You really lost me with at "original thermodynamic purpose". This seems like a very teleological argument.

Yeah. it's a good a point, and I agree that this is the true nature of the regulatory and legislative threat.

A good example of this, is those who act with moral outrage and/or surprise, when the government enforces laws against engaging in financial transactions on bitcoin (or other cryptocurrencies) *at* *all*. It's almost like people are saying "don't you understand the rules of anarchy apply, government?" It's hard not to worry such people are not completely in fantasyland.

Yeah. I 100% agree with you, these are the kinds of risks in front of us. Which is why we spend so much time in front of and educating lawmakers to avoid overly burdensome legislation and regulatory rule-making. I get frustrated by the extremists among us who just assume this is a battle of civilizations, there's no point engaging with the government at all, and just asserting that bitcoin exists as an extra-legal jurisdiction that is beyond the reach of the state, and that the state is on the way out anyways. These are the most counterproductive attitudes I encounter.

Everything will change in the future. Change is a constant.

I don't believe stable equilibriums in complex systems exist *at* *all*, by the way. There are metastable phases within those systems, and the nature of money is not the primary and only input into those systems. There are plenty of non-economic motivations that people engage in, that lead to the conception of the society people want to live in.

I think they could co-exist indefinitely.

The US already regulates on and off ramps.

I think you're reading too much into it. The DOJ always does press conferences, and announces them in a press release ahead of time. They do many of these. This one just happened to capture people's attention because it involved cryptocurrency and people thought it might be related to FTX or something like it.

I feel like I'm often in a minority when I say, I don't think the US will ever try to ban bitcoin. I just don't think it's in the cards. People have it in their heads, because of the importance of the US Dollar and the petrodollar to US political and economic power, that this leads to an inevitable showdown where the government just outright bans bitcoin. This is mostly paranoia and an example of the fallacy of faulty generalization, by focusing in on a very specific set of equities and believing they are overriding in salience to the political economy of the United States. The problem is this is flawed.

Anybody who spends any time talking to lawmakers and policymakers as I have, will know that nobody is seriously considering banning it. They are scratching their heads about how to regulate it, though. People realize the cat is out of the box, and there's no putting it back in.

They allege the owner of the exchange was directly involved with and assisting organized crime in moving money around. Haven't heard them tie bitcoin to Russia.

They seized the assets of some rando Russian crypto exchange that was helping evade sanctions.

This means people have been arrested for something. This isn't new regulations.

You'll excuse me if I render you the impropriety of answering your question with a question. But I can't fight the feeling that I know where you're going with this line of questioning, and I'd ask you: are you familiar with the is-ought problem?

Do you believe there are universal moral truths that are true, and would be true even if humans never existed and the universe was devoid of life?

Insofar as people mean natural laws are universal moral truths, yes, I disagree they exist. I think morality is completely created by humans.

An old one, too! I first installed Little Snitch on a Mac in like 2005!

What does "prove" property is a natural law?

Nostr fixes this. https://twitter.com/tapbots/status/1615428584767733760

You're referring to the concept of negative versus positive rights. Usually the thought experiment used to demonstrate negative rights, are things you can do "do alone on an island". However, I've dealt with why I think this is problematic and why this doesn't invalidate the reality that rights are social constructs, elsewhere in this thread, and I won't repeat those arguments here.