It is unlikely an engineer decided to introduce a block list of names and this likely came from a product manager driven by compliance and risk mitigation. Problems are rarely the cause of the implementer and usually that is the side effect of layers of poor decision making in corporations. Poor because of the aggregation, not poor because of any one specific decision maker in the chain.
That depends on where you're from. Often in the English-speaking world, they do.
To take the another commenter's example, "Smith" comes from a word meaning, roughly, "craftsperson", as in "blacksmith". The ancestor that the surname comes from was likely either a blacksmith, or some other type of crafter whose profession can be described as "smithing".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/smith
Likewise, the surname "Wright" comes from a word with a similar meaning, as in "playwright", "wheelwright" or "cartwright".
When I meet a "Johnson", my mind immediately goes to "John's son" even though "John" is probably a distant ancestor of the person, not their father. The name's meaning has not changed.
Adoption exists. I'm the first in my patriline to be born with my surname. So yes, technically I am descended from a person with that surname, but my father wasn't.
Also, changing a name on marriage happens.
Most first names mean something as well.
Sure, when the company says "We're banning you and not telling you why. Hahahaha!" it's infuriating, and probably worth even more than an angry Twitter rant. But "Can you explain what this specific thing means?" is not worth the rant IMO. Just explain and go on living your life.
But yes anyone who has worked with the list of sanctioned persons circulated by the US government understands what a joke this is. Last time I looked Saddam Hussein was still on it, despite being dead for most of my life at this point. I've also been informed by at least one C-level exec that it was vitally important that we prohibit North Korean internet users from using our website.
Is the implication here that the should walk away from being robbed of 170 quid? They're fighting for dignified treatment.
I know this is an example of another problem, but in the US it's easy to see someone actually being killed over attempting to rob someone of $200.
People have strong reactions to unjust treatment, especially when they believe they are dealing with a fair system. (I feel it's different when you know you just have to pay the bribe.)
Monzo couldn't reverse the transfer as the money wasn't in their hands. Wise Transfer customer support is just garbage. I spent 5 hours on a phone until > their side < ended my call during UK working hours. I called again and again, they never answered. I sent them emails, but each email I was getting was from another person who, like I said in another comment, didn't read previous email from Wise, so each time I had to explain the context and the whole situation. When I sent my response in a morning, they responded the next day afternoon.
> What was the amount of money here?
About £170 for the conference ticket.
>But yes anyone who has worked with the list of sanctioned persons circulated by the US government understands what a joke this is.
I already paid for hotel and plane tickets without issues. Best to my knowledge I'm not involved in any terrorist organisation, unless you account working for EU banking infrastructure company as such.
You don't stand up to a bully just for their initial transgression. You stand up to a bully because if you don't they'll come at you again, even harder, and the world will see that you're soft, that you're a mark.
Gimme your lunch money, kid.
that's an order I would break; to do that goes against the principles of the internet.
I suppose I'm not getting hired any time soon
(Of course, sometimes it takes breaking the law to change the law. Revolutions, for example, have never been lawful. Governments may even praise a revolution - especially the ones that brought them to power, - yet they would always make sure that any future revolution is illegal.)
Germany reunified. Korea might have as well had it not been for North Korea's invasion of South Korea, and China's support of North Korea as a buffer zone.
And why no blame for Japan?
And what "internet principles" are you writing about? Everyone can access everything? This hasn't ever been the case. There have always been access controls.
What's wrong with that?
There are many ways. The most common are: If the users tell you they're from North Korea, you can tell that they're from North Korea. Also, if they connect from a North Korean IP, you can tell that they're from North Korea.
> And what sensitive information could they access? It’s defacto public.
The request likely had nothing to do with "sensitive information", but instead, sanctions.
International sanctions laws are pure and utter madness, with extremely high stakes if the government changes its course on selective enforcement, so everyone is "playing it safe" rather than "doing what makes sense and question outright bullshit".
[1] https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/research/17/j/a-closer-look...
Usually, that's court cases and resulting case law, as well as executive fines... which means there is an insane amount of risk attached to everything related to sanctions, and additionally enforcement may vary between different governments.
Either way, your company is required to follow the law regardless of your opinion on it.
Hey man there's no need to remind me that I'm old.
I’ve been using crypto and stablecoins for this for nearly 7 years now. Basically it skips international transfer scrutiny and for both the sender and the recipient we are using local banking on each side.
The exposure time is like 5 minutes, which mitigates every theoretical issue with the confidence of a stablecoin, or even the volatility of any particular crypto.
