# Crypto Currency Fraud

**URL:** https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/crypto-currency-fraud/128
**Category:** Unbounded
**Created:** [May 20, 2021, 5:27pm UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/crypto-currency-fraud/128 "2021-05-20T17:27:47Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 24

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### Author: ![lmf](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/user_avatar/discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/lmf/32/1302_2.png) [@lmf](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/u/lmf)
#### Post date: [November 30, 2021, 12:15am UTC](https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/crypto-currency-fraud/128/24 "2021-11-30T00:15:32Z")

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> [@Elliot](#):
>
> How might USG permanently harm bitcoin? By e.g. getting control over crypto software – through political pressure, threats, assassinations, democratic voting, working with a coalition of other governments, arresting people involved who don’t cooperate, etc. – and printing a bunch of new bitcoins for themselves. They could potentially cause massive inflation in bitcoin but not in gold. They could also push other damaging changes to crypto software. They could also just make tax policies that are anti-crypto (generally or specific ones, e.g. rivals to the new crypto the USG makes) enough to drive it to zero. I think them driving people away from bitcoin so it never recovers is much more realistic than doing that with gold. It’s much newer and it’s much harder to revive if it dies (particularly if some new crypto alternatives have already replaced it).

> [@Max](#):
>
> I remember this sort of thing being brought up like 10-7 yrs ago – EMPs, collapse of society stuff – some ppl tried to argue bitcoin still could work via offline stuff b/c the blockchain would come back when tech did, but mostly the discussion went nowhere. Also, using bitcoin offline like that wouldn’t work without very sophisticated tech – if you had that tech then it wouldn’t be offline anyway

It could be argued that bitcoin’s value can’t be _permanently_ destroyed as long as the data of the original blockchain is still around, because at a later date (after civilization comes back) the community could reset the blockchain to the point before all the bad stuff happened. There might be widespread disagreement about precisely what block everyone ought to reset to (e.g. was it directive 312-A-1 that destroyed bitcoin or was it 315-C?), and different choices of reset point among different sub-communities would lead to different branches (different daughter currencies). If you had access to your wallet from the original chain, you’d have access to wallets for each of these daughter currencies, so it’s not clear how much value you’d lose.

All we can say for sure is that an individual bitcoin wallet’s robustness against societal collapse depends acutely on a lot of unknowns about future peoples’ preferences and the precise way in which things collapse, whereas gold doesn’t.

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