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

People standing ready to buy legitimizes crypto as property. I don't love crypto. But prohibition has never worked as intended.

>>JumpCr+fF
In the context of crypto-as-property constructivism, I'm neither an absolute institutional nor a communal conferralist. Presently, it appears like there is much more communal conferralism constructing crypto as property, I'd like to avoid institutionalization. In practice, this would not look like prohibition, rather the avoidance of extending existing property laws to encompass crypto assets. ie: courts and lawmakers saying, "No we're not going to get involved." Unfortunately, any future crisis where crypto can be blamed is a convenient way to extend to crypto the legal construction of it's status as property.

Since you brought up prohibition, I'll take the bait. We already have prohibitive socio-legal constructions which few people use to form the basis of "prohibition has never worked, so we should not prohibit it." Some examples that are socially and legally prohibited are: murder, rape, incest, slavery, torture, buying and selling of children. I'm unsure if you believe that the prohibition of these acts has also never worked as intended and should be left unprohibited.

>>kelsey+no1
Literally none of your examples of prohibition are those against an inanimate object. Crypto prohibition is completely incomparable to selling children (which by the way, they may not call it 'selling' but adoptions typically require tens of thousands of 'buying' in, so there is sort of a buying and selling of children at least in the US.)

>>notch6+tF1
Would evidence of a prohibition against an inanimate object change your mind?

>>kelsey+2G1
I would be convinced if you could cite prohibition against inanimate data that maintains the 4th amendment protections in US while simultaneously thwarting those determined to share and manipulate that data. It might, might, work somewhere in someplace like Singapore where the population has widespread support for execution of those found with contraband and few constitutional protections.

Prohibition has doubtful effect in US on even universally hated and criminally suppressed content like CP.