I really think you hit the nail on the head with this statement. There are often so many hidden assumptions in anything that authorities by definition are bad. I believe the whole blockchain/crypto/web3 movement is more an idealogy than a solution to a problem.

Ownership of your funds, which is the primary requirement from which all others stem. You will still have those when you regain access to the internet, or the ability to spend them.

The reality is that a government having the ability to confiscate the funds in your bank account, and attempting to restrict you and your neighbours peer to peer actions, personal mobility or internet access are totally different things. This sort black and white thinking provides lacks a valuable analysis of actual power structures. No one claims your crypto currency will protect you from a bullet.

There is a large middle-ground between a government respecting your ownership and a one stealing your funds using a wrench.

Same that happens when you lose anything else of value- it's lost unless you can get it back. I don't need a central authority to decide that I might be able to get my money back without my password, because then someone else can do the same (via social engineering or otherwise, like internal saboteur)

>What if a 51% attack happens, in which 51% of the processing power in a blockchain network come under attack by a group with immense computing power?

An incredibly unlikely event, given the vast size of the network. Though it is a valid concern.

>This is to say nothing of the environmental aspect of Bitcoin mining, which uses more energy than entire nations.

Agree on this point, FWIW, though PoS aims to fix it (which sadly is moving pretty slowly)

>Or the fact that groups like the Al-Qassam Brigades are using cryptocurrency to finance their operations and solicit donations.

What about the fact that banks assist billions in tax fraud (and pocketed millions in bailouts)? The crypto can be blocked at exchanges in the future making people more wary about the issue.

I hope I don't come across as a crypto shill as I own no crypto, but the author argues against crypto as a whole (instead of, say, crypto evangelists).

When it was created, it was idealized as the digital equivalent to cash. Totally private and anonymous so you can do whatever you want without some bank or government monitoring you or taking issue. It was supposed to be your money, not your social credit at the bank that the authorities allow you to use for approved purposes.

Bitcoin totally failed to become all that. The ledger is public and perfectly traceable so it's even worse than money at the bank. People have even identified the wallets of whales so that they can track their movements and see if they're about to dump on the market.

Coins are not fungible which means exchanges will refuse your tainted money if you use a mixing service for privacy. Governments will sanction addresses, making the coins held by them illegal and unacceptable by any business.

> Becauee my transactions were cheap and quick

Mine were not. Were you using the higher layer networks that delay blockchain settlement? Because that defeats the purpose of having cryptocurrencies in the first place.

You assume that from the blockchain kidnappers can find out who I am. I don't think they can, unless I exchange crypto with them.

>Consider also the scale: what percentage of cryptocurrency users live in regimes like that versus the percentage who have functioning courts but are one exploit/phish away from irrecoverably losing all of their cryptocurrency?

People always make mistakes. Do you suggest to prohibit every possible action which might lead to bad consequences? Do you suggest to damage people in need in order to save those living with good conditions?

Then you are effectively trusting a third party to make it right when you have been wronged. Isn't this contradictory to the promise of blockchains: That trusting a third party is not required??

Taking this further, you are saying that the data on a blockchain cannot be trusted because the transactions might be reversed due to outside action. Honest question: How does this fit into the concept of a blockchain?

You trust random people on the street?

This comment falls apart because your premise here is wrong. All trading parties (and the individuals that make them up) do NOT trust each other without shared history.

Crypto as a base layer recognizes this - the base layer is supposed to be trustless with game theoretic rules to keep the system functional and secure.

Layers on top of crypto can have all the rules and functionality you desire. That includes KYC, that includes reversing transactions, that includes wallet recovery through social multi sig mechanisms.

yes, and so does the other crypto - cryptography. facilitating illegal transactions, illegal speech, illegal opinions, illegal thoughts. list of users includes terrorists, drug dealers, pedophiles, Russians, antivaxers and so on.

it boggles me how do people fail still fail to understand, after watching our collective liberty being eroded for the past 20 years in the name of combating terrorists and protecting children, that the slippery slope is not a fallacy but a law of nature.

the people and entities who want cryptocurrency gone don't give a flying fuck about things they feed the useful idiots as the rationale to do it.

I disagree.

I'm ultimately arguing that this:

> I understood it that if I keep the private key secure, nobody can take it away from me.

Is demonstrably false, both from a practical and a technological standpoint.

I've more faith in developed-world governments than I do in Bitcoin's miners.

You are mistaken. There is a technique called "rubber-hose cryptanalysis" which works wonderfully in cases like the one you described. Once applied, you will gladly give up your key and anything else they ask for. That's what violence means.

