I am not a big fan of alt-coins, but I'm not sure I would dare call ZCash a "Crypto token scam project".

A scam in my book has one or more of the following properties:

- pre-mined (a part) off all tokes (like ETH ~70%) [1]

- has a team that will "rug pull" the users of their coin (think ONEcoin) [2]

- Is only paying lip-service to being decentralized (think again ETH) [3]

Also, who cares where the money comes from? I believe TOR is a project worthy of sponsoring...

[1] https://etherscan.io/stat/supply [2] https://cryptotips.eu/en/blog/the-onecoin-scam/ [3] https://decrypt.co/44321/70-of-ethereum-nodes-are-hosted-on-...

All of them are, including this 'ZCash'. As long as there are enough greater fools to pump the price of the token. Only for them to lose their money in the end.

Tor is already seen in a bad light for being used for illicit activity, terrorism, illegal drugs, etc. We can have and fund tools that enhances privacy without endorsing or taking money from a so called 'cryptocurrency' that exists to distribute fake internet dark web tokens.

At least if the are fake they can't be used for drugs and terrorism. Otherwise it wouldn't be fake :)

You're contradicting yourself many times in this thread.

Wrong.

I explicitly do not call them currencies because they cannot be used as such in the real world. All these tokens are extremely volatile and always used by speculators which makes them useless to be used as a currency.

It is fake money that is being cashed out for fiat money on these unregulated token exchanges, not to mention the decentralised ones.

But you just outlined use cases for crypto (illicit activity, etc) in your grandparent post while simultaneously claiming crypto can't be used as a currency. Which is it?

Both.

As I said, they aren't useful at all in the real world legally, only on unregulated exchanges where only mostly criminals are able to swap their tokens for fiat from their scores of ransomware raids and scams.

I would be in favour of regulations needing to kill this part off as Monero and Zcash isn't accepted on most of them. Not to mention you cannot even pay your taxes with these crypto tokens.

It's quite easy to be ,,just'' a criminal nowdays. All you need is just be born in a country led by a multibillionaire dictator who wants to nuke the world and want to receive your salary for your hard work from an American company.

> All of them are

Perhaps instead of spreading even more ink around you could go into why you think this is the case. As it stands, the reader can only conclude you are angry - nothing else.

As I have mentioned before on other threads, crypto has no usecase other than to speculate on the token price, scam people and to embolden ransomware in the case with Zcash and other privacy tokens. On top of it all they all are unregulated and fluctuate too much to even act as proper currencies which they are not.

Other voices such as Luke [0] explain in vastly more than a HN thread.

[0] https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/the-technological-case-ag...

I mean I urge folks who have the ability to direct some of their company's money towards Tor. It's directly helping both Ukranian and Russian citizens right now.

Sure Tor helps Ukrainian and Russian citizens, but I urge the Tor foundation to question themselves and to stop accepting crypto token donations and grants.

It acts as an endorsement and emboldens the cryptobros, enthusiasts and fans to pump the price of the token.

Why should they forgo an opportunity for funding that allows people to donate in countries where direct bank transfers to the Tor project would be logged and marked as suspicious, and which is resistant to payment processors deciding not to process the donations? Because you personally don't like cryptocurrency? That is ridiculously childish.

There is no reason to present a personal attack with your non-argument. As I said before in other threads there are alternative ways they can receive grants for funding of Tor projects without endorsing crypto scams. I mentioned Mozilla and Rust foundation as examples.

On the crypto tokens, there are tons of reasons not to use them as I have mentioned on this thread and others have mentioned as well. [0]

[0] https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/the-technological-case-ag...

Privacy coins like zcash and monero should be considered distinct from the rest of the crypto sphere. They actually serve their use case very well, and of all cryptos they easily see the most use as actual currency rather than vehicles for speculation.

Their use case just happens to be purchasing drugs and other illicit products off deep web marketplaces. Or receiving payments for ransomware.

When you know a better solution just name it. It's easy to criticice a decision when you don't need to find a better way. Who's interested in some crypto bros and some idiots that lose their money when you don't have another working possibility?

