10 ms·

>Let’s walk through a couple theoretical scenarios where a subset of malicious validators wants to censor transactions, say those originating in FATF-blackliste

>Let’s walk through a couple theoretical scenarios where a subset of malicious validators wants to censor transactions, say those originating in FATF-blacklisted countries. Hang on a second. Just to be clear about this example, this example is walking through how Ethereum has been designed specifically to allow North Korea to transact Ethereum, and more than that, prevent anyone who dissents. Like, I mean ok, I get the ideological position in theory of saying "Hey, we're going to design this network so that you can't prevent any transactions." But it's quite different to go "The motivating example of why we would want to do this is so that we can help Iran and North Korea money launder in a direct attack against our own government's laws". Here's my counter-example to the scenarios the author puts forward. You stake 32 eth to become a validator node and start signing off transactions from North Korea. Other people choose not to do that because... well. Your stake slowly goes up and they slowly bleed Eth. Then the US government smash down your door and throw you in federal prison because you're actively working to help North Korea.

hprotagonist 4y ago
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61090064 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61090064 you don’t even need to go that far!
capableweb 4y ago
Yes, if you actively and knowing break the law, you might get punished for it. Not sure what's new here? If you don't want to connect to North Korea, block connections coming from North Korea, it's like one or two commands of iptables.
- bluGill 4y ago
  Ignorance of the law is not a valid defense. It might get you a lighter sentience, but don't count on that. You are expected to know all the laws that apply to all the activities you do.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - wing-_-nuts 4y ago
    *Except if you happen to work for the government, then it's totally ok.
    - yellowapple 4y ago
      *Or if you're sufficiently rich
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  What I'm saying here is that this system is designed to tax your staked ETH if you do that. So you have three choices: 1: Run a validator blocking NK transactions, safe in the knowledge it's probably legal, but your staked ETH is slowly going to taxed by the network costing you money. 2: Run a validator including the NK transactions, your staked ETH is safe, but you are violating your countries money laundering laws most likely. 3: Don't run a validator, now the only people running ETH validator nodes are those who work with North Korean money launderers, which doesn't seem like a particularly stable footing for Ethereum.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    if ETH is really targeting money laundering like that, then just using it for otherwise legal transactions is participating in criminal activity.
  - danaris 4y ago
    Sounds like the conclusion of your #3 also applies to #2...
- WJW 4y ago
  The sanctions go a little bit further than that though. Financial institutions are not merely blocked from accepting transactions from the IP region of North Korea, but actually from doing business with a whole list of companies and individuals with ties to NK. To comply with the sanctions regulation you would need to have a lookup service listing the owner of every wallet and for every transaction you validate, check if any of the wallets involved belongs to a sanctioned company or individual. I don't think "but I didn't know that it was a NK wallet!" is going to hold up in court either. There are laws regulating the minimum Know-Your-Customer a money transmitting company needs to perform and when the regulators come knocking you need to be able to show your procedures for that and how they lead to compliance with the law. The real question is whether courts will rule that POS validators are "money transmitters" in a legal sense. To me it's kinda obvious that they are, since without the action of the validators no money would get transmitted. No doubt there will be much water under the bridge before that gets settled though.
  - olalonde 4y ago
    It was actually ruled in 2014 that virtual currency miners are not money transmitters[0]. [0] https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/news_release/20140130.pdf https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/news_release/2014...
    - formerkrogemp 4y ago
      Regulations can and do change. Cryptocurrency fanatics are expanding their regulatory capture with various senators and state governments friendly to the 'movement.' I worry about the next crypto crash tanking the economy after this crypto crash.
    - WJW 4y ago
