I think this article is going to result in a crackdown on Bitcoin here in Argentina.<p>It’s interesting that it mentions “The American company Coinbase” but doesn’t mention Coinbase’s Argentine origins. Maybe Brian wouldn’t give an interview to the author?<p>This is a good example of why I haven’t been willing to get involved in Bitcoin so far, despite finding it fascinating: we’ve known since May presented the Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto at Hackers (1989?) that a likely endgame of anonymous digital currencies was that governments would lose their ability to impose capital controls and indeed taxes. While I’m skeptical about the ontological status or moral value of the State, I also don’t want public education, policing, and public healthcare to disappear overnight without a chance to construct alternatives; racism and other hateful ideologies promoted by States over the centuries to keep their subjects divided can simply explode into violence.<p>(I’m not worried about “terrorists and organized crime” — those are of course terrible but nothing we haven’t dealt with before. I’m worried about the collapse of governments leading to a collapse of civilization, which is a thing that has happened before, with disastrous results — the Bronze Age collapse, the Maya collapse, the fall of Rome, and so on.)<p>If it catches on, though, continuing to abstain might become as difficult as Stallman’s continued abstention from using the internet, or the abstention of the Amish from driving cars. And I will yield.