5 ms·

Freedom and Privacy: Two Sides of the Same Coin

69 points by nnx 4y ago

bmazed 4y ago
$dero $arrr $wow $xmr $zcash which n why
eterps 4y ago
It's a bit strange that the EVM doesn't even get a mention, despite its popularity in the crypto financial world today [1]. > Lightning Network Protocol (LNP) and the Bitcoin Protocol (BP) are often compared to TCP/IP. Apparently LNP/BP is determined to be the be-all and end-all without further consideration? [1] https://cryptofees.info https://cryptofees.info
- nnx 4y ago
  The author is a Bitcoin advocate/developer, but of course the argument wrt privacy would be as valid for Ethereum or other blockchains.
  - eterps 4y ago
    Yeah I realized that, but still it feels sloppy or disingenuous when you consider the extent of the subject matter. It's supposed to be an article about Freedom, Privacy and financial communication, not specifically about Bitcoin (or is it?).
    - bhdlr 4y ago
      > Yeah I realized that, but still it feels sloppy or disingenuous when you consider the extent of the subject matter. > It's supposed to be an article about Freedom, Privacy and financial communication, not specifically about Bitcoin (or is it?). Dergigi is a Bitcoin maximalist Here's their book: 21 Lessons: What I've Learned from Falling Down the Bitcoin Rabbit Hole https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083L93MJ7/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_ZN4ZBQB149EY06MGRR6W https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083L93MJ7/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_ZN4ZBQ...
      - whoibrar 4y ago
        Keeping the Bitcoin maximalist ideas aside, I feel the core of the article still holds true. Like you can have the exact same text and replace BTC with XMR and it is equally valid, if not more.
- Geee 4y ago
  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_Wars Just like TCP/IP, there will be only a single winning protocol for money and value transfer.
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    And yet in the modern world there's tens of them. There was no single winner, and why would we want one? I've never heard anyone advocate for merging VisaNet with the Mastercard network with the Discover network with the UnionPay network with the Swift network with the EFTPOS network with the Interac network. This sounds like... centralization.
    - Geee 4y ago
      Those are payment networks, not base layer protocols.
      - arcticbull 4y ago
        Same thing. They're private protocols. People build on top of VisaNet you know. There's this company, Stripe, you may have heard of it.
        Geee 4y ago
        Not same thing.
        arcticbull 4y ago
        Please explain clearly where you think the delta is.
        Geee 4y ago
        In layered systems, there's a hierarchy of layers. Bitcoin is a layer 1 money protocol. Visa is level 8 (not literally), i.e. it is built on top of layers upon layers, which are built on top of US dollar and even that might not be the base layer yet. If we were in a gold standard, gold would be the base layer for US dollar, and the systems on top of it. Layered systems tend to naturally converge into a single base layer, and the higher layers are more sprawling and dynamic.
- drdrey 4y ago
  I went into this article assuming it was about the recent Tornado Cash sanctions, the Bitcoin maximalism twist was a surprise
palata 4y ago
> The similarities between the Hypertext Transfer Protocol and the Bitcoin Protocol are almost too perfect. Except maybe for the fact that HTTP was not looking for an actual, legal, constructive use-case that it solved better than existing technologies say... more than a decade after its creation?
- cloudhead 4y ago
  Neither is Bitcoin? What are you talking about?
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    It literally doesn't have a single use case, and its narrative changes every 2 weeks as the previous one is invalidated. Remember when it was an inflation hedge but then it collapsed 70% during the single most inflationary period in decades? Haven't heard that narrative in a while now. It's a religion, a political movement, and a high-beta way to speculate on USD liquidity in the global financial system - not a technology. The cult of the extremely inefficient linked list.
    - jeroenhd 4y ago
      Like all cryptocurrencies, it has a hugely relevant use case, namely speculation without regulations. The fees for anonymous money transfers at huge costs are also tolerable for large scale criminal networks. I don't know a use case for Bitcoin that benefits society per se, but there are definitely use cases for it.
      - palata 4y ago
        That's precisely why I said "legal" and "constructive" :-)
    - TakeBlaster16 4y ago
      Copying a comment from here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32431494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32431494 --- Just because you come from a place of great financial privilege and a liberal society does not mean others have no use for a censorship resistant form of money. Afghanistan: https://theintercept.com/2022/01/19/crypto-afghanistan-sanctions-taliban/ https://theintercept.com/2022/01/19/crypto-afghanistan-sanct... Argentina: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60912789 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60912789 Russia: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/navalny-ally-urges-donors-use-cryptocurrency-due-crackdown-2021-06-02/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/navalny-ally-urges-dono... Lebanon: https://www.reuters.com/article/lebanon-crypto-currency-youth-idUSL8N2QH1MW https://www.reuters.com/article/lebanon-crypto-currency-yout... Nigeria: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/10/16/nigerian-banks-shut-them-out-so-these-activists-are-using-bitcoin-to-battle-police-brutality/ https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/10/16/nigerian-banks-shut... Ukraine: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/ukrainian-flees-to-poland-with-2000-in-bitcoin-on-usb-drive.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/ukrainian-flees-to-poland-wi... https://www.financialinclusion.tech/ https://www.financialinclusion.tech/
