To add to that, crypto is also a gift from heaven for criminals who need to receive ransoms.

Not true by any means. Fiat is the tried and true way to commit crime. Having transcations on a ledger forever, works against your criminal take. You are just repeating.

> Having transcations on a ledger forever

Do you think cash transactions don't have even more detailed ledgers? The "tried and true fiat" has been used to catch criminals for centuries because banks keep very detailed records of withdraws and deposits.

> You are just repeating

You are just repeating. Obviously both are being used for crime

> Not true by any means. Fiat is the tried and true way to commit crime.

Depends on the crimes, and up to certain values/volumes.

For 'consensual' transactional things for goods/services it could be useful (e.g., drug deals). But for ransom-like stuff, where one end of the 'transaction' is not thrilled with the 'deal', having to physically pick up the cash puts the perp at risk.

Sure, but fiat is indispensable to running a modern economy. And the abuses that occur, of course, are curbed by vigorous regulation and enforcement. Sure, HSBC laundered money for the Mexican cartels. When it came out, it was a big scandal, they were fined, and the money laundering was stopped.

Crypto is entirely dispensable. It is pseudonymous, by design resists regulation, and has no enforcement. Some chains are deliberately opaque (Monero, Zcash), and there are tumblers to obscure flows even further. Its approach to money laundering is "sure, bring it on".

Fiat is indispensable, and better for legitimate purposes than crime. Crypto is dispensable, and better for crime than legitimate purposes. We should dispense with it.

If that was the goal, we'd be doing CBDCs instead of crypto scams.

"Fiat currency can be used to commit crime, too, so my solving-sudokus-for-heroin computer money is totally fine."

Taking possession of the ransom without getting arrested/physically followed by the police is what foils most kidnapping plots [1], and cryptocurrencies definitely address that part.

Criminals don't really need strong anonymity as long as the payment system has strong censorship resistance and at least one counterparty won't mind accepting "tainted" funds.

Arguably, privacy is much more important to non-criminal individual users as they themselves can be targeted by criminals as a result of their income/holdings being globally visible, and unlike organized crime, they often have less means to protect themselves from $5 wrench attacks.

[1] Source: I watched many crime thrillers growing up

"Freedom enables crime" is an entirely true argument, and a gift from heaven for The Powers That Be who need to justify the taking-away of Freedom.

Freedom is never absolute. What gives one person freedom may limit another person's freedoms. Therefore you will have to weigh the pros and the cons of a technology that promises freedom.

There is a difference between "Freedom to do something" and "Freedom to not have something happen to you".

If we keep curtailing the former to serve the latter, we will end up perfectly safe from interruptions, doing nothing at all(aside from what the government dictates as 'serving the common good')

There's no difference. You can't formulate that distinction coherently.

What's the difference between having the freedom to walk the street and having the freedom to not be hindered from walking the street?

There's tremendous difference. Imagine I put a 5' high fence every 3 feet on a sidewalk. You still have the freedom to walk down the street, but no longer have the ability to do so. This is why the Bill of Rights is framed in terms of limitations on governments as opposed to guarantees of rights.

For instance, the Bill of Rights doesn't grant you the right to free speech. You already naturally have that. It instead makes it unconstitutional for the government to try to hinder that right. By contrast the USSR and China both had/have guarantees of freedom of speech in their constitution, but they mean nothing because obviously you have freedom of speech by virtue of being able to speak.

You having the freedom of speech says nothing about the ability of the government (or private companies in contemporary times) engaging in actions making it difficult to exercise that speech without fear of repercussion. Or as the old tyrannical quote goes, "There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech."

> There's tremendous difference.

No there isn't. They are the different sides of the same coin. Any freedom from something is a constraint against someone else doing that thing.

This may be how you personally interpret these things, but it is not how it has been interpreted universally for many centuries now. The freedom to do something has nothing to do with how easy it is to do, or even the absolute viability. For a basic example of the latter, every US citizen by birth has the freedom to become President some day, yet of course it is literally impossible for more than 0.000006% of people to achieve that within their expected lifetimes.

This is why constitutional guarantees of rights, the world round, are generally completely meaningless.

>The freedom to do something has nothing to do with how easy it is to do, or even the absolute viability.

Are you confusing me with someone else?

