tax reasons, but there is simply no need to identify who the customer is in basically 99% of all transactions in the real world (not online shops). No one needs to track when I buy a pair of socks or a sex toy.

In the case where it’s absolutely necessary because the service requires KYC it can always be done completely independent of the payment system.

Our world survived with cash and didn’t devolve into a dystopian nightmare, on the contrary, that came with all the tracking. Now we need to get our privacy back and have cash for digital payments as well.

I mean speak for yourself, all my devices run a Linux system I control and my phone has a custom ROM. It’s far from perfect but a lot better than what most people have.

The very moment such a system exists the clock starts ticking until it is the first time abused.

First they will only abuse it for actual criminals, but there is no time for a judge, trust me bro this is an exception…

Then they will use it for tracking civil disobedient people like activists without a warrant, but trust me bro, they are disrupting your regular live with their stunts, we have to stop that and utilize all the tools.

Then they will come for their political enemies, because didn’t you know, they where evil communist nazis, trying to undermine our political system.

And then they will come for you and your neighbor and everyone they suspect of wrongthink and could challenge their authority.

And that’s just for the timeline where the authorities remain in access, there is another equally dark one when third-parties gain access to this power.

This will all happen faster than you think. No one ever should hold such power. We have to make sure such systems don’t exist and people own their own data and computing again.

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Not now maybe. Maybe something you do, you have, or are, that is perfectly fine now, will become illegal in the future under a different regime, who is to say. Lucky they have all this data ready to make a list.

You are either really naive or just trolling

They can do that anyway. And cash still exists if you forgot.

Again, all this does is take away privacy from regular people, not from criminals. Strong privacy has to be the default for everyone. If you want to catch criminals there are a gazillion other means that worked for centuries before we left digital traces with every movement, unchecked complete surveillance has too much collateral damage.

I use Linux since I abandoned Windows 98 for everything I do and I made it my job. This isn’t a special effort for me. And I’m pretty positive that just by using open source I leave a lot less data traces than the average normi with their proprietary garbage.

But hey if you call me crypto fanatic, you are from now on the surveillance state fascist, how does that sound? Fitting right?

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In my experience, once the gubmint knows that you have something, they figure out how to tax it (which is just a fancy word for stealing).

Yeah ok, as qualified as ever. LOL, not unexpected.

I don’t think we have anything more to discuss. It’s not like you had anything interesting to say anyway no matter the topic. What a waste of time, I should really stop talking to people like you.

Bernie was so foolish. All he needed to do was provide some kind of flimsy make-believe asset and he wouldn’t have gone to prison. The rules aren’t that hard to bend, but you cannot just do nothing!

Guilt can do strange things to people. Elizabeth Holmes did what you suggested but she still went prison. I’m sure these people aren’t mentally well, they seem to think the world owes them riches and power. I was trying to put my self in their position of stealing peoples life savings but I know I just couldn’t do it, I’d only want money that I have worked for.

That’s why you need to have a way to protect civilians from corrupt administration.
The right to arms for example.