denton-scratch 4y ago
> The layer that was—and still is—responsible for standardized text transfer on top of TCP/IP: HTTP Um, wait. HTTP is for transferring documents. There are other text-based protocols that run over TCP, that long pre-date HTTP. And I for one deplore the use of HTTP for everything; I'm afraid the common firewall practice of blocking everything outbound except port 80 is probably largely responsible.
- plebianRube 4y ago
  HTTP represents any documents as ... drum roll ... text. It is literally in the name of the specification. If it were meant to be a document transfer protocol, HDTP would have been a better acronym.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    If you can rely on the name of the protocol as an accurate description, then LDAP would actually be "lightweight", UDP packets would be assembled by users, and SSL would be secure. If HTTP represents documents as text, then the "hypertext" part of the name becomes misleading, because you can't put hyperlinks in plain text. That is: the protocol is misnamed, because the leading "HT" stands for "Hypertext", not "Hyper Text". It's designed to transfer HTML.
    - wsc981 4y ago
      > If you can rely on the name of the protocol as an accurate description, then LDAP would actually be "lightweight", UDP packets would be assembled by users, and SSL would be secure. Also SOAP would be simple: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/xml/soap/simple http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/xml/soap/simple
  - teddyh 4y ago
    Original HTTP (now called 0.9) did not have headers in the request. HTTP 1.0 added headers, including the "Content-Type" header (reused from the MIME e-mail standard), specifying the type of the data being transferred. Before that, all data was indeed implied to be HTML and nothing else.
arcticbull 4y ago
This is a pseudointellectual treatise that advocates for financial privacy by effectively taking all your transactions, publishing them online under a pseudonym, emailing them to every global law enforcement agency and saying "bet you can't figure out who I am!" Bet you they can. The idea that a glacial L1, so slow that it would require 75 years to onboard everyone onto the L2 (and the better part of a trillion dollars of electricity), that publicly publishes all transactions for the FBI and the PRC to feed into their automated de-anonmyization tooling is somehow a panacea for privacy - because the author is three punchbowls deep in the Koolaid - I mean I have no idea where to even begin. It beggars belief. Then they have the gall to mention Hong Kong as though every bit of traffic in and out of the island isn't going through the microscope of the PRC. If you think you can transact under the nose of the PRC on Bitcoin and they'll have no idea what's happening, I've got tokenized ownership of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge [1] to sell you. Those transactions are prosecution futures. They know exactly what they were for, they were letting you make them, and if you're a dissident, look out. Physical, offline cash is the only true decentralized, censorship resistant peer-to-peer payment method that's difficult to trace. If you believe in privacy, let's throw some weight behind Rohan Grey's ecash. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong–Zhuhai–Macau_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong–Zhuhai–Macau_Bridge [2] https://ecashact.us https://ecashact.us
jeroenhd 4y ago
I don't get it: Bitcoin and privacy are by definition orthoginally separated. Bitcoin transactions are not anonymous, they're public and can be traced quickly and easily. You're one public key leak away from having your entire banking history leak to the public. You can work around this problem by having different wallets for every transaction, but getting the coins in there would be a huge hassle if you have to buy them physically, with cash, every time you want to pay. Bitcoin is uncontrollable by the government but that doesn't mean the government isn't following your every step on the blockchain. They'll let you play with your internet coins as long as you behave but if they've got it out for you, either because you're a criminal or because they're oppressive, you can't rely on the blockchain to protect you. Physical money in your wallet is far more private than any other common form of blockchain currency (which is why many countries are trying to limit how much physical cash you can have on you).
- tromp 4y ago
  > Bitcoin transactions are not anonymous, they're public and can be traced quickly and easily. They're arguing that Lightning transactions offer substantially more privacy.
- tchalla 4y ago
  Privacy != Anonymity
- responsible 4y ago
  Which is why we have Monero

