[SilverBirch]

I absolutely agree we should build infrastructure that allows people within oppressive regimes options with which they can resist, escape and co-ordinate.

Which is why this infrastructure, which is clearly designed to empower those regimes, is bad. Are North Koreans using crypto-currencies? Maybe, it doesn't seem like it. Is the North Korean regime using crypto-currencies? Absolutely, we repeatedly see the North Korean regime stealing, laundering and transferring crypto.

You're advocating for a theoretical possibility of helping dissidents to defend the actual reality which is that crypto is a tool of oppressive regimes.

[_81ih]

I really don't get what the argument is here? NK and others also use Tor, Signal (Protocol), and more. Are they all bad? And why always use the most extreme examples like NK and China?

If US citizens could empathize with people not only from NK, but also from places like Turkey, where the value of our currency has been demolished under the current authoritarian government (and, IMO, they aren't far away from putting limits on buying USD), I think we would have healthier discussions. Now, I can — and am — moving out of the country, but not everyone can. Thinking otherwise is privileged and ignorant thinking.

Of course ETH is not flawless, and if I were in a middle-class family in the US, I would love to have these deep philosophical discussions about if Ethereum is really really decentralized, but the fact remains that cryptocurrencies DO solve real problems, and they DO help more people than they hurt, just like any technology. If this weren't the case, humans would have stoped innovating a long time ago.

[thelamest]

You can only be sure in hindsight which solution is comparatively or net good. Not all hard work done by smart and nice people turns out to be worthwhile. There are always trade-offs and cryptoassets bring them too. You have good reasons to be worried about centralization, but concerns that this technology empowers crime and totalitarianism, just in a different way, are valid too.

[nine_k]

All technical solutions are trade-offs.

See, burning coal is bad for the environment under many angles. But it fed the energy to the industrial revolution, with immense improvements to everyone's quality of life (from running water to advanced medical care). Now it's time to retire it, but it won't be realistic to go from muscle power to nuclear and solar power directly.

Same thing with crypto currency. It's like a steam engine from 1800: large, dirty and inefficient as it is, it already solves real problems.

Now, moving from proof of work to proof of stake is a huge step, like moving from firewood boiler to a turbine. Maybe not a complete perfection yet, but a huge jump in efficiency.

[hnthrow1010]

>it already solves real problems.

That's not true though. Crypto currencies do not solve any real problems in any meaningful sense. The problems it solves are all either problems that were created by crypto itself, due to the insistence on using that particular network architecture (which isn't even good), or are better solved in other ways. Moving to proof of stake fixes one of the fatal flaws in the scheme: the energy usage. All of the other fatal flaws still remain: The inability to do anything about fraud, the disastrous security of smart contracts, the ponzi-like economics, the inherent unfairness of mining/staking, the practical lack of decentralization and vulnerability to 67% attacks, the lack of any kind of legal structure around anything whatsoever, and not to mention that the technology is actively enabling new kinds of crimes like ransomware and evading sanctions on a grand scale...

It's patently obvious that the "tradeoff" for most people is that you get to gamble on the price of a highly speculative asset in exchange for enabling massive amounts of crime. I don't like that tradeoff. As a society, we can collectively decide not to make it.

[nine_k]

Why. Imagine that I lawfully own something valuable which is located in Russia: say, a moderate-size business, or a piece of realty. I want to stop dealing with them, sell the assets, and take away the funds.

My two options are: (1) Fly there, sell stuff, and bring a suitcase of cash. (1) Sell stuff remotely and transfer the payment over Bitcoin. I suspect that the second option is more economical even with the proof-of-work electricity-guzzling proof-of-work BTC network, because two transatlantic flights are even worse.

You'll call this a marginal problem. I'll say that marginal problems are still real, and need solutions.

[hnthrow1010]

Or just trade it for some other asset or currency that isn't crypto? Why are those your only two options? I don't understand how you jumped from "I need to trade something" to "my only option is cash or crypto". Those dots don't line up.

[jayd16]

"Bad tool is used by bad guys so don't support it" doesn't imply "any tool used by bad guys is bad." It's perfectly valid to think that different tech has different value based on specific pros and cons.

[yellowapple]

Right, but this presupposes that the particular tool in question is a "bad tool", and the basis of that presupposition elsewhere in this thread is very strongly implied to be "tool is used by bad guys therefore it's bad unless I specifically benefit from it".

[ShamelessC]

Eh, that wasn’t my read. More that it seems to be exclusively used by bad people.

The lack of people manually verifying the _nature_ of a transaction and not just that someone claimed a transaction occurred means everything you’re doing is, well, pointless. It is (highly optimistically) a libertarian political movement that is deeply misinformed about how free markets and trust actually work.

