[hudon]

“ Cash is Censorship-Resistant, meaning it cannot be blocked by banks or governments”

No crypto is large enough to be useful as cash and yet still censorship resistant. Governments can and have censored developers, miners, and exchanges. Monero is no exception, as highlighted at the beginning of the article. Further censorship is just a matter of time, not capability.

[LiquidSky]

Yeah, I never understood this "censorship resistant" nonsense. It seems completely disconnected from the real world. The Internet is not some magic fantasyland in another dimension. If a government made it illegal to possess, use, or accept any crypto your choice of protocol won't matter.

[desumeku]

If it's so easy, why don't they just enforce it? Go ahead and try and catch people when they make Monero transactions and arrest them, considering the entire protocol is designed to make that as hard as possible.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

A law making something like Monero illegal isn't intended to catch all users of the thing, it's intended to be able to add charges to cases involving other things.

[SR2Z]

Sure - you can't stop regular people from making small purchases from other regular people.

But the INSTANT that a regular person becomes a regular small business, the tax authority can and likely will ask to see their records. The INSTANT someone buys a car, the government will be interested in knowing how they paid for it.

Even in the most extreme situation, the government can and will demand taxes to be paid in its preferred currency. How are you gonna get hold of a substantial amount of dollars or remnibi or whatever without getting caught?

This stuff is enforced and no amount of math can beat thousands of years of the state figuring out how to collect taxes.

[bitwize]

Yeah, it's not the 90s anymore. "Cyberspace" does not exist outside national boundaries and laws... and law enforcement is tech savvy, they WILL drop the hammer. Checkmate, lolberts.

[southernplaces7]

You almost seem gleeful at the idea of creeping repression, increasingly severe social controls and a heavy handed state being able to crush what it pleases, with no recourse for rebellious efforts.

So much for the "hacker" in hacker news, and all the ethos behind that word. Instead what we get is pedantic social control freaks flinging smugness as if it were feces at anyone who dares think about the usefulness of things that work around surveillance.