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There are people that still have their accounts frozen because they donated to the truckers in Canada. That’s insane. Other countries had or will have similar c

by emsy 4y ago

There are people that still have their accounts frozen because they donated to the truckers in Canada. That’s insane. Other countries had or will have similar cases in the future. We absolutely should have a way to exchange money without the governments involvement. The government already has the monopoly on physical force. That ought to be enough. So yes, there is a use case. But you’re correct in that it hasn’t really been used that way so far.

twawaaay 4y ago
Oh yeah, and those same people later cry foul when they get robbed of their money because it was not protected in any way. Suddenly everybody wants crypto but with protections. Fools. There is a reason why money and banking is regulated -- to protect little guys from getting scammed right and left. Those protections are not perfect, true, but still orders of magnitude better than crypto free for all. And as to monopoly on physical force, there is a reason for it, too. Take a look at African countries for what happens when people are allowed to take things into their own hands. Take a look at The Last of Us if you want to know what happens when there is no government that can project physical force. Our civilisation is far from perfect but it is a civilisation. It lets you live, travel and do business in relative safety. So think about it the next time you start imagining how good it would be without all this pesky civilisation around you. Because it is much better and productive to try to iteratively fix what we already have than decide to erase everything and start a complete rewrite.
- mike741 4y ago
  > Oh yeah, and those same people later cry foul when they get robbed of their money because it was not protected in any way. Can you give an example? Do you actually know any of these people? > Suddenly everybody wants crypto but with protections Not me, So not everybody. > There is a reason why money and banking is regulated -- to protect little guys from getting scammed right and left. The reason is that their protocols are inherently unsafe. Similarly, there is a reason Bitcoin was made to be unregulated -- to protect the little guys from having their share devalued by trillion dollar bail-outs for the super rich. > orders of magnitude better than crypto free for all Better for who? Maybe better for you, but certainly not everyone. > Take a look at The Last of Us if you want to know what happens The video game?? > It lets you live, travel and do business in relative safety. Speak for yourself. Not everyone is safe. That's an increasingly rare privilege as the wealth divide grows, and many people attribute this divide to our monetary system.
  - JPws_Prntr_Fngr 4y ago
    > The video game?? I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect our pop culture is being intentionally Marvel-ized to keep full-grown adults' mental models of the world at a grade school level. (We have to stop Voldemort!! Captain Gandalf needs our support, and people who question him are traitors!!) > Speak for yourself. Not everyone is safe. That's an increasingly rare privilege as the wealth divide grows, and many people attribute this divide to our monetary system. The crux of the issue, I think, and why I doubt decentralized stores of value will be legal for much longer. "Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws!" - Mayer Amschel Rothschild, probably apocryphally
    - x-complexity 4y ago
      (twawaaay) > > > Take a look at The Last of Us if you want to know what happens (mike741) > > The video game?? (JPws_Prntr_Fngr) > I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect our pop culture is being intentionally Marvel-ized to keep full-grown adults' mental models of the world at a grade school level. (We have to stop Voldemort!! Captain Gandalf needs our support, and people who question him are traitors!!) This article sums it up: https://web.archive.org/web/20210122122555/https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/12/political-disney-world.html#:~:text=Back%20to%20Disney%20movies https://web.archive.org/web/20210122122555/https://waitbutwh.... Essentially, what has happened is the application of Disney movie/show narratives taken outside of their intended context: What was meant as the starting point for guiding children on morality has instead been used as the ultimate end-goal & a shining beacon of what is considered to be moral or immoral. In simpler terms, this is the "Disney-ification" of the political world: We're the good ones, they're the enemy, they must be opposed/defeated/unalived. From the article: > In high-rung politics, it’s understood that people aren’t 1s and 0s—they’re all 0.5s, each in their own messy, complicated, unique way. And to people who see people as 0.5s, it’s clear that PDW narratives not only dehumanize their opponents, they dehumanize everybody into fake cartoon people. > https://web.archive.org/web/20210122122555im_/https://28oa9i1t08037ue3m1l0i861-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/18-dehumanization-1-600x397.png https://web.archive.org/web/20210122122555im_/https://28oa9i...
  - bathory 4y ago
- weberer 4y ago
  >Take a look at The Last of Us if you want to know what happens when there is no government that can project physical force. Is this a serious comment?
bregma 4y ago
No. The few who had their accounts frozen had them unfrozen within days. The freezing was done by the banks without instruction from the government other than the existing "supporting terrorism" laws on the books (it was done by the banks of their own volition before the Emergencies Act was passed). Yes, efforts were being organized to bypass regulation by taking donations in cryptocoin but that turned out to be a scam and thankfully few of the donors were sophisticated enough to go beyond cheques and credit card donations to Give/Send/Go. So, end in the end, a terrible example of why trusting the organized crime behind crypto is superior to the usual crowd and whether it has contributed anything useful to society. It's more of an example of how paranoia can blind one to reality.
thenaturalist 4y ago
