Which is why this infrastructure, which is clearly designed to empower those regimes, is bad. Are North Koreans using crypto-currencies? Maybe, it doesn't seem like it. Is the North Korean regime using crypto-currencies? Absolutely, we repeatedly see the North Korean regime stealing, laundering and transferring crypto.
You're advocating for a theoretical possibility of helping dissidents to defend the actual reality which is that crypto is a tool of oppressive regimes.
If US citizens could empathize with people not only from NK, but also from places like Turkey, where the value of our currency has been demolished under the current authoritarian government (and, IMO, they aren't far away from putting limits on buying USD), I think we would have healthier discussions. Now, I can — and am — moving out of the country, but not everyone can. Thinking otherwise is privileged and ignorant thinking.
Of course ETH is not flawless, and if I were in a middle-class family in the US, I would love to have these deep philosophical discussions about if Ethereum is really really decentralized, but the fact remains that cryptocurrencies DO solve real problems, and they DO help more people than they hurt, just like any technology. If this weren't the case, humans would have stoped innovating a long time ago.
See, burning coal is bad for the environment under many angles. But it fed the energy to the industrial revolution, with immense improvements to everyone's quality of life (from running water to advanced medical care). Now it's time to retire it, but it won't be realistic to go from muscle power to nuclear and solar power directly.
Same thing with crypto currency. It's like a steam engine from 1800: large, dirty and inefficient as it is, it already solves real problems.
Now, moving from proof of work to proof of stake is a huge step, like moving from firewood boiler to a turbine. Maybe not a complete perfection yet, but a huge jump in efficiency.
That's not true though. Crypto currencies do not solve any real problems in any meaningful sense. The problems it solves are all either problems that were created by crypto itself, due to the insistence on using that particular network architecture (which isn't even good), or are better solved in other ways. Moving to proof of stake fixes one of the fatal flaws in the scheme: the energy usage. All of the other fatal flaws still remain: The inability to do anything about fraud, the disastrous security of smart contracts, the ponzi-like economics, the inherent unfairness of mining/staking, the practical lack of decentralization and vulnerability to 67% attacks, the lack of any kind of legal structure around anything whatsoever, and not to mention that the technology is actively enabling new kinds of crimes like ransomware and evading sanctions on a grand scale...
It's patently obvious that the "tradeoff" for most people is that you get to gamble on the price of a highly speculative asset in exchange for enabling massive amounts of crime. I don't like that tradeoff. As a society, we can collectively decide not to make it.
My two options are: (1) Fly there, sell stuff, and bring a suitcase of cash. (1) Sell stuff remotely and transfer the payment over Bitcoin. I suspect that the second option is more economical even with the proof-of-work electricity-guzzling proof-of-work BTC network, because two transatlantic flights are even worse.
You'll call this a marginal problem. I'll say that marginal problems are still real, and need solutions.
If Swift transfers worked, they could be a preferred alternative.
Edit: Also, there's a bit more to unpack here. The transfers from Russia are only a problem with RUB. If you can transfer another currency to them into an offshore bank account then it's not a problem. And I hope you don't transact in RUB anyway, that likely means selling the business back to Putin's war regime, unless you physically go over there and use the proceeds to help the anti-war movement.
The lack of people manually verifying the _nature_ of a transaction and not just that someone claimed a transaction occurred means everything you’re doing is, well, pointless. It is (highly optimistically) a libertarian political movement that is deeply misinformed about how free markets and trust actually work.
Cryptocurrency has zero effective solutions for this. If you were to send your money to anyone claiming to be a NK citizen, you still have to personally verify entire transaction occurs, or you’ll get grifted. It’s useless. You’re being grifted. You’re making it worse by continuing to defend it and at some point you’re culpable for not admitting this despite it coming up on literally every hacker news post about cryptocurrency.
So I'm a bad person, then? Are the migrant workers sending money back to their families bad people? Are the refugees using it to bring their life savings with them bad people? Are the people currently subject to those bad regimes and unable to escape bad people?
