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"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 gover

"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.
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  "Yes, but that doesn't change the fact that there isn't a magical technological fix for that problem." Well there kind of is, at least Bitcoin is better than other things in some regards. "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." I don't really keep score. An example that comes to mind is JK Rowling being disinvited from the anniversary celebration of the Harry Potter movies for saying "Transwomen are not women". Or Gina Carano being fired from the Mandalorian for warning about singling out people using a picture of the Holocaust. It's not a blanket ban, but the proponents of cancel culture are generally pushing for blanket bans. They will write letters to employers and business partners (including banks) of people they want to destroy and ask them to fire/stop doing business with them. Are you sure your employer and bank will double check such claims before firing you? (Edit: here is an example of a bank cancelling the account of a feminist organisation for saying the same thing as JK Rowling - https://www.rebelnews.com/dutch_banking_service_terminates_feminist_org_account_after_trans_activist_complaints https://www.rebelnews.com/dutch_banking_service_terminates_f... ) An example for banks messing up stuff, PayPal freezing Wikileaks bank account: https://www.wired.com/2010/12/paypal-wikileaks/ https://www.wired.com/2010/12/paypal-wikileaks/ Where does Stormfront hosts their servers? Parler took a long time to get back online, but maybe they wanted to overhaul their tech first. And more and more frequently it will just be bots that brand you a nazi. As I said, I was banned from Twitter by a bot misinterpreting some keywords ("hopefully" and "die" appearing in the same tweet - at least that is the only explanation I can find, as they disallow things like "I hope you die", but that was not the content of my tweet). And the beauty of banning people from social media is that nobody can check why it happened anymore, so people will just assume that "there must have been a reason". "Think about what trying Monero would mean" As I said, life under authoritarian regimes won't be easy either way. I don't defend all the sales people saying stuff about crypto coins. Some of it is true, some of it is bullshit. Just because some people tell nonsense, doesn't make all of it wrong.

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.

kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
"Yes, but that doesn't change the fact that there isn't a magical technological fix for that problem." Well there kind of is, at least Bitcoin is better than other things in some regards. "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." I don't really keep score. An example that comes to mind is JK Rowling being disinvited from the anniversary celebration of the Harry Potter movies for saying "Transwomen are not women". Or Gina Carano being fired from the Mandalorian for warning about singling out people using a picture of the Holocaust. It's not a blanket ban, but the proponents of cancel culture are generally pushing for blanket bans. They will write letters to employers and business partners (including banks) of people they want to destroy and ask them to fire/stop doing business with them. Are you sure your employer and bank will double check such claims before firing you? (Edit: here is an example of a bank cancelling the account of a feminist organisation for saying the same thing as JK Rowling - https://www.rebelnews.com/dutch_banking_service_terminates_feminist_org_account_after_trans_activist_complaints https://www.rebelnews.com/dutch_banking_service_terminates_f... ) An example for banks messing up stuff, PayPal freezing Wikileaks bank account: https://www.wired.com/2010/12/paypal-wikileaks/ https://www.wired.com/2010/12/paypal-wikileaks/ Where does Stormfront hosts their servers? Parler took a long time to get back online, but maybe they wanted to overhaul their tech first. And more and more frequently it will just be bots that brand you a nazi. As I said, I was banned from Twitter by a bot misinterpreting some keywords ("hopefully" and "die" appearing in the same tweet - at least that is the only explanation I can find, as they disallow things like "I hope you die", but that was not the content of my tweet). And the beauty of banning people from social media is that nobody can check why it happened anymore, so people will just assume that "there must have been a reason". "Think about what trying Monero would mean" As I said, life under authoritarian regimes won't be easy either way. I don't defend all the sales people saying stuff about crypto coins. Some of it is true, some of it is bullshit. Just because some people tell nonsense, doesn't make all of it wrong.