4 ms·

The core thinking behind the argument in this article is perhaps this: This is my basic argument: blockchain does nothing to solve any existing problem with fi

The core thinking behind the argument in this article is perhaps this: This is my basic argument: blockchain does nothing to solve any existing problem with financial (or other) systems. Those problems are inherently economic and political, and have nothing to do with technology. And, more importantly, technology can’t solve economic and political problems. It's the same issue with things like personal data protection and mass surveillance - everyone who claimed this could be solved by technology like Tor and onion routing has been proven wrong, and it's eminently clear that only reform of government policies, i.e. legal policy changes like enforceable data privacy laws, offers any real solution.

ziddoap 4y ago
>everyone who claimed this could be solved by technology like Tor and onion routing has been proven wrong, Can you expand on this? Outside of theoretical attacks only possible by the largest nation state actors and attacks that rely on something other than Tor (e.g. bad opsec, enabling JS, etc.), are you saying Tor has been broken? Is there a paper?
- lvass 4y ago
  Not sure what OP meant, but Tor is mostly broken right now for anything on clearnet, it's either practically or outright unusable.
  - ziddoap 4y ago
    Not being practical is much different than what the OP seems to be claiming; that onion routing itself is broken in terms of security/privacy.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  I'd read "Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex", by Yasha Levine, for a discussion of why Tor/Onion has relatively little value for private communications, unless it's used in a highly specific manner - and even then, one end of the communication is inevitably going to be known to metadata trackers at the very least. It's also highly probable that most or all Tor nodes on the Internet are backdoored by one intelligence agency or another at this point, meaning they can reconstruct the hops pretty easily. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34220713-surveillance-valley https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34220713-surveillance-va...
  - ziddoap 4y ago
    It's unfortunate, I thought you would have proof, or at least a technical paper, since you said "proven wrong". I was excited to dive into something more technical than the typical hand-waves to 'probable' backdoors and intelligence agencies.
rvz 4y ago
The same tech bros have already ignored the 'free software' arguments made by the FSF and just moved on to implement their surveillance capitalist tools in their products; a telling that the move to stop and get rid of all non-free software has been a complete failure. They continue to scream open-source as if it helps everyone that they can be trusted, but it is only by talk or if the tool, company is shutdown; and everything else is closed-source and not free software. This is why the FSF has failed to stopping all of it as it's co-existing with closed-source software. Now what we are seeing here is the same tech bros are now trying to stop all cryptocurrencies, blockchains and their projects which i'm afraid that they will end up being very disappointed just like the FSF was with stopping all non-free software. And no, the crypto maxis thinking that it will takeover the current system or all crypto projects will succeed will also be very disappointed with that expectation.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

ziddoap 4y ago

>everyone who claimed this could be solved by technology like Tor and onion routing has been proven wrong, Can you expand on this? Outside of theoretical attacks only possible by the largest nation state actors and attacks that rely on something other than Tor (e.g. bad opsec, enabling JS, etc.), are you saying Tor has been broken? Is there a paper?

lvass 4y ago
Not sure what OP meant, but Tor is mostly broken right now for anything on clearnet, it's either practically or outright unusable.
- ziddoap 4y ago
  Not being practical is much different than what the OP seems to be claiming; that onion routing itself is broken in terms of security/privacy.
photochemsyn 4y ago
I'd read "Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex", by Yasha Levine, for a discussion of why Tor/Onion has relatively little value for private communications, unless it's used in a highly specific manner - and even then, one end of the communication is inevitably going to be known to metadata trackers at the very least. It's also highly probable that most or all Tor nodes on the Internet are backdoored by one intelligence agency or another at this point, meaning they can reconstruct the hops pretty easily. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34220713-surveillance-valley https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34220713-surveillance-va...
- ziddoap 4y ago
  It's unfortunate, I thought you would have proof, or at least a technical paper, since you said "proven wrong". I was excited to dive into something more technical than the typical hand-waves to 'probable' backdoors and intelligence agencies.

rvz 4y ago

The same tech bros have already ignored the 'free software' arguments made by the FSF and just moved on to implement their surveillance capitalist tools in their products; a telling that the move to stop and get rid of all non-free software has been a complete failure. They continue to scream open-source as if it helps everyone that they can be trusted, but it is only by talk or if the tool, company is shutdown; and everything else is closed-source and not free software. This is why the FSF has failed to stopping all of it as it's co-existing with closed-source software. Now what we are seeing here is the same tech bros are now trying to stop all cryptocurrencies, blockchains and their projects which i'm afraid that they will end up being very disappointed just like the FSF was with stopping all non-free software. And no, the crypto maxis thinking that it will takeover the current system or all crypto projects will succeed will also be very disappointed with that expectation.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]