[aloknnikhil]

It maybe a bad argument but it's a practical view. Governments around the world (see: India, China) have strict laws around crypto. By law of association, any service that remotely mentions this is severely scrutinized. I can hardly blame my friends if they want no part of this.

[Sunspark]

Crypto is so strange. You claim ownership over a string of 1s and 0s. Exclusive rights.

[Hydraulix989]

That's not how it works. It's more like there's this shared network of participants that has strong incentives to consistently agree that you own a numeric measurement of "value" and that you have the agreed-upon ability to elect to transfer portions of this value to other participants in the network (because you _know_ a specific private key and can irrefutably demonstrate that you know it even without disclosing it).

[gfxgirl]

Most of my finances are just strings of 1s and 0s. My company pays me. They don't send pieces of paper to my bank. It happens via 1s and 0s. From there, 80-90% of my expenses get paid automatically (rent, most taxes, electricity, internet, gas, water, trash collection) all via 1s and 0s. And cash is slowly disappearing into 1s and 0s as well via phone payment systems.

[ludamad]

You don't, though. That's more like IP law, where people really do claim rights over the usage of strings. Crypto is more like allocating a string on some servers with a decentralized process

[saganus]

I don't think cryptocoins are about "claiming" ones and zeroes, but instead having the ability to "use" those ones and zeroes, unlike anybody else.

Although ultimately the effect is similar to "claiming" them by virtue of being the only one (as long as you don't share the private key of course) that can operate on those one and zeroes (i.e transfering them to some other address).

Unlike, say, copyright, where even if you claim ownership, someone else can also operate on it (e.g. piracy), illegally of course, but still can.

[webinvest]

Not too different from the 1s and 0s in your bank account. I bet you use cash for less than 1% of your transactions. Everything else is 1s and 0s.

[johnhenry]

Applies to intellectual property in general.

[tremon]

Banking is so strange. The bank grants you ownership over some pieces of paper that may not even really exist.

[godelski]

They are whitelisting the feature. So this is pretty easy to deal with. Government bans? Take off the whitelist. No more issues. Major services like Google Play will have to deal with this too. Most apps don't work the same way in every single country, they adopt to those countries' policies or get banned.

[eganist]

> They are whitelisting the feature. So this is pretty easy to deal with. Government bans? Take off the whitelist. No more issues. Major services like Google Play will have to deal with this too. Most apps don't work the same way in every single country, they adopt to those countries' policies or get banned.

Contrived strawman rebuttal: Government sees app "ThingX" now deals with crypto. ThingX indicates that different variants of the app can interact with crypto depending on the region. Government doesn't care because they're not tech savvy, bans ThingX because crypto.