      From the link you posted: > The first ruling states that, to the extent a user creates or “mines” a > convertible virtual currency solely for a user’s own purposes, the user > is not a money transmitter under the BSA. That seems to leave rather a lot of open space IMO. For example, does a POS validator create convertible virtual currency? Clearly. But is it solely for their own purposes? Do they become a money transmitter as soon as they sell their crypto? Also, only part of miner income is the block reward; there are transaction fees as well. Is a miner allowed to accept fees from sanctioned individuals for providing payment validation services? 2014 was forever ago in crypto terms of course, so I can imagine that the viewpoints of regulators have evolved together with the technology.
jsemrau 4y ago
That is a nutshell is a variant of the Byzantine generals problem. Without a central authority that governs difficult decisions like censorship of nodes NK could launder their crime money through ETH validator nodes. On the other hand of the spectrum you have the Solana/Solend farce where the Solend team just "voted" to take over the wallet of their main customer. It is still a long way.
RF_Savage 4y ago
Yep, that is going to be an interesting thing to observe. I wonder if USA based validators will just have to block NK and Iran. What a mess.
- aluminaient 4y ago
  Which is how the system works. 109% of people can not run NK txs if they decide to. It is totally democratic.
clippablematt 4y ago
You should understand that this is a very USA centred opinion. There’s a whole big world of different cultures and politics, and it is possible to believe there are other approaches where we reject violence and authority. It’s the usual “you’re helping drug dealers/terrorists/North Korea, but what about the children?!” state simping that ignores the violence of the existing systems, and ignores the billions of people in the world who aren’t any of the above and are also benefiting from our attempts to design systems that respect liberty. I think we absolutely should build infrastructure that allows people within oppressive regimes options with which they can resist, escape, coordinate. For example, we shouldn’t accept that Iranian devs get booted off GitHub.
- __alexs 4y ago
  Providing technology to help dissidents is clearly a separate activity from providing technology to help the entire economy of your enemies.
  - olalonde 4y ago
    That's the root of the problem, it usually isn't.
- blackhaz 4y ago
  Eh, no. Helping North Korea to bypass international agreements won't help us to "reject violence and authority." What authority are you talking about here specifically, what are you trying to reject? Throwing an existing system out of the window without offering anything in return is madness. Cryptocurrency won't replace all the financial and government systems that have been developed internationally for years. How can you help Iranian/Russian people that genuinely would like to reject and escape their current government, without helping that very same government to finance itself?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - totetsu 4y ago
programmarchy 4y ago
Just to play devil’s advocate, is a server responding to a ping request also actively helping North Korea?
- aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
  Most compelling comment in this sub-thread.
drexlspivey 4y ago
Did you just assume that Etherium is American?
- bluGill 4y ago
  I only need to assume one user or validator node is American.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  The US assumes everyone is American when enforcement is concerned. Ask Kim Dotcom.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    Not anymore, see lack of counter sanctions on oil buyers in India and China of Russian oil. (Even though oil buyers in China have significantly increased their purchase volume and Indian purchases of Russian oil have increased 3100%, not a typo, YoY) Of course Washington doesn't want to give the Russian, Chinese, and Indian establishments common cause against the US.
  - tzs 4y ago
    That's not a very good example. What happened to Dotcom is fairly normal in the case where someone in country X is doing something that violates similar laws in both country X and country Y, more of the damages are occurring in country Y than in country X, and X and Y have extradition treaties.
    - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
      Yeah, people have helicopters sent overseas to flank their home after pissing off music and movie companies all the time, cmon!
  - swat535 4y ago
    The complexities and intricacies of geopolitics (which is both driven and impacted by history, culture, school of taught, incentives,.. etc) are literally like a DC Comic Movie in the minds of some people with United States being the superhero world police who will crush evil with a mighty army and restore democracy and peace throughout the world..
usrn 4y ago
On the other hand, North Korea is the way it is because they've rejected our neo-liberal ideology. I think much like TOR did for Iraq this would actually move them away from China and closer to us. EDIT (out of comment quota): I'd hope not but I'm not convinced they aren't. It sure seems to degenerate into that more often than not.
- anonymousab 4y ago
