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Potentially unpopular opinion: This is one of the reasons why we as a society can't afford to allow untraceable electronic money transactions. Imagine the comb

by tpmx 7y ago

Potentially unpopular opinion: This is one of the reasons why we as a society can't afford to allow untraceable electronic money transactions. Imagine the combination of perfectly untraceable money transactions with actual working low-cost swarms of facial recognition-based killbots/drones. That's what, maybe 5-7 years away from now? The risk here is that the cost of a hit could go down to very low costs, say between $1k to $10k per hit/murder. If it goes that low we're screwed as a society, especially if the transactions aren't traceable.

int_19h 7y ago
Thing is, it doesn't really matter what you "allow". There's no way to enforce it for these kinds of uses. A blanket ban can put it outside of purview of your average mildly curious common person for purposes like, say, buying recreational drugs. But if they have seriously decided that they want to murder someone, they'll find out how to make that payment - and you can't meaningfully trace that short of full online Panopticon (all connections wiretapped 24/7, all Internet access tied to secure real name ID). There's a lot more coming. 3D printers similarly enable access to stuff that a lot of people would like to get banned, such as firearms and accessories to them. For example, it is already possible to 3D-print a high-capacity Glock magazine completely from scratch (the only metal part is the spring, and even that is bent to shape out of a suitable steel wire using a 3D-printed jig). And it costs about $200 one-off for the printer, and <$1 per magazine thereafter. There are already laws that make doing this illegal in some locations, but again - how do you actually enforce them? Our societies will have to either go high-tech totalitarian, or learn to live with these possibilities. I hope it's going to be the latter; after all, past societies - before the growth of administrative state with its IDs, registries, accounting, and pervasive bureaucracy - already had to deal with a situation where it was very hard to track a determined criminal. But looking at the evolution of surveillance and police power laws in modern developed democracies and China, it's probably going to be the former.
- tpmx 7y ago
  My informed gut feeling is that legislation is surprisingly efficient. Your tangent on 3d-printing aside: If we decide to make cryptocurrencies illegal, I think that will solve like 80% of the problem. Given the tradeoffs involved, I think that's worth doing.

by tpmx 7y ago

int_19h 7y ago

Thing is, it doesn't really matter what you "allow". There's no way to enforce it for these kinds of uses. A blanket ban can put it outside of purview of your average mildly curious common person for purposes like, say, buying recreational drugs. But if they have seriously decided that they want to murder someone, they'll find out how to make that payment - and you can't meaningfully trace that short of full online Panopticon (all connections wiretapped 24/7, all Internet access tied to secure real name ID). There's a lot more coming. 3D printers similarly enable access to stuff that a lot of people would like to get banned, such as firearms and accessories to them. For example, it is already possible to 3D-print a high-capacity Glock magazine completely from scratch (the only metal part is the spring, and even that is bent to shape out of a suitable steel wire using a 3D-printed jig). And it costs about $200 one-off for the printer, and <$1 per magazine thereafter. There are already laws that make doing this illegal in some locations, but again - how do you actually enforce them? Our societies will have to either go high-tech totalitarian, or learn to live with these possibilities. I hope it's going to be the latter; after all, past societies - before the growth of administrative state with its IDs, registries, accounting, and pervasive bureaucracy - already had to deal with a situation where it was very hard to track a determined criminal. But looking at the evolution of surveillance and police power laws in modern developed democracies and China, it's probably going to be the former.

tpmx 7y ago
My informed gut feeling is that legislation is surprisingly efficient. Your tangent on 3d-printing aside: If we decide to make cryptocurrencies illegal, I think that will solve like 80% of the problem. Given the tradeoffs involved, I think that's worth doing.