[HN Gopher] Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy
___________________________________________________________________
Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy
Author : ghuntley
Score : 121 points
Date : 2022-06-07 09:19 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (concerned.tech)
(TXT) w3m dump (concerned.tech)
| ghuntley wrote:
| Mirrored from
| https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1534097850640093184:
|
| Last week the global tech community engaged the democratic
| process to start a discussion with American lawmakers about
| responsible innovation and financial regulation concerning
| crypto-assets. The letter was covered widely by the global press,
| read by over 25,000 people and signed by over 1,400 new
| signatories.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/03/crypto-sk...
|
| Signatories now include folks such James Gosling, Mat Velosso,
| Martin Fowler, Simon Willison, David SH Rosenthal, Dave Andersen,
| 25 computer science professors and engineers from Amazon, ACM,
| Adobe, AMD, Apple, Box, Block, CMU, Cornell, Disney, Dropbox,
| eBay, Google, GitHub, IEEE, IBM, Microsoft, MIT, Meta, Mozilla,
| Pixar, Shopify, Netflix, Oracle, Stanford, Shopify, Salesforce,
| Thoughtworks, VMWare.
|
| Signatories are not only programming language creators,
| professors, and titans of industry but normal working software
| engineers who feel strongly about this issue and have the courage
| to speak up to help inform policy.
|
| https://www.ft.com/content/f4b2fa1a-4057-4b10-9f3b-efa57e6bc...
|
| The thesis is very simple: the status quo needs to change.
|
| The most vulnerable in our communities are getting hurt because
| of regulatory inaction. And moving forward we need to proceed
| from a place of informed skepticism rather than reckless
| positivity.
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgmyzk/the-pivot-to-web3-is-...
|
| This is all at the same time that the crypto lobby is spending
| more money than the entire defense sector put together to
| influence senators and push their corporate interests on the
| public.
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-02/crypto-in...
|
| A grassroots coalition of scientists, think tanks, finreg
| experts, and legal scholars are organizing to assist the
| legislative process and ensure that fintech innovation serves
| financial inclusion and that investors, markets, and consumers
| are protected.
|
| https://twitter.com/RealBankReform/status/153382048602256998...
|
| The window to sign closes this Friday, and the letter is sent to
| Congress thereafter. Join the 1500+ other fellow programmers,
| scientists and engineers in the technology community in making
| your voice heard on this important issue.
|
| Read the letter at https://concerned.tech
| bitcoin_anon wrote:
| Serious question for those of you who want to regulate Bitcoin
| out of existence:
|
| What do you propose to do with those of us who, despite your
| attestations of its uselessness, have deemed it useful and
| purchased it with our hard earned money? For example, MSTR has
| ~$4 billion in Bitcoin on its balance sheet. It purchased it on
| the free market for reasons that were valid to it. However, you
| disagree and want to step in and do something about it. What do
| you propose to do about entities like MSTR?
| arrosenberg wrote:
| They bought a highly speculative vehicle knowing that eventual
| government intervention was a risk. I feel sort of bad for the
| little guys who get wiped out thinking it actually had value,
| the big funds who institutionally should know the risks can eat
| cake.
| discordianfish wrote:
| I don't think it should be regulation as much as made illegal.
| I'd encourage all governments to put policy in place to outlaw
| exchanging crypto for fiat. Until that policy takes action, you
| can convert still trade in your crypto.
| puranjay wrote:
| To be fair, you're not meant to denominate the value of your
| Bitcoin in dollar terms.
|
| 1 BTC is always equal to 1 BTC.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Serious answer: nothing. Absolutely utterly nothing. Why should
| we? Why is there an expectation that we should? Where does this
| sense of entitlement come in from those who gambled, that
| others are responsible for rescuing you out of it?
|
| I assume you understood the landscape, and the risks, and took
| the gamble as an informed, consenting adult, and are willing to
| stand by it as an adult if gamble doesn't work out.
|
| If NOT, well that's exactly what regulations are meant to
| prevent - make it a little bit harder for uninformed or
| unconsenting people to make a foolish or unaware gamble.
| Mostly, about treating it the same as everything else under the
| sun ("cry me a river", as they say:)
|
| If it helps understand my seemingly heartless position: I have
| exactly as much sympathy and empathy for somebody spending
| $4bil on crypto, as for investing $4bil in Phillip Morris or
| another tobacco company a couple of decades ago.
|
| Just because _you_ "deemed it useful" (i.e. hoped to profit
| massively), doesn't mean _we as society_ cannot decide
| otherwise and attempt to limit, regulate, inform, or otherwise
| stop the madness. And we owe you nada.
| bitcoin_anon wrote:
| > If it helps understand my seemingly heartless position: I
| have exactly as much sympathy and empathy for somebody
| spending $4bil on crypto, as for investing $4bil in Phillip
| Morris or another tobacco company a couple of decades ago.
|
| This did help, thank you.
|
| Your gambling metaphor is useful, but incomplete. Consider
| this instead: You come across your fellow citizens gambling
| in a casino. You decide they must stop what they are doing
| for _reasons_. My original question was basically how do you
| shutdown the casino in a fair and orderly way?
|
| You seem to be saying that when people lose money playing
| casino games, that is their problem, they signed up for it
| when they entered the casino. I agree.
|
| However, suppose gambling were made illegal today. Do you
| think everyone currently seated at a table, people who
| entered the casino legally, should lose the money they
| brought into the casino with them?
| cycrutchfield wrote:
| Bankruptcy
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I propose that they should restructure or go out of business,
| in the same way as a payday loan company might go out of
| business if it becomes impractical to offer usurious loans. I
| wouldn't support anything like a Bitcoin Confiscation Act, but
| I fundamentally reject the idea that we can't impose strict
| regulations on bad financial products without paying off the
| people who've invested in the unregulated version.
| notinfuriated wrote:
| > What do you propose to do with those of us who...
|
| Not my problem. It's your life and your money. And of course
| you know that not everyone who has purchased it has deemed it
| "useful" beyond the use of hodling until you sell to someone
| else for more money. I've used BTC myself, to buy drugs 10
| years ago. Sadly, it seemed more useful then than it is now.
|
| Anyway, I don't think anything should be done to dramatically
| affect Bitcoin directly, but there probably should be something
| done about people taking advantage of the shitcoin market. It's
| far too easy to make your own crypto and rugpull a bunch of
| people. I'm quite disgusted with it and with American society's
| slow cultural procession toward becoming gambling addicts,
| which is most likely not a coincidence (although, I won't blame
| crypto for it entirely).
|
| (And no, it's not now nor ever was the same with trading public
| securities, which have financial statements whose format and
| structure are regulated by the government.)
| alaricus wrote:
| notinfuriated wrote:
| You are misconstruing what I wrote, which is that it's _not
| my problem_. I don 't care what happens to their money,
| just as I don't think anyone should care what happens to
| mine. Although, sure, I wish ill on anyone who is using
| crypto to scam others.
|
| Were you planning on sharing your gains with me? No, right?