So what would have been an international transfer is converted to a scrutiny-free domestic transfer, which goes way faster too.
never mention any = "there are no valid use cases for crypto"
And this is a fairly common one. For example it's how GrapheneOS pays their developers, because TradFi (especially cross-border) is too capricious.
Just speculating. I'll never downvote or argue against anyone pointing out that use case, personally.
Or if you are transacting with someone with a funny sounding name, or who lives in a developing country (especially in MENA).
You can conduct your business without worrying about intermediary risk.
Hell, I've had bizarre issues in the past trying to make transfers between some large American banks and a number of European banks, the transactions just get "stuck" for a couple weeks, then get refunded, because somewhere in the middle something goes tits up.
"HN is weirdly inconsistent about digital currencies. Generally pro encryption, net neutrality, open-source software, VPNs, etc. But mention "Bitcoin," and suddenly half the commenters lose their shit about the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse. Then they go back to commiserating with another Ask HN startup founder whose PayPal account was frozen."
Simultaneously ignoring the benefits of cryptocurrencies and the problems they are trying to solve, while only looking at the negative edges that are covered by mainstream media, seems short-sighted at best. That's the inconsistency.
> Simultaneously ignoring the benefits of cryptocurrencies
I don't actually see a lot of that happening here, though.
Source? Seriously. I mean, we have CEX going down with SBF and Molly White posting anti-web3 stuff. I'm sorry, but that isn't the core fundamental technology that we're talking about here.
> I don't actually see a lot of that happening here, though.
Again... media focuses on the failures and not on the successes.
ETH moving to proof-of-stake was a massive technological advancement that only happened after many years of development, and has gone off without a hitch.
While, at the same time literally decimating all of the GPU based proof-of-work mining in a single day. Not only that, but they were able to MVP release the code without even implementing withdraw! People have trusted the developers with 0.40T dollars worth of value [0]. It is not insignificant.
Next up is some really interesting work being done with zero-knowledge proofs, which will enable the scaling phase of blockchain to happen.
Please try to get past the HN trope of 'crypto has zero purpose other than number goes up or down and bitcoin mining is destroying the planet' and look at what is actually happening in the industry.
No specific source, just how it looks to me based on what I hear pro-cryptocurrency people say (mostly here).
> media focuses on the failures and not on the successes.
By "here", I meant HN, not the larger mediasphere.
> Please try to get past the HN trope of 'crypto has zero purpose other than number goes up or down and bitcoin mining is destroying the planet' and look at what is actually happening in the industry.
This comment is mis-aimed. I'm not on that trope (I see one legitimate use), and I do loosely follow the industry. I don't follow it deeply because it's not a field that is technically interesting to me, but I am interested in the ramifications to society at large.
All I'm saying is that a rather large percentage of people I see advocating cryptocurrency are not making cryptocurrency look good.
It was anecdata the first time. The second time, it became hand-waving.
> I do loosely follow the industry
You follow it closely and care enough to comment here. 'disturbingly large percentages' and 'rather large percentages'... all say it is the big bad cookie monster... but it is just that... all anecdata.
You're trying to spread a myth, without anything more than anecdata, which is the whole point of this thread. I'd love to see less myth and more research.
Yes, because I'm concerned about the societal effects of it. What I don't follow closely are the implementation details.
> You're trying to spread a myth
No, I'm simply reporting what I personally observe. I even stated where I've observed it (mostly here on HN). My observations can, of course, be incorrect -- but describing it as "trying to spread a myth" is misleading. I'm not trying to spread a myth at all. I'm explaining why it is that I view the cryptocurrency space as having a lot of sketchy things in it.
I asked you for a source of the 'why' and you couldn't give me anything concrete. Therefore, my only other recourse is to assume you're spreading a myth. Burden of proof.
In any case, since you brought up burden of proof, it's the cryptocurrency world that is presenting the new thing, so it's on them to prove that what they're offering is an adequate substitution for what we currently have. I am the potential customer that has to be assured about it. So, in the larger sense the burden of proof is on the cryptocurrency people.
What I'm reacting to is your inability to quantify your opinions. Specifically, 'disturbingly large percentages' and 'rather large percentages'.
> it's the cryptocurrency world that is presenting the new thing, so it's on them to prove that what they're offering is an adequate substitution for what we currently have.
"for what we currently have". See, that's the thing, we had newspapers and tv before we had the internet. The internet came along and gave us an entirely new medium. It took a while for people to get used to that. You're in that phase now.
While millions of other people are off experimenting with these new things (and effectively using as part of their daily lives). Nobody forced anyone to use the internet. People gravitated to it because they found value in it.
Just because you have come to the opinion that it has 'large percentages' of grift, doesn't make that opinion true.
