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
> 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.

Isn't this exactly how your access to digital content is mediated? A bunch of servers somewhere says that this user identifier is allowed to access this content.

>>vageli+Cu1
I might be missing something with this analogy. Is there a legal component to accessing digital content that re-enforces its concept of being property? /gen

There are general similarities in computers mechanically enforcing access that applies to crypto-assets and digital content. I'm specifically interested in how the legal system confers additional properties or re-enforces these properties in digital assets that legitimize the properties institutionally.