Crypto can technically implement privacy and anonymity in a way that regulators cannot prevent. Now what do we do about it?
Also, Ethereum could adopt privacy by default some day, via their proposal process.
It's fascinating to watch regulators talk about "bitcoin" and "ethereum" as if they're "gold" and "oil", unchanging commodities that just need to be categorized and dealt with appropriately.
Ethereum is totally publicly visible today, but it does not need to be that way tomorrow. These are living projects.
I think this case is a pretty clear example of why.
The regulators are supposed to be protecting who from what exactly? And at whose expense?
So far I've seen two lines of reasoning:
1) Regulators are needed to protect me from myself. I can't assess if these dog-coins have long-term investment potential or not, so I want the government in the loop somehow. If I can purchase something on the internet, I assume it's safe, or the government wouldn't let it be sold.
2) Regulators need to protect the government from the effects of money laundering. I must give up privacy for the greater good, as the money laundered by North Korean hackers will be used against my country. Giving up all privacy in exchange for a small reduction in the funding of our enemies is always a good trade.
Even if I buy one of these arguments wholeheartedly, the practical matter is that we're trying to prevent math from being done here, and it's just not going to work. It's sort of like preventing piracy.
But public sentiment has become very anti-crypto, so I suspect we'll land in a war-on-drugs type situation where the crypto never really goes away and you can still transact it anonymously, but we mostly just don't talk about it except for the occasional bust to ensure more enforcement budget next year.
I think this is exactly the kind of privacy you can defend in court.
The reason we don't have privacy is because technology has been centralized and it's easy to pressure providers to give up user's privacy.
The idea that parties have financial privacy between each other is actually the default. I can hand you physical cash. This is normal.
That's not because of some special provision that "allows" for cash to be private. That's just how it's always been done.
If you do work for me, and I hand you a gold coin, you don't have to do something special to make sure the government can track the item of value. You just mark it down on your taxes as income.
This is how things had been done until maybe the last 20 years or so, when 9/11 greatly expanded the government surveillance requirements on financial businesses.
There's a mountain of law to support private property transfer.
> These patient assessment measures were developed to be administered at the initial patient interview and to monitor treatment progress, thus serving to advance the use of initial symptomatic status and patient reported outcome (PRO) information, as well as the use of “anchored” severity assessment instruments. Instructions, scoring information, and interpretation guidelines are included.
> Trouble falling or staying asleep, or sleeping too much
Am I having trouble staying asleep because my alarm is going off? How much sleep is "too much"?
> Feeling bad about yourself—or that you are a failure or have let yourself or your family down
What about people that have let themselves and family down? Is that not valid?
> Poor appetite or overeating
Relative to what? I'm not being fed per gram with a feed chart. I have no idea how I'd answer this.
> Thoughts that you would be better off dead or of hurting yourself in some way
This one's a trick question, because I think it's "nearly every day" for most people for at least a brief second per day? But say that and you might get shipped off to in-patient, so I know the answer is "never".
According to this thing, I probably have severe depression. I don't think I'm depressed though? There's no way to tell.
A better way to look at it might be that anyone who talks to a mental health professional has a good likelihood of leaving with a depression diagnosis, an SSRI prescription, and a follow up appointment.
WARNING: This product can expose you to chemicals including arsenic, which is known to the State of California to cause cancer. For more information, go to www.P65Warnings.ca.gov.
I think the original article painted it pretty well. If you could disappear and nobody would notice, you probably aren't part of a community. Shared interests and activities definitely count if there's meaningful interaction happening. Work can be a type of community too.
The hallmarks of community IMO are some shared values, some shared purpose, recurring interactions, united under some named banner. A well functioning workplace can feel a lot like a thriving community.
I don't really have much in the way of community myself at the moment, but I have experienced it before. I think it's one of those things like sex where everyone who's never participated thinks it's a huge deal, but once you've been at it a little while, it's still important, but the framing shifts a lot.
It's one thing to be a stable loner that's not invested in any group, but it's another to desperately be seeking a community without the experience to know what's "normal". That's where the parasocial stuff starts happening.
Non-incel here (I swear, ignore the username) who read your post and some of the accompanying thread. Valid feelings, a little cringey, I hope you figure yourself out, but that's not what I want to comment about.
I spend more time than I should reading extremist content (ok, go ahead, look at the username) because I think the behavior of that crowd is fascinating and disturbingly influential. And sometimes it's funny. Also, they now set US policy, so maybe we should be paying attention.
> I will clear it up now: I am not any kind of incel, conspiracy theory believer, advocate of violence or racism, or follower of any dogma, philosophy, or charismatic person of any kind.
When people talk about "alt right pipeline", this is it, but casper isn't the perpetrator. He's the target.
Ok, not casper specifically. In those circles, they'd make fun of him blogging about his feelings for obvious reasons. Then they'd make fun of his artsy picture, then that he took down his picture, and once more if he puts it back up. The cycle of abuse would continue until he stops reacting to the crowd.