And that's the thing that causes the most cognitive dissonance. If you're going to trust someone, why not trust entities that have had hundreds of years to work out the kinks?
The road is literally being paved and is being done so iteratively. I'm ok with that as that is a standard way to develop things over time.
> why not trust entities that have had hundreds of years to work out the kinks?
Simple. Because they are not acting in your best interest. We've been sold on the idea that money is scary and we shouldn't touch it ourselves. We should put it into 401k's and forget about it until we retire. We should 'trust' people who know these complicated finance things better than us. It is a self fulfilling prophecy.
For 95% of the population (including me) crypto is the same trust system. I can't audit a smart contract and the underlying virtual machine it runs on. I would have no clue whether my transactions can be front-ended by bots that take all of the gains I expected, and then some.
I do have a general idea what happens when I use a credit card to make a purchase, and what to expect. I also have a general idea that if I put money into an investment account what fees will be deducted, and what stocks and bonds are being bought and sold.
And if I make the horrible mistake of sending money or NFTs to the wrong account, I know it can at least theoretically be reversed in non-crypto systems (and that often the reversal costs will be eaten by the bank, not paid by me). Whereas with crypto I have no expectation that the validators care about me to do a MakerDAO reversal on my behalf.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/people-had-to-be-c...
You obviously have some understanding of the system if you can speak about bots and front running. Fact is that front running exists in all markets, not just crypto.
As for reversible transactions, that's something done with smart contracts and escrow services. We are not there yet in terms of development, but it will happen eventually. Today, people actually appreciate the immutability of transactions. It enables the effective store of infinite wealth as a basis.
Credit card companies are providing the reversal business, which is paid for by the people who are borrowing money at insane interest rates... no reason why it can't be replicated once there is enough demand for it, but honestly, I'd rather move to reverse the model.... over collateralized loans. This is what is done in countries without the whole bogus credit rating systems.
> You obviously have some understanding of the system if you can speak about bots and front running.
What I've read on crypto skeptic blogs. So basically my understanding is equivalent to the understanding that anyone gets from reading news articles written by content-expert journalists. From what I understand the front-running in crypto can have pretty egregious effects, and can occur with simple monetary transactions, not just the crypto equivalent of stock market transactions. (Yeah, sure, front running can occur in currency exchanges in non-crypto, too, but as an individual, when you go to a currency exchange, or make a purchase overseas, you know the exchange rate before you trigger the exchange.)
> Today, people actually appreciate the immutability of transactions.
I don't. And I don't see how this follows: "It enables the effective store of infinite wealth as a basis." Infinite wealth cannot exist. And how does immutability facilitate this? And how is a blockchain that can technically be rewritten at non-infinite cost immutable (i.e. the MakerDAO rewrite, or any Sybil/51% attack)?
> Credit card companies are providing the reversal business, which is paid for by the people who are borrowing money at insane interest rates... no reason why it can't be replicated once there is enough demand for it, but honestly, I'd rather move to reverse the model.... over collateralized loans.
From what I understand, the interest rates go to the issuing banks, and the credit card companies take their profit from fees. Credit cards (and payday loans) exist for people who lack the collateral for a non-signature loan (without having to collateralize their freedom, aka debtor's prisons or endenturing). The only way to do this in crypto is to trust a third party lender such as Voyager or Celsius.
> you know the exchange rate before you trigger the exchange
You know this in crypto too. The issue is that the market depth might not be large enough to support your transaction. That will change over time, or you just stick with the basics... BTC/ETH/Stables and ignore the rest of the stuff.
> how does immutability facilitate this?
If you know that it is impossible to double spend, you can trust the math.
> And how is a blockchain that can technically be rewritten at non-infinite cost immutable
This is well covered in Andreas Antonopoulos videos on YT.
> Credit cards (and payday loans) exist for people who lack the collateral for a non-signature loan.
In Vietnam, there is no credit reporting agency. You don't get a credit card from a bank, but you can get a MasterCard/Visa "credit card". The thing is, they are effectively debit cards because you have to time deposit collateral in order to use them. People still get to shop online, but they are limited. This is honestly a far better system because it encourages people to spend what they have, not what they don't have. I also prefer to cut out the middleman who's generating all those fees for both the merchants and the end users.
> The only way to do this in crypto is to trust a third party lender such as Voyager or Celsius.
Bad examples given that Celsius was a ponzi. There are decentralized lending protocols. AAVE is a good example.
We have? I guess I was passed over when that sales job happened.
> > We should 'trust' people who know these complicated finance things better than us.
