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In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

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Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#551

Post by jesusofnazarath »

defaultname wrote: post #358
AmericanChopper wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The claim isn’t that broad. The democratic model of society has never trusted executive government to dispense justice unilaterally. Having due process and an open system of courts is a mandatory feature of the democratic society, and when a government decides to suspend those safeguards, that governments own commentary about how little harm it’s decisions are causing do not have any credibility.

Not a single charter right has been overridden. Every act undertaken under the EA is on the official record (available to the opposition parties). Parliament can revoke or partially revoke any component of the EA at any juncture. Then it has a followup discussion/analysis phase built in. Let's be clear -- there is no silencing component to this act. If someone has unfairly seen their accounts frozen, do a tell-all sa…

No post body was provided.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#552

Post by Rapzid »

jakobdabo wrote: post #13
throwaway22032 wrote: post #3

The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. In the medium to long term it's simply incompatible with any reasonable definition of freedom. Surveillance is bad enough, but a system that allows governments to arbitrarily "turn off" thousands or millions of people at the push of a button is too powerful to not be abused. Even the mere existence of such a system has a chilling effect. Which I suspect is precisel…

> The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. No, that battle is lost. Cashless is easier and more convenient, it's hard to beat that. We need more constitutional human rights. It's not okay to take or freeze somebody's money/property without any court decision. Edit: some of the answers assume that I'm against cash or that by saying "battle is lost" I mean cash is gone; My point of "cashless winning" is tha…

Yeah, better off voting at this point.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#553

Post by max51 »

erichocean wrote: post #394
yellowapple wrote: post #264

This is why I roll my eyes every time someone goes off on some tirade about how cryptocurrency is a scam. Yeah, grifters exist. No, that doesn't make the most viable alternative we have to these centralized digital monetary systems any less vital. My BTC can't be frozen, and my ADA can't be seized during a traffic stop. I strongly disagree with the antivax protestors currently the subject of these measures; I think t…

> My BTC can't be frozen Governments can make it a felony (jail time, fines) to interact with your wallet, effectively freezing it. And because bitcoins are infinitely traceable, governments can make any bitcoins that at any time originated from your wallet property of the state (i.e. any wallet held in an exchange that comes in possession of one of your coins can have those coins confiscated). Your bitcoins become f…

>Governments can make it a felony (jail time, fines) to interact with your wallet

BTC >> Monero >> BTC.

I take take There is plenty of reliable exchange platform that do not require IDs or even creating an account because they do not deal with fiat.

Bitcoin is NOT anonymous by default if you don't know/care how to use it, but it is extremely easy to get full anonymity if you need it. It would also be very hard to prove that you own a BTC wallet in a court of law.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#554

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

heavyset_go wrote: post #348
neb_b wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as bitcoin exists, the battle is not lost.

A few months ago, it cost $4 in BTC transaction fees alone to buy a $2 bottle of soda. Last spring, it cost $60 in transaction fees to buy a $2 bottle of soda.

That is no longer true. I recently topped my sim card for $3, then $1 with Bitcoin, while on vacation in Egypt. Either transaction cost me something like $0.001.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#555

Post by hkt »

Terry_Roll wrote: post #376
jakobdabo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. No, that battle is lost. Cashless is easier and more convenient, it's hard to beat that. We need more constitutional human rights. It's not okay to take or freeze somebody's money/property without any court decision. Edit: some of the answers assume that I'm against cash or that by saying "battle is lost" I mean cash is gone; My point of "cashless winning" is tha…

I had my only personal UK bank account frozen without warning for weeks. The first I knew of it was when the call centre wouldnt answer the phone for 45mins from the shop where I had just tried to use the card. Had to abandon the process and go home. Next morning, call the bank call centre, do security get told they cant talk to me. The processes to get the account activated was interesting, I couldnt complain to the…

Credit unions are also good for this: they won't necessarly have the modern comforts of a bank, but your local one (if you have one) will do cash based accounts, in person. They still KYC but since they're not plugged in to swift etc they might work well as a backup plan in situations like yours.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#556

Post by ladallada »

throwaway_fbfh wrote: post #475
adriand wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is utterly amazing to me that despite all of human history being filled with stories of egregious human rights violations, lies, and propaganda coming from governments all across the political spectrum and world that people still trot out the "look, read this official information. This is proof!" excuse. Shouldn't we be talking about what actually happened, though, instead of buying into a false narrative that i…

We are arguing that government is lying as it has done over and over and 1000 * over and that it did freeze accounts of random donors. Maybe they call them influencers lol because they have a IM account and 100 followers

It's hard to argue without proofs. We can argue so many things when we go the route of conspiracy.