At best, the belief that "it seems to be exclusively used by bad people" is blatantly ignorant of reality. At worst, it's saying the quiet part out loud: that as far as the legacy financial system (and the supporters thereof) is concerned, these people are just as "bad" (read: worth shunning from the benefits of said system), with the only difference being that said system is able to exploit them and their labor while it pretends they don't exist.
> Cryptocurrency has zero effective solutions for this.
Because there's no problem to be solved in the first place. There are many issues with cryptocurrency, but "wah nation-states can't arbitrarily censor transactions wah" ain't one of 'em.
https://coinflip.tech/blog/how-cryptocurrency-is-aiding-ukra...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerhuang/2020/10/19/dissident...
Your turn: prove your assertion that cryptocurrencies "seem" to be used exclusively by bad people.
It’s more like saying “I can’t recommend this to anyone because the legitimate use cases (if there are any) dont offset the potential for abuse (particularly in societies with an existing, trusted banking infrastructure).
Fair enough. Regardless...
> It’s more like saying “I can’t recommend this to anyone because the legitimate use cases (if there are any) dont offset the potential for abuse (particularly in societies with an existing, trusted banking infrastructure).
And in saying that, one betrays either a severe ignorance of reality or a vested interest in the continued marginalization of the very people to whom that "existing, trusted banking infrastructure" currently does more harm than good. There are legitimate use cases and they vastly offset any abuse (potential or otherwise), even in (ostensibly) "developed" economies like here in the US.
Not to mention that said "existing, trusted banking infrastructure" conflates its definition of "abuse" with "whatever the current local regime deems illegal"; as one of many examples, it seems rather plausible (if not probable) for anti-abortion states to start seizing assets from the bank accounts of women who solicit the services of abortion clinics - something which any cryptocurrency worth its salt is explicitly designed to prevent. And don't get me started on the can of worms overturning Roe v. Wade just opened; GSRMs, contraceptive customers/vendors, and other folks previously enjoying that implied right to privacy are now suddenly much more vulnerable to the same economic exile that sex workers and drug users/suppliers have already long faced. Talk about "potential for abuse"!
If you really think cryptocurrency can help with abortion access - stfu and get to work, no need to virtue signal when you have a working system.
In the meantime, things like Biden’s recent executive action to enable purchase of birth control across state lines is far more likely to actually be helpful.
You have to at least realize that the defenses you’re making are the same ones that a jaded libertarian might make and have very little to do with the actual tech, which is too complicated to usefully describe anyway. This paired with the underlying belief-oriented nature of cryptocurrency (e.g. “it has value because we all agree it does”) makes it effectively a neo-libertarian political movement, using self-rolled (objectively worse) “patreon” as its backer.
I mean, if you're opposed to cryptocurrencies even after it's been shown to you both how they currently benefit marginalized groups and how they can potentially benefit yet more marginalized groups, then that does indeed say something about the quality of your character. I wouldn't go so far as to write you off as a "bad person", but I would hope that you reflect on whether one's desire to continue the marginalization of said groups on the basis of "North Korea bad" might preclude one being a "good person".
> If you really think cryptocurrency can help with abortion access - stfu and get to work
If I was qualified to administer abortions, then I absolutely would.
> In the meantime, things like Biden’s recent executive action to enable purchase of birth control across state lines is far more likely to actually be helpful.
Sure, until the same Supreme Court that was willing to overturn Roe v. Wade decides it's willing to invalidate such an EO.
> You have to at least realize that the defenses you’re making are the same ones that a jaded libertarian might make
Well I would hope so, being a jaded libertarian and all ;)
The more I think on these things, the more I think trust is a feature, not a bug
Transparent systems in which transactions are screened do not trust their people.
North Korea would never allow their people access to a truly private cryptocurrency (which Monero does better). It would become easier to funnel money internally and create opposing factions.
This discussion is no different than a discussion about just rulers. If the person in charge of a monetary system has good intentions, or is informed by a democracy with collectively good intentions, it is better for them to dictate who can have access and who cannot.
Crypto forces those on the network to trust in the free decisions of the collective. If you think more people would transact with a large criminal psychopathic state like North Korea than they would with people who oppose North Korea, that is a collective choice. In a truly decentralized system, where everyone had access (which is not the case, and complicates things), the real, in practice will of the people comes out.
