4 ms·

> Otherwise it's like saying "we can figure out all stores you've been to, if we have your credit card transaction history". The preposterous thing is that pay

> Otherwise it's like saying "we can figure out all stores you've been to, if we have your credit card transaction history". The preposterous thing is that payment processors aren't just allowed to collect this information and tie it to your name, they're required to do that. People talk a big game about fighting fascism, but how can you allow these laws to exist if you can contemplate what happens when actual fascists get hold of that data going back decades? They need to be dismantled now.

charcircuit 1y ago
Arguing that we shouldn't do something because it would make it harder to enforce laws is not a convincing argument to me. It sounds like you want to enable people to be criminals.
- magicalist 1y ago
  > Arguing that we shouldn't do something because it would make it harder to enforce laws If you want to do it, get a warrant.
- vdqtp3 1y ago
  At this point in human history, is it relevant to the individual whether someone is a criminal? What matters is whether they've injured someone else. To use the US as an example (I doubt other countries are much better) it's estimated that every adult in the US commits multiple Federal felonies per day[1], Federal law is replete with ridiculous laws[2] and the number of federal laws is uncountable by Congressional Research Service staff. Does it matter at that point? [1] Three Felonies A Day - ISBN 978-1594035227 [2] https://x.com/CrimeADay https://x.com/CrimeADay
  - gruez 1y ago
    >[1] Three Felonies A Day - ISBN 978-1594035227 That's not a serious estimate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43744267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43744267
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      Is a statistical analysis of the specific number actually the point? Suppose it was three felonies a year. What difference does that make when the prison sentence for each felony is also at least a year? The problem is the same; a prosecutor can throw anyone in prison simply because there are so many laws nobody can follow them all or even realize when they're violating one.
      - gruez 1y ago
        You can check the rest of the thread, but I'm not even convinced that the median person commits 3 crimes a year. Maybe there's an average of 3 felonies per day/month/year if you count all the small businesses that aren't complying with federal product/safety regulation to the letter (thus dragging up the average), but I can't think how realistically the average joe is committing 3 felonies per year.
        pesus 1y ago
        > I can't think how realistically the average joe is committing 3 felonies per year. Someone who smokes weed daily in a place where it's illegal could easily commit multiple crimes a day just for drug possession and consumption, for example.
        gruez 1y ago
        Only 16% of Americans marijuana, according to Gallup. If you exclude people who are in states where it's legal/decriminalized, that'd probably be even lower. Needless to say, even if all 16% of them are criminals, that's far from the median person committing 3 felonies. Moreover the weed example isn't not even applicable to thesis of the book or the commenter that invoked it, which is that the US has so many regulations that nobody can hope to comply with them.
        vdqtp3 1y ago
        > If you exclude people who are in states where it's legal/decriminalized There is no state where cannabis derivatives are federally legal. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-II/part-1308 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-II/part-1308
- avidiax 1y ago
  > It sounds like you want to enable people to be criminals. Yes, wherever it is criminal to improve the wellbeing or support progress of society, I support the ability of people to be criminals. Rosa Parks wasn't allowed to sit at the front of the bus. Criminal. I doubt MLK had a permit for every march. Criminal. I doubt the founding fathers were legally allowed to oppose the British taxes. Criminals. A society with no crime is a dystopia.
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    You can justify almost anything as "progressing society" Tech companies can be "making the world a better place", but that shouldn't give then permission to break laws.
    - justonenote 1y ago
      The mental model of how the law works that most people have is wrong. The law does not, by default, prosecute all crimes. There is no country in the world that has even close to the law enforcement capacity to investigate and prosecute all crimes. What tends to happen instead is crimes that to put it colliquially, "piss off the wrong people" get prosecuted. ie, crimes that draw attention of either the general public or specific people in power. A reasonable approximation is single digit or less of crimes get investigated and prosecuted, with it obviously being high for violent and visible crimes like murder and lower for less violent and visible crimes like stealing the office paperclips. Another way of looking at this is, in the current system, if your house get burgled, you need to report it to the police if you expect anything to happen, whereas one could imagine another system where the police already know your house has been burgled and you don't need to report it.
      - charcircuit 1y ago
        I believe with AI we will be able to scale enforcement much better than a single digit percent. This will allow for more fair enforcement and reviews and cleanup of old laws or punishments which don't make sense anymore.
      - 1y ago
