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There are literally "central banks", and if banks don't want to give somebody a bank account, there is nothing these people can do about it. That is the result

• acdha 5y ago
  > There are literally "central banks", and if banks don't want to give somebody a bank account, there is nothing these people can do about it. That is the result of centralized control. You can not prevent somebody from having a Bitcoin address. Banks follow laws, which is also a hard requirement for cryptocurrency businesses. Very, very few people are banned from having an account and those bans are of categories which would also prevent a cryptocurrency exchange in that country from working with them. Note also that “centralized” is only true within a governmental boundary — a bank in Zimbabwe doesn't phone someone in the U.S. to ask whether they should allow someone to open an account, which is why I described it as decentralized because it lacks a central authority. It's true that someone can try to circumvent those measures, which is a practice dating bank centuries, but there's an important distinction between being able to make a transaction and being able to avoid punishment for doing so. Just as most censorship happens because someone is afraid of the potential consequences for speech rather than prior approval of all communications, it's both possible and a natural extension of existing practice to start demanding that people in your jurisdiction disallow any transactions linked to a particular address or to punish people for accepting a payment after it's linked to a criminal activity. You'll never get that down to zero but cryptocurrencies make it a lot easier to block than real cash payments. This is also the problem with anonymization schemes: governments don't say “he used Monero, guess we have to give up on law enforcement” but rather “Monero does not comply with our financial laws, any business or person caught accepting it will be fined and risk jail time”. Bitcoin laundering schemes are unproven at scale from a powerful adversary but also simply using a tumbler is risky because you're publishing a durable record of using a service designed to evade legal controls — if that's ever linked back to you, you've given the police a signed confession that you knew what you were doing was illegal. Legitimate users aren't going to pay a premium to take on that risk — especially since it would open them to charges of collusion on whatever anyone else using that service was doing — and that removes legal traffic volume, making it easier for analysis and blocking.
  • kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
    "Banks follow laws, which is also a hard requirement for cryptocurrency businesses" Laws are not always just, and not everybody who is prosecuted by some government is a criminal. Governments can seize bank accounts. You can be labeled a nazi for nothing these days, and then businesses (including banks) who do business with you will receive threats and shitstorms to make them stop doing business with you. It can happen quicker than you think. Maybe you are lucky that you live a private live and never dissent with anything. By "nothing" I mean literally nothing - my own Twitter account for example was shut down by a rampant bot that was triggered by mere keywords. Even on HN there are frequent stories about Google accounts and PayPal accounts being locked. "governments don't say “he used Monero, guess we have to give up on law enforcement” but rather “Monero does not comply with our financial laws, any business or person caught accepting it will be fined and risk jail time”" Sure, I worry about that kind of issue a lot, when I think about how to enable free speech in unfree countries. Should dissidents in authoritarian regimes just give up, and not use Encryption or Tor? It certainly seems dangerous, but what is the alternative? Also I suppose you could try using Monero without anybody knowing that you used it. In any case, if the laws in your country become unbearable, you can memorize your crypto seeds and try to flee the country.
    • acdha 5y ago
      > Laws are not always just, and not everybody who is prosecuted by some government is a criminal. Governments can seize bank accounts. Yes, but that doesn't change the fact that there isn't a magical technological fix for that problem. Wanting something to be useful for dissidents doesn't make it so and it's irresponsible to tell them otherwise just because adoption would be personally profitable for you. > You can be labeled a nazi for nothing these days Do you have citations on “nothing”? The examples I've seen are all of people who were doing things most people find objectionable and they didn't get a blanket ban on banking or being online but rather a specific company chose not to associate with them. Even actual Nazis like Stormfront don't seem to stay offline for that long. > Should dissidents in authoritarian regimes just give up, and not use Encryption or Tor? It certainly seems dangerous, but what is the alternative? Also I suppose you could try using Monero without anybody knowing that you used it. Think about what trying Monero would mean: you'd have to be able to use a search engine to find a client, download it without triggering monitoring, hope that it's not actually a trojan left by the secret police, hope that it doesn't make identifying network traffic (always-on blockchain networks are easy to profile that way), figure out how to convert local currency into Monero and vice versa, etc. — and either do so perfectly forever or very carefully purge your history without leaving a trace. It seems a lot less risky to avoid things with massive electronic footprints and focus on using cash and offline communications as much as possible, but really the key part is not overpromising. When sales people go around saying things which are not true about cryptocurrency, they're giving advice which is actively unsafe to follow — it'd be much better not to say anything at all rather than give a false sense of security.