The repeating theme of crypto fans postulating "free" cashflow without government involvment is the road to salvation is annoying me so much. Cashflow without government involvement is the absolute opposite of democratic freedom. Take literally any autocratic government ripe with corruption, look at Russia, China et al. Look at any large criminal organization which tries to avoid democratically elected governmental regulation of their cashflows. Instead of being free, in a world with no oversight of how money is exchanged, 99.9% of people will wake up in modern servitude to a tiny rich oligarchy which owns all the assets and brutally opresses their slaves. How this is not apparent to anyone is beyond me. We already found a solution to the problem of being treated unfairly by a government: the judicial branch. Think your money is frozen unfairly? Then sue. Easy as that.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  They know it. When you dig down under the surface a lot of freedom evangelists favor religious warlordism or monarchy.
  - landoftheice 4y ago
    [dead]
- ipaddr 4y ago
  Going the other direction where government controls all aspects of society is what the USSR and China decided was the best system. When the USSR broke up they gave all citizens ownership of previously held state enterprises which was worthless to them and those shares were sold ended up in few players hands. Crypto is the opposite where miners hold as much power as developers to create a balance. You can't sue in Canada when the government introduces wartime measures. Like Canada was under attack
  - thenaturalist 4y ago
    I am not going into the other direction though. I am not in any way saying the USSR or Chinese political system is or was desirable. I explicitly gave the judicial branch as implemented in Western democratic societies as an example. I'm no expert in Canadian politics, but to me it seems reasonable to assume that, just like in any other Western democratic society, the gov introducing wartime measures isn't what's day to day due process 99.9% of the time. So you arguing based on extreme examples, which are at least partially out of context isn't really adding anything substantial to the discussion at hand I think. How do miners hold as much power as big ass capitalists in a crypto world?? Look at the numbers for the distribution of crypto whales: https://insights.glassnode.com/bitcoin-supply-distribution-revisited/ https://insights.glassnode.com/bitcoin-supply-distribution-r... Look at basic economic theory: Those who hold access to the means of production will accrue capital steadily over time. Always has been that way, always will be. Whether you mine a currency and then spend, or a government mints a currency, distributes it to you and then you spend has no effect on the matter.
helloooooooo 4y ago
You’re wrong. All accounts have been unfrozen. They were frozen for less than 2 weeks. Stop spreading misinformative nonsense for you political agenda. This is not the platform for it.
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  I wasn't even aware that the accounts were frozen. That is horrifying.
  - helloooooooo 4y ago
    What’s horrifying is living in a city where someone has attached a train horn to their truck, and honks it hourly through the night for several weeks. What’s horrifying is leaving your apartment building in downtown Ottawa and being spit on and verbally harassed for wearing a mask. What’s horrifying is smelling the literal human shit in the streets waft up through your apartment building’s ventilation system and into your unit. What’s horrifying is seeing half of your country not care about any of that because “it’s peaceful”.
    - ipaddr 4y ago
      "What’s horrifying is smelling the literal human shit in the streets waft up through your apartment building’s ventilation system and into your unit" That smell comes from parliament.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  No they weren't all unfrozen.
ActorNightly 4y ago
Doom posting. The reason crypto never took off is because the government effectively backs a lot of the currency transactions indirectly, which makes engaging in such transactions a lot less risky for everyone involved. If such trust in the government wasn't there, everyone would have jumped on crypto ten-fold. Yes, government has control over aspects of life, and humanity collectively organized governments specifically to have that power, because humanity early on realized that humans are emotion-prone individuals that cannot be trusted. All the anti-state rhetoric that you ever read completely ignores that fact. Yes, there are going to be some negatives associated with this transfer of power that are going to happen, no complex systems like that are perfect. You probably would want someones account frozen if they were directly donating large sums of money to a terrorist group that was planning attacks on US. There are good cases for use of power, and bad ones. The fact that we aren't living in totalitarian regimes and still have plenty of individual of freedoms means that the system is working pretty well.
epgui 4y ago
Crypto aside, it's difficult to point to a less deserving cause than the trucker convoy that paralyzed Ottawa for no good reason (the reasons are no good outside of delusionland).
- ipaddr 4y ago
  Women's right to choose what goes in their bodies is an important right in Canada. Not to worry the wartime act will be used on something you personally care about but by that time your rights will be gone.
  - epgui 4y ago
    ^ Exhibit A: commenter fails to recognize that there are sometimes good reason to temporarily limit rights, such as to limit the spread of infectious diseases, because commenter knows very little about public health or epidemiology. Commenter believes that anytime rights are limited, it's for a nefarious purpose, and it can't possibly be for a good reason. How's the syphillis and HIV treating you? Oh what's that? You live in a society that actively limits the spread of these diseases by carefully limiting rights, so you're free to live your life without these diseases? Nice concept.
    - helloooooooo 4y ago
      They also don’t understand that the “wartime act” is not the act that was invoked. In fact, the War Measures Act has not existed in Canada for nearly 40 years. It was replaced by the Emergencies Act, which explicitly does not violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, unlike its predecessors. It just goes to show how knowledgeable the previous poster is on the subject.
      - epgui 4y ago
        Indeed. But just to be even more clear: > which explicitly does not violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms Indeed indeed. However, it does limit the rights and freedoms in the Charter, and it does so in a way that the Charter allows. The Charter provides an escape hatch in exceptional circumstances, and that is not by accident: it is by design. And anyone who would design the Charter without this escape hatch probably has no business being in governance, because it would just be a ticking time bomb to a constitutional crisis.