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  > Arguing that we shouldn't do something because it would make it harder to enforce laws is not a convincing argument to me. It sounds like you want to enable people to be criminals. I find this view to be lacking in nuance. Laws are intended to exist with the consent of the governed. Substantially the whole of society agrees that murder should be illegal, so if someone commits murder we're willing to commit significant resources to investigating and prosecuting the perpetrator. It doesn't have to be efficient or have perfect enforcement because its purpose is to act as a deterrent. Everyone is willing to spend the resources to enforce those laws because everyone agrees that their enforcement is important. Enforcement efficiency is not required when there is popular consent. Opposing laws that "help criminals" exposes society to shifts in the definition of a crime. When there is a law against being of a particular ethnicity or religion or political ideology, you want to enable people to be criminals. Preventing laws like that from ever being effective is worth sustaining a significant amount of inefficiency in the enforcement of other laws. And this is not a binary distinction with "laws against murder" on one side and "laws against being Jewish" on the other. The latter is only the viscerally powerful extreme that once made us say never again. The spectrum spans the full scale, where the middle is filled with police corruption and political retaliation against the opposition and petty busybodies inducing poverty and homelessness through the incompetent micromanagement of society. Should governments have the ability to freeze the bank accounts of protesters? It doesn't matter what they're protesting or what crimes some minority of the protesters are alleged to have committed when the account freezes are instituted as collective punishment, the answer is no. The government should not have the ability to do that, because in that case they are the criminals, and structural defenses against government abuses are important.
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    >Opposing laws that "help criminals" exposes society to shifts in the definition of a crime. This is not necessarily a good thing and laws can change without requiring them to be broken.
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      > This is not necessarily a good thing and laws can change without requiring them to be broken. That's kind of the problem, right? Suppose you have a system that actually allows perfect enforcement and then the government passes a law against some religious practice. Espousing atheism is banned, or Islam, or Christianity, depending on who controls the government this time; take your pick. If anybody who does it is instantly brought up on charges with severe penalties then nobody does it. But that's bad. That's the problem. You need to sustain enough friction to prevent things like that from being possible because enforcing laws like that is worse than anything that could come out of making ordinary law enforcement require more resources.
- DiggyJohnson 1y ago
  In almost all cases the best policy solution balances idealistic/theoretical goals with feasibility/pragmatism. A two dimensional analysis. This is more effective in nearly all domains, including this one. Or from a different direction: if your method of analysis leads you to believe a HN contributor “want to enable people to be criminals” based on their policy preference about KYC, you’re not taking the discussion seriously.
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    >best policy solution balances idealistic/theoretical goals with feasibility/pragmatism. Which is why people who want to be able to always do activity X regardless of the law will make it infeasable to enforce a ban on X and will try and oppose anything that would make it easier.
bigfatkitten 1y ago
Even if they weren’t required to do it, they would do it anyway because it’s an important part of fraud detection.
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  The vast majority of payments fraud is caused by the regulatory environment. Use cards with chips that can be read by commodity PCs and phones using published open standards and then require the card to be physically attached to a device to authorize a new merchant and criminals can no longer make fraudulent credit card charges without stealing the physical object or breaking strong cryptography. The only reason we don't have this already is that the law makes it so hard to start a competing payments network -- in no small part as a result of KYC requirements -- that the incumbents are insulated from real competition and then don't have to fix the flaws in their systems. Meanwhile you don't actually need everyone to do it, all you need is someone to do it and then that both becomes a competitive advantage in the market and allows any victim of official misconduct to use that one.
- account42 1y ago
  Which is a complete clusterfuck that regularly denies valid transactions because the owner is in a irregular situation.
msgodel 1y ago
The people most opposed to this IME have been the "fascists" who wanted bitcoin. It's another one of those horseshoe situations I guess.
overfeed 1y ago
You can't have a functioning society/civilization without giving some entities power: much like root privileges or ROP gadgets, anything designed for good can be abused in the hands of malicious parties. There is no in-band method to prevent[0] subversion- no one can design an instruction set, security scheme or laws that are immune from subversion. 0. Except the evil-bit header in IPv4. Routing equipment always drop evil packets before they reach the victims network, stopping attacks before they happen.
- account42 1y ago
  We've had functioning societies with anonymous cash transactions for millennia now.
  - overfeed 1y ago
    and then 9/11 happened and Americans lined up behind the flag, and decided anonymous transactions are a threat to national security.
account42 1y ago
You don't need "fascism" for the state to oppress (part of) its citizens. Regular democracies are doing it just fine. And guess who is adding all these data collection requirements and has already been using that data to oppress citizens. Assuming that your government doesn't know what its doing when they do that is beyond naive.