69 points by nnx 4y ago

$dero $arrr $wow $xmr $zcash which n why

It's a bit strange that the EVM doesn't even get a mention, despite its popularity in the crypto financial world today [1]. > Lightning Network Protocol (LNP) and the Bitcoin Protocol (BP) are often compared to TCP/IP. Apparently LNP/BP is determined to be the be-all and end-all without further consideration? [1] https://cryptofees.info https://cryptofees.info

nnx 4y ago
The author is a Bitcoin advocate/developer, but of course the argument wrt privacy would be as valid for Ethereum or other blockchains.
- eterps 4y ago
  Yeah I realized that, but still it feels sloppy or disingenuous when you consider the extent of the subject matter. It's supposed to be an article about Freedom, Privacy and financial communication, not specifically about Bitcoin (or is it?).
  - bhdlr 4y ago
    > Yeah I realized that, but still it feels sloppy or disingenuous when you consider the extent of the subject matter. > It's supposed to be an article about Freedom, Privacy and financial communication, not specifically about Bitcoin (or is it?). Dergigi is a Bitcoin maximalist Here's their book: 21 Lessons: What I've Learned from Falling Down the Bitcoin Rabbit Hole https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083L93MJ7/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_ZN4ZBQB149EY06MGRR6W https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083L93MJ7/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_ZN4ZBQ...
    - whoibrar 4y ago
      Keeping the Bitcoin maximalist ideas aside, I feel the core of the article still holds true. Like you can have the exact same text and replace BTC with XMR and it is equally valid, if not more.
Geee 4y ago
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_Wars Just like TCP/IP, there will be only a single winning protocol for money and value transfer.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  And yet in the modern world there's tens of them. There was no single winner, and why would we want one? I've never heard anyone advocate for merging VisaNet with the Mastercard network with the Discover network with the UnionPay network with the Swift network with the EFTPOS network with the Interac network. This sounds like... centralization.
  - Geee 4y ago
    Those are payment networks, not base layer protocols.
    - arcticbull 4y ago
      Same thing. They're private protocols. People build on top of VisaNet you know. There's this company, Stripe, you may have heard of it.
      - Geee 4y ago
        Not same thing.
        arcticbull 4y ago
        Please explain clearly where you think the delta is.
        Geee 4y ago
        In layered systems, there's a hierarchy of layers. Bitcoin is a layer 1 money protocol. Visa is level 8 (not literally), i.e. it is built on top of layers upon layers, which are built on top of US dollar and even that might not be the base layer yet. If we were in a gold standard, gold would be the base layer for US dollar, and the systems on top of it. Layered systems tend to naturally converge into a single base layer, and the higher layers are more sprawling and dynamic.
drdrey 4y ago
I went into this article assuming it was about the recent Tornado Cash sanctions, the Bitcoin maximalism twist was a surprise

palata 4y ago

> The similarities between the Hypertext Transfer Protocol and the Bitcoin Protocol are almost too perfect. Except maybe for the fact that HTTP was not looking for an actual, legal, constructive use-case that it solved better than existing technologies say... more than a decade after its creation?

cloudhead 4y ago
Neither is Bitcoin? What are you talking about?
- arcticbull 4y ago
  It literally doesn't have a single use case, and its narrative changes every 2 weeks as the previous one is invalidated. Remember when it was an inflation hedge but then it collapsed 70% during the single most inflationary period in decades? Haven't heard that narrative in a while now. It's a religion, a political movement, and a high-beta way to speculate on USD liquidity in the global financial system - not a technology. The cult of the extremely inefficient linked list.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    Like all cryptocurrencies, it has a hugely relevant use case, namely speculation without regulations. The fees for anonymous money transfers at huge costs are also tolerable for large scale criminal networks. I don't know a use case for Bitcoin that benefits society per se, but there are definitely use cases for it.
    - palata 4y ago
      That's precisely why I said "legal" and "constructive" :-)
  - TakeBlaster16 4y ago
    Copying a comment from here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32431494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32431494 --- Just because you come from a place of great financial privilege and a liberal society does not mean others have no use for a censorship resistant form of money. Afghanistan: https://theintercept.com/2022/01/19/crypto-afghanistan-sanctions-taliban/ https://theintercept.com/2022/01/19/crypto-afghanistan-sanct... Argentina: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60912789 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60912789 Russia: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/navalny-ally-urges-donors-use-cryptocurrency-due-crackdown-2021-06-02/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/navalny-ally-urges-dono... Lebanon: https://www.reuters.com/article/lebanon-crypto-currency-youth-idUSL8N2QH1MW https://www.reuters.com/article/lebanon-crypto-currency-yout... Nigeria: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/10/16/nigerian-banks-shut-them-out-so-these-activists-are-using-bitcoin-to-battle-police-brutality/ https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/10/16/nigerian-banks-shut... Ukraine: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/ukrainian-flees-to-poland-with-2000-in-bitcoin-on-usb-drive.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/ukrainian-flees-to-poland-wi... https://www.financialinclusion.tech/ https://www.financialinclusion.tech/

