Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Footnote7341 933 days ago
Justify to me where my rights should end on the spectrum of trading someone a piece of fruit for another piece of fruit, or giving him precious metals for it, or giving him fiat, or giving him electronic dollars, or giving him monero.

please pick the point on that line where my rights should end and I should be submitted to bureaucracy, KYC, etc.

4 comments

No one interferes with your ability to exchange money for fruit. However, exchanging money for a hitman's services, financing terrorists, selling illegal substances, etc are very much curtailed and for good reason. Society has determined you don't have the right to exchange money for those purposes. If you want that right, you have to change the society (by ballot or revolution, as may be applicable to your situation).
You fail to see what the problem is here. The problem is freedom eroding banking laws that do peer into my fruit transactions. They should be first challenged in the courts. Calling for violence isn't legal either, doesn't mean we support the state peering into all my emails.
You have a valid point but when there are conflicting interests, regulations are typically designed to act on the pivot point where they are likely to be effective, have a concentrated set of targets and create minimal harm.

In the case of finance, it is easier and more effective to delegate the bankers to keep tabs on who is moving (large sums of) money around and refuse service to anyone that seems suspicious. With regards to email providers, no similar nexus exists.

You can best believe that if email providers were registered and licensed and the issue of people using email to commit crimes were sufficiently pronounced, having them scan all emails for suspicious activity would be seriously considered (and there would be a good argument for it).

And I'm not going to support the inevitable law that has a LLM scan all of my digital communication either. no matter how they wrap it up in a bow of public safety. The world is safer every year, yet somehow there's more and more scary reasons why the state should have its boot on my face.
People like you will never be happy in life. If this utopia that you crave was ever made, you’d want to change things back when you see the reality.
It's quite simple actually, when you are using a currency, you are not actually using "your own money/dollars", but you're actually using an amount of value that is abstract, but the value of that abstraction is actually shared by all the currency holders concurrently.

The value that your currency holds while you own it is based on the current market rate and is inherently tied to everyone of the currency owners. (It is true that yes, other commodities also work via market forces, but they're inherently different as they aren't abstractions and have inherent value to them.)

To not get into the weeds, your rights end when your actions start to affect other people, so limitations on how currency can be used are put in place. Using a shared currency is a type of social contract that you bind yourself when using it. Society has over the years observed how shared currencies work and set limits on the freedom of use to limit abuse.

And to drive the point home, governments have seen that cryptocurrencies are used for abuse, so they're making steps that limit your rights to exchange their currency directly to crypto to inherently decouple their currencies value from their currency.

To get around this, you'll have to convince your employer to pay you in commodities and you to sell your physical items via cryptocurrency. Like how traditional currencies were originally designed to do. The market for exchanging physical goods or other services set the rate for a currency. But unfortunately the inherent unregulated nature of crypto made it ripe for abuse, also the unregulated and rampant speculation of the value made it infeasible to use as a traditional currency.

TL;DR: Currency is a type of social contract, your rights end when your actions start to affect other people negatively.

Also, an important sidenote, that is unintuitive and very hard to internalize: When quantifiably making profit via speculation, someone else is strictly losing value. This can be a major contributor for inflation.
You rights should end where you try to not pay taxes of your trade.
There are many point where that right ends.

One is when you knowingly become a broker that sits between the two parties.

Heh, I always love the rugged individualists in this kind of thread pretending they are some kind of island, no asteroid floating free of gravity in space. Where as real life down here on earth represents a huge number of social contracts that we commonly agree to without realizing they even exist.