alt Hacker News> The risk is NOT only "will this go up or down" but you have a high risk of being robbed, as have happened to millions of people.
Using a cryptocurrency (originally) meant basically opting out of the governmental violence-as-a-service for cryptocurrency/-token purposes and taking care of this aspect by yourself.
Depending on your resourcefulness and lifestyle, this may mean
- hiring personal security
- being very careful about privacy aspects, e.g. making it very hard to link your personal identity to your cryptographic keys; distribute your crypto-tokens among many keys so that if one key gets "linked", the attacker will find only few tokens there; use anonymization services; ...
- think about what mitigations you have in place against "rubber hose attacks"
- live a modest life so that people (and also taxation authorities?) don't get suspicious that you are secretly rich, i.e. don't boast about your richness
- ...
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> Using a cryptocurrency (originally) meant basically opting out of the governmental violence-as-a-service for cryptocurrency/-token purposes and taking care of this aspect by yourself.
Cryptocurrency was a hidden blade. People were drawn in on the promise of avoiding the things they don't like about capitalism, but then cut by a more unregulated version of the same.
If you're going to dismantle all of the institutions of liberal democracy and capitalism so you can send a billion dollars to somebody, why not just go ahead and get rid of money while you're at it?
You you do the last, you deserve to get found out and punished accordingly. Pay your taxes people, like everybody else.
It originally meant nothing. Bitcoin was a proof of concept, with some examples of things it could solve, but no actual ideological arc.
Some people saw it as an opportunity to push for an ideological agenda because you can convince a lot of people that cryptocurrency is a silver bullet (it's not).