zlacker

>>mikeyo+(OP)
Shouldn't all true crypto believers hate this news?

It's the government trying to enforce their opinion of who should own those Bitcoins, thereby taking power away from the owner that the network has decided on, which would be "whoever has the cryptographic keys".

>>fxtent+35
As a crypto unbeliever I hate this too. Legal enforcement legitimizes crypto as property. It expands the definition of property by institutionally conferring the status of "owned" to a functional configuration of bits distributed over thousands of computers. Do we have this concept for other things? yes. But I'd rather like to contract the space of property rather than expand it.

>>kelsey+Ob
> It expands the definition of property by institutionally conferring the status of "owned" to a functional configuration of bits distributed over thousands of computers. Do we have this concept for other things?

Intellectual property has been a thing for a long, long time. You don't literally need to have a physical thing somewhere for laws to apply.

>>Pragma+mB
Thank you. My yes (which was left off of the quote for some reason) includes intellectual property. I, like many people, are aware of the concept of intangible property. Dollars in my bank account are another example of intangible property.

I'm curious why you included a statement about IP existing for a long time. Is there something about the duration of existence that makes something important? Descriptive statements are notoriously difficult to transform into normative statements.