Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
This.

As a platform, where do you draw the line between offering a product vs not because a developer could do something stupid with it?

edit: keeping in mind the use cases they are pushing in their documentation are for local development

Comment · 3 years ago
>> My question to those who support big brother any lawful but awful speech is - do you really think it won’t be used to silence any dissent of the ruling powers?

My question to those that use this line of reasoning is do you really think a ruling power willing to silence dissent would do so whether or not it is supported?

Comment · 3 years ago
I recommend you read the FAQ for the implications. And as homework for the reader, consider the banlist is a bloom filter
Comment · 3 years ago
>> Being decentralized means no single party controls it

I suggest you have a look at how many people are allowed to merge bitcoins PRs in github

Comment · 4 years ago
I call this the "Vulnerability view" instead of a "Remediation view" and its something I feel a lot of Security people and tooling gets wrong when sharing information with those outside our bubble.

It is dead easy to export a vulnerability scan or penetration test report and throw it at the developers, but you will get much better outcomes and better rapport if you tell them what they need to do (i.e. patch to version x.x.x) versus telling them what is wrong ("the sky is falling!").

Comment · 4 years ago
For project maintainers, yes absolutely Monero.

But then either only ever use Monero for everything (like pre-2013 bitcoin), or exchanges will need the will to "proof" the source of funds aren't illicit.

Comment · 4 years ago
I think mainly that I do not envy the lawyer that has to make the service argument.

We could get lost in the technical details of why it is or isn't a service but ultimately they only need to prove that x person of the project knew about the issues, could have done something about it (like shut it down), and didn't do enough.

It was just the one contract wasn't it? i.e. someone was responsible for deploying the contract that inputs and outputs the blending between addresses. In this scenario, the other permission less stuff is theatre.

Comment · 4 years ago
That's exactly what I mean, its the service that is getting sanctioned. The people that "knew and didn't do enough to stop it" will be arrested.

My meaning of "code is just code" as a bad take, was just that the code part in isolation wasn't sanctioned.

Comment · 4 years ago
As someone else has stated elsewhere in this discussion, I don't think GitHub have much to worry about. Tornado Cash the service was sanctioned, and MS would choose to censor the repo out of an abundance of caution. In the same way that the pair that open-sourced the ransomware PoC didn't get arrested because they are further away from the offenses.

I have mixed thoughts on safe harbor for centralised exchanges, they are the closest thing we have to banks in cryptoland. Mostly because with grey areas like that, a prosecution is only going to be pursued with clear evidence they knew but did nothing.

Comment · 4 years ago
Person that has worked on the defensive side of Money Laundering here.

The Tornado Cash sanction has been fascinating to watch and my key takeaway has been that there are two camps: that TC is a Money Laundering service or a Privacy service. Both are talking past each other, when it can in fact be both. Each camp see the service as their primary concern and consider the other camp as an unintended secondary.

I am seeing a lot of bad takes. "Money laundering requires all three aspects" particularly irks me because you can just point to KYC regulations to disprove that. "Code is just code" is another, but that is just because the code isn't why someone would be sanctioned or arrested. In the same way that The Pirate Bay was just code, its is how complicit they were in the offence that will get them.

Ultimately, the dichotomy feels like a problem unique to public blockchains, and will only be solved with a ZK L1 chain, whatever that looks like. The solution would require the blockchain equivalent of end-to-end encryption, one where intermediaries have zero knowledge but doesn't require co-mingling of dirty and clean money.

While I think money laundering is a more serious crime than piracy (at least the predicate offenses can be). Watch this play out like Megaupload, never ending legal issues for the first parties, and a technical solution like Mega.

Comment · 4 years ago
This is a build deployment perspective.

I for one do not miss hosts never being patched because all those slight modifications to systems files that were tweaked several builds ago and now everyone is too scare to touch.

I won't miss the 12 month projects to upgrade some dated software to a slightly less dated version of that same software.

From my perspective in Security, DevOps has made life much better.

Comment · 4 years ago
The only novel benefit, as you say, is "decentralized trust". The blockchain portion of the NFT in most cases is simple a pointer to the asset and the owner, with the actual asset being off-chain managed by a single entity that can do whatever they please with it. Why does the ownership need to be decentralized if ultimately, the asset is mutable?
Comment · 5 years ago
I still don't understand why this needs to be decentralised?

> without having to solely trust the company issuing the nft ticket

For the transaction yes, but what about the thing you are buying? Perhaps I am not thinking creatively enough, but I can't think of a use case where there isn't ultimately some trust required other than solely digital assets.

Using your hotel example, you will end up at the hotel where they can choose to honor your ticket in the same way as their traditional booking system. There was no need for this to be on a distributed ledger as the asset (a hotel stay) was between you and the hotel.

You are not cutting out the middle man of some SaaS provider, you are substituting them.

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