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• FirmwareBurner 1y ago
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  • harperlee 1y ago
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    • FirmwareBurner 1y ago
      What I think is that your argument is in bad faith and breaking HN rules. The governments, being useless and focusing on the wrong things, are banning objectively non-nefarious objects (ninja swords, anonymous coins) that can be use for good by good actors (cutting stuff in the garden, sending money in privacy) but are sometimes used for evil by bad actors (murder, money laundering), like many other things. How can rape and murder ever be used for good by the general public? Did you ever meet someone in need of a legit rape/murder in the name of good? How can you possibly make such a comparison? Honestly! Banning a tool doesn't stop the criminals from committing crimes that are already illegal, it's just removing a tool from the law abiding citizen.
      • smallnix 1y ago
        My best interpretation of their comment would be that to ban owning ninja swords or rape does not prevent either from happening 100% of the time. But it's still the 'right' thing to do and prevents it some of the time. But I am guessing here.
      • delusional 1y ago
        The argument would be that your "non-nefarious" use is just not that important. Cutting stuff in your garden with your ninja sword or sending money in privacy with your fake money is just not something anybody gives a shit about you being able to do.
      • amarcheschi 1y ago
        I would think that most of the things that require privacy in a payment are more or less shady, except for the few % of people really into tech that can't be traced back I'm not either pro or against such bans because I'm not well versed into the crypto universe (just like almost anyone else) though
      • codetrotter 1y ago
        > ninja swords > cutting stuff in the garden Wait, are you talking about like using a Ninja sword as a gardening tool? Or do you mean something like playing Fruit Ninja IRL in your backyard, chopping up watermelons and other fruits being thrown around in the air, for fun?
        • pjc50 1y ago
          The swinging bladed tool people might use for gardening is a machete, which (absurdly) is banned under separate legislation along with "zombie knives", whatever the hell that is (some sort of serration?) You have to understand that as a headline factory. The Offensive Weapons Act already prohibits carrying anything with the intent of using it as a weapon. Police routinely confiscate kitchen knives from the pockets of young men in stop-and-search. The specific bans on specific weapons are part of a stupid media cycle where a crime is carried out using a fancy weapon so the government legislates against that specific weapon. It's like trying to outlaw cryptocurrencies by banning them by name one at a time. It's incredibly stupid but a tradition of UK politics because it's easier than trying to untangle the actual problems of knife crime. It's also a UK thing, not an EU thing. There isn't an EU level knife directive, rules vary; Czechia and Finland seem to be loosest from some brief googling.
      • qzzi 1y ago
        They aren't comparing those crimes. You don't get to pick and choose where laws should matter based on whether you personally like the item being banned. Your "bad guys will do it anyway" argument doesn’t hold.
      • harperlee 1y ago
        Yeah sorry if you think that! I was just (admittedly, in passing, and through a one-liner), pointing to the fact that I don't think that your argument is really solid. There are already other comments expanding on that so I won't reiterate.
    • dp-hackernews 1y ago
      Do you think having an argument will make any difference either way? "Nothing us either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." That's just the inherent diversity of thinking across the whole of civilization and time, and is as controllable as the weather.
      • harperlee 1y ago
        Well yes I do - I have changed my mind in the past through discussion with others, so I think that there's value on arguing against a given position that I don't share. (And, for what is worth, I also think that there are good and bad acts in the world, and that it makes sense to legislate around them.)
  • troupo 1y ago
    What are the crime stats in the EU compared (apples-to-apples) to the US? And what is the prison population.
  • LeafItAlone 1y ago
    >criminals By definition, they are criminals because they are breaking the law. And therefore the EU government had something to “go after” them for. Remember, it was tax evasion that the government was able to convict Al Capone on, not his other activities. And also a simple traffic stop for an expired registration or inactive taillight that has put many possessors of a small amount of marijuana in jail.
    • bilekas 1y ago
      > And therefore the EU government had something to “go after” them for. The EU doesn't have a government in the sense you're talking to, it has regulatory bodies and a council, the individual countries make up the enactment of their laws and regulations in the EU, there is Interpol and Europol but these work usually in conjunction with a countries governments on large scale/impact crimes where cross border jurisdiction is required.