by emsy 4y ago

twawaaay 4y ago

Oh yeah, and those same people later cry foul when they get robbed of their money because it was not protected in any way. Suddenly everybody wants crypto but with protections. Fools. There is a reason why money and banking is regulated -- to protect little guys from getting scammed right and left. Those protections are not perfect, true, but still orders of magnitude better than crypto free for all. And as to monopoly on physical force, there is a reason for it, too. Take a look at African countries for what happens when people are allowed to take things into their own hands. Take a look at The Last of Us if you want to know what happens when there is no government that can project physical force. Our civilisation is far from perfect but it is a civilisation. It lets you live, travel and do business in relative safety. So think about it the next time you start imagining how good it would be without all this pesky civilisation around you. Because it is much better and productive to try to iteratively fix what we already have than decide to erase everything and start a complete rewrite.

mike741 4y ago
> Oh yeah, and those same people later cry foul when they get robbed of their money because it was not protected in any way. Can you give an example? Do you actually know any of these people? > Suddenly everybody wants crypto but with protections Not me, So not everybody. > There is a reason why money and banking is regulated -- to protect little guys from getting scammed right and left. The reason is that their protocols are inherently unsafe. Similarly, there is a reason Bitcoin was made to be unregulated -- to protect the little guys from having their share devalued by trillion dollar bail-outs for the super rich. > orders of magnitude better than crypto free for all Better for who? Maybe better for you, but certainly not everyone. > Take a look at The Last of Us if you want to know what happens The video game?? > It lets you live, travel and do business in relative safety. Speak for yourself. Not everyone is safe. That's an increasingly rare privilege as the wealth divide grows, and many people attribute this divide to our monetary system.
- JPws_Prntr_Fngr 4y ago
  > The video game?? I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect our pop culture is being intentionally Marvel-ized to keep full-grown adults' mental models of the world at a grade school level. (We have to stop Voldemort!! Captain Gandalf needs our support, and people who question him are traitors!!) > Speak for yourself. Not everyone is safe. That's an increasingly rare privilege as the wealth divide grows, and many people attribute this divide to our monetary system. The crux of the issue, I think, and why I doubt decentralized stores of value will be legal for much longer. "Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws!" - Mayer Amschel Rothschild, probably apocryphally
  - x-complexity 4y ago
    (twawaaay) > > > Take a look at The Last of Us if you want to know what happens (mike741) > > The video game?? (JPws_Prntr_Fngr) > I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect our pop culture is being intentionally Marvel-ized to keep full-grown adults' mental models of the world at a grade school level. (We have to stop Voldemort!! Captain Gandalf needs our support, and people who question him are traitors!!) This article sums it up: https://web.archive.org/web/20210122122555/https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/12/political-disney-world.html#:~:text=Back%20to%20Disney%20movies https://web.archive.org/web/20210122122555/https://waitbutwh.... Essentially, what has happened is the application of Disney movie/show narratives taken outside of their intended context: What was meant as the starting point for guiding children on morality has instead been used as the ultimate end-goal & a shining beacon of what is considered to be moral or immoral. In simpler terms, this is the "Disney-ification" of the political world: We're the good ones, they're the enemy, they must be opposed/defeated/unalived. From the article: > In high-rung politics, it’s understood that people aren’t 1s and 0s—they’re all 0.5s, each in their own messy, complicated, unique way. And to people who see people as 0.5s, it’s clear that PDW narratives not only dehumanize their opponents, they dehumanize everybody into fake cartoon people. > https://web.archive.org/web/20210122122555im_/https://28oa9i1t08037ue3m1l0i861-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/18-dehumanization-1-600x397.png https://web.archive.org/web/20210122122555im_/https://28oa9i...
