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by paxys 1384 days ago
The ideas that:

• The blockchain is an immutable distributed source of truth outside the control of any central authority

and

• The government can pass judgement, seize your assets and give them to someone else

are fundamentally contradictory.

If you want the government to be the final arbiter of property rights then you are conceding that they control property allocation, not some global ledger.

1 comments

Outside the control of something does not mean the same as outside the reach of. For a typical tech example consider e.g. owning a word processor vs using a word processing software as a service. In the former your usage of that is outside the control of any central authority, but certainly not outside their potential reach.

If the government deems your copy of that software is illegal, they may come for you [and it], but at the same time they can't simply whisk it out of existence - because they don't control it. By contrast, in the SaaS case - they can indeed simply whisk it out of existence, so far as you are concerned.

This also has nothing to do with conceding who "controls property allocation." It's all about control/ownership.