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > What do you propose to do with those of us who, despite your
| attestations of its uselessness, have deemed it useful and
| purchased it with our hard earned money?
|
| Penalize you for the collateral damage you caused. Bitcoin has
| consumed a lot of energy and greatly contributed to global
| warming. In addition, it has led to a bunch of fraud. In
| addition, it has made ransomware much more common.
|
| The world is worse off because of Bitcoin and because people
| like you invested in it.
|
| Bitcoin is the unleaded gas of financial schemes.
| criddell wrote:
| What was done for those who held vast stores of tulips and
| tulip bulbs at the end of the tulip craze? As far as I know,
| very little.
|
| Today companies at least have bankruptcy protection and
| corporate structures that should shield individuals.
|
| That said, I think Bitcoin should face most of the same
| regulations that other securities face and in the end I think
| this will _help_ Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. I don 't
| think they should be regulated out of business.
| bitcoin_anon wrote:
| > What was done for those who held vast stores of tulips and
| tulip bulbs at the end of the tulip craze? As far as I know,
| very little.
|
| The difference is that the tulip craze died of its own
| accord. This question was posed to those who would like to
| regulate Bitcoin out of existence.
| TimPC wrote:
| Government has a right to regulate in order to deal with
| negative externalities and the negative externalities from
| Bitcoin and other crypto are extremely large. Most of
| crypto has been various type of financial schemes and
| regulators should ensure at a minimum that all investors in
| such schemes were properly accredited and impose regulation
| if the tokens were historically taking unaccredited
| investment. The government also has the right to regulate
| polluters and even an outright ban is reasonable if they
| conclude that the environmental cost of proof of work
| vastly outweighs the very limited use cases and benefits
| that have been shown to date. Finally, and I think the
| strongest argument is the government is allowed to regulate
| financial transactions. Bitcoin and other crypto
| intentionally circumvent this by removing the party
| conducting the financial transaction. Government could
| conclude this is unreasonable resulting in a ban or could
| create reporting requirements for any cryptocurrency
| transaction, subjecting one or both end users to
| requirements currently dealt with by banks. The idea that
| crypto-proponents seem to have is that removing the bank
| should remove all reporting requirements on transactions
| and I don't see a reason for that to be true. I think in
| aggregate there is a fairly reasonable case for a ban
| across multiple substantial issues. And no, the government
| does not owe people for the price consequences of its
| regulatory policy. Investors in casinos are not made whole
| for changes in gambling laws.
| bitcoin_anon wrote:
| > Investors in casinos are not made while for changes in
| gambling laws.
|
| What about the people seated at the tables in the middle
| of a hand?
| criddell wrote:
| It's not unlike mine owners complaining that new
| environmental regulations make running their mine
| impossible.
|
| That said, regulations would probably come into effect
| after some short period of time and likely in stages.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| andybp85 wrote:
| If a law gets made saying what MSTR is doing is illegal and
| they keep doing it, I'm pretty sure what to do involves the
| police, SEC, etc. Why would one think it's anyone else's
| problem?
| wmf wrote:
| Realistically regulations don't take effect out of nowhere so
| people would have time to exit their positions. Of course the
| price would crash but that's going to happen anyway.
| pavlov wrote:
| This has to be the least convincing argument for not regulating
| Bitcoin:
|
| "What about this obscure enterprise software company that took
| billions of loans to buy Bitcoin? The company's shareholders
| would be very sad if they had a margin call on those loans."
|
| MSTR would presumably have to go back to selling software
| instead of speculating on unrelated assets. And everybody else
| can keep their Bitcoins too, it might just not be as easy to
| convert them to cash.
| bitcoin_anon wrote:
| Nice strawman.
| ironlake wrote:
| >What do you propose to do about entities like MSTR?
|
| He answered the question.
| pmyteh wrote:
| Most bitcoin regulation scenarios would just be an ordinary
| investment risk, in some senses. If you invest in commercial
| property and then changes in the tax treatment of real estate
| mean that the value of your investment falls then that just
| sucks for you. I can't see that it's any different if, for
| example, the US Government started demanding annual
| declarations of crypto wallets on tax returns and started
| taxing capital swings as income.
|
| If cryptocurrency is actually confiscated I'm sure that the US
| government at least will be obliged to pay out. Given the
| volatility of bitcoin (and the extent to which it will likely
| drop if governments come out full square against it) I'm sure
| there will be legal arguments about what the compensation for
| the taking should be. But if the use-case is largely either (1)
| speculation or (2) hiding things from governments and
| governments limit the upside of (1) with tax or structural
| changes and crack down on (2) I don't think anyone's going to
| make the bag-holders whole in case of regulation rather than
| confiscation. Bigger companies than ~$4bn have gone bankrupt by
| misreading their market risks before.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _is actually confiscated I 'm sure that the US government
| at least will be obliged to pay out_
|
| To be clear, nobody is proposing confiscation. Once
| regulated, the value of these assets will presumably fall.
| People invested in casino bonds don't have a magic claim to
| restitution when gambling laws are updated.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Here's a prediction:
|
| Crypto is the next cancer from cigarettes, lead in fuel, climate
| change etc.
|
| The thing linking them is that even after it was widely
| acknowledged these were a net negative, they continued for a
| long, long time. Harming a wide group of people uneccesarily and
| massively profiting a select few.
|
| If I'm correct, the key indicator will be right wing governments
| around the globe being paid off to allow the abuse to continue
| and their media going on the attack.
|
| Communist computer scientists, what do they know? They just want
| to keep the poor white men from getting rich because of political
| correctness etc. etc. Anyone seen any signs of that yet?
|
| Hope I'm wrong, worried I'm correct.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/05/sen-ted-cruz-discloses-a-bit...
|
| https://youtu.be/CyVyCOHODk4
| HideousKojima wrote:
| >If I'm correct, the key indicator will be right wing
| governments around the globe being paid off to allow the abuse
| to continue and their media going on the attack.
|
| >Communist computer scientists, what do they know? They just
| want to keep the poor white men from getting rich because of
| political correctness etc. etc. Anyone seen any signs of that
| yet?
|
| This strikes me as a rather wrong-headed take. What I've
| actually seen happen is several statist types propose creating
| a centralized (government controlled and monitored) digital
| currency in response to the rise of cryptocurrencies. China's
| e-CNY is the most obvious example, but there have been similar
| proposals from politicians and bureaucrats in the US, EU, and
| elsewhere, with the idea being that the governments can track
| financial activity even more closely than they already can.
|
| FWIW, I'm pretty anti-crypto and think there are better
| alternatives for 99% of the things I see crypto proposed as a
| solution for.
| tatertots1234 wrote:
| Proof of Work and Bitcoin may be generally trash, and unless
| they evolve they will eventually crash and burn, but "crypto"
| on the whole encompasses a wide range of good and bad
| applications.
|
| Here's a prediction: Over the next decade or two, scalable
| proof of stake crypto currency networks and blockchain-based
| systems will probably be used as base settlement layers for a
| growing portion of digital payments, disrupting VISA and PayPal
| and enabling new ways of sending and coordinating value online.
| TimPC wrote:
| This world would suck for the same reason I don't use debit
| to pay for things from untrusted merchants. Credit cards
| provide an incredible security layer in transaction
| reversibility that allows you to transact with unknown
| merchants. Internet payments doesn't work without it. What
| cryptocurrency is going to solve this problem?
| tatertots1234 wrote:
| You realize that in many countries, credit cards are not
| common? People pay for things online with their debit card
| all the time.
|
| Not all consumers need or want transaction reversibility,
| especially if they trust the contracts they are using, like
| depositing tokens into a DEX contract address that has not
| changed for several years - this has an extremely low
| counterparty risk.
|
| A VISA- or PayPal-like reversible payment system is
| definitely possible to build on ETH as a rollup that takes
| a 1-5% fee of all transactions in order to cover cost of
| chargebacks. Many applications already support various
| forms of transaction reversal in their contracts, look at
| USDC.
