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For miners operating in the US, I’d like to see sanctions violations cases if they mine blocks that include transactions for Iranian (and other sanctioned) ent

For miners operating in the US, I’d like to see sanctions violations cases if they mine blocks that include transactions for Iranian (and other sanctioned) entities. This seems straightforward to me. Frankly I’m quite annoyed that my democratically elected representatives’ sanctions regime is being undermined by Americans interested in a quick buck from wasting electricity with their PC.

medo-bear 4y ago
lol the crypto currency used was not specified so my question is what miners would you target mr smartie pants
xtian 4y ago
I’m quite annoyed at the sanctions regime conducted in my name with no democratic mandate or oversight whatsoever.
- midasuni 4y ago
  You know the US is a democracy right? You might not like the results but you do have a voice.
  - xtian 4y ago
    No, it's not: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli... Even less so on issues like this, where the two privileged parties have the exact same policy despite it not benefiting the American people.
kkkkvcxss 4y ago
Lmao this is like saying the US should charge the Fed for printing dollar bills with serial numbers later found to be used abroad for prohibited purposes
bushbaba 4y ago
Worse many crypto investors have profited off of Iran and North Korea money laundering. A portion of which is being used to fund terrorism.
- hervature 4y ago
  Many terrorist groups from the Middle East use captured oil wells to fund their ventures. This gets mixed with other oil from the region via places like Turkey (a NATO ally). ISIS is reported to have made $500M in 2015 [1]. Anyway, the vast majority of the world buys this oil. This is why I say that Canada + USA which produce basically as much oil as Saudi + Russia should pull a DeBeers and sell "blood free" oil but obviously with a fun name like Freedom Oil. [1] - https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/10/isiss-new-plans-to-get-rich-and-wreak-havoc/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/10/isiss-new-plans-to-get-...
  - 14 4y ago
    This will sound harsh but I just want cheap gas. And I am not the only one. So many families are struggling to get by and anything that adds to the cost of things going up would immediately oppose it. I am all for freedom oil but not when it would likely cost me more.
    - rglullis 4y ago
      You are living in the richest country of the world and you are still "struggling". Now imagine the lives of the other billions of people, and specially consider those people whose prosperity was undermined or halted by your government, just so you could have "cheap gas". I may be an antirevolutionary to the bone, but seeing some comments like these really make me reevaluate my priors.
spicyramen_ 4y ago
Laughable, you need to read about blockchain
CoffeeCollector 4y ago
lol what an awful take
rglullis 4y ago
How do you feel about North American urban planning? Suburban sprawl, miles and miles of asphalt to build roads, concrete and wasted space for parking lots, large and inefficient single-family homes... these are far more wasteful than someone running a computer at home. Worse still, these things are subsidized by all taxpayers, unlike a miner's electric bill.
- midasuni 4y ago
  None of that directly benefits Iran
  - rglullis 4y ago
    How much oil does the US consume, and how much American money goes to OPEC governments? How much oil could be saved if the US decided to abandon this failed experiment called "American Suburbia" and started to plan for a urban environment that is not car-dependent?
- Helikentio 4y ago
  Strawman argument. No one is stating that this might not be an issue. People are totally able to complain about multiple things. But let me tell you: it's much easier to bash crypto as it's new and fresh and very scammy and bad. It's a good thing that we stand up and say no to it for now to stop the already giant waste it creates. We don't need an Additional co2 creater with zero benefit.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    anyone who equates "crypto" with "Proof of Work" shows automatically their ignorance or dishonesty when arguing. Ethereum will switch to PoS next month, and there will be hundreds of thousands of nodes around the world, in aggregate they will run on a fraction of the energy consumed by the millions of video game consoles while idling. By all means, complain about Proof of Work all you want but get off the high horse. Those "bashing crypto" and talk about "the waste it creates" are usually so covered in privilege they can't even be bothered to actually go to put the numbers in perspective.
ipaddr 4y ago
Are the miners selling blocks directly to the Iranians? If not you would have to go to the entity who sold them coins probably an Asia market. Otherwise if a copy of a music album makes it's way to a street vendor in Iran is Pink in trouble? The your democratically elected official can only control waste of electricity in the region they live.
scottiebarnes 4y ago
Fascinating to me, because you likely know that any such declarations are wastes of time and will be unproductive. But you want this because of what it signals...
sph 4y ago
> This seems straightforward to me. Your comment is so unrealistic and glosses over so many details I wonder if you're the type of politician that gets elected by saying you'll ban the Internet or force porn sites to require identification, and then have to face reality that it's a little more complicated than that. I wouldn't even know where to start explaining that what you're asking for is a very hard problem even for a very closed political and economical system like China.
- paulproteus 4y ago
  As I understand it, Bitcoin mining involves selecting which unconfirmed transactions (mem pool transactions) to include in the block. A common algorithm for selecting them is ones with higher fees. Another aspect could be ignoring ones from sanctioned wallet IDs. If treasury.gov had a monthly-updating CSV file of wallet IDs that are sanctioned, then the person setting up the mining software could have a cron job to refresh treasury.gov's list periodically. Would that work? I think you're saying this would be a big hassle, maybe for miners. Can you explain that more?
  - sph 4y ago
    Just a couple examples off the top of my head (on mobile right now) - One can create an unlimited number of addresses for a single wallet. The size of your banned_addresses.csv updated every morning is for all intents and purposes unbounded. - The hard problem is proving if the beneficiary is an Iranian national. It's already difficult to do in the regular economy with KYC regulations and everything is government controlled (shell companies, etc.), doing so with Bitcoin is even harder. I don't mean hard as in "the US govt has the resources to do it", I mean hard as it's pretty much impossible. Please don't take this the wrong way, but learn a little bit about Bitcoin, if you really want to do something about the problems it poses. It's overall pretty simple. Otherwise you're just another person that has strong opinions about something they don't know anything about.