  > North Korea is the way it is because they've rejected our neo-liberal ideology I don't think the dystopic human torture camps are a necessary part of "rejecting the neo-liberal ideology".
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    Nobody said it was necessary. Hell, it arguably doesn't count as a rejection of neo-liberal ideology in the first place (see also: Guantanamo Bay, Japanese internment camps, and border camps all previously or currently existing within the archetype for neoliberalism).
sneak 4y ago
Censorship resistance is truly blind. That's a feature, not a bug.
olalonde 4y ago
> Then the US government smash down your door and throw you in federal prison because you're actively working to help North Korea. Not a real issue because transactions are not associated with IPs. There's basically no way to know the country of a sender or recipient. Also, it was ruled that virtual currency miners are not subject to AML regulations[0]. [0] https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/news_release/20140130.pdf https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/news_release/2014...
- webinvest 4y ago
  Not related to miners but to the best of my knowledge, every transaction is broadcasted to the network from an IP address. Therefore the IP can be traced back or hidden with TOR or proxies. Receiving cryptocurrency is by default anonymous because it requires no public action on the part of the receiver. Except, checking a transaction tx or wallet balance on blockchain.info could flag the IP checking that balance.
  - olalonde 4y ago
    > Not related to miners but to the best of my knowledge, every transaction is broadcasted to the network from an IP address. Right, but even if you banned North Korea IPs, you'd still get their transactions through the transaction relay mechanism (other peers outside North Korea relaying their transactions).
mabbo 4y ago
I think what you're missing is that this is the entire point of cryptocurrencies. To be decentralized such that governments, banks, central authorities, cannot stop them. No laws, sanctions, rules, taxes, can force the crypto system to do anything. Imho, they are inferior to real currencies at everything except for that. Now, if you want to discuss whether that makes crypto a good or bad thing, oh, I'm with you, let's dive into that. But this article is discussing the implementation of such a system, not the frankly quite concerning ethics behind the existence of the system.
- yellowapple 4y ago
  > Imho, they are inferior to real currencies at everything except for that. Add to that list the transaction speeds for just about any PoS cryptocurrency. A new transaction is visible to others on the network within seconds, and is fully validated within a few minutes (as I just observed moving some Cardano around last night). That first metric is on-par with your average credit/debit transaction while the second blows it out of the water (credit/debit transactions can take multiple days to actually move out of a "pending" state). The only thing other than a PoS cryptocurrency that's even theoretically faster on both points would be a payment app like PayPal or Venmo, and that's only if you're maintaining a balance in those apps (otherwise they fall back on credit/debit or bank withdrawls anyway). There are other possible superiorities or inferiorities which are indeed a matter of opinion (for example, IMO the inability to reverse a cryptocurrency transaction makes it superior to a credit/debit charge or wire transfer or payment app, and the "downsides" are better solvable with escrow anyway; as another example, IMO the ability to send arbitrarily-large-or-small amounts of cryptocurrency makes it superior to said alternatives), but transaction speeds are factual and readily observable.
zionic 4y ago
HN is so crypto-phobic it’s almost impossible to have a comment section without bad-faith arguments like this. It’s a censorship-resistant technology, of course that applies to both good and bad guys. You know that, yet here you are making this absurd argument and the top-voted post. sigh
redox99 4y ago
This is no different than good ole Proof of Work (bitcoin, current eth, etc). A miner already decides what transactions to include in their block, and also their parent block. Bitcoin has been working like this for 13 years. And your hypothetical situation hasn't happened.
0xfoobar 4y ago
Article author here. The tradeoffs between centralized control and permissionless primitives are better explored elsewhere, but the dangerously high costs of depending on a fickle intermediary for all transactions should be clear to any informed observer. Consider a Russian citizen unable to flee Putin's wartorn regime because all personal life savings and assets have been frozen. Just as private communications make some tradeoffs for not acquiescing to the surveillance state, so permissionless value transfer makes tradeoffs. Also recommend a thread writeup on the importance of privacy I put together: https://twitter.com/0xfoobar/status/1502083084052836354 https://twitter.com/0xfoobar/status/1502083084052836354
