591–600 of 827 posts
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Dude created a company that built a reusable rocket and you accuse him of selling vaporware.
Gwynne Shotwell created a company that built a reusable rocket. Elon gave his name and a pile of money to it.
And last I checked, the company’s name was SpaceX, not “Elon Musk’s Rocket Company”
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Guess that makes every government money printer complicit in money laundering, seeing how the majority of it happens through cash.
It’s weird the crypto people think this is a valid argument. If someone did what tornando is doing with physical cash, they would also be committing money laundering.
Does shuffling a bunch of currency notes together - some of which might be from a drug dealer - make you a criminal?
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HN in its current avatar would probably cheer on if the Patriot Act was enacted today. Been on this site for a decade. Never seen it this filled with Big Gov and Big Tech apologists.
So we're all suppose to become techno-anarchists? HN has a great balance of both, it's just mostly the crypto-obsessed that decry government encroachment because they're still struggling to find a useful purpose for the technology before they get regulated.
The thing is, most people here don’t think that escaping government encroachment is a worthwhile endeavor. Which is pretty much the antithesis of the word “hacker”
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I know I will get a hail of downvotes for this, but again you're comparing apples and oranges. The operators are using crypto for a wide range of applications. Using a mixer has probably 99.9% illegal reasons and 0.1% legitimate uses. Making money laundering harder is a good thing, no matter how many people here will try to convince you it isn't.
> Using a mixer has probably 99.9% illegal reasons and 0.1% legitimate uses Similar to people using paper money or end-to-end encryption really. Nobody needs military-grade encryption or anonymous currency unless they're trying to hide something.
Say I sell software, or SaaS. Then I may need military-grade encryption because I need to sell, a few potential customers (may) need that, and I need to keep my costs down so supplying the latest and greatest cipher to everyone is the right default. It may waste a bit of CPU but it saves the time of the sales and support people, and human time is expensive.
Say I'm going to buy something tomorrow, and I don't like SPoFs. There's a card in my wallet, or maybe two, but if the card reader in the shop is down, that's a SPoF unless I also carry some cash.
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That makes no sense and I don't think that lines up with liability. Every hammer maker knows some people use hammers as murder weapons. Their continued manufacturing of hammers obviously does not constitute a criminal act. This argument makes no sense, and while I'm not a lawyer, I doubt it actually has legal basis (at least in the US).
Mens rea isn't some radical idea. If hitting specific sales targets on Bushmaster AR-style hammers is tied to your bonus you might end up settling for $73 million when you get caught pushing them too hard and they're used in a bunch of massacres.
So this argument, while potentially valid, doesn't apply here.
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To be fair, banning guns seems to also ban mass shootings.
At face value, it may seem to, but whether it practically would, in the US especially, is a totally different question.
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What if I don’t want my employer knowing I spent my BTC/ETH/etc on a porn website — so I want a way to disassociate the payment address they know from my spending account? …or guns, alcohol, abortions, etc. People have a need for privacy and disassociating spending from receiving for perfectly normal and legal reasons.
This seems like a better argument for using a system which is correctly designed. A public ledger is a bad fit for currency and layering kludges on top isn’t as good as a better design, especially when that exposes you to being an accessory to criminal activity.
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Taking some leads to all. It's not something that should be compromised on. Gun restrictions won't end until ownership is so legally complex and time consuming that nobody can reasonably do it anymore. Of course it won't be an outright ban. That would never succeed. The frog in boiling water analogy applies here perfectly.
"Taking some leads to all" logic doesn't really follow. If that idea applied then the US would already not have guns as many types of firearms (ex. fully automatic) and weapons (explosive munitions) are heavily restricted (and have been for a very long time).
They aren’t. Just pay the $200 tax and wait for the ATF to process your transfer form. (3 months to a year, generally)
Unless explicitly banned your state, if you can legally own a firearm, you can legally own an NFA item. Including explosives and automatic firearms.
Which is why the NFA is generally bullshit. It’s pointless extra bureaucracy that ultimately achieves nothing but delays.
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> Anonymous cash transactions So not crypto.
The law also applies to barter with equivalent Euro thresholds, so cryptocurrencies aren't excluded. Anyway, the point stands, financial privacy (from the State, at least) is not a feature of life in the Netherlands (or anywhere in the EU, with AML3/4/5/6).
> Germany No limit on cash payments for the purchase of goods.
Consumers who want to pay amounts which are higher than 10. 000 Euro in cash, have to show their ID card. And the trader has to document the surname, first name, place of birth, date of birth, the home address and the nationality.
https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/en/shopping-internet/cas...
A lot of the apologists for this are making arguments along the lines of "being decentralized doesn't make you exempt from the rules" or "imagine if a bank laundered this much money". The problem is it doesn't make sense to treat protocols like companies. And it definitely doesn't make sense to treat protocol devs as if they were the executives of those companies. The CEO of a bank and the lead dev of a protocol have…
Starting a money laundrymat and expecting not to get charged with a crime is a bit absurd. Pretending that it's totally fine because it's "privacy" not money laundering because crypto is special... is likewise absurd.