Cryptocurrency has zero effective solutions for this. If you were to send your money to anyone claiming to be a NK citizen, you still have to personally verify entire transaction occurs, or you’ll get grifted. It’s useless. You’re being grifted. You’re making it worse by continuing to defend it and at some point you’re culpable for not admitting this despite it coming up on literally every hacker news post about cryptocurrency.

[yellowapple]

> More that it seems to be exclusively used by bad people.

So I'm a bad person, then? Are the migrant workers sending money back to their families bad people? Are the refugees using it to bring their life savings with them bad people? Are the people currently subject to those bad regimes and unable to escape bad people?

At best, the belief that "it seems to be exclusively used by bad people" is blatantly ignorant of reality. At worst, it's saying the quiet part out loud: that as far as the legacy financial system (and the supporters thereof) is concerned, these people are just as "bad" (read: worth shunning from the benefits of said system), with the only difference being that said system is able to exploit them and their labor while it pretends they don't exist.

> Cryptocurrency has zero effective solutions for this.

Because there's no problem to be solved in the first place. There are many issues with cryptocurrency, but "wah nation-states can't arbitrarily censor transactions wah" ain't one of 'em.

[ShamelessC]

Can you prove any of those things is actually happening with the sort of regularity you’re implying? Preferably without linking to coinbase articles?

[haxiomic]

Turns out North Korea are using crypto! To fund missile programs https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-60281129.amp

The more I think on these things, the more I think trust is a feature, not a bug

[olalonde]

Do you extend that thought to the Internet as well? The web is undoubtedly helpful to North Korea, probably more so than crypto.

[maratc]

OpenOffice, Linux and RISC-V are of tremendous help to Russia.

[lottin]

I think the problem with this argument is the internet is useful to anyone, not just criminals.

[didericis]

Trust is a feature.

Transparent systems in which transactions are screened do not trust their people.

North Korea would never allow their people access to a truly private cryptocurrency (which Monero does better). It would become easier to funnel money internally and create opposing factions.

This discussion is no different than a discussion about just rulers. If the person in charge of a monetary system has good intentions, or is informed by a democracy with collectively good intentions, it is better for them to dictate who can have access and who cannot.

Crypto forces those on the network to trust in the free decisions of the collective. If you think more people would transact with a large criminal psychopathic state like North Korea than they would with people who oppose North Korea, that is a collective choice. In a truly decentralized system, where everyone had access (which is not the case, and complicates things), the real, in practice will of the people comes out.

[haxiomic]

It’s an appealing idea and what attracts so many bright minds to crypto. People voting with their money for their interests or the interests of the group. Love it. But that’s not how this dynamical system plays out. It would perhaps stand a chance if players could make transaction decisions based on information about the other party but that just isn’t the case in practise. Bad actors have had no issue obscuring sources if they need to (as is clear by NK state successfully using stolen crypto). But let’s say they could make truly informed decisions, that would put them at a competitive disadvantage to those who just trade with anyone regardless of potential harm. So you have a system of oligarchic growth of bastards - the biggest bastards get bigger. We of course have a similar problem in fiat, but with a currency backed by government, you have a chance to place sanctions or seize funds of actors harming the group.

Organisation of systems of humans is _hard_. We’ve been trying many different systems of governance for thousands of years. There are appealing ideas, many experiments but no easy answer. Does currency decoupled from local governance work better or worse for the interests of humanity? The answer is not obvious and we should be careful saying we have clarity. It’s worth the experiment. I’m curious to know the result and watching the evidence carefully but my reading is results don’t support the suggestion that crypto is a force for good overall. It’s not even clear crypto stays trust-less and decentralised in any practical sense once it begins to collapse into more efficient structures of big players (coinbase and friends)

[didericis]

Well said, agree with all of that. I have hope for systems that allow for the easy, anonymous (to outside observers, at least) build up of networks for the kind of information exchange you rightly claim to be the most important aspect of creating good systems in practice.

It doesn’t solve that information bottleneck problem, but I think the more efficient structures that lead to transactional bottlenecks and are necessary in things like Bitcoin are technical problems that can and I think have been worked out in currencies like Monero. Monero has quite successfully resisted the same pulls to centralization that Bitcoin and Ethereum have succumbed to for the sake of efficiency. It is smaller, but still quite large.

That does not necessarily mean it is good, and while I’m optimistic, I understand where the caution comes from. At the very least it’s extremely interesting, both from a technical perspective and a social/political perspective.

At the end of the day I am more and more convinced that all of this money and power stuff is downstream of relationships, culture, and ability to communicate and cooperate across differences. That’s what’s really important, and can be either encouraged or discouraged to move in a direction that helps the most people with all kinds of different tools, of which money is just one, and which could happen all kinds of different ways in different systems.

I wish it were easier to know what helps and what doesn’t so we wouldn’t risk making things worse. But I think the only way to know is to experiment.