| TimPC wrote:
| So we reinvent a VISA-like entity that charges VISA-like
| fees to replace VISA. This seems like a very impressive
| and extremely novel innovation.
| tatertots1234 wrote:
| Pretty much. Now VISA has to compete with every other
| protocol deployed on the permissionless network, some of
| which may charge lower to no fees and provide different
| user experiences. Users can also, as they desire, connect
| with the base layer if they wish to circumvent the VISA-
| like protocols entirely. An example of that might be a
| company moving or exchanging several million dollars
| without wanting to deal with VISA-like fees and control
| mechanisms.
|
| In truth, we may not see VISA-like protocols on the
| blockchain for some time, as most users are finding the
| counterparty risk small enough with the base layer that
| there is little demand for chargebacks and transaction
| disputes.
| TimPC wrote:
| As evidenced by the hard fork of Ethereum when a smart
| contract didn't work the way it was supposed to. There
| clearly is demand for something like transaction
| disputes.
| tatertots1234 wrote:
| Yes, if the vast majority of the users in the network
| come to clear consensus on forking the protocol to enact
| a single change, they can do so. This is not a bad thing,
| it's similar to how we fork our laws in the real world as
| we realize they contain pitfalls and loopholes.
|
| This is very different from individual transaction
| disputes on a VISA-like protocol, and the DAO fork
| doesn't suggest that transaction level disputes are in
| particularly high demand (in 7 years this happened one
| time on the network, and you call that demand? lol).
| [deleted]
| tatertots1234 wrote:
| The letter has some good and bad.
|
| Good because it advocates for more regulation and consumer
| protection, and points out some obvious concerns with crypto like
| energy expenditure in proof of work.
|
| Bad because the letter misrepresents the technology and paints
| privacy as a purely criminal behavior, and suggests the entire
| technology sector is useless.
|
| > Similarly, most public blockchain-based financial products are
| a disaster for financial privacy; the exceptions are a handful of
| emerging privacy-focused blockchain finance alternatives, and
| these are a gift to money-launderers.
|
| Imagine this argument being applied to End-to-End Encryption.
| "Most chat messaging apps are a disaster for user privacy; except
| the ones that are privacy-focused and use E2EE, and those are a
| gift to terrorists and criminals."
|
| There's lots of privacy preserving crypto tech: Monero, ZCash,
| TornadoCash, and soon Aztec. zk-SNARK and zk-STARK are recent
| advances here that dramatically change the future landscape. You
| can also use CEX as a mixer to provide soft anonymity, allowing
| regulators and IRS to track your finances, without revealing your
| accounts to the whole world.
|
| > Blockchain technology cannot, and will not, have transaction
| reversal mechanisms because they are antithetical to its base
| design.
|
| This is false. There is a lot of blockchain technology that has
| transaction reversal mechanisms. USDC and other centralized
| stablecoins can freeze and mint tokens. Optimistic rollups are
| built around the very design of transaction reversal. Many NFT
| projects give the contract owner ability to mint, burn, change
| metadata, and so on. The original DAO itself was drained and
| funds reverted by a hard fork, and yet ETH and ETC still continue
| to exist just fine.
|
| > By its very design, blockchain technology, specifically so-
| called "public blockchains", are poorly suited for just about
| every purpose currently touted as a present or potential source
| of public benefit.
|
| Bah! Perhaps some of the authors would like to shill their own
| private blockchain companies (Adjoint Inc).
| thomzane wrote:
| Climate emissions are only mentioned in a brief side-note.
| Makes me wonder what their motivation is. Sounds like the
| writer was a crypto investor, got scammed out of their money,
| got mad that they could not reverse the payment, and are now
| against the entire tech stack.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _imagine this argument being applied to End-to-End
| Encryption_
|
| There's a stark line between encrypted communication and
| encrypted money. If someone can't see the difference between
| those bits they shouldn't be handling other peoples' money.
| tatertots1234 wrote:
| This line is drawn by society. At one point we did not see
| the need for E2EE or peer-to-peer file sharing, and now some
| of us do. At one point we did not see the need for privacy
| preserving digital currencies and peer-to-peer transactional
| systems, and now some of us do.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _we did not see the need for privacy preserving digital
| currencies and peer-to-peer transactional systems, and now
| some of us do_
|
| Fair enough. I think it's time for those who do to make
| their case. We've run the experiment. The downsides are
| documented and tangible. There should be a way to thread
| the needle whereby the downsides can be limited without
| strangling all of the upside.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| The vast, vast majority of money laundering and illicit
| financial activity happens within the confines of the
| traditional banking system. Why don't we start with
| regulating that properly first?
| TimPC wrote:
| We've done a lot to regulate banking and when we catch
| banks engaging in problematic behaviours there are hefty
| fines attached. We've seen huge numbers of crypto schemes
| without any real consequences to those involved or those
| knowingly profiting off a scam. If we should be
| regulating all illicit financial activity the largest gap
| exists in cryptocurrencies not traditional banking.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| references : cost of doing business; front-running;
| political nepotism; private equity; regulatory capture;
| machine-goes-brrrr
| howinteresting wrote:
| So you should be able to communicate privately with an
| abortion provider in a jurisdiction where it's illegal, but
| not pay them privately?
| darawk wrote:
| It's certainly true that there's a line, but i've never heard
| a principled case for why they ought to be different. Money
| and speech are really not much different in terms of their
| power to organize problematic activity.
|
| Certainly dragnet surveillance of speech could prevent a fair
| amount of terrorism, mass shootings, child pornography, etc.
| Dragnet surveillance of money flows accomplishes that too.
|
| We just as a society decided it was worth it in the case of
| speech, but for some reason have decided the opposite in the
| case of money, except when that money is physical cash. None
| of this seems particularly well grounded in any kind of
| principled argument for one vs the other.
|
| The benefits to anonymity and privacy are always highly
| diffuse and hard to observe, particularly in the moment. In
| another comment you ask for someone to enumerate the upsides,
| but i'd ask you the same question for speech privacy. What
| are the upsides to you being able to talk to your friends
| without the government listening in?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _i 've never heard a principled case for why they ought
| to be different. Money and speech are really not much
| different in terms of their power to organize problematic
| activity_
|
| Speech is more primitive, and far less dependent on
| community efforts, than money. We can theorise working
| societies without money. I don't think we can do similarly
| without speech, at least not without changing what it means
| to be human.
| solveit wrote:
| > We can theorise working societies without money.
|
| Really? At scales larger than a few hundred people?
| rurp wrote:
| Sure, there have probably been thousands of such
| societies throughout history. Bartering was common for
| many hunter gatherer communities. Having a standard
| currency isn't very practical if you have many groups
| across a large geographical area that meet sporadically.
| Directly trading goods would work just fine in those
| cases.
| vaidhy wrote:
| How did they agree on what the exchange rate should be?
| From my understanding, the answer was almost always
| plunder among the primitive societies or a tyrant/king
| enforcing a monetary system. There was really no
| bartering amongst equals across communities.
| darawk wrote:
| Firstly I don't think that's actually true in any
| meaningful sense. I mean, yes, literally we could have a
| completely trivial society without something resembling
| money, but at even the most rudimentary levels of social
| organization that actually exist among humans, something
| resembling money exists. Certainly at the very least, the
| excahnge of value is occurring between people in anything
| that could reasonably be called "society".
|
| Secondly, even if we accept that speech is "more
| primitive", i'm not sure why that implies anything about
| how they ought to be regulated.