  • Lariscus 1y ago
    Yes and if they are caught they will be prosecuted and punished like with any other ban. Converting a significant amount of Monero into actual money will become much harder if its illegal. This will reduce availability of such services and make privacy coins less attractive to criminals which is exactly what the ban is aiming for.
• dist-epoch 1y ago
  Like the cookie-law. An amazing success, I'm reminded daily about it.
  • omeid2 1y ago
    The Cookie law works great. Every time you click "Essentials only" you're denying to be tracked.
  • delusional 1y ago
    The banners are not mandated by law. That's an implementation choice. Websites chose to show you annoying banners to make you annoyed with the law. They could just not track you.
    • glimshe 1y ago
      Yes, the vast majority of the websites are just being annoying because they are childish. It has nothing to do with the law. The medium-large company I used to work in the US hired a full-time senior director to address GDPR. He had a team and the effort took years and touched every corner of the company.
      • dns_snek 1y ago
        The vast majority of websites are obnoxious with consent prompts because they have a clear profit motive that is achieved by harassing and tricking people into giving them permission to abuse their privacy for profit, but I'm sure you know that. Sob stories about companies being forced to reckon with their unethical business practices in the face of new laws are nothing new. Companies that profit from playing fast and loose with people's personal data complain about the hardships of following GDPR, food companies complain that the limits for cancer-causing chemicals and heavy metals are too low, and factories complain that they should be allowed to dump toxic waste in the rivers. And employees working for those companies often pick up these sorts of irrational views by osmosis to preserve social cohesion within the company.
  • nagisa 1y ago
• rightbyte 1y ago
  In the sense "important privacy laws" does not imply pro-privacy?
  • 7bit 1y ago
    No, it means that privacy on cryptocurrency is the major driver of corruptions and tax fraud, and it's important to remove any privacy around these topics. Want to stay private, there always FIAT currency, which protects your privacy (until you reach certain amounts of transactions).
    • rightbyte 1y ago
      No matter the justifications banning anonymous accounts is not pro-privacy. Also, Chat control has almost been passed twice by now.
      • 7bit 1y ago
        He said it's an important privacy law. Not that it's a pro-privacy law. Only you said that.
• JoshTriplett 1y ago
  The EU's legislation has been decidedly mixed, and not an unalloyed good. Makes me wish there was a functional mechanism by which different jurisdictions could have an overall collaborative framework and experiment with different approaches without eventually deciding to force others to comply. I had some hope of the EU being that, but both the US and the EU have trended towards homogenization. I wonder if, in a hundred years, the EU government will claim as much power at the EU-wide level as the US federal government. So much harm has been done in the name of AML/KYC. Money laundering is auxiliary to some other activity that governments define as "evil". Laundering the proceeds of some activity a government does not approve of is exactly as good or evil as whatever the activity itself is, and as always, law and morality are two different things. When passing such provisions, governments will always cite the worst possible activity whose proceeds might be laundered, but the resulting powers are far too easy to abuse.
  • delusional 1y ago
    Do you have any example of when these powers were abused? Where I am, we have seen massive money laundering scandals, and I have yet to hear of anyone abusing it. My read is that the abuse currently comes from not applying it enough to stuff you want to make money from, not over applying it to things you disagree with.
    • JoshTriplett 1y ago
      It's a component of pervasive surveillance. But, as one of many examples, consider the many stories of someone going around with a larger than commonly carried amount of cash, such as the deposits of a business that accepts cash or the savings of someone who is underbanked, and is presumed to be up to something and that pretense is used to seize the cash with no recourse or reasonable legal proceeding or likely hope of timely recovery.
      • pjc50 1y ago
        > consider the many stories of someone going around with a larger than commonly carried amount of cash, such as the deposits of a business that accepts cash or the savings of someone who is underbanked, and is presumed to be up to something and that pretense is used to seize the cash with no recourse or reasonable legal proceeding or likely hope of timely recovery. .. in the US. I'm sure there must be examples of this happening in Europe, but it seems much less of a thing?
• preisschild 1y ago
  This is an anti-privacy law, though. Anonymous cryptocurrencies like Monero allow you to truly privately transfer money.
• soulofmischief 1y ago
  Oh like Chat Control? Don't be mistaken, most countries in the EU ultimately do not respect your privacy and wish to have access to your private correspondence, in addition to preventing you from carrying out private digital transactions, just as we have been doing with physical money for thousands of years.