If you do not control real world then you do not control anything. There is no way around violence. At least for as long as humans have physical bodies and live off blockchain.

> unacceptable to have compliance enforced on us as the current financial system does

You are arguing that because the current system is excessively regulated, then a system with no means to enforce the rules will work better. The problem with that is that blockchain is a lot more expensive to operate per transaction that the conventional systems. Because of that it can only be used when the conventional system cannot be, specifically for circumventing the regulations, i.e. breaking the law.

> but I strongly disagree.

You say you disagree, but you actually agree. All the cases you listed are cases of "circumvention of regulations".

> We'll see.

It's been long enough to see. Believing otherwise is like believing that this contraption with a few more tweaks will produce perpetual motion.

> some forms of governance

It's either able to enforce the rules with real-world violence, or it is irrelevant. It's really that binary 0 or 1. Nothing in between.

> Not that I agree with this statement

It's basic math as in 2 greater than 1. It does not matter if you disagree with it.

> but if the alternative is round the clock surveillance and authoritarian enforcement of regulations

That's not the point. Blockchain is a tool that helps you circumvent regulations (good or bad authoritarian or not, does not matter). It's a tool which has only one use: to facilitate circumvention of regulations. The point is if blockchain is regulated then it's no longer a useful tool for breaking the law and consequently irrelevant.

Crypto isn't about privacy, it's actually the opposite. All transactions on the blockchain are transparent as it's literally a distributed ledger. There is absolutely no secrecy or privacy when it comes to how Bitcoin works for instance. And it's by design. Bitcoin inventor(s) goal was for people not to have to trust the secrecy of banks but essentially be their own bank. Whether that goal was achieved or not is anybody's guess...

So I'm not sure what pro-privacy stance you are talking about.

This is a gross misunderstanding of both the current banking system (which is decentralized) and the degree to which using a slow database doesn’t prevent legal actions. Blockchains are very easy to monitor and censor: ideal for an authoritarian government to get a signed confession for every disapproved transaction you make, and a high-volume always-on network is trivially blocked should they care to.

That's a fair criticism to the extent that any theoretical decentralised ledger process pipeline touches the real world, but the extent to which they do touch the real world, and the benefits available from each of them varies enormously.

> Which puts a huge target on your head for any kind of real world malicious actor.

If the choice is between that and having a bank and its chain of dependencies as a tyrannical real world dictator, I'd rather have to deal with that target than be trapped in that tyranny. That risk can be mitigated, it can be compensated for, structures can be erected to address it.

If you're slave to a tyrant, you're simply immediately subject to whatever their whims are. That is utterly unacceptable, even if it does theoretically reduce some risk for some people sometimes.

In a society that was not a cyberpunk dystopia, the price for instruments that allowed you to circumvent said tyranny would probably be much lower than it is. But this is not that world, I guess.

You claim to understand crypto, yet this is blatantly false.

With cash you are exposed only to your local crime, with crypto you are exposed to a global crime network, implementation bugs (both network & wallet/device)..

No. Anyone who thinks they are is deluding themselves. There is no such thing as a setup that is 100% secure against human error (and nobody is infallible) or a sufficiently motivated and skilled attacker (and there are supreme amounts of motivation here).

The core problem is the lack of legal recourse. Anonymous, irreversible, distributed transactions for money are a really fucking stupid idea.

We the hodlers believe that Bitcoin can be hacked only by hacking cryptografic hash-functions, which will lead to collapse all the banks, all passwords on all websites, maybe some data structures like hash-maps.

> or I get scammed in some way, where is my legal recourse?

How will you get scammed if you have a backup which you promise to yourself to not even introduce to computer with online? Also nobody recommends you to hold all your wealth in crypto. Some metals work not bad also, my favorite example is copper.

> But state regulation nullifies a lot of what bitcoin advocates claim is the advantage of cryptocurrency.

Let me guess, you have not read / have to reread the bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf whitepaper?

It isn't. And this is the fundamental problem with using crypto for its' (professed, intended) use of a trustless currency. In order to actually do that, you need to run a full node on your own hardware. However no one wants to do that, so we've literally just reinvented the existing trust based banking system on top of it all, with the added benefit of zero transparency or regulation.

This is hyperbolic. There are many insured custody services for cryptocurrencies, similar to fiat banks. Secure storage is a big topic in the crypto space, and it is certainly not a goal of cyptocurrencies to weaken protection mechanisms (centralized or otherwise).