[asasidh]

A lot of things can be true at the same time:

1. A lot of scammers launch crypto scams, rug pull tokens, phish/scam people out of their money. 2. Bitcoin is a hard, censorship resistant, permission less money. 3. Outside of Bitcoin, Crypto / blockchain is still experimental and looking for its usecase. We have seen smart contracts, tokenization of assets, NFTs and meme coins all being tried out here.

[acdha]

Bitcoin isn’t “censorship resistant” with its public ledger turning that into a data mining exercise, especially since it’s not widely used in the real economy so enforcement can be gated at the exchanges.

[anonym29]

You seem to be misunderstanding censorship resistance. It means that no government can block or stop a crypto transaction the way they can credit card and bank transactions, and has nothing to do with FIAT on/offramps at CEXs, nor with the traceability of past transactions that were made successfully.

[acdha]

No, you’re trying to define it too narrowly. The term censorship has never referred solely to prior restraint, for the simple reason that it’s hard to know in advance what someone will do. What makes it effective is the idea of consequences: if you’re thinking about saying “military fighting machine male” in China, you know that you’re not cleverly evading the government but rather setting yourself up for retribution.

For a financial system, this is even more true because nobody sets a flag on their transaction to say it’s criminal and so any government knows that they have to retroactively pursue activity after identifying it as forbidden.

For all forms of censorship, that idea of retroactive consequences is extremely useful because it encourages people not to do things they might otherwise consider because they don’t want to leave a permanent record, and that favors those in power. For example, say someone was thinking about donating to a women’s health clinic but is worried about leaving an indelible Bitcoin record just in case that later is deemed criminal – the other side has harmed their political opposition without even having to do a thing.

Once you understand that, the connection to the exchanges is easier to grasp: that’s where they can deanonymize people and institute transaction blocks without having to go after the entire network. Since statistically nobody pays their bills in Bitcoin, this is quite effective because anyone who needs to participate in the real economy has to go through one of few companies with legal presence, and those companies can be compelled to identify their customers and block transactions involving specific IDs.

Bitcoin is a great design for censors: imagine if the Stasi could’ve blocked every transaction someone made even without knowing their identity! Send or receive a political donation and _poof_ you can’t buy food or pay rent.

[jazzyjackson]

Ok, Bitcoin has censorship resistance as long as you pretend CEXs aren't a factor, you can send money to whoever you want, as long as that person never wants to use a KYC'd offramp

[anonym29]

CEXs aren't a factor unless you wish to trade your valuable, scarce Bitcoin for worthless pieces of paper and linen, backed by nothing for the last 50+ years, that have had a 40% expansion in supply in the last 5 years (AKA counterfeit currency), for whatever bizarre reason someone might want to make such a bad trade.