Organisation of systems of humans is _hard_. We’ve been trying many different systems of governance for thousands of years. There are appealing ideas, many experiments but no easy answer. Does currency decoupled from local governance work better or worse for the interests of humanity? The answer is not obvious and we should be careful saying we have clarity. It’s worth the experiment. I’m curious to know the result and watching the evidence carefully but my reading is results don’t support the suggestion that crypto is a force for good overall. It’s not even clear crypto stays trust-less and decentralised in any practical sense once it begins to collapse into more efficient structures of big players (coinbase and friends)
It doesn’t solve that information bottleneck problem, but I think the more efficient structures that lead to transactional bottlenecks and are necessary in things like Bitcoin are technical problems that can and I think have been worked out in currencies like Monero. Monero has quite successfully resisted the same pulls to centralization that Bitcoin and Ethereum have succumbed to for the sake of efficiency. It is smaller, but still quite large.
That does not necessarily mean it is good, and while I’m optimistic, I understand where the caution comes from. At the very least it’s extremely interesting, both from a technical perspective and a social/political perspective.
At the end of the day I am more and more convinced that all of this money and power stuff is downstream of relationships, culture, and ability to communicate and cooperate across differences. That’s what’s really important, and can be either encouraged or discouraged to move in a direction that helps the most people with all kinds of different tools, of which money is just one, and which could happen all kinds of different ways in different systems.
I wish it were easier to know what helps and what doesn’t so we wouldn’t risk making things worse. But I think the only way to know is to experiment.
That might be true, but the structure doesn't appear to have any technical considerations behind it. Following this comment:
>At the end of the day I am more and more convinced that all of this money and power stuff is downstream of relationships, culture, and ability to communicate and cooperate across differences.
If you ask me, the conclusion to this is that Monero has not actually "resisted" centralization, what it's actually done is become centralized around a group of criminals who all refuse to snitch on each other, and use the token as a means to do that. The key part is that "refuse to snitch on each other" comes before everything else including all the blockchain nonsense. These people are the only group who have any reason to bother using this token. Attacking the Monero network itself is orthogonal to what is typically done to break up these groups.
The actual people using Monero are unknown. That’s the point. To say it is centralized behind a group of criminals is incorrect. It has been extensively used to get money into places like Venezuela where the state is hostile, and for all kinds of positive services where people simply value privacy. See http://monerica.com
The fact that criminals also use Monero is a feature, not a bug, and proves that it works in the most hostile environments. The fact that it enforces the fourth amendment is a good thing, and it forces law enforcement to target criminals specifically rather than enabling blanket surveillance.
Anyone who wants tools to prevent the state from abusing power has ample reason to use Monero, and given the way politics has been infringing on banking rights in Canada, that is bound to be a growing number.
Regardless of what you think of the Canadian protestors, the real question is what do you think of the right to privacy and our ability to ensure our rights in the USA, given our constitution. If we do not trust people to transact privately then lets just repeal the fourth amendment and be honest about what rights we do and don’t have.
I happen to believe the right to privacy is fundamental and that to remove it is to create a panopticon. I believe law enforcement has ample means to go after crime without violating financial privacy, and believe it is equally if not more important to prevent abuse of law enforcement powers given the tendency for corruption, political use, and lack of effectiveness that has plagued all of human history.
... the collective of an elite group of for-profit corporations that in no way reflects the will of a significant group of people.
To really help ordinary people in oppressed countries, the first step is to implement policies such that they only affect those who should be affected.
If you do that, cryptocurrency benefits become moot: a Russian freelancer working overseas can legally TransferWise money to help her mom, but a Putin-connected oligarch can't wire money to help the regime.
For many reasons, it's difficult: e.g., how do you verify that your Russian user does not in fact work for Gazprom? Much safer to implement a total ban on anyone connecting from a Russian IP or using a Russian bank, explicitly sanctioned or not.
However, blanket financial anonymity at scale is not an acceptable workaround. Making it simpler for kleptocrats in charge to finance questionable activities and launder money obtained through thievery and violence, it introduces more problems than it solves, and in fact props up the regime.