But it's a window into just how isolated people are and what it feels like to not have community. And we know there's millions or maybe tens of millions of people that feel this way and are nowhere near capable of articulating it.
It's so easy to imagine someone in his position be enticed a movement that has a consistent-ish ideology and purpose greater than yourself. And as a bonus, it comes with a group of regular guys that also hang out on discord or telegram all day and share memes. They might even meet up in the woods sometimes, just to drink some beers and bbq and shoot some guns once a month. Or "protect" an election or school board by providing "security". You know, community stuff.
> No, I am only interested in something real, whatever that may be.
So few can cope with this emotion by blogging about their feelings. For a lot of people "blame the others" seems to be the easiest way to cope with this feeling.
(Also, archive.org still has your picture up, either fix your link or remove the broken img tag. You just look like another @jack clone anyway and nobody cares.)
All the fascist stuff is pretty bad -- nationalism, strongman leaders, isolating an "other" with violence, grifters selling out the people's interests to corporations -- I'm not down with any of that.
But maybe we could have some kind of system where corporations are forced to vote on governance that applies to all other corporations for the collective good of capitalist progress?
There needs to be some kind of unified governing principle to make everyone's lives better.
We can't go on with BIG_CO hiring lobbying firms to most efficiently snake their legislation through the system unchecked.
In my thought experiment here, most corporations would want to enact policy responsibly for the public good. Cooperation between corporations would happen, but the default position would be for more happy consumers.
So far we've tried letting representative democracy work out hard issues and that hasn't gone well. We've also tried deferring governance entirely to the courts with poor results.
I don't think non-Americans appreciate the complexity here.
To anyone unfamiliar with our health care system for typical employees:
Once a year, most companies have a "benefits training" session that explains this year's crazy health care situation. They're boring and I only go to the first one when I join a company.
Anyone employed with benefits needs to have at least a vague understanding of everything in there or they're at financial risk.
So when you hear about contractors fighting to become employees so they have access to benefits, they're fighting for the opportunity to make these benefits elections.
I know plenty of people who design systems for a living that find getting their elections right to be confusing.
You'll notice that a big part of our health care cost mitigation is projecting expenses. It's like a prediction market where you can only lose less, but if you get it wrong you can lose a lot.
This is the n'th tech company today that's made an announcement similar to this.
Even Disney is going to transport workers to abortion-legal states as needed as "health benefit".
It's certainly a perk and good on Google for this one, but we're headed to a dark place if your best shot at human rights is to retain employment by a big tech company.
You can confirm it's non-commercial and they let you keep it for free... for now.
They made the change fairly late in the process, and supposedly there was a way to undo the paid migrations by opening a support ticket, but I saw lots of posts about people being unable to migrate back and get refunded.
Honestly though, it's not "fuck Congress", it's "fuck the electorate".
One of the great ironies about the rise of corporate fascism in the US is that the democracy does function on a technical level. If enough people worked together to do the right things, ballots could be cast and there is no dictator to prevent the will of the people from being heard.
Of course, that does not happen. The people have proven ineffective at self-governance.
At this point I'm wondering if we should just hand all governance over to a consortium of industry leaders that are accountable to shareholders. If we're going to do an oligarchy, let's at least be efficient about it.
That seems better to me than the current system of an easily brainwashed public electing whoever has the best disinformation campaign.
Do you think we'd have all these crazy IP laws if the big IP holders and big tech companies had to get in a room together and actually figure out what the law should be?
Practically, there are a ton of ways to turn 500,000 EUR into "anonymous" crypto, depending on what you mean by "anonymous".
You can use an exchange (KYC or non-KYC) that lets you trade USDT/XMR pairs. Wire 500,000 EUR and convert to USDT. Buy the full amount worth of XMR and send it to your own XMR hardware wallet. You now have anonymous XMR (assuming you trust their math).
You can do something similar with ZEC shielded transactions. Many KYC exchanges support ZEC (but without shielded transactions). You can get your ZEC this way and then shield it.
If you're interested in anonymous crypto, XMR or ZEC is probably what you'd want to have anyway instead of BTC.
Also, LTC recently adopted a new privacy-enabling feature. It's not functional yet as far as I know, but it did cause LTC to be delisted from several korean exchanges last week. This one is interesting because of the widespread adoption of litecoin before it added privacy features.
Or if you'd rather use the ETH ecosystem, you can use https://tornado.cash/. Buy your KYC'd ETH, send to tornado.cash, wait, withdraw a partial amount to a fresh anonymous ethereum address.
There are even privacy-oriented wallets like https://unstoppable.money/ that can use tor to further improve anonymity while doing wallet actions.
But let's say you really do want bitcoin only. Take your 500,000 EUR and wire it to a KYC exchange. Buy your bitcoin and send it to your wallet. Send that BTC into renVM pools, wait, send your renBTC to a new address, release renBTC back to BTC on the new address: https://bridge.renproject.io/.
