5 ms·

Money laundering, ransoms and fraud are pretty much the only actual use cases other than speculation— which is essentially just people extracting profits from c

Money laundering, ransoms and fraud are pretty much the only actual use cases other than speculation— which is essentially just people extracting profits from criminals in a way that makes them feel distanced from engaging in a criminal conspiracy.

DuskStar 7y ago
Don't forget illegal drugs and kiddie porn!
stale2002 7y ago
No, there is lots of financial censorship being done against people have have broken zero laws. For example, at one point, banks blocked donations to WikiLeaks, even though they were not charged with any crimes. Financial censorship, done arbitrarily, to people who have not even been accused of a crime, is the most common form of financial censorship.
- wahern 7y ago
  > Financial censorship, done arbitrarily, to people who have not even been accused of a crime, is the most common form of financial censorship. Source? I find that hard to believe considering the prevalence of fraud. In fact, dealing with fraud is one of the primary reasons transactional banking exists in the first place. Notes and other negotiable instruments were in widespread use even when there existed universal gold- or silver-denominated currencies that made direct payments nominally simple and convenient.
  - stale2002 7y ago
    Are you not aware about things like how anything related to sexual content will have their accounts closed? I was talking about things like this, and other related situations.
    - wahern 7y ago
      The claim as I read it was that most financial censorship befalls innocent accountholders. But while there are countless examples we can find online about people wrongly censored or accused, actual fraudsters don't go complaining on Twitter. Fraud is a huge problem. The usual reason for why we can't have nice things--a high-trust civil society--is because of bad people. Because no system is perfect, our transactional and legal systems have to balance administrative efficiency and fairness. The more you try to be fair, i.e. improve your accuracy (fewer false positives), the higher your costs (less efficacy at stopping bad guys and/or more resources need to be expended); the more you aim for administrative efficiency (lower costs but better at stopping bad guys) the more fairness will tend to suffer (more false positives). Now, it's entirely possible that there are more accounts wrongly closed than closed for actual fraud. Personally I would doubt it, but would still like to see data. That notwithstanding, it would still be wrong to characterize such a system as arbitrary simply because of that skewed result; it could just be a manifestation of a high efficiency but low fairness enforcement mechanism. Maybe it is arbitrary, but I doubt it. I had never heard the phrase "financial censorship" before. Perhaps a better term here would be financial blacklisting. The EFF's page, https://www.eff.org/issues/financial-censorship https://www.eff.org/issues/financial-censorship, conflates a ton of individual issues in a way that I don't think is constructive. Everybody trying to shoehorn their issues into the free speech debate tends to obfuscate problems and potential solutions; and I suspect it will one day backfire, harming traditional freedom of speech in the process. Before I even read the EFF's issue page--and definitely so, afterwards--the very phrase "financial censorship" brought to mind Citizens United v. FEC. Keep going down that road and there's no limit--I could just as well characterize murder laws as violating my free speech.[1] For the record, I protested in front of the Federal Building in San Francisco when Dmitri Sklyarov was arrested way back when. I do take these issues seriously. [1] In fact, IIRC not long after Citizens United the very same conservative justices upheld the criminal convictions of people who gave to a charity and advocacy organization implicated in funding terrorist organizations. The juxtaposition of the two decisions seemed to me to evidence the inconsistency and hypocrisy of the conservative's free speech crusade; such inconsistency and hypocrisy is inevitable once you start to characterize everything that's incident to speech as speech itself.
      - 7y ago
ShorsHammer 7y ago
Are all laws just and all criminals bad people? Being gay was illegal in most of the western world up until a few decades ago. Alan Turing was only pardoned decades after his death, the way that man was treated was utterly horrendous despite playing a pivotal part in defining the 20th century and saving millions of lives on both sides. Then again he did break the "law" and was chemically castrated for it. Would you help Alan Turing avoid punishment given the chance? Just a hypothetical to ponder before blindly accepting the status-quo.
- wpietri 7y ago
  Oooh, quite the straw man you've constructed. But everybody already knows that laws aren't perfect. If you want to use the "being gay was illegal" line of argument, you have to demonstrate that either a) gay people are using Bitcoin to be gay in places where being gay currently is illegal, or b) you have to make a case that things like "money laundering, ransoms and fraud" are mistakenly illegal, and in a few decades we'll all realize how perfectly normal and acceptable they are.
  - ShorsHammer 7y ago
    > But everybody already knows that laws aren't perfect. Do they really? I'd argue the complete opposite and indeed my main reasoning for writing the original comment. The biggest destinations on Earth for money laundering all hypocritically accept the money without shame, all Western countries with strong legal systems, so why is this occurring? Many of them proudly proclaim how much they are against money laundering. Do you know how complicit those governments are at virtually all levels happily accepting the illegal money that clearly is flowing into their suburb/state/nations? The rest of the world begs these places to please stem the tide of illegal funds or at the very least investigate the people spending this cash and yet nothing happens. Corrupt Russian real estate purchases in London is basically a joke for locals now. A common joke. Are Londoners not complicit in this? Or is there enough separation to wipe their hands clean? Very eager to hear your defense given the site we are on and the decent chance you have personally benefited from your own governments intentional willingness to ignore the huge amounts of corrupt, illegal money flowing into the west in the last few decades. Laundering into the West funds entire industries built around it and the blatant complicity from regulators/homeowners is on show for all to see. You need more identification to get a library card than buy a house here. Does that not strike you as strange? My own example: the biggest real estate purchase in Australia happened years ago, a massive mansion in Sydney, it was on the front of most newspapers, including the biggest newspaper read by millions. We only just discovered it was illegal despite many suggesting it at the time. The property has now been confiscated by the government years later. The owner simply fell foul of the government rather than any real insistence on justice or some sort of semblance about money laundering, it simply doesn't register for most. Sydney, Vancouver and London are all singled out as the main destinations on Earth for clearly illegal money, The Australian government has sat on proposals for basic laws to ascertain ownership of the money for well over a decade at the behest of the real estate industry to not investigate this stuff. Hopefully I had a decent crack at one of your points there. But that said you didn't answer my "strawman", so here's the question again: > Given the chance would you personally help Alan Turing avoid punishment for the law he broke that resulted in his chemical castration and ultimate death? Simple yes or no suffices here. Not all laws are good, not all criminals are bad people. These things are gray at the best of times.
CryptoPunk 7y ago
Yeah why else would someone need financial privacy. You won't mind giving up your privacy if you have nothing to hide.