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| Unless you are in the United States and your money is going
| to a super PAC, union, or other association. Then your
| transmission of funds is free speech and covered by the first
| amendment. [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _your transmission of funds is free speech and covered by
| the first amendment_
|
| Political spending has been equated with political speech
| by the Supreme Court. That doesn't mean the government
| can't _e.g._ freeze a criminal 's assets.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Super PACs have to report how they spend their money and
| where they got it from. As long as they don't communicate
| with a campaign, how they spend it is free speech. This is
| very different from not reporting where you spend your
| money or where you got it from.
| thawaya3113 wrote:
| E2E privacy has a lot of uses.
|
| Crypto has none.
|
| It's just an enabler and hotbed of a variety of scams.
|
| Any use it may have can only possibly reveal itself after the
| crypto asset bubble/scams die.
|
| So even if you're a crypto enthusiast, you should be in favor
| of this whole disastrous phase for crypto ending so you can try
| again and actually make it useful this time.
|
| Since crypto has become a completely speculation driven asset
| it's become useless for anything other than buying and stuffing
| under the mattress.
|
| Any value crypto may add to the world will only happen once
| that dynamic is eliminated.
| tatertots1234 wrote:
| Your post is so perfectly in line with the blanket dismissal
| and absolutist attitude of the letter that you could pass as
| one of the authors.
|
| Crypto has its uses. Crypto also has lots of scams. Crypto
| bubble popping will not destroy the scams; these are endemic
| to any semi decentralized system, see email spam and
| robocalls. We can do much more to regulate, moderate, and
| improve the tech for better consumer protection and
| usability, which is one thing the letter calls for.
| hnthrow1010 wrote:
| >Crypto has its uses.
|
| No, this is wrong. By itself it has no uses besides
| speculative gambling. The technology fundamentally doesn't
| enable anything else, if you take that out it's just a
| really niche and inefficient distributed database. You may
| be suggesting that some companies have been able to build
| useful things on top of a blockchain. That might be true
| but out of all the examples you gave, they're useful in
| spite of cryptocurrency, not because of it. The exercise
| for crypto builders now becomes how to separate the useful
| parts from the ponzi tokens and build just those.
| tatertots1234 wrote:
| > By itself it has no uses besides speculative gambling.
|
| And the earth is flat, and I refuse to accept any
| evidence to the contrary.
|
| A simple example of crypto being useful is as a
| timestamped, censorship-resistant and tamper-proof ledger
| of cryptographically signed messages. That is one use
| case for it besides gambling, ergo your statement is
| easily refuted. I presume you will move the goalposts,
| though.
| maccard wrote:
| That's not a use of crypto, that's what it does. What is
| a use for that? I'm with OP on this, I've yet to see a
| use for it that isn't speculative gambling.
| tatertots1234 wrote:
| OP asks for a use, I provided. You say it is not a use,
| it's "what it does." Yes, it's exactly what it does?
| That's what it's being used for.
| anon2020dot00 wrote:
| Don't you get tired of the endless recycling of pro and
| con crypto arguments? It's the same thing every time ad-
| infinitum.
| tatertots1234 wrote:
| Yep, every time crypto is on the front page you have
| nocoiners and web3 pumpers making the same ridiculous
| blanket statements, and then some people in between
| trying to discern the reality of the situation.
| hnthrow1010 wrote:
| The reality of the situation is that blockchains are a
| mostly useless and inefficient datastructure that by and
| large don't solve any real problems. I find it insulting
| that I can't say this without someone labeling me a
| "nocoiner." Yes you can make money with them, that isn't
| the point. Sometimes an algorithm can just be bad. If you
| can't look at an algorithm objectively, maybe consider
| that you're not trying to discern the reality of the
| situation?
| hnthrow1010 wrote:
| Well first of all, cryptocurrency isn't "censorship-
| resistant" any more than any other encrypted distributed
| system, so you can take that phrase out. Take a look at
| Tor or Freenet to see how this is done without the ponzi
| tokens.
|
| Second of all, you can easily build a timestamped and
| tamper-proof ledger without making people pay to access
| it using speculative tokens. The aspect of trying to
| assign money value to these tokens is the problem, not
| the tamper-proof part. Conflating all these concepts
| together under the roof of "blockchain" is one of the
| many sins of web3 companies, but it's not true. Another
| sin is this constant attempt by people to "refute"
| critics. You don't need to do that, the fact that it
| happens so often should tip you off that the technology
| is not the focus of the discussion here. If you ever find
| yourself getting hostile about this, you're falling for
| the trap that the marketers are setting.
| tatertots1234 wrote:
| re: censorship, prove to us how you would go about
| censoring an Ethereum transaction please?
|
| re: timestamp, prove to us how easy it is to build a
| distributed and tamper-proof append-only ledger without a
| BFT consensus mechanism?
|
| The technology is absolutely the focus of this discussion
| here.
| hnthrow1010 wrote:
| >censorship, prove to us how you would go about censoring
| an Ethereum transaction please?
|
| Very simple, throw the wallet holder in jail. I don't
| know why you're asking this question, you should be able
| to answer the same question about Tor or Freenet and
| extrapolate from there.
|
| >re: timestamp, prove to us how easy it is to build a
| distributed and tamper-proof append-only ledger without a
| BFT consensus mechanism?
|
| I also don't know why you're asking this question or what
| it has to do with cryptocurrency or what I said at all.
| There are BFT consensus mechanisms that don't require the
| use of speculative tokens. BFT algorithms are by and
| large, good and useful; the problem comes in when people
| try to solve this by handing out tokens and convincing
| people to use them as money. In that way web3 is actually
| very intellectually lazy to me, the only proposed
| solutions it appears that most of them have for this is
| to simply mint more and more tokens.
| tatertots1234 wrote:
| > Very simple, throw the wallet holder in jail.
|
| This has no effect on the on-chain transaction, message,
| or application, which remains widely distributed across
| all nodes in the network. Tor is great but has different
| design goals, such as consensus of the entire network
| secured by about 10 nodes.
|
| > There are BFT consensus mechanisms that don't require
| the use of speculative tokens.
|
| What BFT mechanism do you propose to secure consensus of
| this "easy to build" tamper-proof ledger for a widely
| distributed network of untrusted nodes? Common choices
| are PoW or PoS, or PoA with a small number of trusted
| authorities as it is used in Tor.
| hnthrow1010 wrote:
| >This has no effect on the on-chain transaction, message,
| or application
|
| Sure, but you can't make those when you're locked in jail
| with no access to the internet. I believe this was made
| obvious all the way back in 2013 with the Silk Road bust.
|
| >What BFT mechanism do you propose to secure consensus of
| this "easy to build" tamper-proof ledger for a widely
| distributed network of untrusted nodes?
|
| Out of what you said, PoA is the only one that has any
| chance at being fair over a long period of time because
| it's a lot easier to eject bad actors from the network.
| If you use PoA there's not much point to using a
| blockchain, but this is good actually; it gives you the
| freedom to choose between any number of more efficient
| datastructures. PoS is mostly just a loose approximation
| of another form of PoA (whomever stakes the most is the
| authority) and it's wholly unnecessary if you get rid of
| the speculative tokens; PoW (and some PoS algorithms too)
| are quite literally based around consensus-by-lottery, in
| my view that's another reason why it will never be useful
| for anything beyond gambling on speculative tokens. I've
| seen a lot of variations on the algorithms but none of
| them can get away from that basic problem without
| morphing back into another form of PoA.
