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>But there will always be a government of some sort making the big decisions for the benefit of its ruling clique

That depends on how much resources said government can extract from the environment. Either by taking or by providing value in exchange.

One can imagine a level of technological advancement that makes violence impossible and trade unnecessary. Poof, no government.

Indeed. That's the point. We can't sidestep human control via technical means.

If you perfectly evade government oversight being illegal doesn't matter much.

It's a weird idea of being physically present in the jurisdiction and not being subject to it's laws which kinda doesn't survive reality.

When fraud, theft occur and/or claims on insurance when fraud theft occurs a regulator must have a legal system to find facts, prove charges, make a judgement that can be enforced etc.. And that means, for one thing, anonymous users are an illusion. Identity to get accountability is required.

Are they really attempting to replace the power structures I'm talking about? Are their methods sufficiently ambitious?

If not they're fooling themselves same as those focused on currency replacement.

The challenge is not a technical one, and cannot be solved with technology.

No, it wont, because you just made the same mistake they talked about. You assumed that its a currency implementation detail and not a power structure thats holding it back.

Good luck

You're mixing up two issues. The need for oracles is a "hard problem" but it's not the problem in this case.

USDC has a central issuer that can freeze funds because that's the only way you can currently have an asset that "looks like" dollars on a crypto ledger. Someone gets a dollar, mints a unit of the bearer token, and pinky swears they'll redeem it. It's a systemic concern that calls into question the legitimacy of the system, but that's not an oracle.

>> Those persons (a judge, the police, even if robots by then) are the oracle.

they are not. The oracle is always a computer. It is a record in gov db that says you own something.

Judge and the police are the enforcers.

"Oracle" being the cover for crypto bros who dont want to admit they need "the legal system" to fix thier mess. Its all idiology and freedom when you are poor but once you actually own something of value, like a flat, suddenly you want lawyers and police to keep you safe from bad people.

No? Cryptocurrency has a ton of utility: it simplified ransomware attacks, enabled the deployment of supplychain attacks to steal funds from unsuspecting users, made illegal gambling accessible to everyone, memecoins, efts and safe storage for any stolen or illicidly gained funds until they could be laundered and the list goes on likely exceeding the character limit.

The biggest benefit is that you can only withdraw what you need into the real world, if you gain millions of dollars you can life off that money for the rest of your life with tiny withdrawals of $2000~$5000 or so serving as a stable stream of income which allows you to have risk free investment into real-world activites that would normally strain your finances and induce sunk cost fallacy.

Losing $5000 doesn't mean anything when you know that you will have $5000 tomorrow.

It's another wealth transfer. No new money is generated.

> At some point it clicked to me that crypto people don’t really care about the utility. Main purpose is creating new players in the world with immense amounts of power.

There are many types of crypto people. Some of them are not crypto people per se, but people who saw crypto as a means to an end. Among them, there are plenty of people who seem to be invested in sheer fraud.

It's also important to note that there are many sides to the scheme. There's for example the instant transactions side, and the long term bet in scarcity. For example, Russia has been leaning heavily on crypto to circumvent sanctions due to their invasion of Ukraine.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2025/08/russias-use-of-...

> In the end, it did produce a lot of rich people out of thin air, and I guess, served its purpose.

It was not out of thin air. This is literally a grift where the people holding the bag saw their money find its way to the pockets of those who got rich from it.

Based on my 10 seconds of Googling, for transactions under $100, Bitcoin is actually more expensive to transfer.

The usual "Governments are evil until I need to be rescued" libertarian shuffle.

I imagine it's possible to design a blockchain where transactions are 1) artificially delayed; and 2) can be blocked by anyone who has the key.

For example, take Bitcoin, except that each transaction must be posted twice to be considered to have modified the ledger between 7 and 14 days apart as measured by the number of intermediate blocks as a function of the difficulty requirement. If a "blocking" transaction makes it to the blockchain in between, then the transaction is deemed to have been cancelled. A "blocking" transaction must merely demonstrate ownership of one of the transaction inputs.

If you hold large funds, you could keep a remote monitoring system somewhere that is empowered to block your own transactions.

The blockchain design could be enhanced so that a blocking transaction proves ownership of the original inputs but cannot sign a transaction itself.

Failure mode: someone trying to legitimately block a transaction could find themselves unable to get their blocking transaction mined. But in practice they'd just up the transaction fee, and game theory should take care of it.

This was just a thought experiment. A point that comes to mind is that given this is possible, what you describe isn't an inherent property of cryptocurrency, so if there's a benefit to having this property then it could be done.

The main reason it is a differentiator is that centralised money understands that its purpose is to be a system of social credit, so reversibility of transactions is just an acknowledgement that there is enough evidence to prove that this particular individual owns this particular sum, so it should go back to them. It is actually a much better and more honest system than the blockchain, because it doesn't treat money like a tangible resource in and of itself that can be "lost" which would be a much older and dumber way of doing things.

It’s not always a choice. If value has been transferred onwards (ultimately in the form of e.g. cash withdrawn or something equally hard to trace, like physical goods handed over to a buyer), simply “undoing all transactions in a database” isn’t without victims either.

