> You are mistaken. There is a technique called "rubber-hose cryptanalysis" which works wonderfully in cases like the one you described. Once applied, you will gladly give up your key and anything else they ask for. That's what violence means.

You aren't really engaging seriously. There is a difference between expensive targeted violence to coerce specific information from individual citizens, and dragnet surveillance and the power to freeze or seize money from anyone's account at will.

> You are arguing that because the current system is excessively regulated, then a system with no means to enforce the rules will work better. The problem with that is that blockchain is a lot more expensive to operate per transaction that the conventional systems. Because of that it can only be used when the conventional system cannot be, specifically for circumventing the regulations, i.e. breaking the law.

As one small example, to give a case where I actually know the numbers. I've done cost per trade analysis for major investment banks (while working at them, with full access to their internal data) and it's certainly not the case that blockchains always cost more per transaction, even with the current irterations of the technology. Not even close.

> You say you disagree, but you actually agree. All the cases you listed are cases of "circumvention of regulations".

Avoiding surveillance is not circumvention of regulations unless submitting to that surveillance is legally required. Certainly where I live, it is not. We can use cash, we can spend crypto, and if the government want to know what we did, they have to ask us (or coerce it out of us) with proper legal basis. There is no regulation requiring submission to constant financial surveillance that I'm aware of, but using the current financial system (ex. cash - so all electronic money and sll financial products) involves submitting to it anyway.

> It's been long enough to see. Believing otherwise is like believing that this contraption with a few more tweaks will produce perpetual motion.

Says who? I don't remember learning about a time limit to turn new technological develpoments into practical or useful inventions or companies. What about new aglorithms and research that have come about since the first networks were built, do they get to reset the timer and have a chance at it too or do they have to stop building because bitcoin didn't meet your targets by the cut off?

Really, there are many reasons massive technological change can, and usually does take a long time. Many layers of abstraction need to be built. Take the internet - we had networking, then TCP/IP, then many protocols some of which were "big" for years and are now dead, then HTTP, then TLS, and JavaScript and "Web 2.0", and cloud hosting, etc. etc. This literally took decades and is still going on! All the while the software was maturing, integrations were built, and adoption took off - first very unevenly and then everywhere.

I wouldn't be surprised at another 10-20 years to see really pervasive use of blockchain technology, but I see leaps toward that future all the time.

> It's basic math as in 2 greater than 1. It does not matter if you disagree with it.

Really no idea what you are on about here. Use cases are not mathematical. The technical use case for byzantine fault tolerance is to reach consensus on a set of facts (or operations or data or whatever) within a group of actors that you individually distrust, without needing to appeal to authority. If you are telling me you can (mathematically?) prove that the only possible use for that is to circumvent regulation, I'd love to see the proof, but without it I think it very much does matter that I see no reason to believe it.

> The point is if blockchain is regulated then it's no longer a useful tool for breaking the law and consequently irrelevant.

If "blockchain is regulated" goes as well as "speed limits on motorways are regulated" and "copying of digital media" is regulated, not to mention the war on drugs, then I think the application of regulation to it is likely to be of little practical concern to those who do want to use it to break laws.