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The letter has some good and bad. Good because it advocates for more regulation and consumer protection, and points out some obvious concerns with crypto like

The letter has some good and bad. Good because it advocates for more regulation and consumer protection, and points out some obvious concerns with crypto like energy expenditure in proof of work. Bad because the letter misrepresents the technology and paints privacy as a purely criminal behavior, and suggests the entire technology sector is useless. > Similarly, most public blockchain-based financial products are a disaster for financial privacy; the exceptions are a handful of emerging privacy-focused blockchain finance alternatives, and these are a gift to money-launderers. Imagine this argument being applied to End-to-End Encryption. "Most chat messaging apps are a disaster for user privacy; except the ones that are privacy-focused and use E2EE, and those are a gift to terrorists and criminals." There's lots of privacy preserving crypto tech: Monero, ZCash, TornadoCash, and soon Aztec. zk-SNARK and zk-STARK are recent advances here that dramatically change the future landscape. You can also use CEX as a mixer to provide soft anonymity, allowing regulators and IRS to track your finances, without revealing your accounts to the whole world. > Blockchain technology cannot, and will not, have transaction reversal mechanisms because they are antithetical to its base design. This is false. There is a lot of blockchain technology that has transaction reversal mechanisms. USDC and other centralized stablecoins can freeze and mint tokens. Optimistic rollups are built around the very design of transaction reversal. Many NFT projects give the contract owner ability to mint, burn, change metadata, and so on. The original DAO itself was drained and funds reverted by a hard fork, and yet ETH and ETC still continue to exist just fine. > By its very design, blockchain technology, specifically so-called "public blockchains", are poorly suited for just about every purpose currently touted as a present or potential source of public benefit. Bah! Perhaps some of the authors would like to shill their own private blockchain companies (Adjoint Inc).

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> imagine this argument being applied to End-to-End Encryption There's a stark line between encrypted communication and encrypted money. If someone can't see the difference between those bits they shouldn't be handling other peoples' money.
- f38zf5vdt 4y ago
  Unless you are in the United States and your money is going to a super PAC, union, or other association. Then your transmission of funds is free speech and covered by the first amendment. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > your transmission of funds is free speech and covered by the first amendment Political spending has been equated with political speech by the Supreme Court. That doesn't mean the government can't e.g. freeze a criminal's assets.
  - lern_too_spel 4y ago
    Super PACs have to report how they spend their money and where they got it from. As long as they don't communicate with a campaign, how they spend it is free speech. This is very different from not reporting where you spend your money or where you got it from.
- tatertots1234 4y ago
  This line is drawn by society. At one point we did not see the need for E2EE or peer-to-peer file sharing, and now some of us do. At one point we did not see the need for privacy preserving digital currencies and peer-to-peer transactional systems, and now some of us do.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > we did not see the need for privacy preserving digital currencies and peer-to-peer transactional systems, and now some of us do Fair enough. I think it's time for those who do to make their case. We've run the experiment. The downsides are documented and tangible. There should be a way to thread the needle whereby the downsides can be limited without strangling all of the upside.
    - 4y ago
thawaya3113 4y ago
E2E privacy has a lot of uses. Crypto has none. It’s just an enabler and hotbed of a variety of scams. Any use it may have can only possibly reveal itself after the crypto asset bubble/scams die. So even if you’re a crypto enthusiast, you should be in favor of this whole disastrous phase for crypto ending so you can try again and actually make it useful this time. Since crypto has become a completely speculation driven asset it’s become useless for anything other than buying and stuffing under the mattress. Any value crypto may add to the world will only happen once that dynamic is eliminated.
- tatertots1234 4y ago
  Your post is so perfectly in line with the blanket dismissal and absolutist attitude of the letter that you could pass as one of the authors. Crypto has its uses. Crypto also has lots of scams. Crypto bubble popping will not destroy the scams; these are endemic to any semi decentralized system, see email spam and robocalls. We can do much more to regulate, moderate, and improve the tech for better consumer protection and usability, which is one thing the letter calls for.
  - hnthrow1010 4y ago
    >Crypto has its uses. No, this is wrong. By itself it has no uses besides speculative gambling. The technology fundamentally doesn't enable anything else, if you take that out it's just a really niche and inefficient distributed database. You may be suggesting that some companies have been able to build useful things on top of a blockchain. That might be true but out of all the examples you gave, they're useful in spite of cryptocurrency, not because of it. The exercise for crypto builders now becomes how to separate the useful parts from the ponzi tokens and build just those.
    - tatertots1234 4y ago
      > By itself it has no uses besides speculative gambling. And the earth is flat, and I refuse to accept any evidence to the contrary. A simple example of crypto being useful is as a timestamped, censorship-resistant and tamper-proof ledger of cryptographically signed messages. That is one use case for it besides gambling, ergo your statement is easily refuted. I presume you will move the goalposts, though.
thomzane 4y ago
Climate emissions are only mentioned in a brief side-note. Makes me wonder what their motivation is. Sounds like the writer was a crypto investor, got scammed out of their money, got mad that they could not reverse the payment, and are now against the entire tech stack.
dan-robertson 4y ago
I think the chat analogy is twice broken. Firstly, the equivalents are something like: Bitcoin <-> some chat system where anyone can see all the messages but not necessarily who sent them Regular banking <-> private chatting but the government, those in chats, and the chat service provider can get detailed access to logs. A bit like email but with more government access. Privacy coins <-> a bit like E2E but maybe chat participants don’t know whom they are chatting to. (I’m not super sure on the details). So I think the first half of your analogy is pretty broken and there are middle grounds (eg government being able to subpoena chat records from companies) in the chat space. The second issue is that I don’t really buy the analogy between private speech and money. Some people have many orders of magnitude more money than others but that isn’t really the case with private speech (obviously some people may have much more reach when speaking publicly, but this doesn’t go through E2E encryption; attempting to maintain large conspiracies is a social challenge rather than a technical challenge of overcoming group size limits on your favourite messenger). So in some sense the benefits of private chat are reasonably fairly shared across people whereas the benefits of private money disproportionately go to the people with much more money.
- tatertots1234 4y ago
  The idea of E2EE in chat is that the chat operator does not have access to the data, and so even the government cannot request this data (and build surveillance mechanisms around it). I don’t agree with your other point. Whether somebody spends $1 or $1000 on an abortion in the US, they deserve the same degree of privacy, or at least the option to achieve privacy. Replace this scenario with any other that might like to take advantage of E2EE, like a dissident or political activist.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

