| HN Mirror

It's a flex when you compare it to a government based currency where the bank or government can freeze your bank accounts or just empty it. Plenty of stories from The USA and Canada from the last decade of that very thing being done.

atomic_cowprod 6 days ago

Sure. The vast majority of those stories being the freezing of proceeds from criminal activity or funds that are part of a legal dispute and for which there is a high probability that the holder of those funds will attempt to illegally hide or move those funds.

Again, this is by design. Such safeguards exist for a good reason. They are tools that are as necessary as a policeman's gun. Yes, they are tools that can be (and have been) abused and for which there should also be guardrails and oversight in place. But saying that crypto is better than "government based currency" because crypto has no such safeguards in place is the same thing as saying Wal Mart security officers are better than police officers because they don't carry guns. It is a naive thought at best.

It comes down to how much you trust the government, central banks, and the institutions of power, especially post Epstein and COVID.

As much as some amount of defiance towards contemporary governments is warranted, believing that the crypto world is more trustworthy is an insane take. Especially post MtGox and all what followed…

The Epstein class and the Bankman-Fried class are the same people (and don't get fooled by their patronyms, it has nothing to do with Jews, and all to do with the American elite). And Trump is both an friend of Epstein and a proponent of cryptocurrencies.

Meanwhile with cryptocurrencies you have the choice between getting blocked by your exchange or losing your wallet (from your own negligence or a hack)

Not all that different from losing your physical wallet with your ID and debit card or giving your bank info to a Nigerian Prince.

Pick your poison, do you trust corrupt institutions or yourself more.

atomic_cowprod 6 days ago

Dude.

You lose your wallet, you make a few phone calls or walk into a bank and get a new card. You lose very little more than some time. Losing your crypto key means you lose your crypto.

Those are not at all the same thing.

“I trust my midwit brain rather than the institutions that makes the modern world work” really isn't the flex you think it is.

> Institutions that make the modern world

The same institutions that caused the 2008 crash, the same institutions that in the last 5 years have printed 50% more of the total US dollar supply, the institutions that keep the poorest and lowest classes perpetually poor and stuck by constantly inflating their savings away?

Yes, I think I will trust Bitcoin and my hardware wallet more.

> The same institutions that caused the 2008 crash

You rightly call that a “crash” that is nowhere near the scale of the regular bitcoin price fluctuations!

> that in the last 5 years have printed 50% more of the total US dollar supply,

Better trust an ecosystem that has created an endless amount of virtual money over the past 15 years instead then…

> the institutions that keep the poorest and lowest classes perpetually poor

Did you miss the fact that you now need an entire data center worth of specialized hardware to mine bitcoin? It was supposed to be a democratic hacker currency that anyone can mine, yet it is entirely controlled by a handful of hyperscalers… Pretty much no individual can even hold a full bitcoin now, talk about keeping people poor.

> I think I will trust Bitcoin and my hardware wallet more.

Delusional.

This! And this is why the “crypto” world is full of scams and heists, in a way that anyone with a brain could have foreseen from the start.