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You say “less important;” I say “vast majority.” How is this better than Visa or MC?
by TradingPlaces 4y ago
You say “less important;” I say “vast majority.” How is this better than Visa or MC?
- toolz 4y agofor one, the base currency in question is uncensorable. e.g. I for one find it detestable that fruits and nuts sellers in Iran suffer immensely because of US sanctions. The idea that innocent citizens are being made to suffer for their governments policy (especially in more authoritarian countries) is gross. I see it akin to punishing a child for their parents behavior.
- _mhr_ 4y agoWhat do you mean by uncensorable? What does censorship have to do with sanctions hurting innocent economic participants?
- toolz 4y agoif you sanction Iran, limiting their fruit sellers, you have to have means to track the trades in order to enforce those sanctions - lightening network is effectively untraceable at the moment (and tools built on top of bitcoin can make tracing payments provably impossible) which means the sanctions can't be easily enforced - no country is going to spend resources proving their businesses aren't doing fruit trades with sanctioned countries, so if you can't trace the money, you're going to have an incredibly hard time enforcing sanctions - which I would suggest means Iranian fruit sellers aren't going to be nearly as limited in their trade. Iran certainly isn't going to limit them and the sanctioning country (US in this example) isn't going to have the resources to audit every single import to every other country.
- ABeeSea 4y agoThe physical fruits and nuts still have to be smuggled out of Iran and into a country supporting the sanctions for this to make sense. And the physical smuggling seems way more difficult than figuring out the payments.
- toolz 4y agoThey don't have to be smuggled out of Iran - Iran explicitly wants to enable that trade. Who inside of Iran are they smuggling the fruits away from?
- ABeeSea 4y agoThey have to be smuggled INTO another country. One that has applied sanctions and doesn’t want Iran’s fruits and nuts. Violating import laws especially for agricultural products is a big deal.
- toolz 4y agono country _wants_ to reduce trade - they simply accept that sanctions are necessary. Reducing trade necessarily hurts both countries, and there aren't likely to be any functioning developed countries that want to act against their own interests. As such, it's not at all hard to imagine the receivers having a hard time enforcing sanctions. After all, with all the problems a country has - why would they dedicate time and resources to purposefully hurt their own?
- ABeeSea 4y agoIf the countries wanted to accept the fruits and nuts, they wouldn’t need bitcoin for payments. They would do the usual trade processes. They have outlawed imports from Iran and bitcoin doesn’t change the fact that circumventing agricultural import laws is a massive crime.
- toolz 4y agoincorrect, those imports paid in fiat are traceable - that's how we enforce sanctions today - we fine companies like banks for violating sanctions all the time - you know how they're caught? Financial audits, every time. Companies use proxy countries to bypass sanctions all the time. You know how they're caught? Financial audits. > change the fact that circumventing agricultural import laws is a massive crime I'm not sure how people so easily forget that it was a massive crime to protect jews from being murdered. That same thing still happens today with various minority groups around the world. If you pay attention to non-developed world problems, you become painfully aware that bypassing laws that are a "massive crime" is extremely important for solving some of the worst problems in humanity today.
- admax88qqq 4y agoI don't think it's as hard as you think to track ships. They're all tracked already Government will adapt and just ban shipping vessels from visiting sanctioned countries, or create a vast make work agency to inspect cargo on ships that visited sanctioned countries.
- toolz 4y agoand who is going to track those ships? The sanctioning country doesn't have the jurisdiction and likely doesn't have the resources to logistically stop it. The countries benefiting from the trade (both sanctioned and allied nations) have every incentive to allow the trade to happen if it can happen without detection - so who is going to stop it?
- Imnimo 4y agoWhat has stopped the fruit sellers from using bitcoin to avoid sanctions for the past five years?
- toolz 4y agoIt hasn't stopped them or anyone else, people have been using bitcoin to bypass censorship for years.
- Grim-444 4y agoBut you're taking transactions off of the base currency, so it no longer matters what the properties of the base currency are.
- eldenwrong 4y agoYou settle on the main chain, which has to follow consensus rules. It does matter. We are scaling BTC like the internet, in layers..
- stonogo 4y agoThe internet does not scale in layers. This sounds more like Bitcoin is not scalable, so we're introducing abstractions to work around its limitations.
- eldenwrong 4y agoAre you familiar with OSI and TCP/IP architecture? Because it definitely works in layers.
- notriddle 4y agoTCP has stronger consistency guarantees, and worse performance, than the underlying IP network. Doing it the other way around is usually considered an anti-pattern [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_inversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_inversion
- stonogo 4y agoScaling is not a goal of the OSI model, and TCP/IP predates (and does not adhere to) the OSI model anyway. For insight into how and why this came about, I recommend Padlipsky's "The Elements of Networking Style."
- eldenwrong 4y agoBut TCP/IP does have layers that help it to scale... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite
- TradingPlaces 4y ago“Evading laws is the killer app of Bitcoin.” You will get no argument from me on that
- toolz 4y agoIt was illegal to protect jews from being enslaved and murdered not too long ago. Evading the law is exactly why it's important and it is the ethically superior position to support tools that enable people to bypass unethical laws.
- throwaway6977 4y agoYou'd think people reading HACKER news would be less pro-establishment in their arguments.
- preseinger 4y agoHumans make mistakes. Systems that intend to serve humans have to accommodate that flaw in order to be viable. Fixing mistakes means rewriting history. That means censorship. And so censorship isn't a bad thing. It's actually a core requirement for any system designed for broad usage.
- toolz 4y agoFlawed logic, censorship can be a mistake just like anything else. Adding the ability to fix mistakes with censorship also adds the ability to make mistakes with censorship. Censorship, however is centralized power and therefore trades fixing small scale mistakes with the centralized power to make big mistakes. This is why western society and individual liberties have been so dominant in modern history. Authoritarian societies have fallen one after another, further evidence that it is incorrect to treat centralization as something other than a bad tradeoff.
- preseinger 4y agoAnd the ability to punish guilty people also adds the ability to punish innocent people. This doesn't mean we abandon the concept of justice.
- toolz 4y agolimiting peoples ability to trade isn't justice anymore than limiting their ability to speak. Sure you could conveniently stop many crimes if you could just monitor and censor everyone's ability to speak - but I think the consequences are quite obvious. There isn't a crime in the world that can't be stopped in more appropriate ways than giving an authority presence the ability to stop me or anyone else from spending resources that they own. Nowhere on the list of top crimes against humanity have there been situations where it would've been better if centralized powers had more authority.
- preseinger 4y agoI don't understand this at all. Authority is a fundamental and underlying requirement of essentially all aspects of civil society, including but not limited to justice. There is actually no way to define even the concept of crime without an appeal to a supervisory authority. Authority, and specifically "centralized" authority, is a necessary component of any system that can effectively serve more than a nominal quantity of human beings.