I once travelled to Beijing and had dinner in a fancy dumpling restaurant. When I went to pay the bill, my European bank instantly flagged the transaction and blocked my card from further use. I had no idea what happened until I called the bank later that evening (had to wait until they opened). So yeah, what you said happened to me - revoked instantly, silently, and invisibly at the most unexpected time. And even though I didn't do anything wrong.
1) I do get a little sick of companies feeling that "software" is a complete explanation for why something has gone wrong.
Anyway, one of the major telcos had an outage of their EFT system the last holiday weekend and everything broke. Except for people who had cash. I was quietly smug, but it shows how fragile the payment systems are.
I'm looking forward to a decent Weibo hack to cause a reassessment of the single centralised 'trust our ledger' model.
That said, I wouldn't be carrying large amounts of cash on me in a country with civil forfeiture plus corrupt, police organizations trying to maximize seizure:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/11/civil-asset-forfei...
Good we have a lot of payment options here. :)
... because the cops would stop him, insinuate that the money probably had something to do with crime, and then seize it to line their own pockets cough cough I mean "bolster their budgets."
People trust technology will always work. Its not a bad bet where banks are concerned, but I too worry about the chaos of even a couple of hours down time. I wonder if there will be a push back. There probably would have been except the unbanked can get pre-paid cards and pretty much do everything at Walmart or through PayPal and its competitors.
It was completely dark, all the lights off, and no one there. But the pumps were active, so I put in my credit card, pumped, paid, and drove off.
So, I for one, am happy credit cards are there :) And that that gas station either forgot to shut off the pumps, or maybe they left them on for locals.
When using cash, you do not have to inform the bank anything.
Which...is the same thing you need to do anyway to use your card in China.
This is so prevalent that it's common for new banks (or existing banks doing a push for their new current account) to offer commission-free overseas spending. But many of them have pulled the 'perk' after they've gained a large enough customer base. If I recall correctly, at least Halifax, Nationwide and Metro Bank have in the past offered accounts with no commission on overseas card transactions, and then changed the terms to the standard (2.25%-2.75%) after 1-3 years.
After much drama they refunded me. The hotel didn't seem to even care -- presumably they were not getting a huge charge back. IDK if it was a 'card not present' or what. They couldn't even tell me the name of the person using my card -- privacy rules.
No idea how they got the number.
But it does actually work sometimes.
Bank 1 : no issues at all with them. Used that card in 6 countries within 40 hours.
Bank 2 : they killed the card on first use in foreign country (the one I listed as visiting). When I got back it took a week of calls to halfway sort out the mess and then I just cancelled the account in disgust.
Bank 3: they flagged the card. I was notified via app. I called them. They unlocked the account / transaction all was good from then on. Further transactions were fine.
So not even some exotic far away location (not that that's an excuse), but London/Berlin. From a customer that Barclay's knew came from Berlin.
Cash.
It works.
Outside that, I've heard mark of the beast from so many people about so many things over the decades that I'm sure it factors into a lot of political decisions where popular vote counts. The wording is kind of catch-all given mark is so ambiguous, it mentions a name, and it has a number. A person can project it on anything.
I still wish we had all followed the Yuki (base 8), it would have made computing so much easier.
I doubt most Christians think the bible is a broken clock
> Just because someone wrote a pre-scientific text which, today, supports antiauthoritarianism ... does not mean that antiauthoritarianism lacks its many other merits.
Most of our culture and philosophy comes from pre-scientific texts. Authoritarianism didn't need science and the ability to stop certain people from participating in commerce doesn't require computers.
> (Not to mention how even some Christians think that Revelation is the writings of a hallucinating madman.)
A small number, while other groups have different interpretations of what the text means or how literal it is.
They are completely useless until misattributed in hindsight, until further reattributed in hindsight to something slightly more coincidentally relevant. 500 years of this so far.
Yes, "permission" is the right vocabulary to use in this instance. In fact, the opposite, being "permissionless", is exactly one of the main selling points of cryptocurrencies: no authority can prevent a user from sending or receiving bitcoins, or ether, etc. This is why cryptocurrencies should be seen as competing with cash, and not with permissioned systems (credit cards, Paypal). This is also why, IMHO, countries moving toward a cashless society will inevitably lead to more people—the underbanked and the unbanked—slowly using cryptocurrencies more and more over time, not by choice but by necessity.
The idea is that no central authority can censor your right to spend money.
I.e. the requirement to report all large cash transactions and prevent anonymity in such deals; the 'know your customer' requirement for cryptocurrency exchanges, etc. Even if your "money" is censorship resistant, transacting with a legitimate business can't be, since all legitimate businesses can be (and are) required to censor certain transactions; and if a particular "kind of money" makes it impossible to distinguish them, then it may well be that these businesses will (or will have to) simply censor the whole "kind of money".
