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Near the end of his speech, Cruz warned Bitcoiners to remember Napster. Although his analogy is imprecise due to Bitcoin’s greater decentralization, it is nonetheless a good and insightful analogy. Cruz is alarmed, as I am, about Bitcoiners’ naïveté and complacency.
Please stop nitpicking and overextending analogies, as an excuse for continued naïveté and complacency.
You can't put Napster and Bitcoin in the same boat! One was facilitation the distribution of illegal warez and mp3z...
That's like saying to ebay, ohh watch out!.. you remember Silk Road right?... Baffled to think there is some kind of analogical correlation between the two!
Bitcoin facilitates terrorist financing, money laundering, drug dealing (you remember Silk Road, right?), killing cute puppies and kittens, evasion of virtuous sanctions by evil Russians, tax evasion, unregulated financial activity, making the FATF have a collective heart attack, evading KYC (gasp! horrors!), disrupting banks’ business models and making banks irrelevant (not allowed!), and evading the U.S. Federal Reserve’s divinely ordained absolute right to steal the value of people’s savings with inflation (definitely not allowed!)—and it literally destroys
I’d say that’s a fair sight worse than sharing some copyrighted songs.
If you think that the scenarios are in any way comparable, or that it’s only a matter of headcount, I am not sure how even to begin to explain this.
I am sick and tired of the stupid "Terrorist Financing/Money Laundering, illegal this illegal that rhetoric!!... Show me any other currency in the world that isn't being used for illegal purposes! Do we ban every other currency as well?
I am sure somewhere in this world, cattle is being traded for opium.. someone is bartering food for other products/services.. avoiding some taxation system.. do we ban that as well?
And that above illustrates my point... nothing to do with head count but rather country of influence... country with massive geopolitical and economical influence has banned bitcoin so many times, yet Bitcoin is not dead, far from it!
I love to see the reaction on El Chapo's successor face when he checks his bitstamp account and it down 40% or -$100B, I mean these cartels are laundering their money via bitcoin right?...