There are plenty of nationalities which are banned from TransferWise:
https://wise.com/help/articles/2813542/why-cant-i-open-a-wis...
Russians may one day join that list.
I agree with everything you said, except this:
>>However, blanket financial anonymity at scale is not an acceptable workaround
Blanket financial anonymity is the only way to prevent circumstances like today's, where entire nationalities are locked out of the global financial system, and power becomes more concentrated over time.
Implementing this anonymity to allow regular guys help their families in Russia, who are now dealing with 4x price hike on basic goods, will help kleptocrats (the very guys causing that hike in the first place) finance their wars and further entrench themselves in power. Don't you see how this ultimately hurts those it ostensibly aims to help?
Regular guys will send home hundreds of USD, kleptocrats will launder billions.
Financial anonymity at scale exacerbates these asymmetries by helping those with the most money/power the most. Thinking otherwise is hoping they are clueless and don't employ teams of savvy people specifically to figure out various financing workarounds.
Those in the centers of power don't need to launder money. They write the laws, so their income is not illicit.
Oh yes they do. Read about all the ways dictators and their friends wash ill-gained riches in the West to buy real estate, enjoy lavish lifestyle, finance activities that undermine democracies and further their own agenda, etc. Sanctions exist for a reason.
You can't have anonymity without enabling crime and laundering. In a digital world where you need less to be physically present to profit from a crime, I want law enforcement to be able to seize criminal's funds.
If you think your government abuses that power try electing a different one, if you are in a democracy you can. If you want lawless anarchy I'm not with you, we had something like that in Russia in the 90s and it's not fun.
Those at the top of the political order within the centers global economic power have no need to engage something as crude as money laundering, or at least not the kind that depends on clandestine exchanges of briefcases filled with cash. Everything is reported and ostensibly legal.
>>You can't have anonymity without enabling crime and laundering.
You can very much combat crime without warrantless mass-surveillance of private financial transactions. Real crime leaves huge numbers of evidence trails that can be followed. Private electronic cash can also be utilized by law enforcement to incentivize informants to come forward anonymously.
Warrantless mass-surveillance enables tyranny. It enables the kind of systemic repression that can harm billions of people.
You can adopt whatever degree of moral relativism suits your purpose, but there's basically not a lot of people anywhere in the world who are looking at what's happening in North Korea and saying "looks good to me".
NK is just another tiny country caught in a proxy war between imperialists.
Look at China, which I think is bigger (or nearly so) than all those countries combined, and they don't have nearly as big a problem with NK as we do.
I'm not saying NK is a model country, but the US has a long history of demonizing random small countries to suit its purposes, from Afghanistan to Iraq to NK to Vietnam to much of Central/South America. That we use our military and propaganda to coerce our allies doesn't mean we automatically get the moral high ground. It just means we're the biggest bully.
This is a comical overstatement. If you followed the ins and out of international relations you'd know this is far from true. The health of those relationships (and any security arrangements included) is constantly debated up and down, and there are periodic crises of various magnitudes that kick up conversation of security arrangements ending.
If you think those countries are not acting in their own carefully-measured self interest and just show up blank faced to support the US... you have a very uninformed notion of the reality.
"they don't have nearly as big a problem with NK as we do."
You're really shooting from the hip. China has enormous problems with North Korea, which it primarily solves by appeasing them and working with them because it's easier than fighting them. As long as North Koreas spends most of it's energy being an active and passionate combatant against democracy and human rights, that suits China just fine.
"That we use our military and propaganda to coerce our allies doesn't mean we automatically get the moral high ground."
Every political regime tries to play these narrative and influence games. And every political regime will gravitate towards what works for it. It's an absurdly myopic American delusion to think that America is pulling all the strings among a world of puppets. That's not serious stuff.
But what you are failing to consider is that there are regimes willing to be far more horrific than whatever failures you see in American behavior. Criticizing America's faults is good. When you end up at "shrug is North Korea worse?" then you've ended up lost.
Compare the actions of France and Germany in the first Iraq war with the second. They don't always agree with the US.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governmental_positions_on_th...
