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
Human society is rapidly moving more and more "things" in the electronic realm. By necessity of technology (we're on HN for goodness sake!) the realm of property absolutely must expand into electronic representations.

Ironically, Bitcoin enables ownership to be established (at least as far as knowing the private keys = proof of ownership), in addition to the transaction path the electronic bits and bytes took in order to reach its current place of ownership.