6 ms·

> How it'll do any of that and why it's a good thing, that's left as an exercise to the reader. I'll give an additional hint to reader: who benefits from encry

by VMG 9y ago

> How it'll do any of that and why it's a good thing, that's left as an exercise to the reader. I'll give an additional hint to reader: who benefits from encryption that even law enforcement cannot break? Who benefits from TOR?

zimpenfish 9y ago
> who benefits from encryption that even law enforcement cannot break? People who live in countries with regressive regimes where law enforcement can be legitimately dangerous?
- cesarb 9y ago
  Also, law enforcement isn't all-powerful. If law enforcement can break it, criminals can break it too.
- VMG 9y ago
  That's one of groups, correct. Who benefits from a financial transaction system that law enforcement cannot censor?
- simias 9y ago
  It's true that bitcoin might be useful in very unstable countries (venezuela comes to mind) when you can't really trust fiat and getting access to dollars or other foreign currencies is trickier. It's still only really useful for relatively rich people who want to get money out or in, I doubt the average Venezuelian bothers with Bitcoin. And Bitcoin requires a widely available "free" internet connection to work correctly which would be trivial for an authoritarian government to disrupt. Turkey doesn't hesitate to block Wikipedia and Twitter, I doubt they'd have any problem blocking the bitcoin exchanges and the bitcoin peer-to-peer protocol if they felt the need to do it. Sure you can work around this and smuggle the blockchain somehow, but it becomes a lot less practical, especially if want something that you can easily spend for your day-to-day purchases like food and toilet paper. I know there's a lot of defiance towards our governments all around the world and there are some good reasons for that. However I feel like we're having the bad engineer reflex, trying to find a technical solution to a societal issue and we might end up making things worse. I want to be able to trust the government that I democratically elect and I want this government to be able to gather taxes and even control the currency to some extent. Instead Bitcoin will make it trivial to evade taxes, smuggle money overseas and makes bribery easier than ever. You can't seize it, you can't freeze it, you can launder it super easily etc... At least when people open an illegal account in some tax haven it leaves some paper trail, there are intermediaries in the loop, you take some risks, you have to figure out a way to smuggle the money over there while keeping the books clean. With Bitcoin you click on "generate a new receiving address" and you're done. If the point is to make governments less corrupt and more accountable I don't see how that'll work. You can't have the Panama Papers or the Swiss Leaks if there's no paper to begin with. The fact that it wastes an ungodly amount of energy to secure its ledger is just the icing on the crap cake as far as I'm concerned. And it's not even super successful because as far as I understand the majority of the hash power is currently in mainland China, so if the Chinese government wanted to take over they'd just send a dozen of military types in each datacenter and that'd be the end of it. Then you make a few double-spend attacks to make people lose all trust in the coin, the value collapses, nobody mines it anymore, game over, thanks for playing.
  - VMG 9y ago
    > However I feel like we're having the bad engineer reflex, trying to find a technical solution to a societal issue and we might end up making things worse. Same is said for encryption. My perspective is that tools empowering individuals is the solution to societal problems. Cryptography does that, whether applied to communication or applied to value transfer.
    - simias 9y ago
      Encryption has legitimate use cases even if you assume that you completely trust the "authorities" like your bank and your government. It's about preventing your neighbor from reading your email over wifi. Monetary transactions are already pretty well protected, which makes it hard for somebody to steal my credit card and use it without my consent. It's arguably even safer than Bitcoin since the bank and regulations offer me some protection if something goes wrong. So bitcoin isn't about making secure transactions the way HTTPS is, it's about hiding my transactions from the bank and, transitively, from the government. It's about creating a completely free libertarian market. Maybe you actually want that but I wish there were more discussions in the bitcoin world about what model of society people really want. I have a hard time believing that all the bitcoin enthusiasts are die-hard objectivists. I feel like many people saw the "get rich quick" scheme and didn't stop to think about the consequences.
      - VMG 9y ago
        > Monetary transactions are already pretty well protected To borrow some progressive terminology: check your privilege. Also let's not forget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point https://wikileaks.org/MasterCard-breaks-ranks-in.html https://wikileaks.org/MasterCard-breaks-ranks-in.html Civil asset forfeiture etc.
  - googletazer 9y ago
    >I want to be able to trust the government that I democratically elect and I want this government to be able to gather taxes and even control the currency to some extent. Well here is your mistake. Why would you ever trust a government, or anyone for that matter? Sure, we hope that people are good, but 99% of people operate based on an incentive structure. The incentives in bitcoin for the miners and the participants are well defined.
- cr0sh 9y ago
  > People who live in countries with regressive regimes where law enforcement can be legitimately dangerous? Depending on who you are, one could argue the United States is one such country. If it can apply to the US - it can likely apply everywhere.
  - zimpenfish 9y ago
    I would definitely agree with that line of argument, especially in 2017.