DuskStar 7y ago

Don't forget illegal drugs and kiddie porn!

stale2002 7y ago

No, there is lots of financial censorship being done against people have have broken zero laws. For example, at one point, banks blocked donations to WikiLeaks, even though they were not charged with any crimes. Financial censorship, done arbitrarily, to people who have not even been accused of a crime, is the most common form of financial censorship.

wahern 7y ago
> Financial censorship, done arbitrarily, to people who have not even been accused of a crime, is the most common form of financial censorship. Source? I find that hard to believe considering the prevalence of fraud. In fact, dealing with fraud is one of the primary reasons transactional banking exists in the first place. Notes and other negotiable instruments were in widespread use even when there existed universal gold- or silver-denominated currencies that made direct payments nominally simple and convenient.
- stale2002 7y ago
  Are you not aware about things like how anything related to sexual content will have their accounts closed? I was talking about things like this, and other related situations.
  - wahern 7y ago
    The claim as I read it was that most financial censorship befalls innocent accountholders. But while there are countless examples we can find online about people wrongly censored or accused, actual fraudsters don't go complaining on Twitter. Fraud is a huge problem. The usual reason for why we can't have nice things--a high-trust civil society--is because of bad people. Because no system is perfect, our transactional and legal systems have to balance administrative efficiency and fairness. The more you try to be fair, i.e. improve your accuracy (fewer false positives), the higher your costs (less efficacy at stopping bad guys and/or more resources need to be expended); the more you aim for administrative efficiency (lower costs but better at stopping bad guys) the more fairness will tend to suffer (more false positives). Now, it's entirely possible that there are more accounts wrongly closed than closed for actual fraud. Personally I would doubt it, but would still like to see data. That notwithstanding, it would still be wrong to characterize such a system as arbitrary simply because of that skewed result; it could just be a manifestation of a high efficiency but low fairness enforcement mechanism. Maybe it is arbitrary, but I doubt it. I had never heard the phrase "financial censorship" before. Perhaps a better term here would be financial blacklisting. The EFF's page, https://www.eff.org/issues/financial-censorship https://www.eff.org/issues/financial-censorship, conflates a ton of individual issues in a way that I don't think is constructive. Everybody trying to shoehorn their issues into the free speech debate tends to obfuscate problems and potential solutions; and I suspect it will one day backfire, harming traditional freedom of speech in the process. Before I even read the EFF's issue page--and definitely so, afterwards--the very phrase "financial censorship" brought to mind Citizens United v. FEC. Keep going down that road and there's no limit--I could just as well characterize murder laws as violating my free speech.[1] For the record, I protested in front of the Federal Building in San Francisco when Dmitri Sklyarov was arrested way back when. I do take these issues seriously. [1] In fact, IIRC not long after Citizens United the very same conservative justices upheld the criminal convictions of people who gave to a charity and advocacy organization implicated in funding terrorist organizations. The juxtaposition of the two decisions seemed to me to evidence the inconsistency and hypocrisy of the conservative's free speech crusade; such inconsistency and hypocrisy is inevitable once you start to characterize everything that's incident to speech as speech itself.
    - 7y ago

