Wow, you won't even provide a link to the comments or article?

For everyone else, here you go: https://themerkle.com/us-attorney-general-hints-at-possible-bitcoin-regulation-due-to-darknet-popularity/


The government will always try to control that which has growing interest among the public but is still not fully understood by the government.

The biggest thing people can do to fight these kind of actions is by voting these misguided leaders out of office. Certainly Trump, Sessions, and nearly everyone Trump has appointed are NOT the most intelligent and capable people of holding such powerful positions.

Sessions comments link Bitcoin to the darknet and therefore regulation may be needed. That's as ridiculous as saying the Dollar is used to buy drugs, therefore we need more regulation over the Dollar.

If you want to fight these kind of uniformed and not well thought through points of view, talk about Bitcoin to everyone you know. The more we talk about it the more we can educate people AND eliminate the "that's just for the dark web" misunderstanding. When you go to buy something, ask the merchant "do you accept Bitcoin?"

If each of us does this we'll see a lot of growth in understanding and adoption.

That's fine, be jaded. The real driver of your angst is because most people in a country don't give a fuck about politics and just choose one of the two awful options that are put forward by the two (or few) major parties and the media.

The vote is powerful. What you don't realize is how few people believe it. If more people stopped following the herd we'd see real change.

Thanks for calling me out on the political tangent bit. Sorry for that. Let's try again?

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Both.

For the me the test is:

• If Bitcoin existed without the dark web would he care as much? No.
• If the dark web existed without Bitcoin would he care as much? No. It's existed for along time using the good US Dollar as the currency of choice!

He's the type that I can picture trying to implement some overly broad, hamfisted regulation typical of regulators who don't have any idea about what their actually trying to regulate. I think it's pretty safe to say he's not going to be able to do anything effective against Bitcoin on a technical level, but I worry about even just the general idea of regulation having a chilling effect on the Bitcoin economy in the short term if he actually tries to do something like this.

I wonder if he even realizes that we can thank the US gov for TOR in the first place. 

Politicians are computer illiterate. Those in office don't understand the difference between RAM and a hard drive. They repeat talking points given to them from special interests. There is a long history to this.

In past years, american politicians tried to convince the public we needed a great firewall to censor data similar to what china has. They tried to convince the public that passwords were obsolete things & that a better system would be to have the government authenticate identity on all websites so that people wouldn't have to remember their passwords.

The latest campaign being waged by politicians/special interests is against encryption. They don't include crypto currencies in this. Their goal is to reduce the effectiveness of SSL/SSH/TOR/VPN and other encryption which make it difficult for governments to spy on activities of the public on the internet.

Here's an example of what Jeff Sessions is talking about.


Politicians like Jeff Sessions want encryption on iphones and other products removed to make it easier for the state to conduct surveillance spy on the public.