What about child pornography gangs? I don't think there are any, but honestly, I've never seen an actual drug gang either. -Or pimps for adults. Pimps are usually violent in movies -- well, not porn movies, cause porn studios have a reputation to uphold, obviously. ....
I don't know where you live, but I spent most of my life living in and around Los Angeles and I can assure you, drug gangs and pimps exist. Before I moved out of the city and into a more rural part of the So Cal desert I'd see them all the time. When I was a kid there was a drive-by shooting in my neighborhood at least once a week, all drug related gang activity. Child pornography gangs, on the other hand, are something I've never seen or heard of.
If children were sexually abused in the privacy of their home rather than beaten on the street AND sexually abused, should we applaud bitcoin's triumphant entry into the market and post comments on news sites about how bad child rape was before bitcoin came on the scene?
There's a difference there. When you choose to use drugs, you're not harming anyone but yourself with that choice (unless you consider that you may be giving money to violent drug gangs.. which is an argument in favor of sites like Silk Road). When you choose to sexually abuse children, you are harming those children, there is clearly and undeniably a victim no matter where you do it or how (or if) you pay for it.
-Or the assassin market. How many people wanted to hire assassins but were assassinated upon payment before crypto-escrow? I bet more than one.
I'm sure more than one, but still, if you hire an assassin that's a crime with a victim no matter how you pay for it.
Honestly, to equate a victimless "crime" with child abuse/molestation and murder for hire where another human being is being harmed or killed is to miss the point and buy into all the "drug war" propaganda we've been fed for decades or longer. To this day, in the United States, alcohol and tobacco are legal in most places and kill more people than all other drugs combined, but the government still insists (in spite of all scientific studies to the contrary) that marijuana needs to be illegal because it has no medical use. Are these the people you want dictating what you can and can't put into your body?
I do realize that you intended that as a "troll argument" and even said so, but it makes no logical sense to argue that just because we shouldn't condone harming children or murdering people we also shouldn't allow people the choice of what to do to their own bodies. By the same logic as the "drug war" we should also ban smoking, drinking, tattoos, piercings.. why stop there? Why not dictate every aspect of a human being's personal life on the grounds that a group of men and women who can't even balance their own budget know what we should or shouldn't do to our own bodies more than you or I do?
I am of the opinion that active pedos are rapists pure and simple. However, when the only outlet at all is child rape, then society is failing those encumbered with this "mental" problem and their victims.
While society is definitely failing their victims, I have absolutely no sympathy for rapists and child molesters. I don't care what kind of "mental" problem they have.
In as much as bitcoin supports victimless freedom of expression and victimless freedom of lifestyle, I support bitcoin's enabling of those.
+1
While I am uneasy that it may enable psychopaths to get guns, and drug money may ultimately support violent cartels, I regard this as an artefact of prohibition, that is not really bitcoin's problem. However, if it allows a level playing field such that average citizens may defend themselves against psychopaths who will make all efforts to obtain guns whatever, or enables ethical sources of drugs to compete on a level playing field with cartels, then it's pushing things the right way.
Psychopaths will get guns anyway, even if you make them illegal they'll get them. Look at what happened just this past week in France, the police retreated because even they didn't have guns.. but these criminals had no problem getting their hands on them. Likewise, violent drug cartels will exist as long as there is a viable black market for drugs. That black market will never completely go away unless those drugs are legalized and regulated, although Bitcoin may or may not take some of that black market money away from the cartels and put smaller dealers on a more level playing field. Notwithstanding either of those points, the vast majority of illegal gun and drug deals are done with fiat money.
That reminds me of the guy who put his DNA sequence on some kind of blockchain... In the future, I'd guess assassins could send you DNA proof in the form of something much smaller than a severed head which you could compare against their public DNA sequence. ..... .... You know, with that DNA sequencer you had made up at the local bitcoin-accepting 3D printer rental outlet at the strip mall.
Please tell me you write SciFi and have several novels available already!
If you don't, then please start writing today. Bitcoin's concepts offer up some areas of thought that even Arthur C. Clarke couldn't have thought of.
+1 again, I'd buy that book.. and probably the movie too.