[hnthrow1010]

>but I think the more efficient structures that lead to transactional bottlenecks and are necessary in things like Bitcoin are technical problems that can and I think have been worked out in currencies like Monero

That might be true, but the structure doesn't appear to have any technical considerations behind it. Following this comment:

>At the end of the day I am more and more convinced that all of this money and power stuff is downstream of relationships, culture, and ability to communicate and cooperate across differences.

If you ask me, the conclusion to this is that Monero has not actually "resisted" centralization, what it's actually done is become centralized around a group of criminals who all refuse to snitch on each other, and use the token as a means to do that. The key part is that "refuse to snitch on each other" comes before everything else including all the blockchain nonsense. These people are the only group who have any reason to bother using this token. Attacking the Monero network itself is orthogonal to what is typically done to break up these groups.

[didericis]

I disagree. Bitcoin started the same way on the darknet. That does not mean it had no greater value, as we now see.

The actual people using Monero are unknown. That’s the point. To say it is centralized behind a group of criminals is incorrect. It has been extensively used to get money into places like Venezuela where the state is hostile, and for all kinds of positive services where people simply value privacy. See http://monerica.com

The fact that criminals also use Monero is a feature, not a bug, and proves that it works in the most hostile environments. The fact that it enforces the fourth amendment is a good thing, and it forces law enforcement to target criminals specifically rather than enabling blanket surveillance.

Anyone who wants tools to prevent the state from abusing power has ample reason to use Monero, and given the way politics has been infringing on banking rights in Canada, that is bound to be a growing number.

Regardless of what you think of the Canadian protestors, the real question is what do you think of the right to privacy and our ability to ensure our rights in the USA, given our constitution. If we do not trust people to transact privately then lets just repeal the fourth amendment and be honest about what rights we do and don’t have.

I happen to believe the right to privacy is fundamental and that to remove it is to create a panopticon. I believe law enforcement has ample means to go after crime without violating financial privacy, and believe it is equally if not more important to prevent abuse of law enforcement powers given the tendency for corruption, political use, and lack of effectiveness that has plagued all of human history.

[jayd16]

>the free decisions of the collective

... the collective of an elite group of for-profit corporations that in no way reflects the will of a significant group of people.

[unity1001]

Yep. Trust is a feature, not a bug. So that the 'legitimate and righteous' blockade of North Korea by the Angloamerican establishment could turn on its domestic dissent whenever needed. As we saw during the Occupy protests in 2011.

[djbebs]

Once you understand that your regime *is* the oppressive regime, you'd understand why this is necessary.

[throwaway290]

Hi, I am Russian.

To really help ordinary people in oppressed countries, the first step is to implement policies such that they only affect those who should be affected.

If you do that, cryptocurrency benefits become moot: a Russian freelancer working overseas can legally TransferWise money to help her mom, but a Putin-connected oligarch can't wire money to help the regime.

For many reasons, it's difficult: e.g., how do you verify that your Russian user does not in fact work for Gazprom? Much safer to implement a total ban on anyone connecting from a Russian IP or using a Russian bank, explicitly sanctioned or not.

However, blanket financial anonymity at scale is not an acceptable workaround. Making it simpler for kleptocrats in charge to finance questionable activities and launder money obtained through thievery and violence, it introduces more problems than it solves, and in fact props up the regime.

[ETH_start]

>>If you do that, cryptocurrency benefits become moot: a Russian freelancer working overseas can legally TransferWise money to help her mom, but a Putin-connected oligarch can't wire money to help the regime

There are plenty of nationalities which are banned from TransferWise:

https://wise.com/help/articles/2813542/why-cant-i-open-a-wis...

Russians may one day join that list.

[throwaway290]

Maybe you misunderstood me. This year Russians got de facto banned from many services, cannot use paid features of Github (Copilot or sponsoring projects), are blocked by freelancer marketplaces, etc. I am not risking using TransferWise to transfer money home (to a non-sanctioned individual's account in a non-sanctioned bank) out of fear of losing my account forever. This is because Western companies interpret sanctions wider than strictly required to err on the side of caution due to the aforementioned reasons.

[ETH_start]

Yes, I totally misunderstood you, apologies.

I agree with everything you said, except this:

>>However, blanket financial anonymity at scale is not an acceptable workaround

Blanket financial anonymity is the only way to prevent circumstances like today's, where entire nationalities are locked out of the global financial system, and power becomes more concentrated over time.

[throwaway290]

It's not the answer, you may have missed the other part of what I wrote.

Implementing this anonymity to allow regular guys help their families in Russia, who are now dealing with 4x price hike on basic goods, will help kleptocrats (the very guys causing that hike in the first place) finance their wars and further entrench themselves in power. Don't you see how this ultimately hurts those it ostensibly aims to help?

Regular guys will send home hundreds of USD, kleptocrats will launder billions.

Financial anonymity at scale exacerbates these asymmetries by helping those with the most money/power the most. Thinking otherwise is hoping they are clueless and don't employ teams of savvy people specifically to figure out various financing workarounds.