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When that crime is terrorism, it's too late by the time it's happened, and a lot of money laundering is used for this purpose. It's also impossible to prosecute

When that crime is terrorism, it's too late by the time it's happened, and a lot of money laundering is used for this purpose. It's also impossible to prosecute crimes originating in countries outside of your jurisdiction, but funded within your jurisdiction. Cryptocurrency is more of a blight than it is useful. It's the only reason that cyber ransom is possible.

GoblinSlayer 3y ago
You can punish funding in your jurisdiction with evidence provided by countries outside of your jurisdiction.
- ryan_lane 3y ago
  What do you do when the police and military forces are illegally controlled by that group?
ETH_start 3y ago
The cost of reducing funding for terrorism cannot be imposing authoritarian controls on the general population. That's a wildly disproportionate and counterproductive response. If the right to use cryptocurrency were legally enshrined, instead always on the verge of being criminalized by new legislation or rules, it would find an enormous number of legitimate use-cases, instead of being fully embraced only by criminals. It's the legal uncertainty, that keeps legitimate actors out, that causes the criminal element to be disproportionately high amongst cryptocurrency users. Cryptocurrency stands to provide the West with a major geopolitical advantage. If you look at the distribution of Ethereum consensus clients, you see they are concentrated in the West: https://monitoreth.io/nodes https://monitoreth.io/nodes Of the current 14,000+ nodes, the US hosts 5,349 of them, and Germany 2,170. No non-Western jurisdiction comes close. This is an industry that cannot thrive in more authoritarian jurisdictions, and will thrive in the West to the extent that authoritarian controls are limited.
- ryan_lane 3y ago
  > The cost of reducing funding for terrorism cannot be imposing authoritarian controls on the general population. The inability to hide the source of your funds isn't authoritarian. > It's the legal uncertainty, that keeps legitimate actors out, that causes the criminal element to be disproportionately high amongst cryptocurrency users. It's been 15 years since cryptocurrency has existed and for the vast majority of those it's had zero regulation, and has been fully legal. It's not used for legitimate purposes because it's not useful for them. Crypto is used for speculation, not as a currency. It's used as a currency for criminals because it's easy to use cross-border, including countries who expressly allow cross-border crime (like Russia and cyber ransom, assuming the ransom doesn't target Russians). It's also heavily used as a mechanism to scam people, through pump & dumps, rug pulls, and the like. We're better off without cryptocurrency, as a whole.
  - ETH_start 3y ago
    >The inability to hide the source of your funds isn't authoritarian. Of course it is. It's your own money, and some other party is forcing you to provide information about it under pain of imprisonment. In the digital age, this now means making it illegal for supposedly free peoples to call cryptographic logic to encrypt their peer-to-peer transaction. That's hundreds of millions of people being forbidden from using software that enhances their privacy. It's police state authoritarianism in the vein of what the Chinese Communist Party would endorse. >It's been 15 years since cryptocurrency has existed and for the vast majority of those it's had zero regulation, and has been fully legal. It's not used for legitimate purposes because it's not useful for them. World renowned venture capitalists with a long record identifying potential efficiency gains wouldn't pour billions into crypto of it didn't have potential use-cases beyond mere speculation. Legal threats and uncertainty, emanating from many high-profile regulators and legislators calling for greater restrictions and punitive measures against parties who use cryptocurrency creates a significant chilling effect that discourages major parties from utilizing it. You must know this. And economic actors have good reason to fear that the threats will be carried out. The recent measures by the US Treasury that effectively make privacy on the blockchain illegal are an example of such a threat being carried out, and prevent a feature that businesses need cryptocurrency to have in order for them to use it on a large scale from being added. >It's used as a currency for criminals because it's easy to use cross-border It would be used by wide swathes of society if the legal uncertainty around it were lifted. As it is, even with all of the restrictions imposed by advocates of a locked down financial system, it is lifting people out of poverty, whether through giving them access to stablecoins [1] in countries with unstable currencies, or giving them a new source of income [2]. The so-called AML system causes untold numbers of deaths [3] and should be totally replaced by a due-process-respecting law enforcement strategy. >We're better off without cryptocurrency, as a whole. The world at large is absolutely not better off with centralized control over money, for the same reason it's not better off with centralized control over the economy at large. In the advanced economies, people deserve better than a financial system entirely dependent on centralized intermediaries and their regulators, as all of the horror stories of Venmo and PayPal freezing customer accounts attest to. People deserve better than being told that they cannot engage in private transactions with others without reporting the transaction to their government overseer. This idea is completely anathema to a free society. [1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/cryptoverse-digital-coins-lure-inflation-weary-argentines-turks-2023-05-02/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/cryptoverse-digital-coins... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/s/vcAc3Lyfqc https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/s/vcAc3Lyfqc [3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/money-reimagined-starve-ugly-side-153111892.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/money-reimagined-starve-ugly-...

