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NancyLebovitz comments on Open Thread, October 27 - 31, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I love this speech, but I suspect it's overoptimistic. I believe that bitcoin will be illegal as soon as it's actually needed.
Still, I appreciate his appreciation of immigration/emigration. I'm convinced that mmigration/emigration gets less respect than staying and fighting because it's less dramatic, less likely to get people killed, and more likely to work.
That is likely, but note that torrenting Lady Gaga's mp3s is also illegal and yet I have absolutely zero difficulty in finding such torrents on the 'net.
Maintaining a currency takes a much more complicated information structure than letting people make unlimited copies of something.
What do you mean, "maintaining"? Bitcoin was explicitly designed to function in a distributed manner without the need for any central authority.
And consequently it has a much more complicated information structure than torrents do. :) But this aside, while you can likely run the Bitcoin economy as such, if Bitcoins cannot be exchanged for dollars or directly for goods and services, they are worthless; and this is a bottleneck where a government has a lot of infrastructure to insert itself. I suggest that, if Bitcoins become illegal, buying hard drugs is the better analogy than downloading torrents: It won't be impossible, but it'll be much more difficult than setting up a free client and clicking "download".
The differences between the physical and the virtual worlds are very relevant here.
Silk Road was blatantly illegal and it took the authorities years to bust its operator, a US citizen. Once similar things are run by, say, Malaysian Chinese out of Dubai with hardware scattered across the world, the cost for the US authorities to combat them would be... unmanageable.