I already did. They can go for the Rust Foundation Grants Program or perhaps the Mozilla Foundation grants program.

I am sure there are other grants that I have missed out but the solution is there.

You could condition your companies annual grant on that, and make it large enough that they'd forgo crypto.

Using crypto is a good thing in my eyes, but you seem to be convinced that crypto is all evil and a scam.

We've seen in recent years that fiat payment systems are ran by bad actors, that will on a whim revoke access to their systems to any entity they deem "problematic", even if no laws have been broken.

Crypto allows entities to freely exchange money without having to worry about passing some arbitrary purity test or getting witch-hunted into oblivion.

It simply is. Not just 'ZCash' but the entire space [0].

[0] https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/the-technological-case-ag...

The entire space is a scam? Luke makes some good points and some not so good points about the challenges with the technology.

He acknowledges that every single digital transaction you make can be seen by banks, for example, and yet does not propose an alternative solution. Credit card data is among the most valuable, and sold many times over to advertisers.

Do you personally think that that is a problem worth figuring out how to solve? If you don’t, it’s going to be hard to see the point. Similar to how we don’t need encryption because we have nothing to hide.

Yes. Web3, Crypto, all of it.

This website [0] chronicles all what is going on in web3 and this site is an excellent rebuttal of the entire space [1]

[0] https://web3isgoinggreat.com/

[1] https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/against-crypto.html

You are linking to those as if I haven’t read them – I have! I find the grift in the space just as gross.

You didn’t answer my second question about whether you (yes, you, not Stephen Diehl) think that having a private way to transact online is important. Do you?

The next question for you is a little more philosophical – say cryptocurrency is bad, evil and should be “gotten rid of”. What do you propose we do about that? Ban Proof of Work? Yell about it online and pretend that’s going to make it go away? Nothing I have heard about “what to do about it” quite makes sense. I think the actual answer is going to involve convincing people of things – people who work in cryptocurrency. Unilateral critics are working pretty hard against themselves in that regard.

The overall stance reminds me of people who think Facebook or Spotify are evil – they very well may be, but they provided such a massive utility to the world that the ideas are not going away (a social network connecting most humans on earth and an instantly accessible database of most music ever recorded). You have to fix what is out there, because you can’t really put the genie back in the bottle.

Tight regulations is the solution and is needed on the crypto space.

The privacy tokens will be first, Monero, ZCash, etc, they will be completely banned and made illegal due to this, (why does Coinbase still not allow these tokens?)

Next, we need to crackdown tighter on the exchange ramps, we only have to look at the Tether fraud [0] that is happening, then the crackdown will begin on the whole space.

Then the crash will happen from there and the fallout would be terrible for people who bought these now worthless casino chips. So maybe that crypto will still exist but way less people will use them, especially the privacy ones.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-07/crypto-my...

So while you refused to answer the question about how you would solve the problem of online financial privacy, your statement that regulation is needed juxtaposed to what looks like excitement that the first thing to be banned (which also BTW ignores part of the challenge you were given: exactly how does one truly ban a private system? at best you are also going to have to ban Tor, which you seem to claim an interest in existing... though I frankly don't believe you anymore) will be "privacy tokens" betrays that you don't give two shits about online financial privacy :/.

You are entitled to your opinion. But it is just that, an opinion. Not fact. Citing other opinions doesn't make your claim, that all crypto and web3 are a scam, a fact.

Only time will tell. In the meantime, I am happy that this project can get any funding from wherever it can. Especially, since open source is a thankless and typically paid-less job.

> I am happy that this project can get any funding from wherever it can.

There is nothing wrong with calling it what it really is. A scam. Complete fact. I can cite countless sources that wouldn't fit this comment box, but instead I point to alternatives as others have asked. [0] [1]

As I said before, solutions exist already outside of accepting and endorsing crypto scam token projects.

[0] https://foundation.rust-lang.org/news/2021-12-09-news-rust-f...

