3 ms·

"I'm in China, request denied."

knorker 8y ago
Sigh. 1) Sounds great! Hand over all bitcoin control to the Chinese jurisdiction. Problem solved, eh? 2) Hey CoinBase, Merchant X, etc… you are acting as a front to dealing in EU citizens PII, cease and desist with all that.
- fixermark 8y ago
  Yep. I don't know that the EU intended to create a perverse incentive to move cryptocoin experimentation out of the European jurisdiction, but here we are. Given how anti-authoritarian the userbase for most cryptocurrencies is, I wouldn't be surprised if this result is---while not intentional---certainly not something EU regulators would worry too much about.
  - knorker 8y ago
    To me this sounds like "why make murder illegal in the EU? What perverse incentive are they creating to move murder offshore to China?" You can't defend doing bad in the world by saying it's not yet banned everywhere. It's kinda defeatist. We can't allow women to drive because then Saudis will have less incentives to come here to spend their money.
    - fixermark 8y ago
      The thing is whether we assume the behavior in question is bad. I expect people in the EU still want to make murder illegal even if it "moves it to China"; they don't want it in their backyard. Did the people of the EU really not want cryptocurrency in their backyard? Maybe they didn't, and this is all working as intended. I'm not sure they intended this side-effect. "Right to be forgotten" may not be something one actually wants to apply to questions like "Where did the mafia get all this money?", even if we want to apply it to other spaces (which is why "follow the money" is so often a useful technique for piercing obfuscatory smokescreens in other data sets). (Personal bias disclosure: I'm also kind of expecting they're going to find the costs of the GDPR outweigh the benefits in general in the next five to ten years, but I might discover I'm mistaken).
      - knorker 8y ago
        I'd say the people of the EU don't want their PII all over the place (even if it's in China. Actually especially if it's in China). If you can make cryptocurrencies not have that then that'd be great. Bitcoin very much does not address this. As for questions like "Where did the mafia get all this money from" this is an argument against all cryptocurrencies, and for the financial regulation that is in place. Financial regulation exists because people want it, for the most part, and either cryptocurrencies should have to abide by them (which includes trackability and reversibility) or it does not (which means GDPR). I'd argue that no, there is pretty much nobody who wants cryptocurrencies, when they think about how yeah almost all the time financial regulation do benefit the individual. I'm not saying GDPR is perfect, or even necessarily a step in the right direction. But cryptocurrencies are definitely a step in the wrong direction, going what people want.

Sigh. 1) Sounds great! Hand over all bitcoin control to the Chinese jurisdiction. Problem solved, eh? 2) Hey CoinBase, Merchant X, etc… you are acting as a front to dealing in EU citizens PII, cease and desist with all that.

fixermark 8y ago
Yep. I don't know that the EU intended to create a perverse incentive to move cryptocoin experimentation out of the European jurisdiction, but here we are. Given how anti-authoritarian the userbase for most cryptocurrencies is, I wouldn't be surprised if this result is---while not intentional---certainly not something EU regulators would worry too much about.
- knorker 8y ago
  To me this sounds like "why make murder illegal in the EU? What perverse incentive are they creating to move murder offshore to China?" You can't defend doing bad in the world by saying it's not yet banned everywhere. It's kinda defeatist. We can't allow women to drive because then Saudis will have less incentives to come here to spend their money.
  - fixermark 8y ago
    The thing is whether we assume the behavior in question is bad. I expect people in the EU still want to make murder illegal even if it "moves it to China"; they don't want it in their backyard. Did the people of the EU really not want cryptocurrency in their backyard? Maybe they didn't, and this is all working as intended. I'm not sure they intended this side-effect. "Right to be forgotten" may not be something one actually wants to apply to questions like "Where did the mafia get all this money?", even if we want to apply it to other spaces (which is why "follow the money" is so often a useful technique for piercing obfuscatory smokescreens in other data sets). (Personal bias disclosure: I'm also kind of expecting they're going to find the costs of the GDPR outweigh the benefits in general in the next five to ten years, but I might discover I'm mistaken).
    - knorker 8y ago
      I'd say the people of the EU don't want their PII all over the place (even if it's in China. Actually especially if it's in China). If you can make cryptocurrencies not have that then that'd be great. Bitcoin very much does not address this. As for questions like "Where did the mafia get all this money from" this is an argument against all cryptocurrencies, and for the financial regulation that is in place. Financial regulation exists because people want it, for the most part, and either cryptocurrencies should have to abide by them (which includes trackability and reversibility) or it does not (which means GDPR). I'd argue that no, there is pretty much nobody who wants cryptocurrencies, when they think about how yeah almost all the time financial regulation do benefit the individual. I'm not saying GDPR is perfect, or even necessarily a step in the right direction. But cryptocurrencies are definitely a step in the wrong direction, going what people want.