David Graeber argues in "Debt: The first 5000 years" that trade started out as being based on debt, and then this turned into a medium of exchange. Barter was never widespread.
> Today we filed an official complaint against @henet (Hurricane Electric) with the @AGOWA (Attorney General of Washington State) over their censorship of legal and protected speech. We have also reached out to the @EFF who has previously shown support in protecting the foundation of free speech on the internet.
> Free speech is for everyone, even those you disagree with. Dropping routes to a subnet in the middle of the night with no notice and with no prior complaints or concerns expressed is not a way to do business. Under Washington State House Bill 2282, ISPs may not "Block lawful content"
The speech concerned is the hosting of the website Kiwi Farms. Their statement:
This article is very strange. It describes CSW as a "polymath," and more or less uncritically gives his side of the story:
> Contrary to what the email to Hearn seems to indicate and what the Sourceforge trail appears to show, Wright claims he did not agree to the transfer of power. He says a new crop of Bitcoin developers, including Wladimir van der Laan, the former lead maintainer of the code repository, circumvented the administrator controls Wright used to manage the codebase when they moved the software to Github and then changed the license there. Essentially, Wright claims, bitcoin was stolen. “What I didn't expect was people to redo everything like that to bypass my administrator control,” he says. “So they set up completely new sites, and moved me out.” In an email to Forbes, van der Laan denied moving the codebase. He also denied changing the license. “This was done by Satoshi,” he wrote.
I can see they use the word "claims," but it's not exactly something that the author of the article should have a hard time double-checking.
> The country’s two mobile phone networks sent messages to people asking them to change the settings of their clocks to manual instead of automatic in order for the time not to change at midnight, although in many cases the time advanced anyway.
> While public institutions, in theory, are bound by the government’s decision, many private institutions, including TV stations, schools and businesses, announced that they would ignore the decision and move to daylight savings on Sunday as previously scheduled.
> “I had an 8am appointment and a 9am class, which will now happen at the same time,” she said. The 8am appointment for her residency paperwork is with a government agency following the official time, while her 9am Arabic class is with an institute that is expected to make the switch to daylight savings.
Developers already hate time zones. But have they tried using two of them at the same time?
What do you mean "can't"? My bank certainly has the information, since I can see it online if I log in. Of course they would have to change the law, but this also goes for the digital pound.
> Great, except each country is tiny and cross-border commerce common, so you end up having to implement all of them…
Yes, and this can be done by software firms. You don't need to roll your own solution, but taking the payment networks' fees out of the equation drastically reduces costs.
> I'm not aware of any payment provider that gives me all European networks, but not credit cards.
That's true, since most sellers can access credit cards. But for EU-only sellers of "sensitive products", of course there is a market. (It's an open question if people on the MATCH list can use those payment providers as long as they don't accept cards.)
> Together with 95% of your customer base, realistically.
Most people where I live are comfortable using mobile payments and use it on a regular basis. I see mainstream retailers offering to take it (alongside cards) very often.
> Some central server needs to be the arbiter of randomness
What, no? My hash-based system is entirely random. The only issue is that draws are done with replacement, so two players may both have e.g. six of spades in their hand. This is aesthetically unappealing, but doesn't alter the actual maths of the game. (There are more complex solutions to this, however)
> not to mention being the actual escrow service for the money in the pot
FHE doesn't solve this, since FHE can't actually interface with your bank. Even if it could, I could just log in on my phone or physically walk into a bank branch to freeze my account before I have to pay out, so you still need a solution for the money layer.
> you can trust their generation of the hole cards
You can do trustless generation of hole cards already, as described in my post.
SEPA isn't great, but there exist functioning country-wide systems as you mention.
> And even if you wanted to implement all these systems, it's so much effort that you're back to relying on payment providers like Stripe, realistically.
No. Payment providers like Stripe have to comply with the rules placed upon them by the card networks. If you only have to deal with European payment systems + FedNow, you don't have to worry about things like the MATCH list. This removes 95% of the censorship issues.
> What would be sort of awesome, though, would be a distributed bank (or prediction market, or casino) along these lines
I think this is already possible for poker, and will never be possible for prediction markets.
Prediction markets require human resolution of "fuzzy" questions. For example, who won the 2020 US presidential election? You can see why the limiting factor isn't the machine.
But for poker, why do you need FHE? To play poker, you have to deal two hole cards and five community cards. First each player gets two secret ("hole") cards, then three community cards are dealt ("flop"), then potentially another ("turn"), then potentially another ("river"). This could be done programmatically as such:
1. Each player generates five secrets: k_HOLE, HOLE, FLOP, TURN, RIVER
2. Each player derives public key K_HOLE from k_HOLE.
3. Each player publishes the hash of each secret in addition to K_HOLE.
4. Each player publishes their value of HOLE, which is checked against the hash from previous step.
5. To get the two hole cards for you, calculate H(HOLE_1 || HOLE_2 || ... || HOLE_N), decrypt the resulting value using k_HOLE (secret to you), then deterministically turn this into cards (for example: hash it, then map the first half into 52 values and the second half into 51 values)
6. Once it's time for the flop, all players publish FLOP. Then calculate H(FLOP_1 || FLOP_2 || ... || FLOP_N).
7. Repeat for turn and river as necessary.
The only difficult part is how to handle colors, but I don't think this is a serious issue, since nobody counts cards in poker anyway. (We can trivially ensure flop, turn and river don't repeat cards, so it's just a question for the hole cards vis-a-vis the community cards)
It's unlikely that web3 will solve it; cryptocurrency already exists, and its many serious issues are not going to be solved by a fresh coat of paint or "moar adoption".
If you want an actual solution, look at FedNow. This would enable direct bank account payments, like in most of Europe, with a government-run intermediary in the place of MasterCard/VISA. This changes the censorship situation from "four out of four must accept" to "one out of thousands must accept".