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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

#681

Post by ahtihn »

sebow wrote: post #640
ladallada wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking to one right now. So let's discuss. My view is that everyone has the right to protest whenever and whatever. And you can also as part of your protest show a little bit of civil disobedience, like break a few windows, burn a fire can, chant loudly through the night keeping everyone awake, or block some roads. Something to really get people to pay attention and really listen to what you have to protest a…

> You can continue to protest, but you can't be breaking the laws forever. One of the reasons the right to protest is a fundamental one is because laws are made by people, for people, in the service of the public good and well-being of the citizens. If the people protest against the laws then that's their right, the people and their will is above the law, the law is not above the people's will as a whole. This is alm…

> If the people protest against the laws then that's their right, the people and their will is above the law, the law is not above the people's will as a whole.

It's not the people's will as a whole though. It's a tiny minority of people that are protesting.

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

#682

Post by erichocean »

yellowapple wrote: post #485
erichocean wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, effectively freezing it. Governments already make it a felony to possess various illicit substances above a certain quantity. That hasn't done much to curtail the drug trade. More to the point: if a government attempted this, it would open up every other Bitcoin user to a DoS attack; I would just need to send some money around to well…

> I would just need to send some money around to well-known addresses to "freeze" those wallets, too.

Easily solved by sending illicitly obtained bitcoins to the government—which they can trivially ask you to do, or automate on the exchange that you're on.

Note: people can already deposit illicit funds into your regular bank account without your permission, and it causes no difficulties.

> They would need to control the private keys in order to actually perform that confiscation.

They're not confiscating them except from private citizens complying with the law, they're freezing those wallets and the bitcoins they contain out of the legal bitcoin system entirely. The government has no need to confiscate bitcoins when it can prevent their legal use without confiscation.

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

#683

Post by erichocean »

max51 wrote: post #553
erichocean wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pro…

> It would also be very hard to prove that you own a BTC wallet in a court of law.

Regulation regimes will work on a whitelist system: only wallets that are "approved" are allowed. All other wallets ("anonymous") are preemptively frozen/tainted until they are approved. Result? No more private/anonymous wallets in the "legal" bitcoin system.

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

Sure, and regulators would make them illegal under pre-existing KYC laws.

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

#684

Post by decafninja »

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #539
decafninja wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you mean, but yes I'm serious. I rarely if ever carry cash. Nearly every transaction I make is via credit card. The only time I'll usually have cash is when traveling overseas (for emergencies, in the foreign currency, not USD). I find cash terribly inconvenient and annoying to use. Meanwhile my wife loves using cash. I don't understand it. It's not for any privacy or idealogical reason - she says she j…

70 years after plastic was invented, people are seriously been proud and think of themselves as progressive and tech savvy because they use plastic.

The thought has not occurred to me even once. It is purely a matter of convenience.

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

#685

Post by raxxorrax »

YZF wrote: post #535
ta_abcd wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a resident of the city in question, lets talk facts(whatever that means) if you care to read on.. Almost nothing was shut down as a result of this protest. You could travel over 99.5% of the city and forget a protest was taking place. Almost anything that was shut down, was shut down voluntarily. Only the 3-4 blocks immediately adjacent to the Parliament buildings (where else do you go to protest your federal gove…

I'm not sure how you read hate into this. It's pretty simple. You break the law, you pay the price. I can't stop my car on a local bridge or by the border and block the road. The police will come and if I don't move my car they'll eventually smash the window and drag me out and then tow the car away. Nobody hates anyone. Well, that's not true, some people do hate and we've seen some of that. But hate or not hate is o…

> Protest is fine when you don't break the law.

Protests mostly happen when the law sucks. My country also only allows permitted protest, but it also is a shitty country regarding civil rights. Trump would call it a shithole country and some would be offended by that. He is technically correct though.

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

#686

Post by progval »

pshc wrote: post #286
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…

This reminds me of all the posts on HN about running your own email server. Admirable but ultimately negligible. Cryptocurrencies will provide solutions that actually scale to these problems in time, but HN’s still not ready to hear it.

Most cryptocurrencies (including Bitcoin and Ethereum) do not solve this issue, governments could order businesses (or payment systems used by businesses) not to accept payment coming from some blacklisted addresses, even indirectly; and this is possible thanks to the public ledger.

And they could outlaw any cryptocurrency that does provide anonymity for senders (Monero, GNU Taler, ...). While easy to bypass for individuals, legitimate businesses would not. Governments might even ban cash one day.

This is a social and political problem, technology won't solve it.

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

#687

Post by 6510 »

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…

> most people in their daily lives prefer using cashless

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

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

#688

Post by gampleman »

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…

I've been told by Citizen's Advice before that if they don't want to talk to you, the best is to send a physical letter to their registered place of business with a clause such as "You have 7 business days to respond" etc. This then firmly places a time limit on how much stalling they can do.

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

#689

Post by 6510 »

peterbraden wrote: post #622
jjav wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need better legal protections for electronic payments and banking. I can comfortably predict that can never happen. Electronic payments offer governments perfect and absolute surveillance and blocking ability. No government on earth will vote their fingers off that pie. The only freedom-compatible answer is to insist on cash.

This makes me sad, you are so confident that a government can never do the right thing, that the only solution you see is to prevent any progress, and anchor yourself to a local minima from the past. Society needs it’s members to believe that they can improve it, that they are represented by a government, and that they can influence it’s path. Anything less is an authoritarian regime. Such deep seated cynicism shows…

Governments can do the right thing most of the time but things should be designed for the worse case.

One of the big motivators behind the general data protection act is how personal data was historically used for genocide.

We still have plenty of politicians that want to target people categorically and make them second class citizens.

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

#690

Post by circlefavshape »

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…

Why was your account frozen?
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