| tatertots1234 wrote:
| You can jail a person but the contract or message they
| deployed, which may include private encrypted information
| or even be a fully fledged blockchain application, is
| still accessible and functioning as it was before. That
| is the point of the ledger being censorship-resistant,
| and it's a different model than trusting a small handful
| of node operators.
|
| PoW and PoS may rely on speculative valuation of the
| token but they aren't really like PoA at all. The whole
| concept is that they are permissionless, as opposed to
| permissioned.
|
| But anyways we have three options: PoW, PoS, PoA. And
| there are crypto currencies and blockchains for each of
| those. PoA tends to secure the least amount of value as
| it's generally seen as less secure, less censorship-
| resistant, and less distributed.
| faddypaddy34 wrote:
| I see a lot that crypto has it's uses. Please explain like
| I am 5 what some of the best ones are.
| throwaway15492 wrote:
| Next time I want to go to a manifestation, I have a
| bitcoin backup plan, cash to survive for some months.
| Could be useful if the government decides to freeze or
| close my bank account due to my political views, as
| happened in Canada _this year_ (which should freak you
| out, coming from a western, relatively rich, established
| democracy!!!1) [1]
|
| I am anti-authoritarianism. I would, at the same time,
| vote democrat if I were in the US.
|
| [1]: https://vaccineimpact.com/2022/after-trudeau-
| freezes-protest...
| logicalmonster wrote:
| > Crypto has none.
|
| Posts on HN about some payment provider robbing somebody
| blind and destroying their life's work are a common
| occurrence here.
|
| We're not too far gone from wrong-think protesters in Canada
| having their bank accounts seized by the government.
|
| But crypto has no use case. Gotcha.
| prohobo wrote:
| "...and urge you to consider our objective and independent expert
| judgments to guide your legislative priorities, which we remain
| happy to discuss anytime."
|
| So they have no real demands, just "listen to us about crypto,
| and not anyone else". I'm all for responsible regulation to
| protect people from scams, but this is ridiculous.
|
| Signatories include every single mega tech corporation, which is
| an obvious development; they want to control this too.
| paulgb wrote:
| I mean, that seems like a reasonable demand? We all know that
| most politicians have a shaky understanding of technology at
| best, and corporate lobbyists fill that information void with a
| narrative that advantages their employers. This is a neutral
| (as in not on crypto payroll) group of technologists saying
| "hey, we understand this stuff at a technical and/or economic
| level, we're willing to talk too".
|
| The signatures from FAANG companies are mostly rank and file
| engineers. I doubt their companies asked them to sign, but I
| think it's representative of how widespread crypto skepticism
| is in tech.
| prohobo wrote:
| They're aren't all neutral, many of them are working on
| private blockchain technologies. For example, anyone working
| for Meta is on the crypto payroll - just not the
| Bitcoin/Ethereum/etc ones.
|
| My pointed questions are: 1) What are their specific
| concerns/demands? 2) Who specifically are politicians
| supposed to be listening to? 3) Why aren't the government
| appointed CBDC research groups already informing politicians?
| 4) If they are, then what is this letter about?
|
| This is about on the same level as the "Please stop people
| from talking about the Wuhan lab leak" letter.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| roenxi wrote:
| > We strongly disagree with the narrative -- peddled by those
| with a financial stake in the crypto-asset industry -- that these
| technologies represent a positive financial innovation...
|
| This is a little bit unfair. When I became convinced that
| cryptocurrencies represented a positive financial innovation I
| immediately went out and bought some. Obviously the more
| potential someone sees the more they will be involved. This is a
| legitimate never-before-in-history situation. It was impossible
| to get an asset with the mix of properties crypto has before
| around 2010. This is an exciting era.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| amelius wrote:
| Also: the enabling of ransomware and other criminal
| activities.
| zaudo wrote:
| Boy, that escalated quickly... Can we not critique content in
| submissions now?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Yes, he certainly escalated to mournful self pity and
| casting himself as the victim then pivoted to shilling
| quite quickly, I agree. Of course you can critique: that's
| exactly what you and I are both doing right now. You don't
| have to ask me for permission.
| pavlov wrote:
| _> "Obviously the more potential someone sees the more they
| will be involved"_
|
| This sentence summarizes why crypto is so peculiar. It's all
| about belief in some potential, not utility or returns. And
| you're supposed to get "involved".
|
| When you buy a stock or a bond or a derivative or a currency
| hedge, it doesn't usually become a way of life. But crypto
| isn't a practical financial product so much as a club
| membership. Bored Apes figured this out and took out the
| financial pretense completely.
| roenxi wrote:
| People can (and have) said the same thing about gold for
| thousands of years. The evidence is in, cryptocurrency is
| some sort of asset. It is unclear how big the crypto market
| is, but at this point it seems a safe bet after the last
| decade that there there is enough interest to sustain a
| billion dollar market in cryptocurrency even under the most
| pessimistic of scenarios. It is probably going to be quite a
| bit bigger.
|
| The next real question is how to value it. That'll take a
| recession to figure out by clearing out the scams, but it'll
| become clear in time.
| rout39574 wrote:
| It's an asset like a baseball card or a beanie baby.
|
| Notably less asset-like than e.g. MTG cards, with which you
| can at least play a game.
| bo1024 wrote:
| What I find most disappointing about this is the extremely vague
| ask. "Do something, anything" coming from technologists? And
| trusting that politicians will not twist that as supporting their
| own agendas?
| b1n wrote:
| Bullish.
| alaricus wrote:
| This is one of the most ridiculous things I read in a very long
| time.
|
| Why does it concern those 1500 people how I decide to store my
| money? What's next, regulating where I can spend my money and
| where I can't?
|
| There is nothing responsible about the government interfering in
| things it should not be interfering with.
| malermeister wrote:
| > What's next, regulating where I can spend my money and where
| I can't?
|
| This is already a thing. See drugs, slaves etc.
| ccuqui wrote:
| Sorry to say, but the petition won't make any difference. The
| reason is simple: the problem is not technical, but political.
|
| Governments, worldwide, have clear goals: to become more
| powerful, omniscient and perpetual in power, and the basis for
| this is the money they hold. Crypto currencies attack _precisely_
| the money part and consequently affect the other objectives.
|
| The currency digitization movement is global (e-dollar being
| proposed by the FED, e-Real in Brazil, the digitization of money
| in India, as well as the banning of cryptocurrencies mining in
| several countries, claiming: * put your ecological/anti-terrorist
| argument here *.
|
| The truth is that governments do not tolerate the loss of control
| and the possibility of currency evasion that cryptocurrencies
| potentially allow. They also don't tolerate the possibility that
| when they do shit, they can't print money at will to try to cover
| it up. Neither do they tolerate not having control over all
| circulating money, especially with regard to taxation.
|
| Laws like this will continue to be passed easily, worldwide, as
| it maintains the status quo that governments will do everything
| to maintain.
|
| PS: I am PRAYING to be wrong on ALL of the above statements....
| paulgb wrote:
| > Governments, worldwide, have clear goals: to become more
| powerful, omniscient and perpetual in power
|
| I think it's a mistake to treat governments (especially the
| elected government(s) like this letter targets) as a singular,
| rational entity. Instead they are a collection of individual
| (let's generously assume) rational actors whose career goals
| are often at odds with each other. These career goals depend on
| the support of the electorate, which is why petitions can work.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Neither do they tolerate not having control over all
| circulating money, especially with regard to taxation_
|
| Plenty of countries have given up their currencies. Presently
| and throughout history [1][2]. In particular, your toy model of
| governance isn't terribly predictive of American politics.