GoblinSlayer 3y ago

You can punish funding in your jurisdiction with evidence provided by countries outside of your jurisdiction.

ryan_lane 3y ago
What do you do when the police and military forces are illegally controlled by that group?

ETH_start 3y ago

The cost of reducing funding for terrorism cannot be imposing authoritarian controls on the general population. That's a wildly disproportionate and counterproductive response. If the right to use cryptocurrency were legally enshrined, instead always on the verge of being criminalized by new legislation or rules, it would find an enormous number of legitimate use-cases, instead of being fully embraced only by criminals. It's the legal uncertainty, that keeps legitimate actors out, that causes the criminal element to be disproportionately high amongst cryptocurrency users. Cryptocurrency stands to provide the West with a major geopolitical advantage. If you look at the distribution of Ethereum consensus clients, you see they are concentrated in the West: https://monitoreth.io/nodes https://monitoreth.io/nodes Of the current 14,000+ nodes, the US hosts 5,349 of them, and Germany 2,170. No non-Western jurisdiction comes close. This is an industry that cannot thrive in more authoritarian jurisdictions, and will thrive in the West to the extent that authoritarian controls are limited.

ryan_lane 3y ago
> The cost of reducing funding for terrorism cannot be imposing authoritarian controls on the general population. The inability to hide the source of your funds isn't authoritarian. > It's the legal uncertainty, that keeps legitimate actors out, that causes the criminal element to be disproportionately high amongst cryptocurrency users. It's been 15 years since cryptocurrency has existed and for the vast majority of those it's had zero regulation, and has been fully legal. It's not used for legitimate purposes because it's not useful for them. Crypto is used for speculation, not as a currency. It's used as a currency for criminals because it's easy to use cross-border, including countries who expressly allow cross-border crime (like Russia and cyber ransom, assuming the ransom doesn't target Russians). It's also heavily used as a mechanism to scam people, through pump & dumps, rug pulls, and the like. We're better off without cryptocurrency, as a whole.
- ETH_start 3y ago
  >The inability to hide the source of your funds isn't authoritarian. Of course it is. It's your own money, and some other party is forcing you to provide information about it under pain of imprisonment. In the digital age, this now means making it illegal for supposedly free peoples to call cryptographic logic to encrypt their peer-to-peer transaction. That's hundreds of millions of people being forbidden from using software that enhances their privacy. It's police state authoritarianism in the vein of what the Chinese Communist Party would endorse. >It's been 15 years since cryptocurrency has existed and for the vast majority of those it's had zero regulation, and has been fully legal. It's not used for legitimate purposes because it's not useful for them. World renowned venture capitalists with a long record identifying potential efficiency gains wouldn't pour billions into crypto of it didn't have potential use-cases beyond mere speculation. Legal threats and uncertainty, emanating from many high-profile regulators and legislators calling for greater restrictions and punitive measures against parties who use cryptocurrency creates a significant chilling effect that discourages major parties from utilizing it. You must know this. And economic actors have good reason to fear that the threats will be carried out. The recent measures by the US Treasury that effectively make privacy on the blockchain illegal are an example of such a threat being carried out, and prevent a feature that businesses need cryptocurrency to have in order for them to use it on a large scale from being added. >It's used as a currency for criminals because it's easy to use cross-border It would be used by wide swathes of society if the legal uncertainty around it were lifted. As it is, even with all of the restrictions imposed by advocates of a locked down financial system, it is lifting people out of poverty, whether through giving them access to stablecoins [1] in countries with unstable currencies, or giving them a new source of income [2]. The so-called AML system causes untold numbers of deaths [3] and should be totally replaced by a due-process-respecting law enforcement strategy. >We're better off without cryptocurrency, as a whole. The world at large is absolutely not better off with centralized control over money, for the same reason it's not better off with centralized control over the economy at large. In the advanced economies, people deserve better than a financial system entirely dependent on centralized intermediaries and their regulators, as all of the horror stories of Venmo and PayPal freezing customer accounts attest to. People deserve better than being told that they cannot engage in private transactions with others without reporting the transaction to their government overseer. This idea is completely anathema to a free society. [1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/cryptoverse-digital-coins-lure-inflation-weary-argentines-turks-2023-05-02/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/cryptoverse-digital-coins... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/s/vcAc3Lyfqc https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/s/vcAc3Lyfqc [3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/money-reimagined-starve-ugly-side-153111892.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/money-reimagined-starve-ugly-...