anon9001

Crypto can technically implement privacy and anonymity in a way that regulators cannot prevent. Now what do we do about it?

Also, Ethereum could adopt privacy by default some day, via their proposal process.

It's fascinating to watch regulators talk about "bitcoin" and "ethereum" as if they're "gold" and "oil", unchanging commodities that just need to be categorized and dealt with appropriately.

Ethereum is totally publicly visible today, but it does not need to be that way tomorrow. These are living projects.

I think this case is a pretty clear example of why.

The regulators are supposed to be protecting who from what exactly? And at whose expense?

So far I've seen two lines of reasoning:

1) Regulators are needed to protect me from myself. I can't assess if these dog-coins have long-term investment potential or not, so I want the government in the loop somehow. If I can purchase something on the internet, I assume it's safe, or the government wouldn't let it be sold.

2) Regulators need to protect the government from the effects of money laundering. I must give up privacy for the greater good, as the money laundered by North Korean hackers will be used against my country. Giving up all privacy in exchange for a small reduction in the funding of our enemies is always a good trade.

Even if I buy one of these arguments wholeheartedly, the practical matter is that we're trying to prevent math from being done here, and it's just not going to work. It's sort of like preventing piracy.

But public sentiment has become very anti-crypto, so I suspect we'll land in a war-on-drugs type situation where the crypto never really goes away and you can still transact it anonymously, but we mostly just don't talk about it except for the occasional bust to ensure more enforcement budget next year.

I think this is exactly the kind of privacy you can defend in court.

The reason we don't have privacy is because technology has been centralized and it's easy to pressure providers to give up user's privacy.

The idea that parties have financial privacy between each other is actually the default. I can hand you physical cash. This is normal.

That's not because of some special provision that "allows" for cash to be private. That's just how it's always been done.

If you do work for me, and I hand you a gold coin, you don't have to do something special to make sure the government can track the item of value. You just mark it down on your taxes as income.

This is how things had been done until maybe the last 20 years or so, when 9/11 greatly expanded the government surveillance requirements on financial businesses.

There's a mountain of law to support private property transfer.

If you're concerned about "work life balance", you're probably the rich that would be eaten.

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I think the original article painted it pretty well. If you could disappear and nobody would notice, you probably aren't part of a community. Shared interests and activities definitely count if there's meaningful interaction happening. Work can be a type of community too.

The hallmarks of community IMO are some shared values, some shared purpose, recurring interactions, united under some named banner. A well functioning workplace can feel a lot like a thriving community.

I don't really have much in the way of community myself at the moment, but I have experienced it before. I think it's one of those things like sex where everyone who's never participated thinks it's a huge deal, but once you've been at it a little while, it's still important, but the framing shifts a lot.

It's one thing to be a stable loner that's not invested in any group, but it's another to desperately be seeking a community without the experience to know what's "normal". That's where the parasocial stuff starts happening.

Non-incel here (I swear, ignore the username) who read your post and some of the accompanying thread. Valid feelings, a little cringey, I hope you figure yourself out, but that's not what I want to comment about.

I spend more time than I should reading extremist content (ok, go ahead, look at the username) because I think the behavior of that crowd is fascinating and disturbingly influential. And sometimes it's funny. Also, they now set US policy, so maybe we should be paying attention.

> I will clear it up now: I am not any kind of incel, conspiracy theory believer, advocate of violence or racism, or follower of any dogma, philosophy, or charismatic person of any kind.

When people talk about "alt right pipeline", this is it, but casper isn't the perpetrator. He's the target.

Ok, not casper specifically. In those circles, they'd make fun of him blogging about his feelings for obvious reasons. Then they'd make fun of his artsy picture, then that he took down his picture, and once more if he puts it back up. The cycle of abuse would continue until he stops reacting to the crowd.

But it's a window into just how isolated people are and what it feels like to not have community. And we know there's millions or maybe tens of millions of people that feel this way and are nowhere near capable of articulating it.

It's so easy to imagine someone in his position be enticed a movement that has a consistent-ish ideology and purpose greater than yourself. And as a bonus, it comes with a group of regular guys that also hang out on discord or telegram all day and share memes. They might even meet up in the woods sometimes, just to drink some beers and bbq and shoot some guns once a month. Or "protect" an election or school board by providing "security". You know, community stuff.

> No, I am only interested in something real, whatever that may be.

So few can cope with this emotion by blogging about their feelings. For a lot of people "blame the others" seems to be the easiest way to cope with this feeling.

(Also, archive.org still has your picture up, either fix your link or remove the broken img tag. You just look like another @jack clone anyway and nobody cares.)

We might have trains!

All the fascist stuff is pretty bad -- nationalism, strongman leaders, isolating an "other" with violence, grifters selling out the people's interests to corporations -- I'm not down with any of that.

But maybe we could have some kind of system where corporations are forced to vote on governance that applies to all other corporations for the collective good of capitalist progress?

There needs to be some kind of unified governing principle to make everyone's lives better.

We can't go on with BIG_CO hiring lobbying firms to most efficiently snake their legislation through the system unchecked.

In my thought experiment here, most corporations would want to enact policy responsibly for the public good. Cooperation between corporations would happen, but the default position would be for more happy consumers.

So far we've tried letting representative democracy work out hard issues and that hasn't gone well. We've also tried deferring governance entirely to the courts with poor results.

I'm open to suggestions.

This is the n'th tech company today that's made an announcement similar to this.

Even Disney is going to transport workers to abortion-legal states as needed as "health benefit".

It's certainly a perk and good on Google for this one, but we're headed to a dark place if your best shot at human rights is to retain employment by a big tech company.

You can confirm it's non-commercial and they let you keep it for free... for now.

They made the change fairly late in the process, and supposedly there was a way to undo the paid migrations by opening a support ticket, but I saw lots of posts about people being unable to migrate back and get refunded.

Honestly though, it's not "fuck Congress", it's "fuck the electorate".

One of the great ironies about the rise of corporate fascism in the US is that the democracy does function on a technical level. If enough people worked together to do the right things, ballots could be cast and there is no dictator to prevent the will of the people from being heard.

Of course, that does not happen. The people have proven ineffective at self-governance.

At this point I'm wondering if we should just hand all governance over to a consortium of industry leaders that are accountable to shareholders. If we're going to do an oligarchy, let's at least be efficient about it.

That seems better to me than the current system of an easily brainwashed public electing whoever has the best disinformation campaign.

Do you think we'd have all these crazy IP laws if the big IP holders and big tech companies had to get in a room together and actually figure out what the law should be?

> Japanese people are just Asian English people.

That's hilarious. I don't know many English or Japanese people, but all of my stereotypes of both have way more overlap than I thought.

Maybe it's something in the tea.