- pa7x1 4y ago
  This is very well put. If you believe the trade-offs of permissionless and private communications (as granted by cryptography) are worth-it and you don't think similar trade-offs to value transfer are worth-it (as granted by cryptocurrencies) you have to be able to explain how you are tracing the risk-reward in both cases to arrive at different conclusions. I'm not claiming it's not possible but certainly some very fine-tuning of the weights involved is necessary to reach different conclusions. The average opinion (as in, the most oft-repeated or most popularly represented through upvotes) in HN maintains opposite conclusions. Which is an interesting observation.
  - mike00632 4y ago
    It's been explained countless times. The world has come together and numerous societies have agreed to not give money to North Korea. There is no comparable discussion or agreements about restricting communications among individuals. It's asinine to ignore all of the history and turmoil of North Korea, just about as asinine as creating a crypto currency for the espress purpose of funding the Kim regime.
- hnthrow1010 4y ago
  Hello, I read your twitter thread. While privacy is absolutely important, your reasoning is fundamentally flawed. In the context of financial transactions, we know from a ridiculous amount of history with banking regulations that it's not ordinary people who benefit from having complete privacy and anonymity in all matters. It's criminals and fraudsters who lie and misrepresent themselves to conceal the source of their funds and their activities. They'll gladly continue to use their privacy as a weapon to disguise themselves and further rob and steal. There is no other group that benefits as much from being able to transfer large amounts of money secretly. This can be verified over and over again, ask any traditional company that processes international remittances. It doesn't really matter what kind of political activism you believe you're engaging in: the reality is, these nasties are the main people that benefit. They absolutely love what you're doing. Anyone involved in cryptocurrency, even tangentially, is complicit in this fraud because it's the only way these currencies have any significant value to begin with. And it will continue to happen for the indefinite future, because even with this new move ETH will still have no capital controls to prevent any of the massive market manipulation that happened over the last few years, that drove tons more fraud and ransomware and also resulted in the recent crash. A system that tries to give privacy but does nothing to stop fraud is just creating worse problems under the false guise of helping people. I ask that you please stop working on these things and please stop promoting them until you can dial the whole thing back to rectify this situation. Any kind of "censorship resistance" without fraud prevention is not going to work. If enough people put their heads together they can solve this, but it will not happen with any of the supposed "privacy solutions" you mentioned. Yes, I'm aware the traditional finance system also has many of the same problems. It's not helping to recreate the exact same system but with even more layers of technical debt around it, which is essentially all you'll be able to do with any of the suggested tools. Regarding the example of Russia, please see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32013981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32013981 The system you have built specifically and explicitly provides much less cover to the Russian citizens than it does to Putin's regime, who will gladly adopt it and then turn around and use the proceeds to further oppress, murder and destroy. It is a net loss for privacy.
unity1001 4y ago
People in China, Russia, India will do that. And nobody from the US will be able to break down their door. The world does not revolve around the US.
ipiz0618 4y ago
When we have a system that could prevent transactions, you'd think the most common use case is to prevent criminals to transact dirty money. But the most common use case is most likely China freezing dissidents' assets and blocking all alternative ways for them to safely emigrate.
- MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  Too bad for the Chinese dissidents but that's not a valid reason to support worldwide libertarian anarchy.
DennisP 4y ago
It's an arguably poor example in an article by "foobar," not a motivating example from Ethereum's white paper, design documents, a senior researcher, or anything official at all. Ethereum was not designed specifically to allow North Korean transactions. Reasonably good censorship resistance in general is a design goal shared with pretty much all decentralized blockchains. Without that, complaints about proof-of-stake being oligarchic rule would have a lot more legitimacy.
overtonwhy 4y ago
Convenient feature especially for countries that are heavily under sanction. Isn't the alleged creator of Ethereum Russian? His father is a Russian computer scientist?