The Canadian government isn't known to have lied over and over a thousand times over as far as I know.

Yes the government has had scandals, here's a list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_scandals_i...

So I won't say they can't, but I also like OP think arguing in these hypothetical is a waste of energy.

We could argue that the process needs to be transparent, make the list public for example. In fact, maybe it is, might be one of these: https://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/international_re...

I also feel logically, I don't see a motivate, small donors would only be cause for political complications. Logically it would make sense for them to restrict it to the people actually blocking roads with their trucks and to big donors financing large sums of money.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#557

Post by ladallada »

caylus wrote: post #419
tshaddox wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If anything this reinforces the author's point about the dangers of lack of transparency of "digital jail". How do we know that statement is true? If a crucial part of your argument is the epistemological claim that we obviously can't trust anyone who presents evidence or arguments that we don't like because they could be lying , then there's clearly no way of having a reasoned discussion.

My claim is that when evaluating when an authority's actions were reasonable, we should lend little to no credence to statements by that same authority claiming the actions were reasonable, especially when it is impossible to verify even who exactly was targeted, let alone why. As a contrasting case, if a police department arrested some people during a protest and released a statement about why, a journalist could ve…

Do we know there's no public records in this case?

I think there might be, the banks aren't in individually being contacted, I'm pretty sure they would have been added to one of the public sanction lists here: https://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/international_re...

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#558

Post by ladallada »

theptip wrote: post #450
adriand wrote: post #57

I agree that this needs to be taken very seriously. However, the author overstates his case significantly when he writes: > Doing this to someone—a small business owner in BC, a public servant in Winnipeg, a student in Halifax—who made a small donation to support the convoy is a clear abuse of power. However: > The RCMP, banking sector and federal government said Monday that account-freezing powers bestowed under the…

Hangon. The reason this shitstorm kicked up in the first place, and was getting retweeted by PG, Sam Altman, and lots of reasonable people (not to mention provoking the libertarian wing to frothing at the mouth), was that the deputy PM said: "The names of both individuals and entities as well as crypto wallets have been shared by the RCMP with financial institutions and accounts have been frozen and more accounts wil…

It's not fake news, they did freeze some accounts, people are arguing which account was frozen, was it only that of people who illegally block major roads and boarder crossings as part of the tricker protest, and/or did they also include small donors to their funds, and/or only large donors, but then what is the threshold for small/large, and/or did they also include collateral of people who might have been peacefully protesting alongside the truckers illegally blocking roads and boarder crossings.

The article makes the point that it's is dangerous to not have some limitations on over reach in this case.

For example, in a protest, you might get physically tear gased or jailed, but it's temporary, and eventually you get due process and can be released, and your tears from tear gas will dissipate. Yet the nature of it is that police punishes you before you've been convinced in a court, so there's collateral damage, people who did nothing wrong are hit and tear gased and arrested by the police, and it's a big deal each time it happens.

Here too, there could very well be this sort of collateral, but the article worries that since it's less visible in nature, that people might not see it as a big deal, the same way that they would if they'd see police throwing tear gas, hitting people and arresting people left and right.

So it's saying, there's a possibility of overreach and collateral, but it might create less of a concern from citizens towards the government, since they won't notice the blast radius, as it is harder to notice it.

It's a good argument to some extent, even if in this case there would have been zero overreach and collateral, it is still a good argument for next time where there could be some.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#559

Post by jesusofnazarath »

ripley12 wrote: post #194
mark_l_watson wrote: post #145

Excellent article and one that I wish my friends would read. Recently on a hike I mentioned how upsetting Trudeau’s actions are, and none of my friends had any idea what was happening up in Canada, except someone talked about a few things that I don’t believe are true: truckers were violent, few Canadians supported them, etc. - I think those things are not true. As other people here have pointed out, cashless society…

I think those things are true, and I live in Canada. I strongly support Trudeau's actions on this, and I'm sad that the government took so long to crack down on the "truckers". It's deeply damaging to civil society when a few extremists can shut down a city without consequences.

No post body was provided.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#560

Post by tiborsaas »

i_like_waiting wrote: post #531
DeathArrow wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better than crypto, you can store some money in a foreign bank account with a debit card attached and withdraw from the ATM when you need.

afaik its complicated to create bank account in country where you don't live no? I always had to provide proof of address or something, from that country, which is complicated if you are not millionaire with property here and there.

There are plenty of fintech companies that allow you to keep money without much hassle. Also, when you are on vacation, consider paying a visit to a bank, it's not that hard.
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