Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Merits 9 from 6 users
Re: A treatise on privacy
by
o_e_l_e_o
on 12/04/2022, 07:55:58 UTC
⭐ Merited by fillippone (3) ,BlackHatCoiner (2) ,n0nce (1) ,aysg76 (1) ,JayJuanGee (1) ,DdmrDdmr (1)
Take for instance the current politics in Russia, where you aren't allowed to call a war, a war, or where holding up an empty paper sheet gets you arrested. Those things are illegal there, so therefore we shouldn't incentivize the use of free (freedom) money to allow protestors to receive donations and fight for information freedom, peace and democracy?
One of the problems with this is that people hold the mindset as they hold when it comes to centralized exchanges: "Well, it would never happen to me".

With centralized exchanges, despite literally thousands of warnings from users who have had their money go missing, had their coins confiscated, or had their accounts locked or terminated, people continue to leave large amounts of money on these exchanges, thinking "Well, I've never had any problems so I'll be fine to continue doing this". When their account is locked, they are obviously too late to do anything about it.

When it comes to governments censoring certain citizens or certain viewpoints, many people think either "Well, it would never happen in my country" or "Well, it would never happen to me". Here's the thing though. It almost certainly already is happening in your country, but it's just people you don't agree with being censored so you don't notice or care. Are you certain that your government will always treat your fairly? What about all future governments? You really can't imagine any circumstance in which your government might not like something you have to say? As we've seen throughout history, by the time they've silenced all the outspoken critics and start coming for the average citizens, then it is far too late to do anything.

I often mentally draw a parallel between this forum and bitcoin itself. There are a minority of users on this forum who express opinions which are provably wrong and/or abhorrent. Despite this, I have never and would never try to have their posts deleted or ban them from posting here just because of the nature of their opinions. There are a minority of users of bitcoin which use bitcoin for acts I would deem immoral. I have never and would never try to have them excluded from using bitcoin. Bitcoin is either censorship resistant, or it isn't. You cannot pick and choose who it is censorship resistant for.