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Younger me was so excited by bootstrapping new connectivities & systems, resented government survelliance of personal lives. The Manifesto of Cyberspace was scr

Younger me was so excited by bootstrapping new connectivities & systems, resented government survelliance of personal lives. The Manifesto of Cyberspace was scrawled across my brain. But wow, my dislike for how many vast powers in the world are so very un-observable was also high then, & the implications of bitcoin & cryptocurrency to let these systems grow & be harder to deal with has only gone up & up & up ever-more. Ultimately we're far more tracked by corporations anyhow now, and that only barely has to do with the currency we use.

photon12 4y ago
I recently had to leave working for a cryptocurrency adjacent startup because my stomach kept getting into knots about how oligarchs are doing a lot of VC funding in the space, and the reason they are funding it is to cement their authority.
- wonderwonder 4y ago
  Interesting, can you provide more details without doxxing yourself?
  - photon12 4y ago
    This person isn't necessarily an oligarch, but they are a major vendor of market research and VC dollars in the space. This is how important they think the stakes are around fake internet money [1]: > The Biden Administration is trying to strangle crypto. > A lot of folks have been trying to stifle that criticism, but the effort to destroy the industry is quiet but pervasive across the exec branch. > The time to make crypto an issue that wins or loses the Presidency is now. Investors in my company support that view. It's an example of doing things indistinguishable from what oligarchs want: no questions on their authority, even in the wake of massive consumer harms relating to token speculation and fundamentally unsolvable UX issues for retail consumers. I had to leave mostly because I couldn't deal with the constant cognitive dissonance. The only reliable source of income in crypto is arbing yields on customer deposits to US treasuries, and the whole space is reliant on the government for macroeconomic stability already and they are creating big deposit flow risks and banks are rightfully worried about it. [2] [1] https://twitter.com/twobitidiot/status/1624563275760279554 https://twitter.com/twobitidiot/status/1624563275760279554 [2] https://twitter.com/ecommerceshares/status/1630287169330749443 https://twitter.com/ecommerceshares/status/16302871693307494...
rt4mn 4y ago
> the implications of bitcoin & cryptocurrency to let these systems grow & be harder to deal with has only gone up & up & up ever-more. While I agree the implications are concerning, I think its difficult to overstate just how much of a stranglehold the US regulatory and surveillance machine has over the global financial system. Trying to buy and sell things online without sharing your real name or address is functionally impossible for 99% of people (unless you are willing to break the law or learn how to use cryptocurrency). This is because the gatekeepers to the Internets finances (banks, credit cards, etc) are required by law to identify who they are working with. This makes a sort of sense until you zoom out and see the scope of the problem. Because it is impossible in 99% of cases to move money around online without using those gatekeepers, there functionally is no financial privacy online. I should not have to share my bloody name or address with anyone to order a god damn box of chocolate. > Ultimately we're far more tracked by corporations anyhow now, True, and thats very concerning and should be pushed back against. But when corporations collect data on you, the worst thing they do with that data (generally speaking) is not treat it with care and the data gets stollen / made public. When the government collects data on you, the worst thing they do with it (generally speaking) is throw you in jail or kill you. The scope of the concern is astronomically higher.
- Invictus0 4y ago
  Corporations can deny you credit, change your interest rate, increase your bail, close your account, refuse to do business with you, and generally make your life harder.
- forgetfreeman 4y ago
  "I should not have to share my bloody name or address with anyone to order a god damn box of chocolate." You don't. Get off your ass and go buy a box with cash. On the drive over meditate on who generally benefits when given the ability to move large sums of cash anonymously (hint: terrorist organizations, drug cartels, and tax dodging oligarchs).
  - csydas 4y ago
    I think you're missing the point here. I'm not a crypto advocate, but Visa and Mastercard definitely have too much power as do most online transaction processors, and the amount of information that online processors collect (at the request and joy of governments) is quite scary. A select few organizations can control whether you can buy necessities or not and cut you off even from legally earned money on a whim. Banks have finite cash on hand which limits your mobility and liquidity at any given moment in the event of an emergency. Online commerce at this stage may as well be a secondary benefit given how your information is scooped up and resold to advertisers. Financial systems are quite convenient, there's no denying that, but they're extremely fragile and the system exists at the whim of a few select people. Visa and Mastercard have demonstrated they can effectively remove persons from modern civilization at their discretion, not even with official government requirements, and that this has not been challenges is really unsettling. To reiterate, cryptocurrencies are not the answer here in their current state, as they're too unstable and basically inherit not only all the issues that normal banks bring, but also introduce a ton of new issues. I don't know how to ensure sovereignty for individuals who are legally earning compensation when a support representative for banks can click on a checkbox and make them penniless. Nevermind if the company the representative works for is influenced by an unhappy government. Finance is terrifying, and we're really in a strange place where we don't have a good answer for ensuring individual sovereignty with any currency, crypto included. I stress over this because I'm less and less confident every year that there is a good solution for this besides eschewing Finance entirely (and that's quite the magic trick...)
diordiderot 4y ago
Crypto has been pretty unsuccessful at moving large volumes anonymously over a multi year timespan https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60462182 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60462182
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  I think there are a lot of things that aren't tracked very well. Randomly pumped tokens/NFTs - even newly issued and pumped ones - are moving large volumes anonymously. You act like a random trader that caught the wave, but really you are also the addresses pumping the asset with the dark money that isn’t intended to be cashed out. The pumped addresses just wind up with the asset and will never cash out. Your KYC'd address just looks like a good crypto trader. A clean 8,000% gain doesn't look different than a dirty 8,000% gain.
  - photon12 4y ago
    Got this message in my Discord message requests, from 13 hours ago: Yo!*Welcome to [redacted]!* What can we offer you We providing quality crypto pumps. *We share the name of target coin in advance.* *We are professional cryptotraders* And finally, we show you how to beat the market and be ahead of everyone. **This is your chance to multiply your investment together with the cryptocurrency market whales**! ** The amount of invites is limited! Hurry up to take your place there:** : [redacted]
    - yieldcrv 4y ago
      maybe, but that's most likely a scam where you will be exit liquidity for the leader too. but people with the "dark money" can also pay similar kinds of groups. this happens in the stock market all the time too. if you have the dark money that you won't cash out, you can do it yourself pretty easily as well, you don't actually need to notify a crowd because there are so many bots that will join a pump of any token, and that will cause it to trend too.
DennisP 4y ago
A potential solution is to make small transactions anonymous, but break the anonymity for large transactions. Of course a large transaction could be broken into many small transactions, but it'd be much more cumbersome and expensive. For specific sanctioned entities, a possibility would be to let users specify a list of addresses they're not willing to share an anonymity pool with. Here's Vitalik talking about these ideas in a recent interview: https://podclips.com/c/K3RLE1?ss=r&ss2=ethereum&d=2023-02-28 https://podclips.com/c/K3RLE1?ss=r&ss2=ethereum&d=2023-02-28

