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Yeah but what if a DAO doesn't have a physical office that can be shut down? It's very difficult to stop the spread of something people want to use, and will only become more so.

joosters 3409 days ago

The DAO didn't need a physical office for it to be 'hacked' and drained.

And a car sharing scheme would need physical cars, making it pretty easy to take down the system or haul the car owners to court if the service is breaking laws.

Prototypes fail but clearly people haven't given up on the basic crypto/blockchain idea. A product or service that reliably delivers value (even if imperfectly) will hang around. Look at the draconian penalties for dealing cocaine, or the fairly draconian social sanctions of being caught in possession of it, and yet the trade thrives despite decades of aggressive interdiction. It's going to be politically much more difficult to indict someone for running a gardening or vehicle rental service than a drug kingpin; it's possible of course, but I don't remember a whole lot of public outrage over Kim Dotcom's supposedly nefarious activities.

Cocaine thrives because it is easy to conceal, easy to manufacture, has sky-high profit margins, no legal competition, and because you get paid in untraceable, unrecordable, launderable cash.

Stopping crypto-mixing is much easier then stopping money laundering.

anigbrowl 3408 days ago

I'm sure it looks that way from the outside.

drdeca 3408 days ago

It ("The DAO") did need a mistake in how it was written though...

It's very easy to do, by arresting anyone who will accept transactions from you. The US government can destroy crypto-currencies overnight, by simply shutting down interfaces between the crypto-currency, and the rest of the world (exchanges and payment processors).

Prohibition drug war etc. suggests this is easier to say than it is to do. If a reliable way can be found to identify and isolate contractual defectors in a mutual system then the currency exchange becomes a sideshow.

This is incredibly easy to do, when 99.9% of the world relies on above-the-board banking to get shit done. My landlord doesn't accept rent payments in bitcoin, just like he doesn't accept payments in hooch, heroin, or pirate treasure - especially if it were illegal.

At some point, your internet crime ring will have to procure goods from the rest of the world. If the government wanted to crack down on it, they very easily could.

The underground drug markets only work because illegal drugs enjoy enormous profit margins (And because they are incredibly easy to conceal), due to lack of legal competition... And because, unlike crypto-currencies, cash transactions are common and untraceable (Which makes money laundering possible.) How is your illegal self-driving car company going to make those margins? How are they going to be able to afford to pay off all their suppliers (Who will charge a premium due to the legal risk), to keep your operations under wraps? How are you going to get customer to pay you, when it's illegal to drive your cars round town?

During prohibition, Al Capone was running moonshine, not beer. There weren't enough margins in beer, to risk federal prison. There aren't enough margins in <Whatever illegal bitcoin business you want to run, that doesn't involve a meth lab, or burning people alive in oil drums>, either.

You're saying that there cannot possibly be large enough margins in anything to risk federal prison, which is self-evidently false. Your whole argument relies on declaring crypto currency as contraband, but contraband items are popular because they have inherent value to the consumers rather than simply being a medium of exchange.

It's much easier to proscribe the possession of child porn, hand grenades, or heroin because it's easy to demonstrate the harm of allowing free traffic in such items. Prohibiting voluntary arrangements that don't inherently have first-order harm effects is more difficult. Thus there isn't much opposition to heroin remaining a controlled substance - junkie life sucks - but prohibitions on cannabis use are collapsing left and right because people can see that smoking weed is unlikely to wreck your life.

Of course I don't expect you to get familiar with my comment history, but I'm heard all these basic roadblocks to crypto currencies because I've made many of these same arguments myself in the past. The existence of unsolved problems does not mean that the problems are insoluble.

> You're saying that there cannot possibly be large enough margins in anything to risk federal prison, which is self-evidently false.

No, I'm saying that outside of drugs, assassinations, and moonshine in countries following Sharia law, there aren't large enough margins in anything to risk federal prison.

> Your whole argument relies on declaring crypto currency as contraband, but contraband items are popular because they have inherent value to the consumers rather than simply being a medium of exchange.

Crypto currency is not contraband - but if you are using crypto currency to run a contraband business, you can be shut down by applying pressure on the parties you transact with. The easiest way to do this is by going after the exchanges.

For example, if the feds really wanted to take away all of Ross Ulbricht's money, they could make it illegal for a BTC exchange to accept in payment a bitcoin that, after a particular point in time, ever touched the Silk Road wallet. This would have made his coins de-facto unspendable - and the feds have the ability to do that, given that the exchanges interface with the USD economy.

> It's much easier to proscribe the possession of child porn, hand grenades, or heroin because it's easy to demonstrate the harm of allowing free traffic in such items. Prohibiting voluntary arrangements that don't inherently have first-order harm effects is more difficult.

That's correct. However, we are discussing using a blockchain to run a company that 'can't be shut down'. What exactly would you be selling, that makes it worth the trouble?