ShorsHammer 7y ago

Are all laws just and all criminals bad people? Being gay was illegal in most of the western world up until a few decades ago. Alan Turing was only pardoned decades after his death, the way that man was treated was utterly horrendous despite playing a pivotal part in defining the 20th century and saving millions of lives on both sides. Then again he did break the "law" and was chemically castrated for it. Would you help Alan Turing avoid punishment given the chance? Just a hypothetical to ponder before blindly accepting the status-quo.

wpietri 7y ago
Oooh, quite the straw man you've constructed. But everybody already knows that laws aren't perfect. If you want to use the "being gay was illegal" line of argument, you have to demonstrate that either a) gay people are using Bitcoin to be gay in places where being gay currently is illegal, or b) you have to make a case that things like "money laundering, ransoms and fraud" are mistakenly illegal, and in a few decades we'll all realize how perfectly normal and acceptable they are.
- ShorsHammer 7y ago
  > But everybody already knows that laws aren't perfect. Do they really? I'd argue the complete opposite and indeed my main reasoning for writing the original comment. The biggest destinations on Earth for money laundering all hypocritically accept the money without shame, all Western countries with strong legal systems, so why is this occurring? Many of them proudly proclaim how much they are against money laundering. Do you know how complicit those governments are at virtually all levels happily accepting the illegal money that clearly is flowing into their suburb/state/nations? The rest of the world begs these places to please stem the tide of illegal funds or at the very least investigate the people spending this cash and yet nothing happens. Corrupt Russian real estate purchases in London is basically a joke for locals now. A common joke. Are Londoners not complicit in this? Or is there enough separation to wipe their hands clean? Very eager to hear your defense given the site we are on and the decent chance you have personally benefited from your own governments intentional willingness to ignore the huge amounts of corrupt, illegal money flowing into the west in the last few decades. Laundering into the West funds entire industries built around it and the blatant complicity from regulators/homeowners is on show for all to see. You need more identification to get a library card than buy a house here. Does that not strike you as strange? My own example: the biggest real estate purchase in Australia happened years ago, a massive mansion in Sydney, it was on the front of most newspapers, including the biggest newspaper read by millions. We only just discovered it was illegal despite many suggesting it at the time. The property has now been confiscated by the government years later. The owner simply fell foul of the government rather than any real insistence on justice or some sort of semblance about money laundering, it simply doesn't register for most. Sydney, Vancouver and London are all singled out as the main destinations on Earth for clearly illegal money, The Australian government has sat on proposals for basic laws to ascertain ownership of the money for well over a decade at the behest of the real estate industry to not investigate this stuff. Hopefully I had a decent crack at one of your points there. But that said you didn't answer my "strawman", so here's the question again: > Given the chance would you personally help Alan Turing avoid punishment for the law he broke that resulted in his chemical castration and ultimate death? Simple yes or no suffices here. Not all laws are good, not all criminals are bad people. These things are gray at the best of times.

CryptoPunk 7y ago

Yeah why else would someone need financial privacy. You won't mind giving up your privacy if you have nothing to hide.