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.
People standing ready to buy legitimizes crypto as property. I don't love crypto. But prohibition has never worked as intended.
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.
9/10ths of law is property ownership. I find hilarious that anyone would want less of this concept, not more. My interpretation is that crypto enthusiasts want the "trust of the crowds" not a centralized government. Which doesn't mean the trust system becomes contracted per se, but rather under a different set of rules (i.e. purely direct democracy vs centralized republic).
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.
Do Visa and Mastercard count?
Another way of putting it is this. Expansions in the legal concept of property are consequently expansions in the dominion of the state.
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.
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.
Prohibition has doubtful effect in US on even universally hated and criminally suppressed content like CP.
Crypto is on the balance sheet of individuals, businesses, financial institutes and even at least one nation (El Salvador). There's crypto index funds and ETFs trading on wallstreet.
And here you are philosophizing about whether crypto can really be owned? You're a decade too late.
Allow me to rewrite since it wasn't understand I was replying to your question:
I would be convinced to change my mind 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.
My understanding so far is that "I currently believe prohibition of inanimate objects has no effect. If supplied with this evidence, then I would believe prohibition of inanimate objects would have an effect."
edit: also under what criteria would be used to judge whether a prohibition "maintains the 4th amendment protections in US"? Any specific relevant cases? If I go hunting for evidence, I want to make sure the goalposts are not moved.
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.
So your concerns are about restriction of liberties? or society moving away from small government?
Are you a supporter of cryptocurrencies?
My current belief is that attempting prohibition against inanimate data (sharing and manipulating) while maintaining the 4th amendment protections in US and simultaneously thwarting those determined to share and manipulate that data, will be minimally effective and will not significantly impact the ability of those determined to violate the prohibition.
My new belief is immaterial to whether I have changed my mind, other than it must be different somehow (otherwise the mind wasn't changed). Changing your mind just means it changed, so the only requirement is the belief is different. Without evidence, I can't possibly predict what my new belief would be. Therefore I refuse to box in what my new belief would be, and I think it would be ignorant of me to make such a presupposition.
Bear in mind 'change your mind' was a notion introduced by you not me, I can't possibly speak for what you meant there when you brought this phrase into the conversation.
>I currently believe prohibition of inanimate objects has no effect. If supplied with this evidence, then I would believe prohibition of inanimate objects would have an effect."
That's actually not my belief. Clearly there is an effect, and the criteria I think crypto meets is much stricter than merely an inanimate object but rather it drills down to just being sharing and manipulating data. You can memorize a seed phrase that resides entirely in your mind, and other than chemical storage in your brain there is no physical manifestation to seize at a national or individual level that would effectively destroy that wealth.
I think prohibition on inanimate objects has an effect, just not usually the intended effect.
The only data that can even comparably be viewed as a candidate for what prohibition of (strictest case) crypto data can look like I think again is CP. It is universally detested, the criminal penalties can be devastating, fellow prisoners may straight up kill you, and the community will virtually always back the jailing for as long as anyone cares to jail the people engaged in sharing it. I think that puts a decent ceiling for what is possible to impose on crypto, because the public will to impose prohibition on crypto surely can't be as high as it is for the prohibition of sharing data of the abuse of children. Given that even this effort has been essentially futile, I'm not seeing much of a prayer of crypto prohibition being effective at thwarting anyone but the undetermined.
There may be prisoners this moment mining some crypto on their phone, smuggled up someone's ass into prison. If they're not, they trivially could be. That's how hard it is to get rid of.
>also under what criteria would be used to judge whether a prohibition "maintains the 4th amendment protections in US"
The criteria would be not to violate the 4th amendment.
>If I go hunting for evidence, I want to make sure the goalposts are not moved.
That's really up to you, you don't owe me anything and I don't owe you anything either.
When the government steps in, it's not usually to say _you_ own it but rather _they_ own part of it. If you own it of course you owe them nothing of it. Government finally getting their greedy hands out of private property would be a huge step up.
This is even more obvious when I present it this way. Yesterday there's a cow in my yard. The next day my neighbor says he recognizes the cow as my cow. The neighbor has ceded over power of the cow, now recognizing I have full control of the cow and they're removing any claim of power they had. It's a contraction or break even of, not expansion, of my neighbor's power.
Ownership means you have full control over your crypto. Paying taxes on it means you don't have ownership, but rather partial ownership. If the state is conferring you full ownership, it would appear their power is decreasing. If the state is taxing crypto, then they're taking away ownership status and instead attributing some of it to themselves -- THEN it's an expansion of power.