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Reddit co-founder’s quest for unseizable property
- skyyler 4y agohttps://archive.is/Qy343 https://archive.is/Qy343
- jadbox 4y agoI'm not sure where the unseizable NFT assets fits in. If you own anything physical or store digital data that's tied to an NFT, it can be repossessed by government or some financial institution. The only real merit is storing value in strictly a stable currency (like USDC) and holding the private key in a secure, hidden location. Even then, if there's any traces (bank routing) to that wallet address, the government or some other institution can legally press to take ownership. As someone that's been in the crypto scene a very long time, I've come to the conclusion that there's no real alternative to local and federal political involvement to secure a fair economy. Crypto will not save you if politics (or a hostile mega corporation) turn against you. Another thought experiment is what if a billionaire decides to hide all their money in crypto to avoid taxes or asset seizing?
- davidw 4y ago> local and federal political involvement to secure a fair economy That seems a lot more important in any case, in that fancy digital assets aren't going to prevent the atrocities mentioned in the beginning of the article.
- LadyCailin 4y agoIf the government is willing to kill 1.5 million people, storing your assets in NFTs is not particularly useful, and anyways assets are low on your list of concerns anyways.
- scoofy 4y agoAgain... and I can't stress this enough. The best way to get someone's password isn't phishing, it's threatening to hit them in the head with a wrench. The idea that we can create some sort of libertarian utopia seems blind to the fact that humans are inherently social. I think the idea of making unseizable assets is noble, sort of, but the concept of property, and money or value, is social by design. The assets with intrinsic value are wheat fields, oil tankers, and silos of grain... not artistic works. I think the idea of a digital, anonymous currency, though fraught with problems, can be extended past national (thus cultural) borders, but the same can be accomplished with the banking system. When a country plans to seize your assets, the goal should be to leave the country, not remain with hidden cryptos.
- zombiwoof 4y agoTotally agree. All this bitcoin wallet stuff that's protected by a key is more safe than cash in the ground. When somebody hits you in the head and asks for your encryption key you gonna give it.
- alchemist1e9 4y agoBut which key is the question isn’t it? why do you assume attacker can know which wallet or address is yours.
- ejb999 4y agobecause you will tell them while they are hitting you in the head with a wrench.
- notch898a 4y agoWhy would I have any reason to believe they'd stop after I told them the truth? Read Gulag Archipelago describing tortures by the Soviet regime. When these entities don't know how much information you have, they just beat and beat until they're satisfied it's enough beating that they expect they got the answers. If you tell them everything they keep beating because they think there is more; if you don't tell them everything they keep beating because they think there is more. If they don't know what information you have, whether or not you told all of what you know doesn't have much bearing on how the wrenching goes. If you find yourself getting beat with a wrench and unable to fight back, you're going to have to accept the beating in and of itself, and accept the fraction of the full truth you tell them has little correlation to what kind of beating you're going to get.
- TinyRick 4y agoThis article is about unseizable digital property, which is an important distinction. I'm curious if he thinks his "unseizable" digital assets will be worth anything in the event where the US is illegally seizing assets from citizens (which seems to be his reason for "investing" so heavily in digital assets - due to past family history). In an event like that, I'd much rather have food and fresh water supplies than some NFTs.
- chongli 4y agoIf the government is illegally seizing your assets, sue them. Should be an open-and-shut case because it’s illegal. The real problem is when the government legalizes the procedure and uses it to seize assets. This happens all the time [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
- junofan 4y agoHuh, didn’t we do it to ethnic Japanese within living memory regardless of citizenship?
- km3r 4y agoI think thats an issue with crypto in general. The use cases of times where a bank fails and FDIC insurance doesn't work is a time where digital money is going to have little use. Now if you decide to trust a central entity just a tiny amount, all other forms of digital currency win out in countless ways.
- notch898a 4y agoCollapse of US economies and banks would be devastating worldwide, but doesn't mean crypto would be worthless throughout the entire world. Our borders are large and porous and undefendable; one could escape and spend them elsewhere.
- km3r 4y agoWhat situation would the US collapse not be the biggest global catastrophe since WW2? No matter where you escape everything is collapsing at that point. All though, to be clear, I think the risk of a collapse isn't worth worrying about. It's like prepping for a nuclear war. The chances of happening are tiny and the chances of surviving are even smaller.