charcircuit 1y ago

Arguing that we shouldn't do something because it would make it harder to enforce laws is not a convincing argument to me. It sounds like you want to enable people to be criminals.

magicalist 1y ago
> Arguing that we shouldn't do something because it would make it harder to enforce laws If you want to do it, get a warrant.
vdqtp3 1y ago
At this point in human history, is it relevant to the individual whether someone is a criminal? What matters is whether they've injured someone else. To use the US as an example (I doubt other countries are much better) it's estimated that every adult in the US commits multiple Federal felonies per day[1], Federal law is replete with ridiculous laws[2] and the number of federal laws is uncountable by Congressional Research Service staff. Does it matter at that point? [1] Three Felonies A Day - ISBN 978-1594035227 [2] https://x.com/CrimeADay https://x.com/CrimeADay
- gruez 1y ago
  >[1] Three Felonies A Day - ISBN 978-1594035227 That's not a serious estimate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43744267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43744267
  - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    Is a statistical analysis of the specific number actually the point? Suppose it was three felonies a year. What difference does that make when the prison sentence for each felony is also at least a year? The problem is the same; a prosecutor can throw anyone in prison simply because there are so many laws nobody can follow them all or even realize when they're violating one.
    - gruez 1y ago
      You can check the rest of the thread, but I'm not even convinced that the median person commits 3 crimes a year. Maybe there's an average of 3 felonies per day/month/year if you count all the small businesses that aren't complying with federal product/safety regulation to the letter (thus dragging up the average), but I can't think how realistically the average joe is committing 3 felonies per year.
      - pesus 1y ago
        > I can't think how realistically the average joe is committing 3 felonies per year. Someone who smokes weed daily in a place where it's illegal could easily commit multiple crimes a day just for drug possession and consumption, for example.
        gruez 1y ago
        Only 16% of Americans marijuana, according to Gallup. If you exclude people who are in states where it's legal/decriminalized, that'd probably be even lower. Needless to say, even if all 16% of them are criminals, that's far from the median person committing 3 felonies. Moreover the weed example isn't not even applicable to thesis of the book or the commenter that invoked it, which is that the US has so many regulations that nobody can hope to comply with them.
        vdqtp3 1y ago
        > If you exclude people who are in states where it's legal/decriminalized There is no state where cannabis derivatives are federally legal. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-II/part-1308 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-II/part-1308
avidiax 1y ago
> It sounds like you want to enable people to be criminals. Yes, wherever it is criminal to improve the wellbeing or support progress of society, I support the ability of people to be criminals. Rosa Parks wasn't allowed to sit at the front of the bus. Criminal. I doubt MLK had a permit for every march. Criminal. I doubt the founding fathers were legally allowed to oppose the British taxes. Criminals. A society with no crime is a dystopia.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  You can justify almost anything as "progressing society" Tech companies can be "making the world a better place", but that shouldn't give then permission to break laws.
  - justonenote 1y ago
    The mental model of how the law works that most people have is wrong. The law does not, by default, prosecute all crimes. There is no country in the world that has even close to the law enforcement capacity to investigate and prosecute all crimes. What tends to happen instead is crimes that to put it colliquially, "piss off the wrong people" get prosecuted. ie, crimes that draw attention of either the general public or specific people in power. A reasonable approximation is single digit or less of crimes get investigated and prosecuted, with it obviously being high for violent and visible crimes like murder and lower for less violent and visible crimes like stealing the office paperclips. Another way of looking at this is, in the current system, if your house get burgled, you need to report it to the police if you expect anything to happen, whereas one could imagine another system where the police already know your house has been burgled and you don't need to report it.
    - charcircuit 1y ago
      I believe with AI we will be able to scale enforcement much better than a single digit percent. This will allow for more fair enforcement and reviews and cleanup of old laws or punishments which don't make sense anymore.
    - 1y ago
AnthonyMouse 1y ago
> Arguing that we shouldn't do something because it would make it harder to enforce laws is not a convincing argument to me. It sounds like you want to enable people to be criminals. I find this view to be lacking in nuance. Laws are intended to exist with the consent of the governed. Substantially the whole of society agrees that murder should be illegal, so if someone commits murder we're willing to commit significant resources to investigating and prosecuting the perpetrator. It doesn't have to be efficient or have perfect enforcement because its purpose is to act as a deterrent. Everyone is willing to spend the resources to enforce those laws because everyone agrees that their enforcement is important. Enforcement efficiency is not required when there is popular consent. Opposing laws that "help criminals" exposes society to shifts in the definition of a crime. When there is a law against being of a particular ethnicity or religion or political ideology, you want to enable people to be criminals. Preventing laws like that from ever being effective is worth sustaining a significant amount of inefficiency in the enforcement of other laws. And this is not a binary distinction with "laws against murder" on one side and "laws against being Jewish" on the other. The latter is only the viscerally powerful extreme that once made us say never again. The spectrum spans the full scale, where the middle is filled with police corruption and political retaliation against the opposition and petty busybodies inducing poverty and homelessness through the incompetent micromanagement of society. Should governments have the ability to freeze the bank accounts of protesters? It doesn't matter what they're protesting or what crimes some minority of the protesters are alleged to have committed when the account freezes are instituted as collective punishment, the answer is no. The government should not have the ability to do that, because in that case they are the criminals, and structural defenses against government abuses are important.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  >Opposing laws that "help criminals" exposes society to shifts in the definition of a crime. This is not necessarily a good thing and laws can change without requiring them to be broken.
  - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    > This is not necessarily a good thing and laws can change without requiring them to be broken. That's kind of the problem, right? Suppose you have a system that actually allows perfect enforcement and then the government passes a law against some religious practice. Espousing atheism is banned, or Islam, or Christianity, depending on who controls the government this time; take your pick. If anybody who does it is instantly brought up on charges with severe penalties then nobody does it. But that's bad. That's the problem. You need to sustain enough friction to prevent things like that from being possible because enforcing laws like that is worse than anything that could come out of making ordinary law enforcement require more resources.
DiggyJohnson 1y ago
In almost all cases the best policy solution balances idealistic/theoretical goals with feasibility/pragmatism. A two dimensional analysis. This is more effective in nearly all domains, including this one. Or from a different direction: if your method of analysis leads you to believe a HN contributor “want to enable people to be criminals” based on their policy preference about KYC, you’re not taking the discussion seriously.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  >best policy solution balances idealistic/theoretical goals with feasibility/pragmatism. Which is why people who want to be able to always do activity X regardless of the law will make it infeasable to enforce a ban on X and will try and oppose anything that would make it easier.