> imagine this argument being applied to End-to-End Encryption There's a stark line between encrypted communication and encrypted money. If someone can't see the difference between those bits they shouldn't be handling other peoples' money.

f38zf5vdt 4y ago
Unless you are in the United States and your money is going to a super PAC, union, or other association. Then your transmission of funds is free speech and covered by the first amendment. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > your transmission of funds is free speech and covered by the first amendment Political spending has been equated with political speech by the Supreme Court. That doesn't mean the government can't e.g. freeze a criminal's assets.
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  Super PACs have to report how they spend their money and where they got it from. As long as they don't communicate with a campaign, how they spend it is free speech. This is very different from not reporting where you spend your money or where you got it from.
tatertots1234 4y ago
This line is drawn by society. At one point we did not see the need for E2EE or peer-to-peer file sharing, and now some of us do. At one point we did not see the need for privacy preserving digital currencies and peer-to-peer transactional systems, and now some of us do.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > we did not see the need for privacy preserving digital currencies and peer-to-peer transactional systems, and now some of us do Fair enough. I think it's time for those who do to make their case. We've run the experiment. The downsides are documented and tangible. There should be a way to thread the needle whereby the downsides can be limited without strangling all of the upside.
  - 4y ago

thawaya3113 4y ago

E2E privacy has a lot of uses. Crypto has none. It’s just an enabler and hotbed of a variety of scams. Any use it may have can only possibly reveal itself after the crypto asset bubble/scams die. So even if you’re a crypto enthusiast, you should be in favor of this whole disastrous phase for crypto ending so you can try again and actually make it useful this time. Since crypto has become a completely speculation driven asset it’s become useless for anything other than buying and stuffing under the mattress. Any value crypto may add to the world will only happen once that dynamic is eliminated.

tatertots1234 4y ago
Your post is so perfectly in line with the blanket dismissal and absolutist attitude of the letter that you could pass as one of the authors. Crypto has its uses. Crypto also has lots of scams. Crypto bubble popping will not destroy the scams; these are endemic to any semi decentralized system, see email spam and robocalls. We can do much more to regulate, moderate, and improve the tech for better consumer protection and usability, which is one thing the letter calls for.
- hnthrow1010 4y ago
  >Crypto has its uses. No, this is wrong. By itself it has no uses besides speculative gambling. The technology fundamentally doesn't enable anything else, if you take that out it's just a really niche and inefficient distributed database. You may be suggesting that some companies have been able to build useful things on top of a blockchain. That might be true but out of all the examples you gave, they're useful in spite of cryptocurrency, not because of it. The exercise for crypto builders now becomes how to separate the useful parts from the ponzi tokens and build just those.
  - tatertots1234 4y ago
    > By itself it has no uses besides speculative gambling. And the earth is flat, and I refuse to accept any evidence to the contrary. A simple example of crypto being useful is as a timestamped, censorship-resistant and tamper-proof ledger of cryptographically signed messages. That is one use case for it besides gambling, ergo your statement is easily refuted. I presume you will move the goalposts, though.

thomzane 4y ago

Climate emissions are only mentioned in a brief side-note. Makes me wonder what their motivation is. Sounds like the writer was a crypto investor, got scammed out of their money, got mad that they could not reverse the payment, and are now against the entire tech stack.

dan-robertson 4y ago

I think the chat analogy is twice broken. Firstly, the equivalents are something like: Bitcoin <-> some chat system where anyone can see all the messages but not necessarily who sent them Regular banking <-> private chatting but the government, those in chats, and the chat service provider can get detailed access to logs. A bit like email but with more government access. Privacy coins <-> a bit like E2E but maybe chat participants don’t know whom they are chatting to. (I’m not super sure on the details). So I think the first half of your analogy is pretty broken and there are middle grounds (eg government being able to subpoena chat records from companies) in the chat space. The second issue is that I don’t really buy the analogy between private speech and money. Some people have many orders of magnitude more money than others but that isn’t really the case with private speech (obviously some people may have much more reach when speaking publicly, but this doesn’t go through E2E encryption; attempting to maintain large conspiracies is a social challenge rather than a technical challenge of overcoming group size limits on your favourite messenger). So in some sense the benefits of private chat are reasonably fairly shared across people whereas the benefits of private money disproportionately go to the people with much more money.

tatertots1234 4y ago
The idea of E2EE in chat is that the chat operator does not have access to the data, and so even the government cannot request this data (and build surveillance mechanisms around it). I don’t agree with your other point. Whether somebody spends $1 or $1000 on an abortion in the US, they deserve the same degree of privacy, or at least the option to achieve privacy. Replace this scenario with any other that might like to take advantage of E2EE, like a dissident or political activist.