Whether undoing transactions or not is an option strongly depends on how fast value is allowed to move. Sometimes being slow is a feature as much as it is a bug.

Wire payments are definitely reversible, but you might need to involve the courts, and international wires are more complex [0]. Most notably, 900 million in accidental payments made by Citi were eventually fully reversed by appeals courts.

> A full recounting of it is outside the scope of this anecdote, but it rhymes with “If you and the United States federal government disagree whether a transaction is final, you are wrong.”

[0]: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/no-payments-are-final...

Yes, they can.

If it's a significantly large sum, it may look like this:

Step 1: The CEO of the debtor bank calls the CEO of the creditor bank and asks to return the money.

Step 2 (only needed if there is disagreement): Lawyers of the debtor bank send a ton of legal papers to the creditor bank and figure it out.

But it's just one of nearly infinite number of scenarios.

6 billion in fiat is too large a figure to be irreversible. Do you have any examples?

And yet somehow nobody hears about North Korean hackers stealing billions from regular banks.

You say that like that's not spread by NK

And crime.

This gets downvoted... People here really suddenly love The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse as long as it's against "evil crypto" that simultaneously is dangerous enough to supress but also useless.

This is crypto we're talking about. "Trust us bro" is the gold standard

Exactly. It turns out a lot of the things in the banking system that cryptocurrency people complain about are actually features, not bugs.

IMHO, cryptocurrency is technically interesting but for pretty much every use-case, the preexisting technologies are superior and/or cryptocurrency is practically unworkable.

Serial numbers of all old dollar bills are recorded when those bills are destroyed and replaced with newly printed bills AND when bills are deposited to banks. Even if fake bill is perfectly made, it will still be detected with this method. Fake and duplicate serial numbers will be detected when compared against official ones.

Forging doesn't scale. No one wants counterfeit for anything close to $1 per dollar. You have to pass off bad bills one at a time.

10 million dollars in $100 bills weighs 100 kg. Distributing and fencing that much counterfeit is probably hard.

They probably do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar

There are tons of youtube videos about this. much harder than it sounds to forge at scale. The feds are very good at coming down on forgery. Also, it would provoke strong action by the US, whereas stealing crypto apparently does not.

They probably are. I used to write software for a financial institution and we saw a lot of traffic from Chinese and Russian IP's hitting our firewalls constantly (ssh login attempts with typical default passwords, random wordpress exploits, that sorta thing). It wasn't very sophisticated so I don't think it was state sponsored or anything, probably just random cyber criminals trying to hit US targets because their governments wouldn't care.

> Binance isn’t headquartered anywhere.

Don’t fall for their propaganda. Everybody is ultimately headquartered somewhere.

Ok their putative gdp. Given that the number is probably exaggerated maybe it’s 50%.

Respected Comrade knows everything.

> It's well understood

Where might one read more about this?

They teach that in schools. /s

So a sixth?

I never actually understood the whole "bitcoin mixer" scheme. Shouldn't all all the transactions still be traceable in the end?

But then in turn I'm surprised that states haven't yet sanctioned the mixers themselves. I understand there's no proof that they might not also mix legitimate funds, but I wouldn't have expected this to be a big hindrance given that everyone seems to know that most of their use is for money laundering.

Is that something that is actually needed for something or just money "laundering"?

Justice can be brought to them tho... At some point someone will delete the building they work in with a cruise missile or two...

Retaliation, sanctions against the country behind the curtain. Geopolitical justice.

that is why they don't care about opsec that much. what are anyone gonnna do?

how much of those are customer deposits though?

They'll use that bitcoin to buy $100M worth of the Trump shitcoin and call it even, which may be cheaper than using mixers.

That's my feeling, too. It's probably my TDS, but it just seems weird that the shady founder of Binance got busted for laundering money, then got a shady pardon from Trump, and now billions have mysteriously gone missing. Someone's gonna have to kick up a portion of that money to Trump; he'll lay it all on North Korea and we'll all move onto the next headline.

They're not.

There was a failed op to install a device to listen to comms about 2 years ago.

>perhaps he got into hacking there because it's the only way to support his family.

North Korean hackers are state employees. They're selected for the role based on their academic ability (top achievers go to the nuclear programme). The state takes the bulk of the earnings, but it is a more comfortable existence than for the average North Korean.

Your typical North Korean doesn't have the kind of unrestricted access to the internet necessary to become a hacker.

To be fair, people can't afford COL by opening a coffee shop in this day and age.

Its government. Sorry, I don't mean the entire country. The people should be free.

The people who have managed to escape describe a real-life hellscape.

Educate yourself on history before lecturing us on democracy.

Friendly reminder that this was never about democracy. The US imposed a military dictatorship on South Korea that was even more brutal than the North. The goal has always been promoting capitalism at all costs, and nothing else.

The people are starving because North Korea has been cut off from the global economy for its entire existence. In other words, the people sanctioning are responsible for the starvation. Sanctions obviously do nothing to hurt the ruling party or coerce them to change their views.

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Since 2019ish.

The usual