It's worth remembering that cash is no clear panacea. Germany's inflation made it unworkable. Some countries have arbitrarily changed currency. Its value is based on agreement.
A true e-currency would have different problems. It would not necessarily be bad.
Edit spelling
You can also send transactions over any communication, even SMS. A good example from Andreas Antonopoulos is that emoticons are a 128 character set, so you could send a 250 byte bitcoin transaction as a sequence of 15 emoticons.
Good luck stopping that.
Until you realize that >90% of Bitcoin hashing power is controlled by a handful of Chinese guys, and those guys are probably controlled (or can be easily coerced into cooperation) by Chinese totalitarian government.
It's false. You are repeating a sadly misunderstood aspect of pooled mining. Articles writing such sensationalist claims are written by people who don't understand that a mining pool representing x% of the hash rate doesn't mean they "control" x% of the hash rate. Their end-users, who are distributed around the world, are the ones who control the hashrate, who own the mining hardware, and who choose which pool to use. That is, if a pool were to use the hashrate maliciously, users around the world would abandon it and point their miners at more trustworthy pools.
This is not as easy as you try to paint it, because mining requires hardware, and you can't just move it around the world at will - most of it is physically located in China, and that's not gonna change.
It is not true that "most" mining hardware is located in China. There is a good portion of it over there for sure, but because of the secrecy around most miners, we don't know how much exactly. It's certainly not ">90%".
Every single article that makes similar claims mistakenly assumes that for example it the AntPool Chinese pool represents 20% of the hashrate, then it means this hardware is located in China. This is patently false. AntPool is one of the most popular pools for various reasons (reliability, availability, flexibility, branding), so they are used by many users worldwide. They even have stratum endpoints in the US for their North American users. Only a fraction of the AntPool hashrate comes from hardware physically located in China.
Banks, on the other hand, censor transactions all the time.
a contradiction right there. Security/freedom is a trade-off, and bitcoin has traded away some security for some freedom. Some people like that freedom, but some don't.
Its coming
For some of the other things, best practices prevent much of that. I could imagine a common practice where base layer transactions to open a channel use a joint account that requires X of Y signatures, where X-n keys are yours, and the remainder being a friend or actual intermediary business which only facilitates avoiding user error. After the channels are open it having no say in how things are transmitted. I also imagine this being seamless. Each element of a computer's boot sequence were all major stepping stones at one point, and now computers don't even show you the list of things its doing anymore. I see this technology going that way once UX designers figure out how to get paid in this space.
Just another 18 month from now and I'm sure it will be finished.
I myself need to pay for food right now and I do not have time to wait for a solution that is perpetually years from completion.
If you want to perpetuate that criticism, you'll need up to date arguments: Lightning is cumbersome to use and impractical because of the requirement to run a personal full node to connect to AND your device running the payment channel needs to always ben online for the duration of the payment channel. "Watchtowers" solve both of these issues, and they have not proliferated yet.
Yes, this isn't about what you need right now, use cash or a financial network using intermediaries. We are operating on different time frames and most forward thinking things we are talking about are on that time frame. Nobody in this movement is perturbed by your astute observation that it isn't available right now, nobody is saying "well pack it up boys, stale2002 can't be accommodated, shows over"
The problem in Bitcoin today are the same problem that have existed for years.
That problem being that there are too many people focused on esoteric solutions, like watchtowers, 2nd layers, and even 3rd layers, that only developers care about. And not enough people talking to customers or merchants, and building things that make Bitcoin work as an actual currency.
Seeing as the whole point of this stuff is to work as a currency, it seems like this should be important.
It is a rare few companies, such as BitPay, that are building things like point of sale devices that actually make it possible for consumers to buy things from merchants.
Bitpay's solution would have been okay while 0-conf transactions were not replaceable on BTC. But this had capacity limitations that lightning won't.
What you are saying would have merit, if thats what was happening on these particular topics. Wallets are totally not built for customers, but thats not one of the things you highlighted.
> The technology to build a functioning e-krona is already available today. It is not dependent on using distributed ledger technology and it is not to be confused with cryptocurrencies.
I agree.
Cash or no cash.
One of the proposed goals is to have non-traceable transactions. Seems unrealistic to me but that would be the holy grail.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash
* - For some values of untracable. The privacy provided by ecash is in theory less than cash provides in practice, but certainly a massive privacy improvement over credit cards. In theory cash provides less privacy than ecash since stores could record the serial numbers on cash. However in practice they don't and thus cash in practice provides quite a bit of privacy.
We have known how to do untraceable transactions since 3,000 BC.
1. When you get cash from an ATM or Bank they record the serial numbers of the cash they gave you and attach it to your identity.