by VMG 9y ago

zimpenfish 9y ago

> who benefits from encryption that even law enforcement cannot break? People who live in countries with regressive regimes where law enforcement can be legitimately dangerous?

cesarb 9y ago
Also, law enforcement isn't all-powerful. If law enforcement can break it, criminals can break it too.
VMG 9y ago
That's one of groups, correct. Who benefits from a financial transaction system that law enforcement cannot censor?
simias 9y ago
It's true that bitcoin might be useful in very unstable countries (venezuela comes to mind) when you can't really trust fiat and getting access to dollars or other foreign currencies is trickier. It's still only really useful for relatively rich people who want to get money out or in, I doubt the average Venezuelian bothers with Bitcoin. And Bitcoin requires a widely available "free" internet connection to work correctly which would be trivial for an authoritarian government to disrupt. Turkey doesn't hesitate to block Wikipedia and Twitter, I doubt they'd have any problem blocking the bitcoin exchanges and the bitcoin peer-to-peer protocol if they felt the need to do it. Sure you can work around this and smuggle the blockchain somehow, but it becomes a lot less practical, especially if want something that you can easily spend for your day-to-day purchases like food and toilet paper. I know there's a lot of defiance towards our governments all around the world and there are some good reasons for that. However I feel like we're having the bad engineer reflex, trying to find a technical solution to a societal issue and we might end up making things worse. I want to be able to trust the government that I democratically elect and I want this government to be able to gather taxes and even control the currency to some extent. Instead Bitcoin will make it trivial to evade taxes, smuggle money overseas and makes bribery easier than ever. You can't seize it, you can't freeze it, you can launder it super easily etc... At least when people open an illegal account in some tax haven it leaves some paper trail, there are intermediaries in the loop, you take some risks, you have to figure out a way to smuggle the money over there while keeping the books clean. With Bitcoin you click on "generate a new receiving address" and you're done. If the point is to make governments less corrupt and more accountable I don't see how that'll work. You can't have the Panama Papers or the Swiss Leaks if there's no paper to begin with. The fact that it wastes an ungodly amount of energy to secure its ledger is just the icing on the crap cake as far as I'm concerned. And it's not even super successful because as far as I understand the majority of the hash power is currently in mainland China, so if the Chinese government wanted to take over they'd just send a dozen of military types in each datacenter and that'd be the end of it. Then you make a few double-spend attacks to make people lose all trust in the coin, the value collapses, nobody mines it anymore, game over, thanks for playing.
- VMG 9y ago
  > However I feel like we're having the bad engineer reflex, trying to find a technical solution to a societal issue and we might end up making things worse. Same is said for encryption. My perspective is that tools empowering individuals is the solution to societal problems. Cryptography does that, whether applied to communication or applied to value transfer.
  - simias 9y ago
    Encryption has legitimate use cases even if you assume that you completely trust the "authorities" like your bank and your government. It's about preventing your neighbor from reading your email over wifi. Monetary transactions are already pretty well protected, which makes it hard for somebody to steal my credit card and use it without my consent. It's arguably even safer than Bitcoin since the bank and regulations offer me some protection if something goes wrong. So bitcoin isn't about making secure transactions the way HTTPS is, it's about hiding my transactions from the bank and, transitively, from the government. It's about creating a completely free libertarian market. Maybe you actually want that but I wish there were more discussions in the bitcoin world about what model of society people really want. I have a hard time believing that all the bitcoin enthusiasts are die-hard objectivists. I feel like many people saw the "get rich quick" scheme and didn't stop to think about the consequences.
    - VMG 9y ago
      > Monetary transactions are already pretty well protected To borrow some progressive terminology: check your privilege. Also let's not forget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point https://wikileaks.org/MasterCard-breaks-ranks-in.html https://wikileaks.org/MasterCard-breaks-ranks-in.html Civil asset forfeiture etc.
- googletazer 9y ago
  >I want to be able to trust the government that I democratically elect and I want this government to be able to gather taxes and even control the currency to some extent. Well here is your mistake. Why would you ever trust a government, or anyone for that matter? Sure, we hope that people are good, but 99% of people operate based on an incentive structure. The incentives in bitcoin for the miners and the participants are well defined.
cr0sh 9y ago
> People who live in countries with regressive regimes where law enforcement can be legitimately dangerous? Depending on who you are, one could argue the United States is one such country. If it can apply to the US - it can likely apply everywhere.
- zimpenfish 9y ago
  I would definitely agree with that line of argument, especially in 2017.