- bathory 4y ago
weberer 4y ago
>Take a look at The Last of Us if you want to know what happens when there is no government that can project physical force. Is this a serious comment?

bregma 4y ago

No. The few who had their accounts frozen had them unfrozen within days. The freezing was done by the banks without instruction from the government other than the existing "supporting terrorism" laws on the books (it was done by the banks of their own volition before the Emergencies Act was passed). Yes, efforts were being organized to bypass regulation by taking donations in cryptocoin but that turned out to be a scam and thankfully few of the donors were sophisticated enough to go beyond cheques and credit card donations to Give/Send/Go. So, end in the end, a terrible example of why trusting the organized crime behind crypto is superior to the usual crowd and whether it has contributed anything useful to society. It's more of an example of how paranoia can blind one to reality.

thenaturalist 4y ago

The repeating theme of crypto fans postulating "free" cashflow without government involvment is the road to salvation is annoying me so much. Cashflow without government involvement is the absolute opposite of democratic freedom. Take literally any autocratic government ripe with corruption, look at Russia, China et al. Look at any large criminal organization which tries to avoid democratically elected governmental regulation of their cashflows. Instead of being free, in a world with no oversight of how money is exchanged, 99.9% of people will wake up in modern servitude to a tiny rich oligarchy which owns all the assets and brutally opresses their slaves. How this is not apparent to anyone is beyond me. We already found a solution to the problem of being treated unfairly by a government: the judicial branch. Think your money is frozen unfairly? Then sue. Easy as that.

anigbrowl 4y ago
They know it. When you dig down under the surface a lot of freedom evangelists favor religious warlordism or monarchy.
- landoftheice 4y ago
  [dead]
ipaddr 4y ago
Going the other direction where government controls all aspects of society is what the USSR and China decided was the best system. When the USSR broke up they gave all citizens ownership of previously held state enterprises which was worthless to them and those shares were sold ended up in few players hands. Crypto is the opposite where miners hold as much power as developers to create a balance. You can't sue in Canada when the government introduces wartime measures. Like Canada was under attack
- thenaturalist 4y ago
  I am not going into the other direction though. I am not in any way saying the USSR or Chinese political system is or was desirable. I explicitly gave the judicial branch as implemented in Western democratic societies as an example. I'm no expert in Canadian politics, but to me it seems reasonable to assume that, just like in any other Western democratic society, the gov introducing wartime measures isn't what's day to day due process 99.9% of the time. So you arguing based on extreme examples, which are at least partially out of context isn't really adding anything substantial to the discussion at hand I think. How do miners hold as much power as big ass capitalists in a crypto world?? Look at the numbers for the distribution of crypto whales: https://insights.glassnode.com/bitcoin-supply-distribution-revisited/ https://insights.glassnode.com/bitcoin-supply-distribution-r... Look at basic economic theory: Those who hold access to the means of production will accrue capital steadily over time. Always has been that way, always will be. Whether you mine a currency and then spend, or a government mints a currency, distributes it to you and then you spend has no effect on the matter.