2. When you spend those funds at a store they record what you bought and the serial numbers of the cash you paid with and the serial numbers of the bills you received as change.
The government could then build a graph of spends attached to your identity. With high probability they could trace how you spent that money. One problem they would run into is if you gave or received cash from a friend. However while this might cause the tracing procedure to make some errors, it would also allow it to, in some cases, infer which of your friends you exchange cash with.
In any realistic scenario the government would also be intersecting this graph of spends with additional information such as license plate readers, RFID data from public transit, facial recognition,cell tower geolocation, etc... Serial number tracing would be just one data source.
Probably your best bet for privacy here would be pay people begging for money to swap bills with you e.g. exchanging a twenty dollar bill for a ten dollar bill.
No, Zcash offers the option to always use shielded transactions, if that's what you want. The choice to use a shielded or unshielded transaction rests solely in the hands of the user.
It is true that CPU and memory complexity use to be high for shielded transactions. However Sapling just activated (https://z.cash/blog/sapling-activation-complete/) and it resolves the issue: a shielded transaction used to take up to minutes of CPU time and 3GB+ of RAM, but now can be done in 1 second with ~40MB: https://medium.com/@EthAdvisor/everything-you-need-to-know-a...
Furthermore, Zcash promotes the use of TOR if users wish to hide their IP address.
Also, zcash has the trusted setup issue, which requires that you trust the developers were not compromised or did not store data during the setup, or they might be able to print infinite coins without detection if the data were to be recovered. For some, this makes it a non-starter, despite the efficiency of SNARKS over Bulletproofs which Monero now uses.
Don't let that deter you though. Zooko only pays himself a $300,000/mo salary. He will struggle to get by without the crowds of new adopters.
There is no "default" behavior. The software gives you the choice between shielded and unshielded, and the enduser has to choose. There is no default.
«requires that you trust the developers»
Not really. In the latest Powers of Tau ceremony, there were 87 participants. This group spans more than just the developers. Even if 86 participants were malicious or compromised, as long as there is at least 1 honest participant, the system can be trusted.
«Zooko only pays himself a $300,000/mo»
Not sure why this is a problem. By comparison, Satoshi "paid himself" (mined) 1M BTC =~ $6 billion dollars. I'm fine with the founders of world-changing cryptocurrencies being handsomely rewarded.
There is no wait time when recipients accept 0-conf transactions (which is always the case in a brick and mortar store, because 99% of the time it's safe enough – there is even smart tools that verify the transaction is sufficiently broadcasted to reduce risk).
But what if untraceable transactions were limited to small amounts and slow rates, such that you could personally provide for your family but not run an enterprise? (basically that's what physical cash attempts, and as long as the denominations are kept low, it sort of works)
So then you might argue that if it can enable crime, we must do something about it. Admirable ideas, but you then need to ask the question, can we do anything about it? When you ask this, you come to the conclusion that you can't do anything about it. Bitcoin happened. Nobody is in control. It does not care about your opinion.
So the real question we should be asking, is, if Bitcoin can enable crime, and we are unable to prevent the use of Bitcoin, how must our law enforcement adapt to this new world? Then we can stop wasting resources on hopelessly trying to adapt the world to suit law enforcement.
Another problem is that governments which attempt to restrict bitcoin usage will suffer the economic and brain drain which will occur as people move themselves, their businesses and their money overseas to somewhere more friendly to Bitcoin, whose economies will prosper as a result. Also aided by having a stronger monetary base which can't be devalued by central bankers.
Governments don't want to say "we're going to make Bitcoin legal," because they don't yet know how to deal with collecting tax in a world of Bitcoin use. They also don't want to just say "we're going to make it illegal," because they would be doing so at their own peril.
Good luck enforcing any prohbition anyway. We've seen how prohibition of alcohol played out in the 1920s. We also know that many drugs, despite being illegal for many decades, are easily obtainable anywhere there is a demand for them, and largely at the loss of the governments banning them, who could've been collecting taxes all along on drugs sold.
The main reason cannabis is becoming legal in many places now is because it is hugely profitable, and governments want their slice of the pie.
I grew up in Brazil during hyper inflation, and I have Argentinian friends now, so I understand what it means to obtain currency overseas or on a black market, and I can assure you it's a huge hassle and not something people want to do unless their local fiat currency has major problems. If governments with strong currencies start moving against bitcoin, transaction volume will decrease, investors will lose confidence, and the value will crash out. This doesn't require a coordinated effort, it just requires a handful of major countries to start seeing things a certain way.
This was already implemented for hundreds of years. It is called "paying with cash".
Sure, there are some minor edge cases, like dollar serial numbers that are sometimes tracked to catch bank robbers or whatever, but cash is mostly anonymous and untraceable.
