Fools and their crypto

You're absolutely right, of course. However, I'm reminded of this wonderful (recent) quote by Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi:

"Business is actually surprisingly good for everything that the company went through. The part of the business that is not going well is the profitability part. We have some details to work out."

https://www.axios.com/uber-ceo-1516627656-77c68a5a-6d42-4c85...

>private transactions: your identity need not be associated with donating to wikileaks or buying a sex toy

We have to define "private", currently my purchase history is not exactly public even though some trusted entities do have access to it.

In the same way I keep getting conflicting viewpoints about transactions on the blockchain. Are they public or not? I ask because every time I point out that cryptocurrencies are a dream come true for anybody who's trying to evade taxes, launder money or corrupt politicians I always have somebody telling me that it's not true because with enough effort you can track money on the public blockchain. So which one is it?

>irreversible: no chargebacks or transaction reversals

As a consumer this is an obvious negative. As a seller it might also be because people will be more afraid to send money to somebody without reputation. So good for Amazon but bad for the little guy selling home made socks on ebay.

>unseizable: protection against civil forfeiture, IRS account seizures for "structuring", etc

Ah yeah, the "my government has issues so the obvious solution is to get rid of it" line of thought. Maybe you should work on fixing these weird idiosyncrasies instead of trying to find a way around them, because maybe you're being honest but I can assure you that there's a long line of thugs behind you waiting to use your "protection" scheme to evade taxes and regulations. You can't have a working government if you make taxes "opt-out".

>remittance: send any amount of funds anywhere in the world with minimum fees with no 3rd party ever having access to funds

That's only valid if you don't need any guarantees whatsoever (like a pure donation without counterparts or sending money to somebody you trust). If you try to buy something from an untrusted source you'll want a 3rd party to provide arbitration. No chargeback, remember?

As for the "minimum fees" we'll see about that when some cryptocurrency is actually used "at scale" to do this.

>exit from corrupt monetary policies: see Argentina, Venezuela

I can't offer any rebuttal to this but I wonder how much good it'd do. Rich people would be able to exfiltrate their money more easily to other countries and poor people will convert their 0peso into 0BTC. I'd be really curious to read a serious study about how things would've changed in Venezuela if they had switched to BTC before the crisis. I don't really believe in magic bullets, the failings of the Venezuelan economy are multiple and go way beyond a choice of currency.

I can't shake the feeling that if you put money out of the hands of the government you effectively give all the economy power to the rich people and it's effectively harming democracy. You seem to have a very USA-centric point of view (judging by your examples above) so I ask you: when you look at the state of the USA and its government, do you really think "damn, I really wish rich people had more power"?

> Which basically says - rich gets richer and you poor little guy is too stupid for participating in potentially highly lucrative deals.

It's more along the lines of having enough money to weather the value of your investments disappearing.

No more than repeat offenders remind you of why Gulags exist. In your mind the hypothetical libertarian just doesn't want any regulation because he forgets that regulations have any good impact.

It's simply tone deaf.

> In the end you may end up with something very much looking like a government, where people with connections and leverage in the governing structures get to decide the evolution of the rules, where a few players with disproportionate wealth or hashing power, help elect those people to committee positions. And once again, people will be looking to create systems to escape the defacto control and cronyism imposed on the system.

There are 'good governments' and 'bad governments'. The rich and powerful try to game the system in both of them but there are much more effective in bad govts than in good govts.

So the question is, what separates a society which ends up with good governments (for example western societies) than societies which end up with bad governments (pretty much all the non-western societies).

This is precisely where the argument breaks down. According to libertarians, there is a reason X (whatever that might be) which separates good from bad governments. According to libertarians, that reason is 'economic freedom', the places where good govt exists, there is economic freedom, and places with bad government lacks economic freedom (even dictatorship like Singapore, UAE, or ex-dictatorships like S Korea are far better off than their non-economic free counterparts).

You may disagree what the cause 'X' is (according to alt-right that cause X is genetic-cultural environment, as places with good govt tend to be white westerners and places with bad govt tend to be non-white non-westerners).

But a plain denial of differences between good govts and bad govts is insane.