- wpietri 4y agoThe wild thing to me with this "unseizable" fantasy is that it in practice opens the door for far more property loss. Scams, phishing, hacking, market manipulation, fraud, corporate malfeasance (e.g. SBF), ransomware and other sorts of fraud and theft are rampant in the cryptocurrency space. Your government may not be able to seize your property from you, but they also can't seize your property back from criminals. And they still know where you live and have guns, so I'm not sure how much unseizability is gained.
- darth_avocado 4y agoSomething can only be “Unseizable” if it’s not real. Change my mind.
- adolph 4y agoAre ideas in your mind real enough?
- darth_avocado 4y agoIdeas can be seized.
- adolph 4y agoMost often I am seized by an idea rather than vice versa
- sudosysgen 4y agoThey're not property.
- khuey 4y agoI would go with "not tangible" rather than "real" but I think I agree.
- geysersam 4y agoMaybe "more or less" unseizable is the better concept. Try to "seize" the belief in the death and resurrection of Christ from one billion believers (or even from one sufficiently devoted). Even if the story isn't real, it has very real and tangible consequences. A painting is seizable. But if it is simple enough, it can be recreated from memory. How could you seize it? Ultimately it depends on what you care about. Often we care about seizable things. But not everything is seizable.
- cmh89 4y agoIf the US government wanted his digital assets, they would get his digital assets. Currencies that aren't state backed will always have massive fluctuation in value anyway. If you are Argentinean, the USD is a better store of value than BitCoin. A pump and dump with a good story is still just a pump and dump. NFT's and crypto are for suckers and those who prey upon them.
- dale_glass 4y agoNFTs aren't a good fit for this, because they critically depend on external infrastructure. Here's a monkey: https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061c2e118a18a936f13d/3716 https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061... But what's actually on the blockchain? A pointer to an IPFS URL: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmeSjSinHpPnmXmspMjwiXyN6zS4E9zccariGR3jxcaWtq/3716 https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmeSjSinHpPnmXmspMjwiXyN6zS4E9zccariGR3... Which in turn points to a picture again on IPFS. For this to work: First OpenSea has to do this work to format it in a human-readable way. If the authorities contact OpenSea, this may be disabled. Next, the ipfs.io domain has to keep resolving. This can be stopped by the authorities and ICANN. Next, ipfs.io has to keep returning data at those URLs. That can be stopped by the authorities and whover runs ipfs.io. And if we work around the need for an IPFS proxy and talk to IPFS directly, then this still only works so long people keep on hosting that image. I don't know how many people is that world-wide, but probably not that many. Even assuming this survives a hostile government and keeps working, the real-life owner is usually easily found and targeted.
- yieldcrv 4y agothere are plenty of SVG NFTs where everything is stored in the contract. I personally think its useful to qualify your statement to be about improper common uses of NFTs, since few other people knows there is a difference too.
- daveidol 4y agoPlus, who is going to want a shitty picture of a monkey when the chips are down? If that's your concern at least hoard Bitcoin or something.
- TinyRick 4y agoBut it has a smoking jacket!!! Only 2% have that trait! /s
- EFreethought 4y agoThe only way NFTs make any sense to me is: You are spending money so you can brag that you spent money. Why you would do that is another question.
- jdmtheNth 4y agoIt's good to see that even though families push to perpetuate trauma, it is possible to lead a successful, upstanding life.
- tyrrvk 4y agooh look. Some techbro billionaire fretting about his billions. Why is this news? What's next, an indepth look at finding 'just the right bunker' for the apocalypse. I mean, yeah a bad thing happened. His family survived, and he's gotten a better life than 99% of the population on the planet. Cool. Maybe rather than worry about hoarding his stuff he could find ways to improve the planet? Or better yet, collect some digital thing, obfuscated behind other digital things all with some arbitrary value - that won't feed you, keep you warm and or provide clean water in a real emergency.
- dang 4y agoPlease don't fulminate. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You may not owe techbro billionaires better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoNFTs, and crypto as a whole, have a lot of interesting use cases. Unfortunately, the way crypto works currently, any sort of utility gets drowned out in a sea of pump and dump schemes and speculative mania.
- notatoad 4y agohis ancestors had property siezed in the armenian genocide, and that's why he wants to sell me a chunk of text proving that i own a png commemorating the superbowl? sounds pretty goofy to me.
- nickdothutton 4y agoI’ve always found it odd that in the US today, there is a show called “The Young Turks” seemingly in honour of the group that planned and executed the Armenian genocide. I can only presume they don’t have a very large Armenian-American audience.