You sort of seems to be proposing that the US federal government is similar to the government of China, with each using the barrier of trivial inconvenience to forestall otherwise revolutionary processes (non-fiat currency and the free flow of information respectively). Your admonition to “read the whole post” makes me think you’re offering a latent suggest that “libertarian paternalism” might be de facto implemented by creating a bitcoin market that sells banned things and is allowed to exist so long as dumb people can’t be victimized by it because they aren’t smart enough to strategically access it.
I think this is something I’ll have to ponder for a while. Thanks :-)
I indeed explicitly pointed that out in a comment, but as Nornagest mentions it sounds like they have since changed their minds. (Or maybe they were previously unaware of such a market. Prob’ly Gwern has a better explanation for why they left it alone until last October and then cracked down on it than I can think up.)
You sort of seems to be proposing that the US federal government is similar to the government of China, with each using the barrier of trivial inconvenience to forestall otherwise revolutionary processes (non-fiat currency and the free flow of information respectively). Your admonition to “read the whole post” makes me think you’re offering a latent suggest that “libertarian paternalism” might be de facto implemented by creating a bitcoin market that sells banned things and is allowed to exist so long as dumb people can’t be victimized by it because they aren’t smart enough to strategically access it.
I think this is something I’ll have to ponder for a while. Thanks :-)
I indeed explicitly pointed that out in a comment, but as Nornagest mentions it sounds like they have since changed their minds. (Or maybe they were previously unaware of such a market. Prob’ly Gwern has a better explanation for why they left it alone until last October and then cracked down on it than I can think up.)
That would have been a fair description of Silk Road, before it was shut down. Suppose it depends on your parameters for “dumb”, though.