If your government wants to cut you off from your money, they'll do it for crypto just as easily as they do it for traditional banks. With the exception of direct-crypto purchases from shady internet sites, at some point your payment rails must pass through an entity that your government has some degree of authority over—you're not going to buy your groceries using Bitcoin over an onion service.

Even if crypto becomes 100% ubiquitous, the end game isn't "now the government can't control finance" the end game is "now the government will find a new way to control the new finance". Eventually, the government will intervene because people will be begging them to, because they don't actually want to live in a world where theft and fraud are irreversible and their entire financial life is tied to a set of cryptographic keys that they barely understand.

You're trying to push a technological solution to authoritarianism, and it's not going to work for the masses. Canada doesn't need crypto, Canada needs voters to hold the government accountable for its abuses.

Apart from some edge cases, Western democracies have quite solid property rights upheld also by the judicial system. But yes if you’re in Russia or China then this argument is moot. They have much less property rights. However, Bitcoin is also not a solution because there is no point in owning Bitcoin if you fell trice out of a Russian window or are sentenced to a labour camp or to the death penalty in China for "fraudulus activities“. Difficult to spend your Bitcoin in both cases.

Not only Russian or Chinese, you should open the bracket for any individual, organization or country that the western democracies will deem bad in their view. Or even have the any doubt of association with them. For example we can talk to many Muslims in the UK where no banks will grant them accounts (close account without notice) and how safe they feel [1]

Not that I am a crypto supporter, but the current western based financial system hegemony is good until you are have wrong name, religion, country... etc.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-08-16/british-m...

I certainly wouldn't call being Canadian an "edge case."

Protesting ought to be something you can do in any Western democracy without fear of losing access to your accounts.

I would hope that the judicial system fixes the government intervention. I haven’t heard of similar cases in Canada or other liberal democracies.

They were violating the law, and using the funds in the accounts to further the law breaking.

They call it civil disobedience. People seem to forget part of civil disobedience is going to jail and paying a fine. That’s always been the deal.

Civil disobedience carrying a negative of some kind for the protester is a significant part of my respect for people doing it.

If it was entirely painless, it would have a lot less effect I think.

There is a massive difference between freezing someone's funds, and having them simply pay a fine

Unbanking someone isn't the same as charging them a fine.

I drew Mickey quite a few times without any helicopter appearing. Do you have a source for that claim?

Instead, you can lose access to your money just because you forgot your secret key.

Or Worse, coinbase decided you are no longer worth their time. Wait, I thought this was supposed to be decentralized.

Yes, like you can lose your treasure by forgetting where you buried it. Or you can lose your silver when an accidental fire melts your palace into slag. Or you can lose your wheat harvest to mold! Self-storage is the default way of holding wealth, not a new one. And it's a tradeoff that people will always choose to make as long as personal wealth exists.

Among the innumerable problems with cryptocurrency, this is not one of them.

But one of those things has the responsibility placed up on you.

The other, not so much.

Plenty of downsides to crypto no doubt, but I'm not sure "personal responsibility" is one of them.

Honestly, the first thing I'd do is hope that they forgot that I make house and car payments though them and that they forgot how much damage they could do to my professional life just by intentionally sabotaging my credit. Crypto doesn't provide any realistic protection to me from their whims should they become bad actors.

> what could you possibly do?

Magical Amulets?

Fake your own death, move into a submarine?