I am native or Sweden and I hate, from the bottom of my heart, having to use my bank card for visits to restaurants, stores, etc. It is better when staying staying away from Stockholm, Göteborg, & Malmö.
Which is exactly what happened in Sweden, according to the article.
They can't skim my cash, can't MITM my cash transactions, they can't accept payment and then not deliver (more fraud than theft, but still) because the cash and the object being purchased are both right there.
So I think you are wrong.
Sweden made cash (practically) illegal so now everyone has one less choice.
Not at all like cash, which just requires the entity to accept it as legal tender.
It is entirely possible to live your entire life, paying with only cash, in the United States. The hardest part would likely be paying rent, but even that isn't unheard up to pay with using cash.
Society is not cashless. The edge cases you are talking about rarely ever come up. If it is possible to only pay with cash, then the last hop is all that matters for you as an individual.
This would be abused in the US in very short order. How it works for the swedes should be interesting.
Paypal cite the following reasons that they may freeze or suspend an account (at their sole discretion):
- You’ve received an abnormally large amount of money in your account that is way above your average
- Someone has filed a complaint to Paypal about your business
- A series of chargebacks have been placed against your account
- Your website has questionable content
- You are in violation of Paypal’s use policy. For example if you sell drugs or anything illegal, you may get banned
- Your account information is not up to date or your account is not fully verified
- Someone has logged into your Paypal account from a strange location.
- Your credit score is low or something with your background history makes you a higher risk customer
- They have detected fraudulent activity on your account.
> WikiLeaks' founder accused two members of Congress of pressuring MasterCard (MA) and Visa (V) to block payments to his group after it published thousands of confidential messages about U.S. diplomacy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
> Julian Assange charged Tuesday that Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Rep. Peter King from New York influenced the moves by both companies in December 2010 to halt the payments.
> Assange, speaking to reporters from the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he claimed asylum in June to avoid extradition to Sweden to face charges of sexual assault, said the blockade had eliminated 95% of WikiLeaks' revenue and cost the group roughly $50 million in donations.
Of course, it could be argued that we don't have a competitive payments market. But then your proposition wouldn't reflect the real world.
This happens all of the time to lots of people.
The biggest example is probably legal porn transactions that get censored by all the major financial companies.
If you want to get into political discrimination, we can bring up how wikileaks, which broke zero laws, had all their payment processing revoked.
And more recently, we can bring up legal services such ash GAB, that are being targeted for political reasons, and have had payment processing revoked.
It is not ok that a political organization, that did not break any laws, have had multiple payment processors collude together to censor their transactions.
It seems that the 'not breaking any laws' part should preclude actions by law enforcement/government, but why shouldn't private companies be allowed to act on political motives? I get that there's a potential slippery slope here, but it's not obvious to me that a better alternative is to force companies to e.g. facilitate the campaigning and fundraising of neo-nazis.
The solution is to use anti monopoly laws to break them up.
I don't think that companies should be forced to do something. What I instead want is for there to be enough competition in the market, such that no matter how terrible your views, there exists at least 1 one who will work with you.
And if there isn't enough competition in a market, then that's a problem.
If a politically undesirable group wants to accept donations, is this legitimate?
https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/9/18079880/paypal-proud-boy...
Sorry, legitimate transactions! We reject you!
https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/9/18079880/paypal-proud-boy...
Regimes that absolutist and authoritarian usually aren't the nicest of places to live.
Don't worry, it'll be owned by Elon Musk.
That's why you don't have to worry about salmonella in your chicken sandwich or a steel beam falling onto your head at work.
You're welcome.
You having pieces of plastic/paper and/or metal trinkets in your pocket plays will not save you from this.
I understand the apparent privacy angle, but if you analyze it further, cash won't help in the presence of a malicious system. If the government cares enough about you to stop you from using e-cash/credit cards to buy or sell, they will also care enough to not let you roam free.
Hell, even the USSR had paper cash in circulation allowing some privacy and trade between individuals.
Having solely account-based money under complete regulatory control amounts to a huge increase in what is practical to put under political control. It could drastically increase the incentives to ban and regulate trade in anything of interest to special interests. E.g. the pharmaceutical industry could finally get rid of herbal medicine.
You have to worry about both of those things. Why? Because instead of forcing the placement of every steel beam and the sale of every chicken sandwich to pass through the hands of an intermediary who both profits from and regulates the action, we just decided to regularly inspect places where problems were likely to occur, and to investigate reports of possible violations.
The argument you're making would work just as well for recording all human speech at all times, and processing it for suspicious topics - which is totally currently technologically possible. Even if it weren't, why not require that all conversations be had over a telephone? That's pretty much the same as having rules about the amount of arsenic allowed in salt...
Sorry, I'm not buying it.