> For a basic example of the latter, every US citizen by birth has the freedom to become President some day, yet of course it is literally impossible for more than 0.000006% of people to achieve that within their expected lifetimes

I have no idea what this has to do with my point and you have not adequately explained the relevancy either.

street is public. Nothing is "done to you"

Freedom to walk anywhere means someone can walk onto your property ("done to you") You can curtail that freedom, because you are essentially giving up ("inability to do something with stuff someone else owns") some freedom to get some other freedom ("ability to own stuff that will not be used by strangers").

It's a tradeoff. A good one. Tradeoff of say "nobody's anything is private now because that allows govt a slightly easier time to catch criminals" is not a good tradeoff.

>> There is a difference between "Freedom to do something" and "Freedom to not have something happen to you". […]

> There's no difference. You can't formulate that distinction coherently.

The historian Timothy Snyder just wrote a book on the difference between Freedom from and Freedom to:

> Freedom is the great American commitment, but as Snyder argues, we have lost sight of what it means—and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power: We think we’re free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government overreach. But true freedom isn’t so much freedom from as freedom to—the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible.

* https://timothysnyder.org/on-freedom

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Snyder

(The book was published in 2024, and there are a number of talks he gave on the subject online made during his book tour.)

Yes, you can, if you consider that liberty and freedom are functions of society and not nature. In this sense, dying from old age is not being unfree.

To stay with your example, one is bascically the absence of limitations (negative freedom), ie. the freedom to walk the street. The other is the presence of possibilities (positive freedom), ie. there needs to be a street to walk it.

You have articulated the same freedom twice here.

I live in a city where I can be fairly certain that I will not be the victim of a robbery. I don't need to carry a weapon or otherwise appear defensible. This type of crime simply does not exist here (or only to a very limited extent). That is “freedom from.” If I had the right to carry a firearm to defend myself in the event of a robbery, that would be “freedom to.” These two forms of freedom can be distinguished in a very clear-cut way. One allows you to do certain things. The other ensures that negative events do not occur. In North America, the cultural focus seems to be primarily on “freedom to.” But I would consider it a massive restriction of my freedom if I could not walk through my neighborhood at night without worry, even if I had the right to carry a firearm for protection.

Your semantic sleight of hand cannot reflect the difference between someone who feels safe because they believe they can and are allowed to defend themselves against danger (freedom to defend oneself) and someone who feels safe because they believe there is no danger (freedom from danger). However, there is a clearly discernible qualitative difference between these two freedoms. Otherwise, there would be no difference in terms of freedom between walking through Caracas, Tijuana, Port-au-Prince, or Pietermaritzburg with a firearm in your pocket and walking completely unarmed through Abu Dhabi, The Hague, or Trondheim.

Freedom to walk the street means no police will stop me when I try to walk the street. Freedom to not be hindered from walking the street means police will stop other people from stopping me.

My freedom to put cameras in your home is your non-freedom to have privacy.

Sounds like not such a great idea now?

You would have the freedom to try to put cameras in my home, I would have the freedom to try and stop you or take them down again. Shock horror, personal agency instead of surrogate power via government!

Unless amelius is stronger than you, or has better weapons, or commands a gang that is bigger than your gang, then you can't stop them.

Its almost like you need some sort of power structure with the monopoly on violence to enforce agreed upon freedoms, they could be called the "government" which enforces "laws".

>stronger than you, or has better weapons, or commands a gang that is bigger than your gang, then you can't stop them

How do you not realize you're literally describing government?

How can you not realize that’s the point? Monopoly on violence is just that, the definition of the state.

Anarchy is not a stable system, you have no property rights or freedoms without a way to enforce them.

You provide no alternative, a government will form from a power vacuum made up of whoever has the most physical power around you.

It can also be companies who put cameras in your home and abusing them.

>government will form from a power vacuum made up of whoever has the most physical power around you.

Yup! My issue with the current system is that The Powers That Be pretend to act in the interest of their subjects(or, actually my issue is that people believe it) instead of being a gang of thugs imposing their will.

I'd extend that a bit, in the same vein as TFA: you should always be aware of who you're taking freedom away from and who you're giving it to, in practical actual terms, when designing or deploying revolutionary technology.

If you deploy a non-government fiat monetary system... most of your users are going to be people who want to avoid government currency controls.

