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Progressive Group Rebukes Democrats for Being 'Fully Complicit' in Industry-Backed Crypto Bill
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
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I respectfully disagree. Crypto is a tool. It can be used by oppressed people to protect their money, and it can be used by people like Trump to grift them out of it too. It’s the same energy as a knife—it can perform life saving surgery and it can kill depending on the hands using it. The tool isn’t to blame, the people using it are.
Another interesting phenomenon with crypto is the safety it has brought to the drug trade through online markets. Instead of a dealer being able to sell bunk product to hundreds of unaware customers, now we have anonymous online reviews to assist people in sourcing safer products from an industry that governments have refused to regulate and provide access to.
It’s a double edged sword, but it isn’t crypto’s fault how it gets used, just like it isn’t a dollar bills fault when it buys a child bride. Accountability is for humans, not objects.
Lol. Lmao.
Accountability is for the people that design, build, maintain, use, and moderate the program just like every other program. That's just bullshit for the devs and their backers to weasel out of responsibility. Clearly they're able to fork out transactions they don't want to happen, if it benefits them.
Saying the system has no accountability for the way it allows anonymous actors to commit virtual financial crimes without fear of consequences is again, laughable. It's a program, it should be judged on how it's used. If a website allows people to post child porn, it's just "a tool that's being used and could be used to post art as well" oh well.
It's purpose is what it does. I've never seen an "oppressed person" protect their money with crypto. By what mechanism would that happen? Wishful thinking?
The drug trade issue is soaked in capitalist libertarianism and any more socially libertarian / anarchist effects are purely derivative. Bypassing the capitalists government by going directly into the unregulated market.
Your lol’s and lmao’s aren’t necessary, I’m trying to engage in a good faith discussion with you here. Laughing me off isn’t the same as making a valid point.
Saying that they can fork out transactions they don’t like is clearly a misunderstanding of how most crypto works. There may be some shitcoin out there that has nefarious design qualities that I don’t know about, but the largest coin out there is undoubtedly bitcoin, and speaking to that system, the entire purpose of it is that it is trustless at its core. It is defined by a set of rules that were set out in the white paper, and it does not deviate from that. Transactions are verifiable by each ledger. Satoshi Nakamoto isn’t sitting there with his finger on a switch to screw you. There may be whales who are able to move the needle with huge transactions, but that is literally the same for any currency.
Maybe we will have different definitions of oppression, so I will just say people in general can protect their assets from seizure with crypto. If you have too much cash in your car and get pulled over at a traffic stop, the cops can just take it on the assumption that having a large amount of money on you is suspicious. This has happened multiple times in America when people have been traveling with large amounts of cash to purchase properties, cars, antiques, or a whole variety of other things. No beat cop is going to be smart enough to start hassling you over your USB keychain when you get stopped for going 5 over the limit.
I agree with the first sentence of your second paragraph—if the creators of a coin have included hidden design elements to screw people, they should be held accountable for that, but that is not going to be the case with every crypto coin out there, and they should be judged individually. Going back to my knife example, a knife that is a murder weapon should be seized, a knife that is a cooking utensil should not.
And lastly, to speak to your point about CP, while I’m not an expert on the subject, nearly every system I’ve heard of that is used for that is something that is also used for totally legal purposes including Lemmy! Should Lemmy be illegal because there are some illegal instances out there? Of course not—those individual instance operators should be held accountable, and the other instance operators have nothing to do with it. When you paint with such a broad brush, you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I find them quite necessary. The derision is part of the point. So many people treat cryptocurrency like something to be venerated when it's just a bunch of bullshit.
Bitcoin forked into bitcoin classic, in order to undo a transaction. I'm aware this isn't a trivial process, but it protects those with power and capital and has no function to protect those who do not. The issue is that this is completely ran by capitalists and has no oversite, obviously banks have plenty of ways to fuck you over, that's why they're regulated.
Yes that is an issue. I'm suggesting that "cryptocurrency" as a solution to that issue is just as much of a solution as any other investment vehicle and isn't something crypto is in any way uniquely suited to solve. Civil forfeiture is theft and unconstitutional.
There is no mechanism through which accountability can be held. That is entirely the point. You can "judge" them individually all you want but the ecosystem is uniquely suited for abuse.
I am not venerating cryptocurrency, you are firing your shots at the wrong person. I’m just taking a more balanced stance about it than you are. Frankly, you come off as rude.
There are methods for accountability in the crypto space, just look at where Sam Bankman-Fried is now.
A forked currency is a new currency—you can’t judge the currency it was forked from by the effect of the new one.
You are correct that crypto is an imperfect solution for protecting assets from seizure for a variety of reasons, but seeing as there is absolutely no government appetite for police reform, it’s what we’ve got.
You don’t seem interested in a respectful debate at all, so I’ll just end by saying you have been unpleasant to talk to and I hope we don’t meet again.