It has been fascinating to watch society rethink/rebuild financial regulations from first principles and largely end up with the same conclusions. If anything, hopefully getting people to realize that all the rules tradfi institutions follow aren’t just made up for no reason.
Those “regulations“?
This incident alone has forged grim resolve in many people, including myself, to produce systems to grind TradFi to dust.
Good luck to you, competition is a good thing.
No clue on the veracity of the statement, but here it is repeated by news media[0] which is sourcing a member of the Canadian parliament[1].
[0]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/mp-mark-stra...
[1]: https://twitter.com/markstrahl/status/1495472037438967808
>In a tweet on Sunday, Chilliwack-Hope MP Mark Strahl said a woman called Briane, "a single mom from Chilliwack working a minimum wage job," had apparently fallen foul of the Emergencies Act, which was recently invoked by the federal government in a bid to stop protesters occupying streets in downtown Ottawa.
>Vancouver Granville MP Taleeb Noormohamed says he's "quite skeptical" about the claim and has written to Strahl asking for more information, offering to help rectify the situation.
>Strahl has declined to speak to CBC News about the tweet or give any more information about Briane.
>On Monday, the Globe and Mail reported it had been mistakenly sent an email by the Ottawa Police Service, in which a constable said they had gone through the list of donors and found two "Briannes," neither of whom lived in B.C.
I mentioned that in my previous reply. I never even made a claim of truth or not, I was just giving context for what I believe they were claiming. Don't shoot the messenger.
> No clue on the veracity of the statement
Also
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
There could be other reasons but I wouldn't be surprised if that was the only reason. Visa and mastercard suspended payment processing for wikileaks.
Some banks were closing accounts if you purchased crypto so it can be even more arbitrary.
https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2022/02/23/chilliwack-mark-str...
It would only be possible if everyone used anonymous coins like Zcash and Monero from their own wallets. Any use of exchanges or secondary networks like lightning provides levers to turn people off. Any corporation can be subjected to pressure by not just governments but large groups of people.
I don’t see people like the trucker protestors using cryptographic hardware wallets and waiting minutes for transactions to clear on a block chain.
BTW the trucker thing was a line for many people including myself, and I wasn’t anti-vax and did not vote for Trump. Freezing the assets of people for participating in a protest is not okay. The content of the protest is irrelevant.
But right now, you have people, mostly younger, thinking they know how to build a better world by starting over from scratch. In programming, we've all seen (and been) the engineer who sees an old codebase for the first time and thinks they could do a better job with a full rewrite. We know that rarely works. And yet somehow many of those same engineers think they can do the same with a global financial system that's been in existence for centuries.
How is this any different than the people who are trying to write a whole social media/communications infrastructure from scratch (ie. fediverse), which turns out to be mostly the same as incumbents but worse? There's even an example of "[new system] is speedrunning the history of [old system]", which the recent debacle on mastodon where people were complaining about unfair/arbitrary bans and name impersonation, both of which are well known problems that centralized platforms ran into and they attempted to put a lid on.
So much for “Code is law”.
Moving cryptocurrencies around barriers such as custodial exchanges freezing/losing/stealing it is one of the “superpowers” that makes real Crypto valuable.
Any thief dumb enough to deposit their stolen goods onto someone’s exchange deserves to have it frozen — heck, if they deposited it into my wallet, that’s what I wound do!
Explain again how this defeats “code is law”?
Related sayings: "Feet of clay", "Emperor has no clothes". etc.
2. On a more fundamental level, I don't see how this is inconsistent with "code is law". After all, if the attacker willingly transferred his stolen funds to a third party, then in the eyes of the network he legitimately gave up control of it[1], just like luke legitimately gave up control of his coins when his wallet was hacked. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
[1] if you want to make it kosher in the eyes of the law, you could even sneak a clause in the ToS that says you have the right to freeze whatever funds you want.
it’s apparently illegal for cz to help americans via binance.com.
It would be like finding out that the fire chief in your town was filling up his car with gas that was supposed to only be for the fire trucks, and then deciding to totally get rid of the fire department. Yes, you end the corruption, but the next time there is a fire a whole block of homes burns down.
A decentralized trustless currency or store of value means that a minor typo OR a hack could cost you everything. And adding layers of protection on top of that makes the underlying layer completely pointless. If every exchange is going to stop any transactions involving my wallets the minute they decide I'm "suspicious" why not just leave my money in cash or gold or in a bank account?
It would be like a town where the government fire department was corrupt and stealing from the town's treasury, so some people move outside the city limits and set up their own volunteer fire department.
Maybe it doesn't work as well. Maybe there are fires the volunteers aren't prepared for. Maybe some government firefighters start fires in the unincorporated area to make townsfolk afraid to leave and join the rebel group. But at least the volunteers aren't stealing from the treasury any more.
Bitcoin is a protocol, I assume TradFi means traditional finance companies. The companies that deal with Bitcoin shouldn't be different from TradFi to begin with (and that's a good thing). They are typically holding and handling assets (Bitcoin) on behalf of others and philosopically I see only little difference whether you are doing that with Bitcoin, with physical assets like gold, or digital database rows like equities or bonds.
Using Bitcoin in a self-custodial manner is something else altogether.
The difference between Bitcoin and TradFi shrinks every day.