|
| > _not having control over all circulating money, especially
| with regard to taxation_
|
| Non sequitur. I can invoice from New York in euros or Bitcoin
| and still pay my taxes on those earnings in dollars.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_board#Examples_in_rec...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_union#History
| baby wrote:
| Disappointing. I think technologists who also understand finance
| should be heard, not technologists who don't. Where are the
| cryptographers on this list besides Schneier?
| zja wrote:
| What makes you think the signatories don't understand finance?
| kevinpet wrote:
| Why is a letter about crypto referring to Fintech in general in
| the title? To me this shows a distinct lack of context and the
| view that these people think they know a lot about crypto, but
| know very little about finance and moreover the authors don't
| think they need to know much about finance. For example, the bald
| assertion that crypto has no real world use cases ignores the
| work happening within traditional finance to use blockchain for
| trade settlement.
|
| Do I know everything about these topic? No, but I'm not writing a
| public letter soliciting signatures.
|
| Am I a crypto shill? No, I think current crypto is a rip off, but
| this letter isn't a good argument for that. It's too light on
| details and doesn't acknowledge the areas where it could be
| valuable.
| politician wrote:
| Disappointing and misguided. It's especially sad to see Bruce
| Schneier indirectly advocate for back doors.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| "Indirectly", huh? But not actually? Exactly how is he doing
| that?
| politician wrote:
| > "The claims that the blockchain advocates make are not
| true," said Bruce Schneier. "It's not secure, it's not
| decentralised. Any system where you forget your password and
| you lose your life savings is not a safe system," he added.
|
| His tweet. He clearly identifies the problem as "lost
| password" implies disaster. This line of thinking is what the
| government uses to argue for back doors in cryptography
| software. The position he is taking leads to the argument
| that we need our cryptographic keys backed up by the
| state/corporations so that we don't lose our life savings.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Have you considered the possibility that maybe he's simply
| advocating for a customer service representative who can
| reset your password in the sql database after verifying
| your identity, instead of going back on everything he's
| ever said and repudiating his life's work as a well
| respected security professional, and that perhaps Bruce
| Schneier is not just an unethical hack like the crypto bros
| he's criticizing?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| >Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation
| of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith.
|
| Edit:
|
| politician> Without the man coming on HN and explaining his
| apparently incongruous position, though, who can say?
|
| Bruce Schneier explains why he's not coming on HN and
| explaining his apparently incongruous position to you:
|
| Bruce> Honestly, I can't care very much about random
| conversations that misrepresent me. Life is too short.
|
| Don> Am I right to presume you don't directly or indirectly
| advocate for backdoors, and your position on
| cryptocurrencies is not incongruous with that? ;)
|
| Bruce> Of course not. I don't even understand how
| "blockchain is useless" has anything to do with backdoors.
|
| Don> If so, could I share that fact, and have you written
| any articles about your position on backdoors that I could
| link to please?
|
| Bruce> This might be my latest:
|
| https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/12/scaring_peop
| l...
| politician wrote:
| I am allowed to be disappointed in his advocacy of a
| position that undermines his life's work. That his major
| accomplishments are cryptographic in nature is precisely
| why I called him out specifically, and not some random
| hack.
|
| Don, sometimes people can find themselves advocating for
| policies that accidentally undermine their long held
| positions in other areas.
|
| Without the man coming on HN and explaining his
| apparently incongruous position, though, who can say?
| TimPC wrote:
| It's only your weird interpretation of what he's saying
| that undermines this though.
|
| He's saying systems where you could lose your life
| savings to a forgotten password are unsafe. This is
| clearly true. He hasn't proposed a specific solution but
| I think it's far more likely he believes in "use other
| systems" than inserting a back door into the system he's
| identified as fatally flawed.
| politician wrote:
| Why is this a weird interpretation?
|
| 1) Bruce says systems that result in catastrophic loss
| from loss of a password are unsafe. 2) Reading at face
| value, Bruce's idea of a safe system is one where your
| passwords are recoverable. 3) Bruce knows that wallets
| are secured by asymmetric cryptography, not "passwords".
| Therefore, he must be simplifying for a general audience.
| 4) Reconciling the previous two points results in an
| argument for mandatory private key escrow.
|
| It does not make sense that Bruce would advocate for
| mandatory key escrow, and yet, that is the logical
| endpoint of the argument he made in his tweet for
| supporting this letter.
| TimPC wrote:
| Because it's extremely consistent he's arguing the system
| in question is fatally flawed and that he opposes it
| entirely. He doesn't need to be advocating for some back
| door in crypto when "don't use crypto" is a better
| simpler explanation of his position. I think his signing
| a letter that may argue for a ban of crypto is fairly
| consistent with this.
| politician wrote:
| Just read your latest edit: Thank you for reaching out
| and getting a definitive answer. For the record, I don't
| object to the argument that "blockchain is useless" - I
| don't think it's useless, but I can understand why many
| people do believe that. What was off-putting about his
| tweet was the notion that its an unsafe system that
| arises from unrecoverable private keys, or, in other
| words, systems whose security depends on the privacy of
| private keys are unsafe.
|
| I am relieved that that is not his position.
| tzs wrote:
| That's a pretty unpersuasive argument.
|
| By your argument anyone who is in favor or reducing child
| molestation is indirectly advocating Orwellian levels of
| state surveillance because some people that want such
| surveillance might use reducing child molestation as one of
| their arguments for it.
|
| Similarly anyone that argues for reduction in net
| greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change is
| indirectly advocating for a dystopian future where the
| government monitors everything we do at a fine grained
| level because people who do want such a dystopian future
| might use reducing greenhouse gas emissions as one of their
| justifications.
|
| And what about building bike paths and walkable
| neighborhoods and public transit? Also indirectly promoting
| the surveillance state. They make it easier for people to
| live in dense car-free neighborhoods, and the denser the
| population the easier it is to surveil them. Dense housing
| means you neighbors hear more, and those neighbors might be
| informing the State. Public transit like buses and trains
| will have cameras (for safety they claim) but really just
| make it easier for them to track the movements of many
| people at once.
| FabHK wrote:
| You are conflating money and messages. It is perfectly
| compatible to argue, simultaneously, against
| cryptocurrencies, and for e2e encrypted messages.
| politician wrote:
| The Supreme Court of the US has determined money to be
| speech, so this is an unwise position to take.
|
| If you ask the government to prevent the use of
| cryptography in cryptocurrencies then you undermine the
| argument that the government should not tap or
| intermediate all communications.
|
| At the end of the day, a financial transaction IS a
| message. It's a command to a ledger to make an
| adjustment.
| FabHK wrote:
| And nobody is arguing against digital money.
|
| I am just arguing against public blockchains, resulting
| in a very specific, wasteful, and unregulated form of
| digital money.
| miracle2k wrote:
| It's certainly a needle you can thread, but I don't think
| such nuance will be a winning political argument.
|
| e2e encryption is in danger as is, and the strongest
| arguments against both are rooted in the same ideological
| substrate (criminals vs those needing protection); as are
| the arguments in favor.
| FabHK wrote:
| Presumably you meant Bruce Schneier. I don't think he is
| advocating for backdoors, what makes you think so? He is just
| advocating against cryptocurrencies, as he laid out in his
| article linked from the open letter: "Cryptocurrencies are
| useless. Blockchain solutions are frequently much worse than
| the systems they replace."