Consequently, without a counterbalance, they're going to skew the industry towards their needs.

In the same way that allowing the largest advertising company in the world to own the most popular browser in the world has some conflicts of interest.

Money sets strategic direction over the long term.

Which funnily is the dumbest thing ever. Because in order to use the currency you need to exchange it which means that you need input and outputs, you slightly obfuscate that but in the crypto chain everything is saved, so everything is traceable forever. Slip up once when extracting or get your wallet involved in unsavoury interactions and you're done. It's not a matter of if but a matter of when...

It's nice and all, but the same people who are running the biggest ransomware operations now had no trouble receiving the billions of dollars they were stealing directly from US bank accounts before they pivoted to ransomware.

Ransomware would still work just fine using regular bank transfers. Especially given that the payor has no incentive to stop that money from arriving at it's destination.

But sure, using crypto the criminals get to keep the 20-30% they'd pay for payment processing otherwise. I'm not sure that really makes a difference though.

Pre-crypto ransomware operations receiving billions through bank transfers is fantasy, or less euphemistically, a lie. Trying to hand wave away the absolutely-real logistical difficulties groups would be plagued by if they shifted to using global financial institutions instead of crypto is additionally dishonest.

It's neither fantasy, nor a lie. You shouldn't throw around accusations like that without actually familiarizing yourself with the topic.

Banking trojans were doing just that, and receiving that money is obviously far more challenging than ransom payments because the owner will tend to notice pretty quickly and want it back. Ransomware doesn't have this problem, they can just deliver the keys only after they actually have the money in their control.

BEC groups are stealing billions every year via bank transfers right now.

.ru crime forums are absolutely full of people who will handle the logistics for you. They'll provide you bank accounts to send the money to, and deliver you whatever is left after their cut. A regular customer with high volumes will get excellent rates. The logistics aren't a challenge because there is absolutely massive pre-existing infrastructure already available.

Ransomware isn't big because of crypto(currency), Winlockers were popularized well before crypto payments became common. Ransomware just happened to develop at the same time as crypto, not thanks to it.

Anonymous crypto, yes.

But if you're suggesting blockchain is anonymous and payments are untraceable, that's not the case for bitcoin at least. It's a gift to law enforcement, if they cared enough to trace btc transactions.

This looks like a case of in theory yes, in practice no.

Tracing btc transactions to real persons can be quite some work and is a new kind of cat and mouse game.

Easier than with either cash or gold.

Unless you know where and when the ransom exchange takes place.

For criminals this is far less convenient than obfuscating the transaction trail.

In practice all tokens including BTC are massively used for law evasion. Criminal don't need any fancy Monero for that, they only need to break the chain once, or maybe a few times an that is enough. That usually happens at the entry points, a criminal backe exchanges of any size will happily take your cash or digital money and exchange then for any tokens you like and vice versa. A politician then declares that his several BTC worth a few millions were "fairly mined" and nothing to see there. Or a corrupt government pays with tokens for some sanctioned wares. The whole Axis of Losers trade is propped up by mafia's USDT, which are used to trade between Axis countries and willing collaborators like India, to buy oil/rockets/chips/soldiers/anything, with central exchange in Dubai and other petrocratias.

India banned crypto. It never even traded using crypto. By the way a country of billion plus should have freedom to do trade in whatever way they like

I tried to pay my parking ticket in heroin, and they threw me in jail!

Viva la revolución!

And other countries have freedom to scoff at that or even sanction trade with it (gasp, the horror!). Freedom works both ways, you know.

A fitting quote for the moment:

"Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other." (c) George Orwell

Also regarding India and tokens, sure they are officially banned. But they are still a key link a in trade chain, that' why I mentioned Dubai and its neighbors. They act as a laundromat and a tumbler, obscuring financial flows. And one part of the Russia-India trade or Russia-Iran trade or even Russia-China trade involves tethers (USDT), without which exchanging rubles to rupee or to yuan directly would be highly problematic and risky. Tokens mitigate some of the risk by hiding financial flows through multiple jurisdictions.

>> "Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other." (c) George Orwell

America and Europe invaded other counties for no valid reasons which means they are the fascist nations.

Is not America buying Russian Uranium and fertilizers is not helping Russian economy?.

Is not Europe buying Russian gas and oil is not helping Russian economy?

btw India never ever traded with crypto. bought oil under price cap which was set by the west.