bigfatkitten 1y ago

Even if they weren’t required to do it, they would do it anyway because it’s an important part of fraud detection.

AnthonyMouse 1y ago
The vast majority of payments fraud is caused by the regulatory environment. Use cards with chips that can be read by commodity PCs and phones using published open standards and then require the card to be physically attached to a device to authorize a new merchant and criminals can no longer make fraudulent credit card charges without stealing the physical object or breaking strong cryptography. The only reason we don't have this already is that the law makes it so hard to start a competing payments network -- in no small part as a result of KYC requirements -- that the incumbents are insulated from real competition and then don't have to fix the flaws in their systems. Meanwhile you don't actually need everyone to do it, all you need is someone to do it and then that both becomes a competitive advantage in the market and allows any victim of official misconduct to use that one.
account42 1y ago
Which is a complete clusterfuck that regularly denies valid transactions because the owner is in a irregular situation.

msgodel 1y ago

The people most opposed to this IME have been the "fascists" who wanted bitcoin. It's another one of those horseshoe situations I guess.

overfeed 1y ago

You can't have a functioning society/civilization without giving some entities power: much like root privileges or ROP gadgets, anything designed for good can be abused in the hands of malicious parties. There is no in-band method to prevent[0] subversion- no one can design an instruction set, security scheme or laws that are immune from subversion. 0. Except the evil-bit header in IPv4. Routing equipment always drop evil packets before they reach the victims network, stopping attacks before they happen.

account42 1y ago
We've had functioning societies with anonymous cash transactions for millennia now.
- overfeed 1y ago
  and then 9/11 happened and Americans lined up behind the flag, and decided anonymous transactions are a threat to national security.

account42 1y ago

You don't need "fascism" for the state to oppress (part of) its citizens. Regular democracies are doing it just fine. And guess who is adding all these data collection requirements and has already been using that data to oppress citizens. Assuming that your government doesn't know what its doing when they do that is beyond naive.