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/theres-no-good-reason-to-trust-b...
| politician wrote:
| From Bruce via Don (see below), he did not intend to imply
| that recoverable credentials are a critical component of
| "safe" systems and he has other reasons for not supporting
| cryptocurrencies as evidenced by the writings you and Don
| linked.
|
| Other than that, I just want to point out that I didn't say
| he was advocating for backdoors; I said he was indirectly
| doing that by way of the argument he had offered in the tweet
| supporting his post. Perhaps a better way of raising this
| concern would have been to ask the question, "Does Bruce
| believe that unrecoverable credentials prohibit the creation
| of 'safe' systems?"
| rvz wrote:
| I can only predict that both the people signing this letter and
| the crypto maximalists are going to be very disappointed that
| this will somehow be the end of all cryptocurrencies or the full
| adoption and dismantling of the current system with one
| cryptocoin being a reserve currency. An example of such is where
| the critics were screaming over the so-called NY bill on
| 'banning' of PoW [0], but it turns out that not only it doesn't
| affected PoS cryptocurrencies, but only affected PoW with carbon
| methods and not via renewable methods.
|
| As for the same letter [1] being pushed by critics like Grady
| Booch, ghuntley, Molly White etc al. who many here know in the
| industry, we would like to also know the ones who are left blank
| like _' Darren W. Seng'_ and _' Stephen Diehl'_ who are _the_
| most extreme and prominent names arguing against crypto. But it
| turns out that they seem to be connected as C-level executives
| and co-founders of a private blockchain startup named 'Adjoint'
| [2] that appears to be in direct competition with public
| blockchains like Bitcoin, and especially Ethereum.
|
| Again it's very strange to see why that wasn't mentioned in the
| first place and why it's only specifically 'public blockchains'
| and not all blockchains both 'public' AND 'private'? This critic
| [3] seems to attack both of them and doesn't see any difference
| to them at all. Any idea why all of that including something
| called 'nanocoin' was deleted and scrubbed off of the internet?
|
| Maybe cryptocurrencies like Ethereum (which has smart-contract
| capabilities) are the reason why the folks at Adjoint are
| eternally at odds with the crypto industry and are dedicated
| every single day to totally getting rid of all cryptocurrencies?
| I'm sure many have tried going down this path and Seng, and Diehl
| seem to have already deleted their repositories and associations
| [3] with the whole of Adjoint to pursuing this long utopian
| conquest and bringing others on board.
|
| These crypto-assets for sure will be regulated, but once again
| the goal of getting rid of all of them is a similar path that has
| been trodden by the free-software activists, anti-IoT activists,
| privacy activists, anti-AI activists and anti surveillance-
| capitalism activists etc before them and it has resulted in co-
| existence rather than a complete and total removal or outright
| total ban on what they were against. Cryptocurrencies are no
| different and will co-exist rather than wither away. In this
| latest push, at least they learnt their lesson with this failed
| petition in the UK [4].
|
| [0] https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2021/A7389
|
| [1] https://concerned.tech
|
| [2] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/adjoint-inc
|
| [3] https://medium.com/@johny.codes/private-blockchains-even-
| wor...
|
| [4] https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/601629
| gjm11 wrote:
| A key premise of this comment -- that the "concerned.tech" open
| letter only complains about _public_ blockchains (with the
| insinuation being that some of the people involved are only
| doing that because their own private-blockchain companies are
| threatened by public blockchains) -- seems to be false.
|
| Almost everything the open letter says about blockchains is
| neutral on public versus private. There are two exceptions. (1)
| They say that _public_ blockchains specifically are a privacy
| disaster, which seems fair enough since this genuinely is a
| difference between public and private blockchains. (2) One
| paragraph refers to "blockchain technology, specifically so-
| called "public blockchains". (The paragraph suggests that
| advocates of such technology have "latched onto concepts such
| as financial inclusion and data transparency", which so far as
| I know is in fact true of public blockchains and not true of
| private ones.)
|
| You keep talking about "the folks at Adjoint" etc., but it
| looks to me as if Adjoint have simply gone out of business.
| E.g., their website no longer exists. This seems to me like
| sufficient explanation for why Seng and Diehl are no longer
| describing themselves as associated with Adjoint. Do you have
| evidence for whatever more sinister "long utopian conquest"
| scheme you're suggesting they're engaged in?
| rvz wrote:
| > A key premise of this comment ... seems to be false.
|
| Seems false? I don't think you are even sure yourself.
|
| > Almost everything the open letter says about blockchains is
| neutral on public versus private.
|
| And is that why they didn't _' mention'_ stopping all _'
| blockchains'_ and they knowingly hid their ties to Adjoint
| Inc.? At least the Bitcoin maximalists are a bit honest at
| disclosing their associations and holdings when discussing
| such topics despite their delusional view of a cryptocurrency
| replacing the whole financial system.
|
| > They say that public blockchains specifically are a privacy
| disaster, which seems fair enough since this genuinely is a
| difference between public and private blockchains.
|
| Ah yes, A _' privacy disaster'_ especially when no-one knows
| who the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin really is (unless you
| do somehow?) or how one can't easily figure out which address
| belongs to another random address or even when users can
| generate and have multiple addresses tied to them which makes
| it harder to trace. No different to tracing someone's IP
| addresses.
|
| As with having 'privacy', it is also a double-edged sword as
| it is no different to why E2EE messengers like Signal is also
| a favourite and safe-haven for terrorists, extremists and
| scammers to hide and encrypt their communications. Does that
| mean we need to ban E2EE messengers?
|
| > You keep talking about "the folks at Adjoint" etc...
|
| So they are not at Adjoint? Is that what Crunchbase [0] and
| Companies House [1] says? Why is Stephen Diehl still CTO of
| Adjoint? [0] Their services of their private blockchain
| offering has shutdown but the company has not.
|
| > Do you have evidence for whatever more sinister "long
| utopian conquest" scheme you're suggesting they're engaged
| in?
|
| Evidence of what? Trying to ban all cryptocurrencies and
| projects just like those wanting to get rid of _all_ non-free
| software completely? Have they all 100% fully gone yet? It 's
| been like 37 years for the free-software movement to remove
| all non-free software and 13 years for cryptocurrencies to be
| totally stopped.
|
| A very long utopian conquest indeed attempting to stop all of
| them.
|
| [0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/adjoint-inc
|
| [1] https://find-and-update.company-
| information.service.gov.uk/c...
| FabHK wrote:
| > it's very strange [...] why it's only specifically 'public
| blockchains' and not all blockchains both 'public' AND
| 'private'?
|
| There is nothing objectionable with private blockchains (except
| maybe the hype). They are permissioned, and don't need PoW. As
| such they're just another data structure: an append-only
| distributed database that certain people can append to (like
| git).
|
| It is neither wasting energy, nor a scam, nor an unregulated
| mechanism to move/launder money.
| rvz wrote:
| > There is nothing objectionable with private blockchains
| (except maybe the hype).
|
| Is that why companies like Adjoint closed down their products
| and removed services like 'Uplink' and even basic projects
| like nanocoin, because maybe they also think that
| _blockchains_ _' including private blockchains'_ in their
| case didn't work for them?
|
| So when a company partners with Adjoint and shut downs their
| solution, the whole chain is abandoned and rendered useless
| for these clients; assuming you have read the article [3]
| mentioned by another critic of all blockchains.
|
| > It is neither wasting energy, nor a scam, nor an
| unregulated mechanism to move/launder money.