That's not how I look at it. How I see it is that when I'm operating in the established monetary system, I have some amount of protection and recourse available to me if/when things go wrong. With cryptocurrency, I have none.
To me, that's a really significant difference, and is in the top 3 reasons why I avoid cryptocurrency.
It has nothing to do with "trusting" financial institutions, or feeling like money is too complicated to understand.
We just literally witnessed several banks fail in the last few weeks, along with a litany of startups freaking out about how they were going to pay their staff. The government had to step in to prevent things from going totally ape shit and we are still on the edge of things getting worse by the day. All because people had some sort of belief like you do.
> With cryptocurrency, I have none.
This is simply not true.
We did, and those startups got into the state they were in because they chose to avoid getting insurance on their deposits that exceeded the FDIC limits. That's not the fault of of the financial system. And the financial system protected them well over and above what it had committed to do.
> All because people had some sort of belief like you do.
Not at all. If I had a large deposit like them, I would have actually used the services that would have protected my deposits.
> This is simply not true.
It isn't? What protection is there?
Hilarious. On one hand, you're saying that cyrpto is this big mess full of bad actors and on the other hand, placing no blame on a financial system that can just blow up in a week because of poor design and oversight.
Just like it isn't the fault of cryptocurrencies that there are bad actors. It is just intrinsic that there will be issues in any functioning system.
> What protection is there?
You said none, but I can provide you with at least 3 different decentralized insurance protocols with proven track records. Here is one: https://nexusmutual.io/
More will come over time and demand. DeFi is still quite new.
You've taken my stance on both counts to an extreme that mischaracterizes them. I never said cryptocurrency was a "big mess", and I never said that the established financial system is some paragon of virtue and perfection.
What I said is that the financial system did what it promised to do for those people who were affected by the bank failures.
> You said none, but I can provide you with at least 3 different decentralized insurance protocols with proven track records.
And yet, until now, you didn't actually mention any of them. I can't read your mind.
The one you link to doesn't seem to cover the most important protection (to me), though. I could be wrong -- the website isn't exactly clear. Does it offer the same coverage as I can get through chargebacks on a credit card? Does it cover me if I accidentally send money to the wrong destination?
Wait, there is a law that says that when a bank fails, the government has to step in and bail them out? Wrong. Otherwise, all banks would get bailed out.
> Does it offer the same coverage as I can get through chargebacks on a credit card? Does it cover me if I accidentally send money to the wrong destination?
No. You're asking for a credit card product. I don't believe that crypto has to be a credit card to be effective and useful. A good analogy is Zelle, which allows you to transfer money, but they don't bail you out. I'll tell you... even with bank wires, you send money... it is gone. Our finance department got phished last year. They didn't get the money back.
I'm curious when the last time you accidentally sent money to the wrong destination though. Is that really a common use case?
With crypto it doesn't matter whether it's you sending the money to the wrong address, someone who has hacked your account sending the money to the wrong address (and if you have insurance to protect against this, you'll have to prove it wasn't you), or a smart contract that someone slipped you without your knowledge sending money to the wrong address. You're out the money regardless. The last case isn't possible in non-crypto, and in the middle case you're protected by depositor's insurance in the US.
And yeah, I'm not using Zelle or a wire transfer unless I know who it is and what it's for beforehand.
For this reason, the choice is to only use credit cards where merchants have to pay exorbitant fees and end users have to pay massive APYs for borrowing.
If only someone could at least try to come up with a better system.
Payday loans and cash purchases? We have a variety of "systems", each with pros and cons. And hopefully that kind of diversity will continue into the future. For daily consumer purchases most crypto systems seem to have more cons than pros. For investment purposes I really don't know. And as a store of large chunks of value, maybe crypto will have an important role at some point.
That said, every advertisement I get for a bank or financial institution, doesn't seem much different. Instead of individuals, it is big organizations trying to shill us into letting them manage our money for us.
Instead of arbitrarily low amounts
It solves the friction for the person I replied to, and anyone that wants to avoid that particular kind of fiction
In a case like that, threaten to contact a lawyer because they are engaging in discrimination against you on the basis of (I assume) national origin. Unless your name is something like 'John International-Jewel-Theft,' they have no case.
WiseTransfer blocked my transfer because they didn't like my full name that they got from Monzo (Mozno has partnership with Wise). They blocked my transfer, hold it hostage until I contacted them, spent a few days hanging on phone, emailed them etc... they wanted to know what my surname means. I made an international transfer to buy a conference ticket. I don't remember the precise dates, but I spent full days on phone, emailing dozens of people and took me 3-4 weeks to revert the transfer. They. wanted. to know. what. my. surname. means.