hprotagonist 4y ago

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61090064 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61090064 you don’t even need to go that far!

capableweb 4y ago

Yes, if you actively and knowing break the law, you might get punished for it. Not sure what's new here? If you don't want to connect to North Korea, block connections coming from North Korea, it's like one or two commands of iptables.

bluGill 4y ago
Ignorance of the law is not a valid defense. It might get you a lighter sentience, but don't count on that. You are expected to know all the laws that apply to all the activities you do.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- wing-_-nuts 4y ago
  *Except if you happen to work for the government, then it's totally ok.
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    *Or if you're sufficiently rich
SilverBirch 4y ago
What I'm saying here is that this system is designed to tax your staked ETH if you do that. So you have three choices: 1: Run a validator blocking NK transactions, safe in the knowledge it's probably legal, but your staked ETH is slowly going to taxed by the network costing you money. 2: Run a validator including the NK transactions, your staked ETH is safe, but you are violating your countries money laundering laws most likely. 3: Don't run a validator, now the only people running ETH validator nodes are those who work with North Korean money launderers, which doesn't seem like a particularly stable footing for Ethereum.
- bluGill 4y ago
  if ETH is really targeting money laundering like that, then just using it for otherwise legal transactions is participating in criminal activity.
- danaris 4y ago
  Sounds like the conclusion of your #3 also applies to #2...
WJW 4y ago
The sanctions go a little bit further than that though. Financial institutions are not merely blocked from accepting transactions from the IP region of North Korea, but actually from doing business with a whole list of companies and individuals with ties to NK. To comply with the sanctions regulation you would need to have a lookup service listing the owner of every wallet and for every transaction you validate, check if any of the wallets involved belongs to a sanctioned company or individual. I don't think "but I didn't know that it was a NK wallet!" is going to hold up in court either. There are laws regulating the minimum Know-Your-Customer a money transmitting company needs to perform and when the regulators come knocking you need to be able to show your procedures for that and how they lead to compliance with the law. The real question is whether courts will rule that POS validators are "money transmitters" in a legal sense. To me it's kinda obvious that they are, since without the action of the validators no money would get transmitted. No doubt there will be much water under the bridge before that gets settled though.
- olalonde 4y ago
  It was actually ruled in 2014 that virtual currency miners are not money transmitters[0]. [0] https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/news_release/20140130.pdf https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/news_release/2014...
  - formerkrogemp 4y ago
    Regulations can and do change. Cryptocurrency fanatics are expanding their regulatory capture with various senators and state governments friendly to the 'movement.' I worry about the next crypto crash tanking the economy after this crypto crash.
  - WJW 4y ago
    From the link you posted: > The first ruling states that, to the extent a user creates or “mines” a > convertible virtual currency solely for a user’s own purposes, the user > is not a money transmitter under the BSA. That seems to leave rather a lot of open space IMO. For example, does a POS validator create convertible virtual currency? Clearly. But is it solely for their own purposes? Do they become a money transmitter as soon as they sell their crypto? Also, only part of miner income is the block reward; there are transaction fees as well. Is a miner allowed to accept fees from sanctioned individuals for providing payment validation services? 2014 was forever ago in crypto terms of course, so I can imagine that the viewpoints of regulators have evolved together with the technology.

jsemrau 4y ago

That is a nutshell is a variant of the Byzantine generals problem. Without a central authority that governs difficult decisions like censorship of nodes NK could launder their crime money through ETH validator nodes. On the other hand of the spectrum you have the Solana/Solend farce where the Solend team just "voted" to take over the wallet of their main customer. It is still a long way.

RF_Savage 4y ago

Yep, that is going to be an interesting thing to observe. I wonder if USA based validators will just have to block NK and Iran. What a mess.

aluminaient 4y ago
Which is how the system works. 109% of people can not run NK txs if they decide to. It is totally democratic.

clippablematt 4y ago

You should understand that this is a very USA centred opinion. There’s a whole big world of different cultures and politics, and it is possible to believe there are other approaches where we reject violence and authority. It’s the usual “you’re helping drug dealers/terrorists/North Korea, but what about the children?!” state simping that ignores the violence of the existing systems, and ignores the billions of people in the world who aren’t any of the above and are also benefiting from our attempts to design systems that respect liberty. I think we absolutely should build infrastructure that allows people within oppressive regimes options with which they can resist, escape, coordinate. For example, we shouldn’t accept that Iranian devs get booted off GitHub.

__alexs 4y ago
Providing technology to help dissidents is clearly a separate activity from providing technology to help the entire economy of your enemies.
- olalonde 4y ago
  That's the root of the problem, it usually isn't.
blackhaz 4y ago
Eh, no. Helping North Korea to bypass international agreements won't help us to "reject violence and authority." What authority are you talking about here specifically, what are you trying to reject? Throwing an existing system out of the window without offering anything in return is madness. Cryptocurrency won't replace all the financial and government systems that have been developed internationally for years. How can you help Iranian/Russian people that genuinely would like to reject and escape their current government, without helping that very same government to finance itself?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- totetsu 4y ago

programmarchy 4y ago

Just to play devil’s advocate, is a server responding to a ping request also actively helping North Korea?

aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
Most compelling comment in this sub-thread.

drexlspivey 4y ago

Did you just assume that Etherium is American?

bluGill 4y ago
I only need to assume one user or validator node is American.
ceejayoz 4y ago
The US assumes everyone is American when enforcement is concerned. Ask Kim Dotcom.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  Not anymore, see lack of counter sanctions on oil buyers in India and China of Russian oil. (Even though oil buyers in China have significantly increased their purchase volume and Indian purchases of Russian oil have increased 3100%, not a typo, YoY) Of course Washington doesn't want to give the Russian, Chinese, and Indian establishments common cause against the US.
- tzs 4y ago
  That's not a very good example. What happened to Dotcom is fairly normal in the case where someone in country X is doing something that violates similar laws in both country X and country Y, more of the damages are occurring in country Y than in country X, and X and Y have extradition treaties.
  - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
    Yeah, people have helicopters sent overseas to flank their home after pissing off music and movie companies all the time, cmon!
- swat535 4y ago
  The complexities and intricacies of geopolitics (which is both driven and impacted by history, culture, school of taught, incentives,.. etc) are literally like a DC Comic Movie in the minds of some people with United States being the superhero world police who will crush evil with a mighty army and restore democracy and peace throughout the world..