helloooooooo 4y ago

You’re wrong. All accounts have been unfrozen. They were frozen for less than 2 weeks. Stop spreading misinformative nonsense for you political agenda. This is not the platform for it.

sebzim4500 4y ago
I wasn't even aware that the accounts were frozen. That is horrifying.
- helloooooooo 4y ago
  What’s horrifying is living in a city where someone has attached a train horn to their truck, and honks it hourly through the night for several weeks. What’s horrifying is leaving your apartment building in downtown Ottawa and being spit on and verbally harassed for wearing a mask. What’s horrifying is smelling the literal human shit in the streets waft up through your apartment building’s ventilation system and into your unit. What’s horrifying is seeing half of your country not care about any of that because “it’s peaceful”.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    "What’s horrifying is smelling the literal human shit in the streets waft up through your apartment building’s ventilation system and into your unit" That smell comes from parliament.
ipaddr 4y ago
No they weren't all unfrozen.

ActorNightly 4y ago

Doom posting. The reason crypto never took off is because the government effectively backs a lot of the currency transactions indirectly, which makes engaging in such transactions a lot less risky for everyone involved. If such trust in the government wasn't there, everyone would have jumped on crypto ten-fold. Yes, government has control over aspects of life, and humanity collectively organized governments specifically to have that power, because humanity early on realized that humans are emotion-prone individuals that cannot be trusted. All the anti-state rhetoric that you ever read completely ignores that fact. Yes, there are going to be some negatives associated with this transfer of power that are going to happen, no complex systems like that are perfect. You probably would want someones account frozen if they were directly donating large sums of money to a terrorist group that was planning attacks on US. There are good cases for use of power, and bad ones. The fact that we aren't living in totalitarian regimes and still have plenty of individual of freedoms means that the system is working pretty well.

epgui 4y ago

Crypto aside, it's difficult to point to a less deserving cause than the trucker convoy that paralyzed Ottawa for no good reason (the reasons are no good outside of delusionland).

ipaddr 4y ago
Women's right to choose what goes in their bodies is an important right in Canada. Not to worry the wartime act will be used on something you personally care about but by that time your rights will be gone.
- epgui 4y ago
  ^ Exhibit A: commenter fails to recognize that there are sometimes good reason to temporarily limit rights, such as to limit the spread of infectious diseases, because commenter knows very little about public health or epidemiology. Commenter believes that anytime rights are limited, it's for a nefarious purpose, and it can't possibly be for a good reason. How's the syphillis and HIV treating you? Oh what's that? You live in a society that actively limits the spread of these diseases by carefully limiting rights, so you're free to live your life without these diseases? Nice concept.
  - helloooooooo 4y ago
    They also don’t understand that the “wartime act” is not the act that was invoked. In fact, the War Measures Act has not existed in Canada for nearly 40 years. It was replaced by the Emergencies Act, which explicitly does not violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, unlike its predecessors. It just goes to show how knowledgeable the previous poster is on the subject.
    - epgui 4y ago
      Indeed. But just to be even more clear: > which explicitly does not violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms Indeed indeed. However, it does limit the rights and freedoms in the Charter, and it does so in a way that the Charter allows. The Charter provides an escape hatch in exceptional circumstances, and that is not by accident: it is by design. And anyone who would design the Charter without this escape hatch probably has no business being in governance, because it would just be a ticking time bomb to a constitutional crisis.