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Interesting side thought, this whole debacle has made me see the real value of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies..

by Dig1t 5y ago

acdha 5y ago
You mean where your support for a controversial political movement would be irrevocably public? If this list had leaked Bitcoin addresses, the next thing you'd see would be a report of everything else those addresses had been used for.
- Dig1t 5y ago
  True, but its much harder to dox this number of people if all you have is a big list of Bitcoin addresses. It requires significantly more work, plus it's also harder to stop the disbursement of funds like what happened with the Canadian government freezing bank accounts and transactions with this campaign.
  - acdha 5y ago
    > True, but its much harder to dox this number of people if all you have is a big list of Bitcoin addresses. This is also true of any other mechanism: if this was just a list of credit card transaction IDs, it'd be hard to do much with it as well. The problem is when you combine those with other metadata and it seems highly unlikely that anyone would spontaneously stop collecting that information.
    - Dig1t 5y ago
      Sort of true, but also credit card numbers are useless without the PII metadata. If you're storing credit card info like this then you pretty much have to store the sensitive stuff that can be used to dox people alongside it. The metadata isn't a requirement in the Bitcoin case. In fact, the way that bitcoin works, you wouldn't even end up with a centralized list like this of all the donors to get leaked in the first place. Some interested journalist or activist would have to go and manually compile it by looking at all the transactions themselves.
      - acdha 5y ago
        Do you think they would not otherwise store names if they weren't accepting credit card donations? If they were using Bitcoin, I'd bet that the only difference might be the lack of a billing address — it seems exceedingly unlikely that the crowdsourcing site or people running the campaign weren't planning to be able to contact their supporters and in many cases they need that for accounting or tax purposes, too.
  - maccard 5y ago
    The equivalent of a list of bitcoin addresses would be a list of credit card numbers, which this is not. This is closer to a list of names on an exchange like coinbase than a list of wallet addresses.
- kobalsky 5y ago
  if I want to make an anonymous donation I can send BTC to any big player that consolidates outgoing transfers from their hot wallets and you won't have a chance in hell of knowing who sent it. of course you can't move millions or illegal monoey like that (you can't use it like a tumbler) because it would be traceable if coinbase or whoever get subpoenaed but you on this case you would be safe from persecution from supporting some political activism that gets ppl frothing in the mouth and want to make other ppl lose their jobs.
  - acdha 5y ago
    That's like saying you could give cash to someone else and then there won't be a link. We know that most people, even fairly committed users, do not have perfect opsec and cut corners for convenience. If you're proposing something for general use, you need to make your plans about what's safe for the median user rather than the 99th percentile.
ineedasername 5y ago
Bitcoin or other crypto would just be the payment mechanism, alongside any other option like CC, paypal, bank transfer, etc. The donation platform could still collect any other data as part of the user profile. Sure, they could choose not to collect or retain that data for crypto, but they could do the same with other payment mechanisms as well. Crypto wouldn't confer much more in the way of anonymity benefits above and beyond what a donation platform could provide right now if they wanted to.
- hammock 5y ago
  Who needs a donation platform?
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    It's a service that provides a convenient form of aggregation. It's not impossible to do things without one, but doing ad hoc peer-to-peer donations from a large number of donors to a large number of recipients in a very short amount of time is pretty difficult without some type of infrastructure to facilitate it. It doesn't have to be a general purpose donation platform, but whatever it is will have the same privacy factors I referenced already: independently of whether it accepts crypto, it will have to decide if/what user data to retain.
nitwit005 5y ago
I'm not at-all familiar with Canadian law, but receiving money from foreign donors for political activity is often illegal. These funding platforms would probably need you to disclose who you are even if you gave bitcoin.
- Dma54rhs 5y ago
  The movement has to brand it as human rights issue (which they possibly have) and the political activity problem flies out of the window.

Interesting side thought, this whole debacle has made me see the real value of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies..

by Dig1t 5y ago

Interesting side thought, this whole debacle has made me see the real value of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies..

You mean where your support for a controversial political movement would be irrevocably public? If this list had leaked Bitcoin addresses, the next thing you'd see would be a report of everything else those addresses had been used for.

Dig1t 5y ago
True, but its much harder to dox this number of people if all you have is a big list of Bitcoin addresses. It requires significantly more work, plus it's also harder to stop the disbursement of funds like what happened with the Canadian government freezing bank accounts and transactions with this campaign.
- acdha 5y ago
  > True, but its much harder to dox this number of people if all you have is a big list of Bitcoin addresses. This is also true of any other mechanism: if this was just a list of credit card transaction IDs, it'd be hard to do much with it as well. The problem is when you combine those with other metadata and it seems highly unlikely that anyone would spontaneously stop collecting that information.
  - Dig1t 5y ago
    Sort of true, but also credit card numbers are useless without the PII metadata. If you're storing credit card info like this then you pretty much have to store the sensitive stuff that can be used to dox people alongside it. The metadata isn't a requirement in the Bitcoin case. In fact, the way that bitcoin works, you wouldn't even end up with a centralized list like this of all the donors to get leaked in the first place. Some interested journalist or activist would have to go and manually compile it by looking at all the transactions themselves.
    - acdha 5y ago
      Do you think they would not otherwise store names if they weren't accepting credit card donations? If they were using Bitcoin, I'd bet that the only difference might be the lack of a billing address — it seems exceedingly unlikely that the crowdsourcing site or people running the campaign weren't planning to be able to contact their supporters and in many cases they need that for accounting or tax purposes, too.
- maccard 5y ago
  The equivalent of a list of bitcoin addresses would be a list of credit card numbers, which this is not. This is closer to a list of names on an exchange like coinbase than a list of wallet addresses.
kobalsky 5y ago
if I want to make an anonymous donation I can send BTC to any big player that consolidates outgoing transfers from their hot wallets and you won't have a chance in hell of knowing who sent it. of course you can't move millions or illegal monoey like that (you can't use it like a tumbler) because it would be traceable if coinbase or whoever get subpoenaed but you on this case you would be safe from persecution from supporting some political activism that gets ppl frothing in the mouth and want to make other ppl lose their jobs.
- acdha 5y ago
  That's like saying you could give cash to someone else and then there won't be a link. We know that most people, even fairly committed users, do not have perfect opsec and cut corners for convenience. If you're proposing something for general use, you need to make your plans about what's safe for the median user rather than the 99th percentile.

ineedasername 5y ago

Bitcoin or other crypto would just be the payment mechanism, alongside any other option like CC, paypal, bank transfer, etc. The donation platform could still collect any other data as part of the user profile. Sure, they could choose not to collect or retain that data for crypto, but they could do the same with other payment mechanisms as well. Crypto wouldn't confer much more in the way of anonymity benefits above and beyond what a donation platform could provide right now if they wanted to.

hammock 5y ago
Who needs a donation platform?
- ineedasername 5y ago
  It's a service that provides a convenient form of aggregation. It's not impossible to do things without one, but doing ad hoc peer-to-peer donations from a large number of donors to a large number of recipients in a very short amount of time is pretty difficult without some type of infrastructure to facilitate it. It doesn't have to be a general purpose donation platform, but whatever it is will have the same privacy factors I referenced already: independently of whether it accepts crypto, it will have to decide if/what user data to retain.

nitwit005 5y ago

I'm not at-all familiar with Canadian law, but receiving money from foreign donors for political activity is often illegal. These funding platforms would probably need you to disclose who you are even if you gave bitcoin.

Dma54rhs 5y ago
The movement has to brand it as human rights issue (which they possibly have) and the political activity problem flies out of the window.