Comment by Eridrus

Start from the assumption of liberty and the freedom of association. Unfortunately, most people don't believe in human liberty and prefer varying degrees of slavery.

> If you start from an assumption that there should be no regulation, then your conclusion will be that there should be no regulation

To be fair, they argued against intermediation. Not regulation. Requiring a filing for every $100 cash transfer to one's mother would satisfy their requirement.

How about this:

Regulation is a controlling mechanism that puts constraints on what people can and can't do. Some constraints will enable more things to happen because it reduces certain risks (e.g. property rights and laws against stealing enable investment and development of property).

But when there is too much regulation it has the opposite effect, and instead of enabling progress it stifles it. It acts as a calcification that slows change and makes society less adaptable.

So it's not that regulation is bad, it's that too much regulation can be bad.

Now in terms of regulating people's abilities to transact specifically: in a health democracy putting some regulations on transactions will probably have a positive effect because it can limit abuse and risk, and therefore increase freedom for honest people to make transactions. However when a civilization reaches the point in its life cycle when it is transitioning from a healthy plurality into authoritarianism, the risk of over-regulation of transactions skyrockets and the elimination of privacy when transacting is extremely likely to lead to tyranny.

When someone acts like regulating transactions is inherently bad, they're either repeating something they heard and didn't question, or they're assuming the people they are speaking to are educated in history and have a healthy fear of tyranny.

If you start with the assumption there should be regulation, even then IDK how you get there.

You're regulating an "untraceable" utterance of a string of data.

Pragmatically it's worse than trying to stop fentanyl, which is already impossible, and even trying to stop it has just made the gangs that much more powerful because they now control whole small nation-state tier light-infantry militias funded by black-market profits induced from trying to ban it.

I honestly don't see any way to effectively ban cryptocurrency that has net positive utility. "Yay we caught some criminals, all it cost us was a dystopia!"

Would that make it a probable cause for searches and seizures?

If so, that would be pretty bad right?

> I think arguments for privacy are pretty poorly argued and often come down to "isn't the idea of someone watching you icky" which this thread is not disabusing me of.

Now imagine that "someone" hates people like you, has the power to hurt you with impunity and is actively looking for any excuse to do so.

The main argument for privacy is that a lack of privacy is the primary vehicle of crimes against humanity.

When you do not have privacy, you must then have trust. You are trusting, typically blindly, that your governments and other organizations will not use knowledge against you.

Before the Holocaust, Germany built a registry of known Jews by census. Obviously at the time, nobody knew what it could be used for, the latent evil within just plain information. It was done innocently, naively.

The same applies to all privacy violations. Yes, we could monitor, record, and analyze all text messages. Sure.

What are the consequences of that? What if you live somewhere where being gay is punishable by execution? What if you out yourself?

What if you're not even gay, but it seems as though you might be?

Or what if you live in an authoritarian state, and dissent is punished with death? Your government has cornered you. They can do whatever they like, and you cannot so much as vocalize complaints.

You may say, "oh well this isn't the case for me, so who cares?"

Yes, now, in this particular point in time, in your very specific place. What garantees do you have that things stay that way? None. You are blindly trusting that those who hold your information will not weaponize it.

You have given your enemies a gun, loaded it for them, held it up to your forehead, and said "please don't pull the trigger"

As a thought experiment, imagine how differently the underground railroad would look if everyone had smartphones that were tracked and communications surveilled.