medo-bear 4y ago

lol the crypto currency used was not specified so my question is what miners would you target mr smartie pants

xtian 4y ago

I’m quite annoyed at the sanctions regime conducted in my name with no democratic mandate or oversight whatsoever.

midasuni 4y ago
You know the US is a democracy right? You might not like the results but you do have a voice.
- xtian 4y ago
  No, it's not: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli... Even less so on issues like this, where the two privileged parties have the exact same policy despite it not benefiting the American people.

kkkkvcxss 4y ago

Lmao this is like saying the US should charge the Fed for printing dollar bills with serial numbers later found to be used abroad for prohibited purposes

bushbaba 4y ago

Worse many crypto investors have profited off of Iran and North Korea money laundering. A portion of which is being used to fund terrorism.

hervature 4y ago
Many terrorist groups from the Middle East use captured oil wells to fund their ventures. This gets mixed with other oil from the region via places like Turkey (a NATO ally). ISIS is reported to have made $500M in 2015 [1]. Anyway, the vast majority of the world buys this oil. This is why I say that Canada + USA which produce basically as much oil as Saudi + Russia should pull a DeBeers and sell "blood free" oil but obviously with a fun name like Freedom Oil. [1] - https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/10/isiss-new-plans-to-get-rich-and-wreak-havoc/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/10/isiss-new-plans-to-get-...
- 14 4y ago
  This will sound harsh but I just want cheap gas. And I am not the only one. So many families are struggling to get by and anything that adds to the cost of things going up would immediately oppose it. I am all for freedom oil but not when it would likely cost me more.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    You are living in the richest country of the world and you are still "struggling". Now imagine the lives of the other billions of people, and specially consider those people whose prosperity was undermined or halted by your government, just so you could have "cheap gas". I may be an antirevolutionary to the bone, but seeing some comments like these really make me reevaluate my priors.

spicyramen_ 4y ago

Laughable, you need to read about blockchain

CoffeeCollector 4y ago

lol what an awful take

rglullis 4y ago

How do you feel about North American urban planning? Suburban sprawl, miles and miles of asphalt to build roads, concrete and wasted space for parking lots, large and inefficient single-family homes... these are far more wasteful than someone running a computer at home. Worse still, these things are subsidized by all taxpayers, unlike a miner's electric bill.

midasuni 4y ago
None of that directly benefits Iran
- rglullis 4y ago
  How much oil does the US consume, and how much American money goes to OPEC governments? How much oil could be saved if the US decided to abandon this failed experiment called "American Suburbia" and started to plan for a urban environment that is not car-dependent?
Helikentio 4y ago
Strawman argument. No one is stating that this might not be an issue. People are totally able to complain about multiple things. But let me tell you: it's much easier to bash crypto as it's new and fresh and very scammy and bad. It's a good thing that we stand up and say no to it for now to stop the already giant waste it creates. We don't need an Additional co2 creater with zero benefit.
- rglullis 4y ago
  anyone who equates "crypto" with "Proof of Work" shows automatically their ignorance or dishonesty when arguing. Ethereum will switch to PoS next month, and there will be hundreds of thousands of nodes around the world, in aggregate they will run on a fraction of the energy consumed by the millions of video game consoles while idling. By all means, complain about Proof of Work all you want but get off the high horse. Those "bashing crypto" and talk about "the waste it creates" are usually so covered in privilege they can't even be bothered to actually go to put the numbers in perspective.

ipaddr 4y ago

Are the miners selling blocks directly to the Iranians? If not you would have to go to the entity who sold them coins probably an Asia market. Otherwise if a copy of a music album makes it's way to a street vendor in Iran is Pink in trouble? The your democratically elected official can only control waste of electricity in the region they live.

scottiebarnes 4y ago

Fascinating to me, because you likely know that any such declarations are wastes of time and will be unproductive. But you want this because of what it signals...

sph 4y ago

> This seems straightforward to me. Your comment is so unrealistic and glosses over so many details I wonder if you're the type of politician that gets elected by saying you'll ban the Internet or force porn sites to require identification, and then have to face reality that it's a little more complicated than that. I wouldn't even know where to start explaining that what you're asking for is a very hard problem even for a very closed political and economical system like China.

paulproteus 4y ago
As I understand it, Bitcoin mining involves selecting which unconfirmed transactions (mem pool transactions) to include in the block. A common algorithm for selecting them is ones with higher fees. Another aspect could be ignoring ones from sanctioned wallet IDs. If treasury.gov had a monthly-updating CSV file of wallet IDs that are sanctioned, then the person setting up the mining software could have a cron job to refresh treasury.gov's list periodically. Would that work? I think you're saying this would be a big hassle, maybe for miners. Can you explain that more?
- sph 4y ago
  Just a couple examples off the top of my head (on mobile right now) - One can create an unlimited number of addresses for a single wallet. The size of your banned_addresses.csv updated every morning is for all intents and purposes unbounded. - The hard problem is proving if the beneficiary is an Iranian national. It's already difficult to do in the regular economy with KYC regulations and everything is government controlled (shell companies, etc.), doing so with Bitcoin is even harder. I don't mean hard as in "the US govt has the resources to do it", I mean hard as it's pretty much impossible. Please don't take this the wrong way, but learn a little bit about Bitcoin, if you really want to do something about the problems it poses. It's overall pretty simple. Otherwise you're just another person that has strong opinions about something they don't know anything about.