One advantage of the Silk Road style markets was that, being centralised, they could choose to filter their wares down to a particular niche. By permitting everything by design, OpenBazaar is probably going to become infamous for facilitating trade in child pornography, materials of terrorism, and other such items considered a great deal more disreputable than prohibited drugs.
I think your fears are purely speculative and are distracting from what's really going on here. We are witnessing a demand for unregulated markets because regulated markets are way too slow in responding to social changes.
Let's face it - governmental decisions are made in the best interest of influential parties, not in the best interests of the individual.
Nobody is protecting you from yourself. They're trying to protect other people from the damage you can do as an addict, a child pornographer, or a terrorist.
Everytime you, or someone who thinks like you, about the "Next Big Thing" in Terrorism, Child Porn and Drug Trafficking, replace that "Next Big Thing" technology with the "Internet", and reconsider the argument you were about to make.
I don't think too many people could've envisioned the good the Internet could do in the future, when it was launched. And it's also so much easier to think about the bad ways in which it could be used. Heck, I think the Internet today is still mostly about porn. Does that mean we should ban it because it's only 30-40 percent "useful"?
Look at Popcorn Time and torrenting. Netflix, Amazon, Google, Apple, could all use the same technology to drastically reduce their bandwidth with only a few servers to seed all shows at all time. But there's so much stigma about it from the beginning. Torrenting for legal stuff could be huge. But it's not because people like you yelled from the beginning about how it's a "piracy tool".
So let's try and not repeat the same mistakes with new innovations such as Bitcoin. which was also in the news mostly for drug trafficking in the early days, but fortunately Bitcoin users managed to successful promote and overcome that with the "good uses", and by yelling at sites for continuing to talk about Bitcoin as a "drug tool".
Same goes for OpenBazaar, Ethereum, Storj, Firechat and other innovations that may start gaining adoption.
It's also really unfortunate that the Facebook era + massive US government propaganda against Tor, is also making Tor and anonymity seem like a "bad thing" these days, even though most people on the Internet were "anonymous" in the early days. And guess what - the world didn't collapse!
>Nobody is protecting you from yourself. They're trying to protect other people from the damage you can do as an addict, a child pornographer, or a terrorist.
This is patently false. Counter-examples include A) non-addictive, very safe drugs are also illegal B) NYC tried to outlaw large sodas C) unpasteurized milk is illegal.
Except for the fact that the OP claimed "Nobody is protecting you from yourself." To which the person you responded to directly disputed with examples.
I think you need to re-evaluate what you classify as incorrect.
What is terrorism, actually? If you give this question some serious thought, it becomes apparent that the term is full of confusion. Politicians perpetuate – and exploit – this ambiguity; causing greater harm by diverting attention away from issues which really do need to be addressed.
More people are killed by the police than terrorism in the United States.
It will always be possible to cause harm with legal objects, unless they ban fists and teeth.
While I think linking terrorism is a stretch, there are benefits to regulating the sale of things designed specifically to cause death, automatic firearms, high capacity magazines, warheads...
you are right, but child porn and addicts are already in the world.
You fear addicts for good reasons.
But if one looks how countries which legalized drugs are doing, you will see that violence, crime and number of addicts are decreasing.
e.g. Portugal:
- Drug use among adolescents (13-15 yrs) and "problematic" users declined.[15]
- Drug-related criminal justice workloads decreased.[15]
- Decreased street value of most illicit drugs, some significantly
(although recreational (soft) drug use seemed to increase)
Child porn prohibition is not about consumers. It is about increasing the risk on (and taking the market away from) producers, who are necessarily actually abusing real children (who are not the producers themselves) in the real world in an unambiguously horrific way, with the end result that less child abuse happens.
You will have to try pretty hard to spin that into being the same thing as drug prohibition.
Arguments are, of course, less strong for convicting 16/17-year-olds of child porn for sexting, and even for removing images that were produced long ago.
I don't agree that regulated markets aren't sufficiently adaptive to social change. Silk Road was also a regulated market, just one that dealt in mostly illegal narcotics - so this clearly was adapting to the liberalisation of drug laws that is desired by so many.
But if Silk Road had also dealt in child pornography, for example, we can be pretty sure that most people would know about it as a haven for paedophiles, rather than an online drugs den.
My point is that purportedly neutral technologies become best known for their predominant use case. The Internet is mostly synonymous the web and email, as these were its first killer applications. Bittorrent is notorious for copyright infringement, as that is what it is overwhelmingly used for. Bitcoin has connotations of being a get rich quick scheme crossed with illegal drugs currency. And so on.
Despite its intentions of neutrality, as an anonymised, unregulated, decentralised market, OpenBazaar will most probably become known for facilitating illegal trades - of all types.
I read your argument in two parts - one that appeals to my own emotions and one that hides behind the law to demonize illegal trade.
Let's ignore the emotional part because that is highly subjective.
I'd argue that the current legislation is not effective in representing the best interests of the general public, which is what I understand the spirit of all laws to be. It takes too long to change, and for change to even be considered it takes a significant amount of money or collective effort which is not always practical.