The problem is that circumventing the government gets into criminal territory pretty quick, even if enough people view the activity as legitimate.

I remember Thailand letting everyone free with weed related crimes.

Or sometimes being a whistleblower is seen as criminal. Or if it isn’t seen as such but the government wants to view it that way, they will make it happen.

only for privacy coins tho

This. The moment dex’s started allowing speculation is when it all when bottoms up.

When it was just a value exchange to buy tokens, it was fine, except that there’s a limited number of tokens and they needed supply to actually operate as an exchange so they became a trading platform and forex-like fraud house.

It was inevitable and trivial to predict, which people did, and the cryptbros laughed at them coz that's how old people think.

We put so much law and limitations about anything money purely because at times when we did not, stuff went wrong.

The whole idea of currency without any laws and limitations around it means any and every problem that those law were supposed (some do it better, some worse, some make actual problem worse, not trying to pretend they are perfect here) to help with will happen, easily, with the "new money".

The fact that on top of all the old problems the crypto invented a whole set of new problems is just a little turd cherry on top of a manure cake.

Okay, that was harsh, manure have some actual positive use

The existence of fraud, toxicity and misinformation around bitcoin doesn't necessarily mean that bitcoin itself is broken. It's a very poorly understood technology, centering around money that once spent cannot be reversed. It's natural that MANY people would come along and attempt to exploit that gap. Over time though the bag of tricks will start to wear a bit thin, and people will learn what to look for.

Many people in the bitcoin community have been and are still calling out wallets that rely on 3rd party trust, decentralized exchanges that are build on a house of cards, alternative coins that are created purely for the purpose of pump and dump etc.

Meanwhile the core technology progresses and deals with functioning at larger scales, with lower entry and exit friction, improved safety guarantees.

> The risk is NOT only "will this go up or down" but you have a high risk of being robbed, as have happened to millions of people.

Using a cryptocurrency (originally) meant basically opting out of the governmental violence-as-a-service for cryptocurrency/-token purposes and taking care of this aspect by yourself.

Depending on your resourcefulness and lifestyle, this may mean

- hiring personal security

- being very careful about privacy aspects, e.g. making it very hard to link your personal identity to your cryptographic keys; distribute your crypto-tokens among many keys so that if one key gets "linked", the attacker will find only few tokens there; use anonymization services; ...

- think about what mitigations you have in place against "rubber hose attacks"

- live a modest life so that people (and also taxation authorities?) don't get suspicious that you are secretly rich, i.e. don't boast about your richness

- ...

It originally meant nothing. Bitcoin was a proof of concept, with some examples of things it could solve, but no actual ideological arc.

Some people saw it as an opportunity to push for an ideological agenda because you can convince a lot of people that cryptocurrency is a silver bullet (it's not).

> but no actual ideological arc.

Wasn’t the first thing signed an article about the collapse of the banking system?

This is the first thing:

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

It has nothing about the collapse of the banking system.

> The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

> Using a cryptocurrency (originally) meant basically opting out of the governmental violence-as-a-service for cryptocurrency/-token purposes and taking care of this aspect by yourself.

Cryptocurrency was a hidden blade. People were drawn in on the promise of avoiding the things they don't like about capitalism, but then cut by a more unregulated version of the same.

If you're going to dismantle all of the institutions of liberal democracy and capitalism so you can send a billion dollars to somebody, why not just go ahead and get rid of money while you're at it?

> People were drawn in on the promise of avoiding the things they don't like about capitalism

Quite the opposite: the marketing was always about more "pure", "unrestricted" capitalism without all the "evil" restrictions and red tape that the governments set up and (depending on the cryptocurrency) no option for the governments to turn on the money printing press to devalue the currency by their will.

You you do the last, you deserve to get found out and punished accordingly. Pay your taxes people, like everybody else.

> its nothing more than a high risk stock

Nothing more? Proof-Of-Work wasn't innovative?

With fiat you have high risk of losing 50% of USD's purchasing value within 2 years, which already happened, and which is not far from being robbed, as have happened to millions of people too.

Sure, but if i have investments they cant be stolen, and if they are im pretty much compensated (given im not straight up giving my account away, hell even then there is usually a 24h window with a limit on withdrawls).