photon12 4y ago

I recently had to leave working for a cryptocurrency adjacent startup because my stomach kept getting into knots about how oligarchs are doing a lot of VC funding in the space, and the reason they are funding it is to cement their authority.

wonderwonder 4y ago
Interesting, can you provide more details without doxxing yourself?
- photon12 4y ago
  This person isn't necessarily an oligarch, but they are a major vendor of market research and VC dollars in the space. This is how important they think the stakes are around fake internet money [1]: > The Biden Administration is trying to strangle crypto. > A lot of folks have been trying to stifle that criticism, but the effort to destroy the industry is quiet but pervasive across the exec branch. > The time to make crypto an issue that wins or loses the Presidency is now. Investors in my company support that view. It's an example of doing things indistinguishable from what oligarchs want: no questions on their authority, even in the wake of massive consumer harms relating to token speculation and fundamentally unsolvable UX issues for retail consumers. I had to leave mostly because I couldn't deal with the constant cognitive dissonance. The only reliable source of income in crypto is arbing yields on customer deposits to US treasuries, and the whole space is reliant on the government for macroeconomic stability already and they are creating big deposit flow risks and banks are rightfully worried about it. [2] [1] https://twitter.com/twobitidiot/status/1624563275760279554 https://twitter.com/twobitidiot/status/1624563275760279554 [2] https://twitter.com/ecommerceshares/status/1630287169330749443 https://twitter.com/ecommerceshares/status/16302871693307494...

rt4mn 4y ago

> the implications of bitcoin & cryptocurrency to let these systems grow & be harder to deal with has only gone up & up & up ever-more. While I agree the implications are concerning, I think its difficult to overstate just how much of a stranglehold the US regulatory and surveillance machine has over the global financial system. Trying to buy and sell things online without sharing your real name or address is functionally impossible for 99% of people (unless you are willing to break the law or learn how to use cryptocurrency). This is because the gatekeepers to the Internets finances (banks, credit cards, etc) are required by law to identify who they are working with. This makes a sort of sense until you zoom out and see the scope of the problem. Because it is impossible in 99% of cases to move money around online without using those gatekeepers, there functionally is no financial privacy online. I should not have to share my bloody name or address with anyone to order a god damn box of chocolate. > Ultimately we're far more tracked by corporations anyhow now, True, and thats very concerning and should be pushed back against. But when corporations collect data on you, the worst thing they do with that data (generally speaking) is not treat it with care and the data gets stollen / made public. When the government collects data on you, the worst thing they do with it (generally speaking) is throw you in jail or kill you. The scope of the concern is astronomically higher.