usrn 4y ago

On the other hand, North Korea is the way it is because they've rejected our neo-liberal ideology. I think much like TOR did for Iraq this would actually move them away from China and closer to us. EDIT (out of comment quota): I'd hope not but I'm not convinced they aren't. It sure seems to degenerate into that more often than not.

anonymousab 4y ago
> North Korea is the way it is because they've rejected our neo-liberal ideology I don't think the dystopic human torture camps are a necessary part of "rejecting the neo-liberal ideology".
- yellowapple 4y ago
  Nobody said it was necessary. Hell, it arguably doesn't count as a rejection of neo-liberal ideology in the first place (see also: Guantanamo Bay, Japanese internment camps, and border camps all previously or currently existing within the archetype for neoliberalism).

sneak 4y ago

Censorship resistance is truly blind. That's a feature, not a bug.

olalonde 4y ago

> Then the US government smash down your door and throw you in federal prison because you're actively working to help North Korea. Not a real issue because transactions are not associated with IPs. There's basically no way to know the country of a sender or recipient. Also, it was ruled that virtual currency miners are not subject to AML regulations[0]. [0] https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/news_release/20140130.pdf https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/news_release/2014...

webinvest 4y ago
Not related to miners but to the best of my knowledge, every transaction is broadcasted to the network from an IP address. Therefore the IP can be traced back or hidden with TOR or proxies. Receiving cryptocurrency is by default anonymous because it requires no public action on the part of the receiver. Except, checking a transaction tx or wallet balance on blockchain.info could flag the IP checking that balance.
- olalonde 4y ago
  > Not related to miners but to the best of my knowledge, every transaction is broadcasted to the network from an IP address. Right, but even if you banned North Korea IPs, you'd still get their transactions through the transaction relay mechanism (other peers outside North Korea relaying their transactions).

mabbo 4y ago

I think what you're missing is that this is the entire point of cryptocurrencies. To be decentralized such that governments, banks, central authorities, cannot stop them. No laws, sanctions, rules, taxes, can force the crypto system to do anything. Imho, they are inferior to real currencies at everything except for that. Now, if you want to discuss whether that makes crypto a good or bad thing, oh, I'm with you, let's dive into that. But this article is discussing the implementation of such a system, not the frankly quite concerning ethics behind the existence of the system.

yellowapple 4y ago
> Imho, they are inferior to real currencies at everything except for that. Add to that list the transaction speeds for just about any PoS cryptocurrency. A new transaction is visible to others on the network within seconds, and is fully validated within a few minutes (as I just observed moving some Cardano around last night). That first metric is on-par with your average credit/debit transaction while the second blows it out of the water (credit/debit transactions can take multiple days to actually move out of a "pending" state). The only thing other than a PoS cryptocurrency that's even theoretically faster on both points would be a payment app like PayPal or Venmo, and that's only if you're maintaining a balance in those apps (otherwise they fall back on credit/debit or bank withdrawls anyway). There are other possible superiorities or inferiorities which are indeed a matter of opinion (for example, IMO the inability to reverse a cryptocurrency transaction makes it superior to a credit/debit charge or wire transfer or payment app, and the "downsides" are better solvable with escrow anyway; as another example, IMO the ability to send arbitrarily-large-or-small amounts of cryptocurrency makes it superior to said alternatives), but transaction speeds are factual and readily observable.

zionic 4y ago

HN is so crypto-phobic it’s almost impossible to have a comment section without bad-faith arguments like this. It’s a censorship-resistant technology, of course that applies to both good and bad guys. You know that, yet here you are making this absurd argument and the top-voted post. sigh

redox99 4y ago

This is no different than good ole Proof of Work (bitcoin, current eth, etc). A miner already decides what transactions to include in their block, and also their parent block. Bitcoin has been working like this for 13 years. And your hypothetical situation hasn't happened.

