> The Biden Administration is trying to strangle crypto.
> A lot of folks have been trying to stifle that criticism, but the effort to destroy the industry is quiet but pervasive across the exec branch.
> The time to make crypto an issue that wins or loses the Presidency is now.
Investors in my company support that view. It's an example of doing things indistinguishable from what oligarchs want: no questions on their authority, even in the wake of massive consumer harms relating to token speculation and fundamentally unsolvable UX issues for retail consumers.
[1] https://twitter.com/twobitidiot/status/1624563275760279554
While I agree the implications are concerning, I think its difficult to overstate just how much of a stranglehold the US regulatory and surveillance machine has over the global financial system.
Trying to buy and sell things online without sharing your real name or address is functionally impossible for 99% of people (unless you are willing to break the law or learn how to use cryptocurrency). This is because the gatekeepers to the Internets finances (banks, credit cards, etc) are required by law to identify who they are working with.
This makes a sort of sense until you zoom out and see the scope of the problem. Because it is impossible in 99% of cases to move money around online without using those gatekeepers, there functionally is no financial privacy online.
I should not have to share my bloody name or address with anyone to order a god damn box of chocolate.
> Ultimately we're far more tracked by corporations anyhow now,
True, and thats very concerning and should be pushed back against. But when corporations collect data on you, the worst thing they do with that data (generally speaking) is not treat it with care and the data gets stollen / made public.
When the government collects data on you, the worst thing they do with it (generally speaking) is throw you in jail or kill you. The scope of the concern is astronomically higher.
You don't. Get off your ass and go buy a box with cash. On the drive over meditate on who generally benefits when given the ability to move large sums of cash anonymously (hint: terrorist organizations, drug cartels, and tax dodging oligarchs).
A select few organizations can control whether you can buy necessities or not and cut you off even from legally earned money on a whim. Banks have finite cash on hand which limits your mobility and liquidity at any given moment in the event of an emergency. Online commerce at this stage may as well be a secondary benefit given how your information is scooped up and resold to advertisers.
Financial systems are quite convenient, there's no denying that, but they're extremely fragile and the system exists at the whim of a few select people. Visa and Mastercard have demonstrated they can effectively remove persons from modern civilization at their discretion, not even with official government requirements, and that this has not been challenges is really unsettling.
To reiterate, cryptocurrencies are not the answer here in their current state, as they're too unstable and basically inherit not only all the issues that normal banks bring, but also introduce a ton of new issues. I don't know how to ensure sovereignty for individuals who are legally earning compensation when a support representative for banks can click on a checkbox and make them penniless. Nevermind if the company the representative works for is influenced by an unhappy government.
Finance is terrifying, and we're really in a strange place where we don't have a good answer for ensuring individual sovereignty with any currency, crypto included. I stress over this because I'm less and less confident every year that there is a good solution for this besides eschewing Finance entirely (and that's quite the magic trick...)
I’ve never understood the hubbub over privacy. Outside of obviously malicious attacks (that we should be well-protected from) it all just seems that you’re being observed so that other people can make money. That doesn’t bother me if I’m getting something out of it (chocolate). There are extreme examples of employees with access viewing the data, but they should be considered statistically insignificant in the discussion because they’re so rare.
For example, Ralph Van Deman[1]. After being instrumental in the Philippine-American war (1899-1902)'s military intelligence division, creating some of the first (and incredibly far reaching) catalogs of potential enemies & associates & basically anyone anywhere near-by & using torture regularly to extract confessions/information, he came home to America... to start enormous files as leader of the new Military Intelligence on anti-War, labor, human rights & basically any American standing up or making any noise. Or who happened to be a couple degrees of separation away. Sending under-cover agents out to report back with unsigned reports, working under a veil of secrecy, & calling them "enemy agents" for not being happy-dumb American's & advocating voices.
Among many truly awful things, this lead to the sheriff of Bisbee gathering a vigilante posse of 2000, taking over the telephone network, and then leading the group by a car with a machine-gun mount on it (owned by the local mines of Phelps & Dodge), through Bisbee breaking into homes & pulling people out of beds at gunpoint. The strikers were told at gunpoint to get back to work, and 1186 refused & were shoved into passenger & cattle cars & hauled 180 miles under armed guard. Van Deman is far from personally responsible here, but he is an early leader of the modern world in weaponizing information against potential or related threats. You might be innocent, but if you talk to the wrong people or go to the wrong place, suddenly you're suspect, and maybe men with guns will come into your house & put you on a train out & that's that.
Creating systems that resist the impulse to corruption is necessary. "Abuse of power comes as no surprise", is one Holzer-ism. And what's safe today may not be safe tomorrow (power changes hands but records endure). And I think there is some essential need for human privacy at some level, that it's a gross & disgusting world if humans are deprived of a sense of independent identity, are too closely handled from above.
My example comes from American Midnight, which is a very very very long tale about awful things the US did just 100 years ago. It's well written and as the title says incredibly dark. A huge amount of the book touches on the power of information. We've seen other horrific examples in other states. It seems essential we have privacy, that we give people a sense that they have their own lives to live, with free choices.
The immediate example has to do with supplying identifying information in order to purchase online goods. I view it as the regulations that enable the data collection are in place to empower the consumer. Obviously, if we could keep the good parts (good return processes, immediate credit return for fraudulent transactions, etc.) I would prefer more privacy to less. It’s just not possible in today’s technological climate.
And I'm not even talking "accidentally", or though neglect. I'm thinking of the union busting efforts of the railroad and mining companies in the late 1800s and early 1900s where the corporations straight up murdered folks.
my favorite examples of corporate union busting from that era all involve the US Army being deployed against workers.
Randomly pumped tokens/NFTs - even newly issued and pumped ones - are moving large volumes anonymously.
You act like a random trader that caught the wave, but really you are also the addresses pumping the asset with the dark money that isn’t intended to be cashed out. The pumped addresses just wind up with the asset and will never cash out. Your KYC'd address just looks like a good crypto trader.
A clean 8,000% gain doesn't look different than a dirty 8,000% gain.
Yo!*Welcome to [redacted]!*
What can we offer you
We providing quality crypto pumps. *We share the name of target coin in advance.*
*We are professional cryptotraders*
And finally, we show you how to beat the market and be ahead of everyone.
**This is your chance to multiply your investment together with the cryptocurrency market whales**!
** The amount of invites is limited! Hurry up to take your place there:** : [redacted]but people with the "dark money" can also pay similar kinds of groups. this happens in the stock market all the time too.
if you have the dark money that you won't cash out, you can do it yourself pretty easily as well, you don't actually need to notify a crowd because there are so many bots that will join a pump of any token, and that will cause it to trend too.
For specific sanctioned entities, a possibility would be to let users specify a list of addresses they're not willing to share an anonymity pool with.
Here's Vitalik talking about these ideas in a recent interview:
https://podclips.com/c/K3RLE1?ss=r&ss2=ethereum&d=2023-02-28
But wow, my dislike for how many vast powers in the world are so very un-observable was also high then, & the implications of bitcoin & cryptocurrency to let these systems grow & be harder to deal with has only gone up & up & up ever-more.
Ultimately we're far more tracked by corporations anyhow now, and that only barely has to do with the currency we use.