In other words, your point does not hold at all. There are probably a dozen different ways to get anonymous crypto right now. In the near future, many common coins will have privacy features anyway, maybe even by default.
You have to think about what level of anonymity you want and what premium you're willing to pay, but there's a wide spectrum of options.
And if you think it's not easy enough yet, just wait. The math works, it's just not wrapped up into a convenient user experience yet.
Wireguard gives you an interface like any other network interface.
You manage the traffic the same way you would manage a physical network. That's the whole point.
The actual complaint here is that wireguard isn't productized in a way that produces clearly visible metrics.
I'm sure this author would be absolutely thrilled at a wireguard SaaS product that provides "observability" and "traceability" to meet "KPIs" or whatever.
> As an inevitable crash occurs, many of the swindles and alleged swindles are coming to light.
Yeah, bubbles make overvalued prices. Crashes occur. Losers fail. Winners gain bigger marketshare and mindshare.
Spectacular failures are actually a sign of a functioning market. The worst possible thing that could have happened last week would be the federal reserve offering Do Kwon a very cheap bridge loan to stabilize his section of the crypto economy, lest we risk broader market contagion.
Crypto failures are fast and painful as opposed to long and corrupt. This is a feature, not a bug.
Also, ironically, this author has spilled a fair amount of ink over all the market crises of the years. He wrote a whole book on the dot-com bust. The Luna saga was over in about 3 days.
> The list includes some traditional tactics for illicitly relieving rubes of their money, such as pump-and-dump schemes and phishing for passwords. It also describes new, more novel schemes, including the “pig butchering” crypto scam, which often involves an attractive person approaching you online and offering you spectacularly lucrative crypto investments.
Sure, I get these DMs on discord too. Don't fall for scammers. They were doing the same nonsense with "Double your Square Cash!" scams shortly before the crypto boom. Or offering great deals on "GPUs" during the shortage. This is not a crypto problem in the slightest and crypto probably makes these lower end scammers easy to prosecute.
> The over-all aim was to make crypto investing seem mainstream and draw in gullible investors who feared they were being left on the sidelines.
Does anyone seriously believe that etrade or robinhood advertising options trading to me is somehow different? There are constant commercials for precious metals and ETFs and all kinds of things.
I know a fair amount of bitcoin millionaires, all of whom were called "gullible investors" at the time.
What really bothers me is the incredible amount of ignorance I see in the comments section about crypto, blockchain technologies, poor understandings of economics, etc.
Wtf HN. Do better. I feel like I'm watching my peers get old and resistant to change and dismissive of new technologies and exciting possibilities.
Also, if you appreciate my contrarian (for HN?) view and are looking to take on more risk, now is the time to build for web3. The people chasing easy money will give up and the people moving the tech forward will build while no one is watching.
Serious question for HN: How do we replace eBay with a reliable, sensibly run public service?
It's extremely disheartening that it's now 2022 and we haven't figured out a way to replace eBay.
It's the most basic form of commerce. Select a product from the listings, check the seller's reputation based on how active the seller is, ask a few questions, finalize a transaction. On rare occasion, in some markets, adjudicate a dispute.
Everyone in the world should be able to have access to this service for essentially free.
eBay is such a basic thing that it was started as a hobby because of course people should be able to buy and sell online with minimal friction. It's obvious.
Why don't we make new things like this anymore?
I hear all this hype about the fediverse and web3 and crypto, but the reality is that the public cannot even reliably send messages to each other without invoking a big tech company.
Crypto barely works and there have been billions of dollars made and lost just trying to keep track of account balances.
It feels like we're forever away from having a well run public global market.
Uber and Twitter and Netflix and eBay and the rest of the "essential" services seem so basic, but we can't seem to get enough nerds together to start replacing them.
We're each individually globally connected with more bandwidth than I ever thought would fit in my pocket.
But I can't hail a ride without involving Uber.
I can't deliver a 140 character message to a lot of people without involving Twitter.
We can't crowdfund the creation of great art, unless we all pay Netflix to do it for us.
> Don’t use eBay.
And, as OP is soon to notice, it's very hard to sell used electronics without using eBay.
What can we actually do, today, as hackers, to replace eBay?
If I was actually going to do it, where would I start? Would replacing eBay be a government project, a web3 project, a federated network?
Is there actual hacktivism to be done here by simply replacing services with p2p equivalents without engaging in the current corporate system?
I've had enough of relying on companies for what should be human to human services.
Also, Ethereum could adopt privacy by default some day, via their proposal process.
It's fascinating to watch regulators talk about "bitcoin" and "ethereum" as if they're "gold" and "oil", unchanging commodities that just need to be categorized and dealt with appropriately.
Ethereum is totally publicly visible today, but it does not need to be that way tomorrow. These are living projects.