0xfoobar 4y ago

Article author here. The tradeoffs between centralized control and permissionless primitives are better explored elsewhere, but the dangerously high costs of depending on a fickle intermediary for all transactions should be clear to any informed observer. Consider a Russian citizen unable to flee Putin's wartorn regime because all personal life savings and assets have been frozen. Just as private communications make some tradeoffs for not acquiescing to the surveillance state, so permissionless value transfer makes tradeoffs. Also recommend a thread writeup on the importance of privacy I put together: https://twitter.com/0xfoobar/status/1502083084052836354 https://twitter.com/0xfoobar/status/1502083084052836354

pa7x1 4y ago
This is very well put. If you believe the trade-offs of permissionless and private communications (as granted by cryptography) are worth-it and you don't think similar trade-offs to value transfer are worth-it (as granted by cryptocurrencies) you have to be able to explain how you are tracing the risk-reward in both cases to arrive at different conclusions. I'm not claiming it's not possible but certainly some very fine-tuning of the weights involved is necessary to reach different conclusions. The average opinion (as in, the most oft-repeated or most popularly represented through upvotes) in HN maintains opposite conclusions. Which is an interesting observation.
- mike00632 4y ago
  It's been explained countless times. The world has come together and numerous societies have agreed to not give money to North Korea. There is no comparable discussion or agreements about restricting communications among individuals. It's asinine to ignore all of the history and turmoil of North Korea, just about as asinine as creating a crypto currency for the espress purpose of funding the Kim regime.
hnthrow1010 4y ago
Hello, I read your twitter thread. While privacy is absolutely important, your reasoning is fundamentally flawed. In the context of financial transactions, we know from a ridiculous amount of history with banking regulations that it's not ordinary people who benefit from having complete privacy and anonymity in all matters. It's criminals and fraudsters who lie and misrepresent themselves to conceal the source of their funds and their activities. They'll gladly continue to use their privacy as a weapon to disguise themselves and further rob and steal. There is no other group that benefits as much from being able to transfer large amounts of money secretly. This can be verified over and over again, ask any traditional company that processes international remittances. It doesn't really matter what kind of political activism you believe you're engaging in: the reality is, these nasties are the main people that benefit. They absolutely love what you're doing. Anyone involved in cryptocurrency, even tangentially, is complicit in this fraud because it's the only way these currencies have any significant value to begin with. And it will continue to happen for the indefinite future, because even with this new move ETH will still have no capital controls to prevent any of the massive market manipulation that happened over the last few years, that drove tons more fraud and ransomware and also resulted in the recent crash. A system that tries to give privacy but does nothing to stop fraud is just creating worse problems under the false guise of helping people. I ask that you please stop working on these things and please stop promoting them until you can dial the whole thing back to rectify this situation. Any kind of "censorship resistance" without fraud prevention is not going to work. If enough people put their heads together they can solve this, but it will not happen with any of the supposed "privacy solutions" you mentioned. Yes, I'm aware the traditional finance system also has many of the same problems. It's not helping to recreate the exact same system but with even more layers of technical debt around it, which is essentially all you'll be able to do with any of the suggested tools. Regarding the example of Russia, please see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32013981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32013981 The system you have built specifically and explicitly provides much less cover to the Russian citizens than it does to Putin's regime, who will gladly adopt it and then turn around and use the proceeds to further oppress, murder and destroy. It is a net loss for privacy.

unity1001 4y ago

People in China, Russia, India will do that. And nobody from the US will be able to break down their door. The world does not revolve around the US.

ipiz0618 4y ago

When we have a system that could prevent transactions, you'd think the most common use case is to prevent criminals to transact dirty money. But the most common use case is most likely China freezing dissidents' assets and blocking all alternative ways for them to safely emigrate.

MomoXenosaga 4y ago
Too bad for the Chinese dissidents but that's not a valid reason to support worldwide libertarian anarchy.

DennisP 4y ago

It's an arguably poor example in an article by "foobar," not a motivating example from Ethereum's white paper, design documents, a senior researcher, or anything official at all. Ethereum was not designed specifically to allow North Korean transactions. Reasonably good censorship resistance in general is a design goal shared with pretty much all decentralized blockchains. Without that, complaints about proof-of-stake being oligarchic rule would have a lot more legitimacy.

overtonwhy 4y ago

Convenient feature especially for countries that are heavily under sanction. Isn't the alleged creator of Ethereum Russian? His father is a Russian computer scientist?