denton-scratch 4y ago

> The layer that was—and still is—responsible for standardized text transfer on top of TCP/IP: HTTP Um, wait. HTTP is for transferring documents. There are other text-based protocols that run over TCP, that long pre-date HTTP. And I for one deplore the use of HTTP for everything; I'm afraid the common firewall practice of blocking everything outbound except port 80 is probably largely responsible.

plebianRube 4y ago
HTTP represents any documents as ... drum roll ... text. It is literally in the name of the specification. If it were meant to be a document transfer protocol, HDTP would have been a better acronym.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  If you can rely on the name of the protocol as an accurate description, then LDAP would actually be "lightweight", UDP packets would be assembled by users, and SSL would be secure. If HTTP represents documents as text, then the "hypertext" part of the name becomes misleading, because you can't put hyperlinks in plain text. That is: the protocol is misnamed, because the leading "HT" stands for "Hypertext", not "Hyper Text". It's designed to transfer HTML.
  - wsc981 4y ago
    > If you can rely on the name of the protocol as an accurate description, then LDAP would actually be "lightweight", UDP packets would be assembled by users, and SSL would be secure. Also SOAP would be simple: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/xml/soap/simple http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/xml/soap/simple
- teddyh 4y ago
  Original HTTP (now called 0.9) did not have headers in the request. HTTP 1.0 added headers, including the "Content-Type" header (reused from the MIME e-mail standard), specifying the type of the data being transferred. Before that, all data was indeed implied to be HTML and nothing else.

arcticbull 4y ago

This is a pseudointellectual treatise that advocates for financial privacy by effectively taking all your transactions, publishing them online under a pseudonym, emailing them to every global law enforcement agency and saying "bet you can't figure out who I am!" Bet you they can. The idea that a glacial L1, so slow that it would require 75 years to onboard everyone onto the L2 (and the better part of a trillion dollars of electricity), that publicly publishes all transactions for the FBI and the PRC to feed into their automated de-anonmyization tooling is somehow a panacea for privacy - because the author is three punchbowls deep in the Koolaid - I mean I have no idea where to even begin. It beggars belief. Then they have the gall to mention Hong Kong as though every bit of traffic in and out of the island isn't going through the microscope of the PRC. If you think you can transact under the nose of the PRC on Bitcoin and they'll have no idea what's happening, I've got tokenized ownership of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge [1] to sell you. Those transactions are prosecution futures. They know exactly what they were for, they were letting you make them, and if you're a dissident, look out. Physical, offline cash is the only true decentralized, censorship resistant peer-to-peer payment method that's difficult to trace. If you believe in privacy, let's throw some weight behind Rohan Grey's ecash. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong–Zhuhai–Macau_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong–Zhuhai–Macau_Bridge [2] https://ecashact.us https://ecashact.us

jeroenhd 4y ago

I don't get it: Bitcoin and privacy are by definition orthoginally separated. Bitcoin transactions are not anonymous, they're public and can be traced quickly and easily. You're one public key leak away from having your entire banking history leak to the public. You can work around this problem by having different wallets for every transaction, but getting the coins in there would be a huge hassle if you have to buy them physically, with cash, every time you want to pay. Bitcoin is uncontrollable by the government but that doesn't mean the government isn't following your every step on the blockchain. They'll let you play with your internet coins as long as you behave but if they've got it out for you, either because you're a criminal or because they're oppressive, you can't rely on the blockchain to protect you. Physical money in your wallet is far more private than any other common form of blockchain currency (which is why many countries are trying to limit how much physical cash you can have on you).

tromp 4y ago
> Bitcoin transactions are not anonymous, they're public and can be traced quickly and easily. They're arguing that Lightning transactions offer substantially more privacy.
tchalla 4y ago
Privacy != Anonymity
responsible 4y ago
Which is why we have Monero