[1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/

Small crypto grants seem perfectly designed for just such a project as Tor! I mean if one discounts the possibility of a rug pull situation, it has all the hallmarks: privacy preserving, decentralized, fungible ;)

Bad actors use effective technologies, just like good ones do. So what?

So this means that Tor taking money from Zcash is an explicit endorsement of the crypto token space and the scams and speculation and environmental destruction they harbour.

Not to mention the ransomware enablement of a so called privacy token.

I don't think Tor would want to be associated with all of that on top of all the other illicit activities they are already associated with.

So when did you stop using Amazon? Or Apple? Or Visa? Because of the gift card scams. Or the usd? Almost all crime is paid for in usd.

Your argument is less than merited because there is no moral contrast with alternatives. Guilt by association is fallacious. That leaves only "because you don't like it" and that's a valid opinion, which you're welcome to, but having privacy enabling technology allows real world freedom. Others of us have the opinion that despite bad people existing, supporting the freedom and anonymity of people, good or bad, is an improvement to the world.

Your whataboutism is missing the core point.

These privacy tokens enable ransomware, full stop. Taking money from them enables them to exist and to allow criminals to continue using Zcash, Monero, etc and effects are huge. They are not even regulated and this needs to stop.

Even if I were to use these crypto tokens, the price would fall over drastically upon receiving them. No notable improvement or use at all than receiving a donation or grant via card payment straight into my bank account. No scams or price drops at all there.

> Others of us have the opinion that despite bad people existing, supporting the freedom and anonymity of people, good or bad, is an improvement to the world.

There is nothing wrong with having privacy enabling technology, I didn't argue this at all so I am calling strawman on this.

What I do not want is for the Tor foundation endorse or accept money from a project that environmentally destructive and only benefits speculation, scams and doesn't work as a currency at all.

Taking a donor's money is at most an implicit endorsement. If an active serial killer gave me a million dollars to make the world a better place, it would be wrong for me to refuse to move money from a bad actor to those in need.

Great strawman but I still disagree and it is not what is happening here, it is still an endorsement of crypto scams, and in the case for crypto, this only amplifies the adoption of ransomware, scams and sure bad actors because of the donation. It just makes it all worse.

I don't understand how what I said is a strawman. I think an active serial killer is orders of magnitude worse than any crypto scam, but I would still take their money- ie. I'm disagreeing with a stronger version of your point.

I despise crypto, but telling an underfunded OSS project to abandon scarce funding for what is a relatively minor ideological reason definitely rubs me the wrong way.

Rather than demanding them to change, why not find a way to help secure them a source of less objectionable funding.

I would want them to at least go to the Rust Foundation Grants Program [0] or perhaps the Mozilla Foundation grants program [1].

This isn't minor, Wikimedia [2] is also asking the same thing of their project and they shouldn't use or endorse these crypto tokens, same thing as Tor.

[0] https://foundation.rust-lang.org/news/2021-12-09-news-rust-f...

[1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/

[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Stop_ac...

Wikimedia is one of the most well-funded non-profits on the planet; they have largely unconstrained spending. They can easily be choosy about funding sources while other projects cannot afford to be.

I have already mentioned elsewhere in the thread alternative sources of grant funding they can use which are not an endorsement of the crypto space.

> This isn't minor, Wikimedia [2] is also asking the same thing of their project and they shouldn't use or endorse these crypto tokens, same thing as Tor.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Stop_ac... is a proposal with what looks like extremely divided voting; I'm not seeing where it was ratified? So Wikimedia is not asking that, someone suggested that Wikimedia should ask that.

So it isn't a minor open and shut case then as you said? Surely something minor should have been sorted quickly no?

And most people actually support the motion to stop accepting them, despite the division it is the correct decision.

I only hope that Tor does the same.

Is it underfunded? (Genuine question.) According to the 2020 fiscal report they received ~$4.5mm in donations and grants which isn’t too shabby.

https://blog.torproject.org/transparency-openness-and-our-20...

While funding is decent, you'd also want to compare to expenses, as well as reserves. The 2020 report did show an overall gain, but this has to be contrasted against the depletion of reserves in the previous year, not to mention the overall trend.