Bottom line is no one takes responsibility in the world of bitcoin.

You can buy an ETF that wraps spot crypto and get all those guarantees you name in exchange for a small fee.

Proof of work was innovative when it was created in 1997 as an anti-spam email solution.

lol. No, PoW existed before. Putting it all together in this specific form was an innovation, if only a minor incremental one on the large body of work of state machine replication, enabling for the first time sybil resistance and thus permissionless distributed consensus. But all that gave us were crime tokens; haven't seen a use case but crypto yet.

Invest in stocks and bonds to maintain purchasing power.

If it was only a minor incremental innovation, in this specific form, wouldn't it have appeared years earlier?

> haven't seen a use case but crypto yet.

BTC is up 500%+ since 2 years ago. This looks like a use case to me. It maintained purchasing power better than stocks and bonds.

This comment read to me like AI slop.

It was started as an alternative to fiat casino capitalism. It became an absurdist parody of fiat casino capitalism.

Some printed materials, perhaps most are garbage. That doesn’t mean the printing press is bad.

Offtopic but zerotier is really good software that I used but I am in India and its pings were high which is when I started to look around at free vps's in the form of jupyter notebooks like intel tiber and others using things like pinggy and trying to find a non rooted version of ssh (dropbear) etc.

Technically it was one of my "first" achievements that I can do a lot of things if I devote the time to tinkering.

I think a lot of zerotier customers atleast free users just want to host minecraft ngl, I think after trying out lots of custom solutions, I found a custom solution which I stuck with it for a long time: https://trulyfoss.mataroa.blog/blog/self-hosting-vanilla-min...

I didn't know why I shared this but just wanted to share I guess that human spirit can try to find ways around and tinkering and how its an indominatable spirit I guess (ps hackernews "hacking" community glorified it a lot to me as well and gave me confidence that I am sure I can find ways to do this so thanks to hackernews as well)

It uses (https://e4mc.link/), I have no skin in the game but its open source and maybe just wanted to give another open source software and its team if possible some leads on improvement

maybe you guys can look into hosting e4mc software on your infrastructure or similar. Minecraft hosting is one of the largest markets, maybe zerotier can look into it

I know my blog was really messy but if zerotier really does implement my idea, the only thing I wish if is if the team ever create a blog post about it, maybe I can be given the opportunity to write it if possible but even if you do not, I would respect it and I just wanted to give some leads because I "wished" to create a product in this market but I don't have the funds and/or I wouldn't have the proper ability to monetize it in my opinion.

Also, what are your thoughts on creating a zerotier alternative to pinggy, recently shown on hn (pinggy.io), Heck I have created a custom huggingface space + websockify/ssh solution in house (vibe coded) too and I would love to discuss more about it as I am truly passionate about these things and if it might align with zerotier (sorry if I am yapping and the overlap is none)

have a nice day and sorry for catching you off-guard I guess.

Also must admit, you have a really catchy name on hackernews and that was why I decided to click and found you made zerotier (and its infrastructure, I decided that the biggest hurdle for me was the infrastructure aspect of things and I am also curious how zerotier started its infrastructure and journey, I feel overwhelmed by these infrastructure side of things basically and like to focus on trying to create crafty solutions around them) :p

You're right that the risk profile isn't just volatility. In a system where "you are your own bank," losing a seed phrase, signing the wrong transaction, or getting phished is equivalent to someone draining your checking account with no recourse

Yeah... say what you will about FIAT currencies, but at least they can be used as currencies. I always chuckle at people who insist their transactions on exchanges are secret. With the "Know Your Customer" rules, FINCEN knows what you're doing (or at least has the option of looking into what you're doing.)

Folks, the word "fiat" is not an initialism, unless you're referring to the car brand.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fiat

It's funny. I drive a FIAT, and started capitalizing it ... But yes, in this instance I was talking about fiat currency, not FIAT Currency, a little known sportster model sold in the UK market for one year 1968.

Another risk is just loosing your keys.

I bet it happens a lot more than people like to talk about.

You can't convince me bitcoin wasn't simply a psyop to get criminals to commit crimes on a global, immutable ledger.

The issue is also that people refuse technological advancement and get stuck at bitcoin.

One pyramid scheme to rule them all, One pyramid scheme to find them, One pyramid scheme to bring them all and to the pump and dumps bind them.