Invictus0 4y ago
Corporations can deny you credit, change your interest rate, increase your bail, close your account, refuse to do business with you, and generally make your life harder.
forgetfreeman 4y ago
"I should not have to share my bloody name or address with anyone to order a god damn box of chocolate." You don't. Get off your ass and go buy a box with cash. On the drive over meditate on who generally benefits when given the ability to move large sums of cash anonymously (hint: terrorist organizations, drug cartels, and tax dodging oligarchs).
- csydas 4y ago
  I think you're missing the point here. I'm not a crypto advocate, but Visa and Mastercard definitely have too much power as do most online transaction processors, and the amount of information that online processors collect (at the request and joy of governments) is quite scary. A select few organizations can control whether you can buy necessities or not and cut you off even from legally earned money on a whim. Banks have finite cash on hand which limits your mobility and liquidity at any given moment in the event of an emergency. Online commerce at this stage may as well be a secondary benefit given how your information is scooped up and resold to advertisers. Financial systems are quite convenient, there's no denying that, but they're extremely fragile and the system exists at the whim of a few select people. Visa and Mastercard have demonstrated they can effectively remove persons from modern civilization at their discretion, not even with official government requirements, and that this has not been challenges is really unsettling. To reiterate, cryptocurrencies are not the answer here in their current state, as they're too unstable and basically inherit not only all the issues that normal banks bring, but also introduce a ton of new issues. I don't know how to ensure sovereignty for individuals who are legally earning compensation when a support representative for banks can click on a checkbox and make them penniless. Nevermind if the company the representative works for is influenced by an unhappy government. Finance is terrifying, and we're really in a strange place where we don't have a good answer for ensuring individual sovereignty with any currency, crypto included. I stress over this because I'm less and less confident every year that there is a good solution for this besides eschewing Finance entirely (and that's quite the magic trick...)

diordiderot 4y ago

Crypto has been pretty unsuccessful at moving large volumes anonymously over a multi year timespan https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60462182 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60462182

yieldcrv 4y ago
I think there are a lot of things that aren't tracked very well. Randomly pumped tokens/NFTs - even newly issued and pumped ones - are moving large volumes anonymously. You act like a random trader that caught the wave, but really you are also the addresses pumping the asset with the dark money that isn’t intended to be cashed out. The pumped addresses just wind up with the asset and will never cash out. Your KYC'd address just looks like a good crypto trader. A clean 8,000% gain doesn't look different than a dirty 8,000% gain.
- photon12 4y ago
  Got this message in my Discord message requests, from 13 hours ago: Yo!*Welcome to [redacted]!* What can we offer you We providing quality crypto pumps. *We share the name of target coin in advance.* *We are professional cryptotraders* And finally, we show you how to beat the market and be ahead of everyone. **This is your chance to multiply your investment together with the cryptocurrency market whales**! ** The amount of invites is limited! Hurry up to take your place there:** : [redacted]
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    maybe, but that's most likely a scam where you will be exit liquidity for the leader too. but people with the "dark money" can also pay similar kinds of groups. this happens in the stock market all the time too. if you have the dark money that you won't cash out, you can do it yourself pretty easily as well, you don't actually need to notify a crowd because there are so many bots that will join a pump of any token, and that will cause it to trend too.

DennisP 4y ago

A potential solution is to make small transactions anonymous, but break the anonymity for large transactions. Of course a large transaction could be broken into many small transactions, but it'd be much more cumbersome and expensive. For specific sanctioned entities, a possibility would be to let users specify a list of addresses they're not willing to share an anonymity pool with. Here's Vitalik talking about these ideas in a recent interview: https://podclips.com/c/K3RLE1?ss=r&ss2=ethereum&d=2023-02-28 https://podclips.com/c/K3RLE1?ss=r&ss2=ethereum&d=2023-02-28