Iranians trying to get cash so they can buy groceries are not the problem. North Korea using ransomware to get lots of cryptocurrency they can use to fund their nuclear weapons program is the problem.
Do you really want to turn SourceHut into an instrument of US foreign policy, even if it keeps Iranians from buying groceries? US foreign policy doesn't have a great track record on human rights or diminishing global inequality, you know. It's killed and imprisoned a hell of a lot more people than North Korea.
Since the company incorporated in the EU, I don’t quite see how this is relevant.
Never read a better summary before - > These domains are strongly associated with fraudulent activities and high-risk investments which take advantage of people who are suffering from economic hardship and growing global wealth inequality. Few to no legitimate use-cases for this technology have been found; instead it is mostly used for fraudulent “get rich quick” schemes and to facilitate criminal activity, such as r…
A monetary unit that can't be debased running on an open, permissionless financial network anybody can use is the use-case. The big and only use case. Research suggests less than 1% of "crypto" usage is for criminal activity. Energy isn't fungible and it isn't wasted if it's securing hundreds of billions of value for hundreds of millions of people. So maybe you shouldn't send something to everyone you know if it isn'…
> Energy isn't fungible and it isn't wasted if it's securing hundreds of billions of value for hundreds of millions of people.
Sadly, this echoes the kind of defective reasoning I have observed with a majority of “crypto” proponents.
Also, without a proper source for a claim, I can just as well state that research has shown that less than 1% of cryptocurrency proponents are aware enough to realize the hole they’ve dug themselves in.
I was recently considering moving to Sourcehut or Github after self hosting using gitrc for over a year. I have been going back and forth over self hosting versus leveraging an existing service, but this news and fumblings over Gitea last week have pretty much put me right back into self hosting..
We do not kick people out for political differences.
Yes, you will. What else does this mean: > The scope of this is intended to cover incidents where users harass other users or make bigoted, racist, homophobic, transphobic, etc, comments on our platform. You say "harass other users OR make bigoted...etc, comments on our platform." The fact that you said "or" means that you intend to kick users off who make comments that you judge to be that, even if it's not harassme…
"Certain [gender|sexual|racial|etc] identities are not valid" is a political opinion held by those to whom I am quite comfortable telling, as the official policy of SourceHut, to go fuck themselves.
It is, indeed, a subjective thing. I personally have given up on cryptocurrency, but I seem to recall (and the absolute worthless rag called Reuters seems to corroborate: https://www.reuters.com/technology/venezuelas-economy-regres... ) that Venezuelans found a recourse in crypto after the Venezuelan economy imploded. However that is just one data point, and the utter lack of any real wins aside from that would seem…
To take an extreme example, it’s probably true that CSAM has some value (there’s people willing to pay for it) and you could in theory traffic in it for “good reasons” but for most it would be repulsive. Would they choose to die rather than do it? Hopefully nobody would be put to the test. That something found a good use doesn’t mean it’s a good (or bad) thing. Society is all about trying to navigate the trade offs.
> it’s probably true that CSAM has some value
I think you're conflating financial value and social value (CSAM may have some financial value, but highly negative social value). I really struggle to see how you could (even theoretically) traffic CSAM for "good reasons".
Never read a better summary before - > These domains are strongly associated with fraudulent activities and high-risk investments which take advantage of people who are suffering from economic hardship and growing global wealth inequality. Few to no legitimate use-cases for this technology have been found; instead it is mostly used for fraudulent “get rich quick” schemes and to facilitate criminal activity, such as r…
Can anyone elaborate on this? Cryptography course at my university covers blockchains and we were never made aware of this. And academic community in general seems to be unaware, not a single blockchain talk I attended drew attention to this.
elaborate on what specifically? There are plenty of academics talking about blockchain = bad. If you took a CS course, likely people were invested themselves or do not see it that way, f.e. if they either care about making money or a libertarian idea of freedom which sees government as bad, and needs 'uncensored' money.
99% of crypto/blockchain projects give the rest a bad name, so I especially like this part: > We will exercise discretion when applying this rule. If you believe that your use-case for cryptocurrency or blockchain is not plagued by these social problems, you may ask for permission to host it on SourceHut, or appeal its removal, by contacting support. looking forward to seeing what (if any) crypto projects there manag…
Bitcoin
btc is probably the worst as it will never move from PoW. And only has the price it does due to bridging to other chains probably.
I'm very familiar with the poem, thanks. Take a look at the last line! > If a devops team for a pro-choice campaign was being censored on SourceHut because it does not align with Drew's moral compass, nobody would defend this with "well, they can just run their own git hosting services, so what's the problem?" Actually, I suspect that's precisely how some people would defend it. And why wouldn't they? It's completely…
Yikes, I hope that people on HN would not defend such a decision this way.
The difference is that projects like Tor were certainly not created with any devious purpose in mind. Arguments and use cases for anonymity are very easy to come up with. Blockchain related projects cause damage on two fronts: - They are commonly created with the explicit goal to scam most people while making very few people rich. - The tech around blockchains ( almost ) qualifies as snakeoil. The use cases are nonex…
>- They are commonly created with the explicit goal to scam most people while making very few people rich. Examples? I'm struggling to come up with examples outside of something like "ponzicoin". The typical token/ICO project has some plausible business model (ie. you're investing in a token that allows you to use this smart contract, which presumably will have demand if the smart contract becomes popular) which make…
Basically most ICOs. Almost anything that mentions tokenomics. Most of these only function when you have an influx of new buyers. This basically includes all that provide a token to use some smart contract. In the worst case, you have a useless token that you can use with a smart contract that does precisely nothing. Apart from having made some people money and providing money for the affiliated companies, even if they have a business model, it would in most cases be better served to function without blockchain. As someone else said, the most compelling use case is independence from banks and other institutions, which is an ideological position that does not serve most business models.
A monetary unit that can't be debased running on an open, permissionless financial network anybody can use is the use-case. The big and only use case. Research suggests less than 1% of "crypto" usage is for criminal activity. Energy isn't fungible and it isn't wasted if it's securing hundreds of billions of value for hundreds of millions of people. So maybe you shouldn't send something to everyone you know if it isn'…
> Research suggests less than 1% of "crypto" usage is for criminal activity. I’m really curious to know where this statistic is coming from. Spend a day following other sources [0] and you’d be hard-pressed not to come to the same conclusion. [0] https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
See [1].
$14B in illicit activity in a year sounds like a lot, but it's about a single percent of $1T, and Chainalysis is tracking $1T worth of transactions per month in crypto.[2]