Bitcoin represents the strongest property rights that have ever existed.
It is trivially easy for a government to steal someone’s USD, AUD, etc. It can be harder for a government to steal someone’s gold. It can be even harder to steal someone’s Bitcoin. In addition, it’s nearly impossible for the government to stop me from transferring my Bitcoin to whomever I damn well please.
A government can just shut down a country’s internet and communication services. A government can just outright ban the currency.
@prologic@twtxt.net If a government bans the currency, it wouldn’t have a hope of being enforced unless they could make all the internet service providers enforce a domain whitelist. Not a blacklist like the Great Firewall of China.
The GFW also does deep packet inspection, and perhaps that could be used (likely on a per-currency basis) to limit the access of nodes, but that can be circumvented with Tor bridges.
The government could cut off a country from the Internet like you said, but then you have bigger problems than your favorite internet currency being unusable. Even then, there would still be ways around it.
@mckinley@twtxt.net Oh don’t get me wrong, I never said a country like Australia or the US or UK or any other “civilised” country would ever do this 😅 – Governments actually like cryptocurrencies anyway (now) since in many countries it is basically considered an asset and comes under the same taxation laws that already exist 😅 – So no good sensible government would ever ban or make crypto hard, becuase then they couldn’t tax it 😂
@brasshopper@twtxt.net It’s something you should also consider as well here…
There are two things in life you cannot avoid:
- Taxes
and
- Death
The only thing you can control is what you do with your time and effort 😅
@prologic@twtxt.net I think practice is proving this one. In addition, I’ve heard of reports of folks memorizing their seed phrase, uninstalling their BTC wallet on their phone, crossing the Venezuelan border, proceeding to reinstall it, and restoring access to their wallet using their seed phrase. Try that with Gold or fiat.
@brasshopper@twtxt.net Reminds me of James Howells’s story: $11 million campaign is planned to find James Howells’ hard drive with 8,000 Bitcoin in Newport, South Wales | Fortune 😂