> They're not exactly vassal states but close enough.
It's laughable that you would consider the EU a vassal state of the US, to the point I'm reasonably certain you're not being genuine in your argument
They're not, but whatever ...
There is also the matter of nine United Nations Security Council resolutions calling for sanctions, of twenty one total resolutions relating to non-proliferation; and a UN Commission of Inquiry report on human rights that found, amongst other things that:
"systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations have been and are being committed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. In many instances, the violations found entailed crimes against humanity based on State policies"
"there is an almost complete denial of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, as well as of the rights to freedom of opinion, expression, information and association"
"police and security forces of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea systematically employ violence and punishments that amount to gross human rights violations in order to create a climate of fear that pre-empts any challenge to the current system of government and to the ideology underpinning it. The institutions and officials involved are not held accountable. Impunity reigns"
Of all the hills to die on, the one that involves takes a moral relativist position on the badness of the North Korean regime is one of the oddest ones.
(the report being quoted is https://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/HRC/25/63 for those that want to take a fuller read)
Throwing an existing system out of the window without offering anything in return is madness. Cryptocurrency won't replace all the financial and government systems that have been developed internationally for years.
How can you help Iranian/Russian people that genuinely would like to reject and escape their current government, without helping that very same government to finance itself?
(But that's obviously not what you meant...)
"During the campaign, conventional weapons such as explosives, incendiary bombs, and napalm destroyed nearly all of the country's cities and towns, including an estimated 85 percent of its buildings"
No idea why they have bad infrastructure and hate the west
Where it started going seriously off the rails was in the '80s when they adopted a policy of radical self-sufficiency. Unfortunately they can't really be self-sufficient, at least at their current population levels, because the climate and geography limit the amount of arable land and limit how much can be grown on it. They get winds from Siberia bringing bitter cold and heavy snow, making it so they can usually only get one crop per year (compare to two crops per year which is possible in much of South Korea).
So they remained heavily dependent on Russia and China. When the Soviet Union broke up they lost most of their Russian aid, and that really hurt. They never really recovered from that, and their infrastructure suffered as part of the general poor economic conditions.
"Russian accusations of indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets did not register with the Americans at all. But for the North Koreans, living in fear of B-29 attacks for nearly three years, including the possibility of atomic bombs, the American air war left a deep and lasting impression. The DPRK government never forgot the lesson of North Korea's vulnerability to American air attack, and for half a century after the Armistice continued to strengthen anti-aircraft defenses, build underground installations, and eventually develop nuclear weapons to ensure that North Korea would not find itself in such a position again. ... The war against the United States, more than any other single factor, gave North Koreans a collective sense of anxiety and fear of outside threats that would continue long after the war's end"
If by USA you mean any country that doesn’t enjoy rogue states which constantly threaten nuclear attacks against others, sure
So... every nuclear power in existence?
What is a US-centric idea is the thought of helping North Korea because their are an enemy of the United States. If your primary concern is breaking US hegemony then that is a US-centric viewpoint.
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2020/10/23/money-reimagined-...
Hmm. IMHO libertarianism (which is at the core of the crypto movement) is much more striking as a USA-centric belief system than “KYC / AML is desirable”. In fact, most developed countries seem to have anti money laundering regulations.
Your “what about the children?” is a straw man whereas “you’re helping North Korea” is a fact. See the exponential growth of the ransomware market when cryptocurrencies took of.
We all universally agree that we should build infra that helps people within oppressed regimes. The disagreement is that not only crypto fails to do so meaningfully, it empowers those oppressive regimes by providing them with ways to circumvent trade restrictions.
The post you're replying to was discussing sanctions, not violence.
It’s the usual “you’re helping drug dealers/terrorists/North Korea, but what about the children?!” state simping that ignores the violence of the existing systems, and ignores the billions of people in the world who aren’t any of the above and are also benefiting from our attempts to design systems that respect liberty.
I think we absolutely should build infrastructure that allows people within oppressive regimes options with which they can resist, escape, coordinate. For example, we shouldn’t accept that Iranian devs get booted off GitHub.