| > Third, a vendor might not have a working terminal... does that make the vendor a tax evader or a scammer? Often, yes. Among New York taxis it's notorious - a driver who tells you their card machine isn't working is probably scamming you in other ways, and will probably decide it actually is working if you tell them you have no cash on you. More generally I've had more than one vendor tell me "oh, in that case I have to include the tax" if I ask to pay by card. > you should accept that there isn't a consensus: different people have different opinions on this. Different people have different opinions, but the trend is pretty consistent IMO. E.g. bearer bonds are almost completely unknown these days. > Bitcoin never claimed to want to replace law or law enforcement, or to be immune from the application of law by courts and law enforcement. Bitcoin itself may not have claimed that (the white paper talks about making transactions irreversible explicitly to avoid the need to mediate disputes, but I guess that's not strictly the same thing), but certainly many Bitcoin advocates did. > people are using/buying it, so there must be some sort of selling point that hasn't been eliminated. It's good for buying drugs online, it's good for ransomware, it's ok for speculation. I don't see anything that's a net positive for society being done with it. > Sure... and I did not say otherwise. My point is that property rights apply equally to blockchain assets as to other assets, and thus can be seized by a court. Are there cases where a court is unable to seize someone's cash or blockchain assets (or any other assets that can be "hidden")? Yes. Does that make property laws not apply? Not really. I think it's fair to say that property rights apply more weakly to assets that are harder for courts to return to their rightful owner. And yes, I agree that that amounts to saying that property rights for cash are weaker than property rights for property that has a stronger system of ownership records (though those of bitcoin are probably even weaker than those of cash, since courts are even less effective at returning stolen bitcoin than stolen cash in practice). |