|
| And Adjoint and others still shutdown their private
| blockchain offerings. Not all blockchains 'waste energy' or
| neither is the technology a 'scam' (some are but not all of
| them are) and some of them are compliant with standards like
| ISO 20020. Otherwise they all would have been destroyed a
| long time ago.
| ghuntley wrote:
| Re: [1] if you are familiar with the developments in the
| Haskell space (https://medium.com/@kim_crawley/web3-nfts-and-
| cryptocurrency...) where circa eight years back what we see
| today happened in Haskell - concerns for the future of language
| due to over exposure of risk. It makes more sense and you'll
| understand beginning of the entire story arc better of how we
| got here today. Specifically re: [2] if you haven't touched
| blockchain then your opinion is discarded but if you have
| touched blockchain then your opinion is also discarded. There's
| no winning in this space. All critique is off limits because
| people are concerned that it will devalue their magic beans.
| rvz wrote:
| > if you haven't touched blockchain then your opinion is
| discarded but if you have touched blockchain then your
| opinion is also discarded.
|
| Nope. And not what I said. Not all projects and blockchain
| startups will survive either. Hence why some of them end up
| shutting down or becoming dormant and inactive like Adjoint.
|
| From what I see, the successful ones seem to be partnering up
| and co-existing with companies like Moneygram, Stripe,
| Namecheap, Checkout.com, etc. Some cryptocurrency projects
| and their technologies are more useful than others and some
| of them comply with standards like ISO 20020 whilst others do
| not and some of them are more inefficient than others and
| work better for a use case than others.
|
| > There's no winning in this space. All critique is off
| limits because people are concerned that it will devalue
| their magic beans.
|
| One thing that's certain is there is only one absolute here:
| _There are no absolutes_. Which is why both the pro-crypto
| and the anti-crypto camps will both be disappointed in
| achieving their very absolute goals, as mentioned in the
| letter.
| tatertots1234 wrote:
| re: [2] Diehl regularly blocks users who point out that he
| works at or has worked at Adjoint, and blockchain-based
| information seems to have been scrubbed from its website.
|
| Why does he not talk about the fact that most of the tools he
| has built upon, like Bulletproofs, Groth16 provers, Sonic, is
| research that is funded and driven by the crypto and
| blockchain space? [a] Why does he seem to hide the competing
| interest: that the goals of Adjoint Inc, the company he is a
| director of [b], are to drive more users away from public
| permissionless blockchains, and toward private permissioned
| blockchains?
|
| Most crypto proponents will admit they hold crypto and use
| blockchains, rather than scrubbing it from their timelines
| and blocking anybody who points out their ties to
| blockchains. If Diehl were more transparent about his use of
| blockchain-funded technology and the goals of his own
| private-blockchain-based company, it would probably give his
| arguments more credibility.
|
| [a] - https://github.com/orgs/adjoint-io/repositories
|
| [b] - https://find-and-update.company-
| information.service.gov.uk/c...
|
| EDIT: lol I am getting downvoted for posting these questions,
| and due to my limited karma its likely that my comment will
| soon be hidden. the irony.
| generationP wrote:
| > Finally, blockchain technologies facilitate few, if any, real-
| economy uses. On the other hand, the underlying crypto-assets
| have been the vehicle for unsound and highly volatile speculative
| investment schemes that are being actively promoted to retail
| investors who may be unable to understand their nature and risk.
| Other significant externalities include threats to national
| security through money laundering and ransomware attacks,
| financial stability risks from high price volatility, speculation
| and susceptibility to run risk, massive climate emissions from
| the proof-of-work technology utilized by some of the most widely
| traded crypto-assets, and investor risk from large scale scams
| and other criminal financial activity.
|
| Venezuelan emigrants have been using cryptocurrencies to get cash
| back to their families:
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/venezuelas-economy-regres...
|
| Navalny's Foundation takes BTC and ETH donations and recommends
| them as the safest option:
| https://donate.fbk.world/?utm_campaign=10MAR22_fundraising_a...
|
| Several Ukrainian humanitarian and military fundraisers are using
| crypto:
| https://nitter.net/kamilkazani/status/1533471887958986758#m
|
| These are just the first three examples that come to my mind.
| When I see Americans crow about the uselessness of
| cryptocurrencies, I think of Marie Antoinette.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| More Venezuelans used Zelle with dollars than crypto. I was
| able to donate dollars without issue directly to the Ukrainian
| government.
|
| Crypto proponents trot out these edge suboptimal use cases as
| excuses to allow an entire global Ponzi scheme to continue,
| when the discussion should be "what mechanisms can be provided
| to support refugee value protection and transferring value to
| friendly nations under attack using existing fiat rails _and
| the laws that protect users of them_?" That's not hard to do
| using existing systems, but crypto proponents are so wrapped up
| in the thought of their digital assets rapidly declining in
| value that it isn't an option to them. "Crypto must be the
| way." when the evidence is clear it is not.
|
| https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/06/16/venezuela-is-a-t...
| generationP wrote:
| Can a random Venezuelan sign up for Zelle? I needed an SSN if
| I recall correctly (in the US at least).
|
| And yes, I've donated to the Ukrainian military through
| https://uahelp.monobank.ua/ , with a normal credit card
| donation. But these are slightly different things. One is a
| catch-all army account, which will probably take its time to
| percolate the money to whomever the higher-ups think needs it
| most. The other are grassroots initiatives supporting small
| divisions or local ter-oboronas (and yes, some of them are
| probably fake, but I don't think the majority is; it's a risk
| you take when you're funding anything). Neither replaces the
| other; in a war, there are things that the central government
| can do that a local volunteer bataillon can't, and vice
| versa.
| yks wrote:
| You can send money to any Ukrainian bank account via SWIFT.
| This includes all personal bank accounts. A recipient needs
| to lookup the bank's SWIFT code and IBAN which can be non-
| obvious but working with crypto is also non-obvious. Fees
| vary as do crypto fees. Crypto is not a qualitative
| improvement here, it's just one option out of many with
| pros/cons.
| generationP wrote:
| For many Americans, SWIFT is harder than crypto. I don't
| think I can transfer via SWIFT without physically going
| to my bank here in the US.
| searchableguy wrote:
| Financial inclusion tech letter:
| https://www.financialinclusion.tech/
|
| Support from activists and people in corrupt, poor, and
| developing countries.
| hnthrow1010 wrote:
| I find these type of things to be deeply unconvincing, not in
| the sense that these people aren't getting something out of
| it, but again because it is happening in spite of the fact
| that it's cryptocurrency. They aren't using this because of
| some technical blockchain reasons, they're using this because
| it's a group of powerful foreigners coming along allowing
| them to do illegal forex. I guess you can't as easily push
| the "financial inclusion" angle if you're illegally selling
| them USD on black markets as a way to evade taxes? Then it
| becomes a lot more obvious what the game is.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Signatures from activists, people in corrupt, poor, and
| developing countries_
|
| Speaking purely from a political perspective, this is a
| _terrible_ argument. You 're addressing the U.S. Congress.
| The letter this comment thread attaches to lists harms crypto
| brings on Americans. Your letter lists benefits accruing to
| non-Americans.
|
| If I were a lobbyist for the original letter's writers, I'd
| line these two up and end my case. Benevolence has its place.
| But it's a strange bedfellow to financial deregulation.
| generationP wrote:
| > Your letter lists benefits accruing to non-Americans.
|
| This is the literal reading, yes.
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