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Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

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Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#81

Post by CydeWeys »

bscphil wrote: post #46
eli wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yeah of course it would be easier to send money without any KYC laws. That has nothing to do with crypto.

The point is that crypto used to be able to do that, trivially. So it very much speaks to the question of whether crypto has any strengths versus other approaches to the same problems. It used to , and doesn't anymore.

Crypto absolutely can still do that. There's nothing in the Bitcoin protocol itself that enforces KYC, so you can send whatever you want to whoever you want using a basic Bitcoin client. Meanwhile, good luck sending a wire from your bank account to Iran. That will flat out be prevented. But with crypto, you take all the burden/consequences of the KYC on yourself, and the algorithm itself disallows no transactions.

Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#82

Post by majormajor »

miracle2k wrote: post #57
DannyBee wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt most of tech would appreciate being lumped in with crypto, which should be the first sign that your take is a little off. IE if you think you are just "tech being tech" but lots and lots of tech is like "uh, no, we aren't like you at all, please don't lump us in with you", that should tell you something. Beyond that, your take seems so divorced from reality i'm not even sure where to begin. I don't agree at a…

> Crypto has always been a subset of tech's goals, and is even framed that way 99% of the time in presentations/etc. GP is simply saying that making a permissionless financial network a key element of the way value is exchanged across the world is a much more ambitious goal than selling books online.

> GP is simply saying that making a permissionless financial network a key element of the way value is exchanged across the world is a much more ambitious goal than selling books online.

They said:

> And that's in a space whose biggest ambition was to replace catalogue shopping and how hotel reservations are made.

Which is an amazingly uncharitable interpretation of "the whole tech industry" in the 90s when the internet was being created, ask people at the time to give their best-foot-forward description of ambitions and you'd probably get something much more like "make all the world's knowledge available to everyone" and "eliminate the tyranny of distance to let human relationships flourish"

Vs, you know, "replace banks and let people transfer money instantly" or "create a new currency" - which sounds an AWFUL lot like a subset of that "connect everything together" original tech goal. Hell, "create a new currency" was even a goal for a lot of players back then, too!

(Interestingly they both share a level of idealism in terms of transcending traditional national borders, whether or not that is practical/achievable/or was achieved fully.)

Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#83

Post by bscphil »

jandrese wrote: post #66
bscphil wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that crypto used to be able to do that, trivially. So it very much speaks to the question of whether crypto has any strengths versus other approaches to the same problems. It used to , and doesn't anymore.

Unfortunately, that strength mostly boils down to "you can launder money with it". The idea that it would maintain that property indefinitely seems naiive at best. "I've made the perfect platform for criminals, but for some reason there are a lot of people using it for crimes and now law enforcement is shutting me down! This is an outrage!" This reminds me of why there are so few ways to simply send someone a large f…

This is actually sort of an example of what I'm talking about. Yeah, part of the strength of cryptocurrency is that it allows bad people to do bad things. Sort of how part of the strength of encrypted messages is that they allow bad people to do bad things. Same with file transfers.

The defenses people give of file transfers, chat encryption, etc etc are pretty straightforward: certain things should be equally usable by both law-abiders and criminals, for both legitimate and illegitimate ends. That kind of broad protection is the only way to insure that the civil liberties of all users are protected. Some of the illegal things that people do with these tools are unfortunate, but protecting them remains worthwhile.

What I'm saying is that the people who invented cryptocurrency believed basically the same thing about finances - that we would be better off treating the ability to transfer money as an absolute right, kind of like Signal treats encrypted messaging as an absolute right. The fact that the government doesn't see this as "legitimate" is kind of the point. (It was illegal to export many forms of encryption for *years.) As someone who at some points has used cryptocurrency for completely legal money transfers, I've directly benefited from the ease of use and simplicity this entailed.

Is it "naive at best" to hope that Signal will indefinitely maintain the property of protecting my chats against intrusion by third parties? Maybe! But that doesn't change the point that the fact that Signal does this is the whole reason I use Signal!

Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#84

Post by npunt »

leashless wrote: post #9

I've crossed swords with Molly a couple of times. I was the release coordinator for Ethereum, and I've been active in the space a long long time. Here's what it boils down to: freedom is messy. The early days of the dotcom space were filled with carnage of a type which makes crypto look pretty normal. Amazon stock dropped >90% and a trillion and a half in value vanished from the market overall. https://en.wikipedia.o…

So in other words, "its going great" :)

Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#85

Post by shagymoe »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #60
vvpan wrote: post #56

I send money across borders to friends an organizations via blockchain. And millions of other people do, especially in countries with volatile financial systems. I much prefer crypto to anything else in this case. Hearing "no legitimate use case" arguments is awfully annoying when you get objective use from the thing being criticized.

I send money across borders without blockchain. Without fees. Without having to wait 2 weeks for the transaction to be confirmed.

Really? How? I needed to transfer money from the sale of a property in Europe and the fees + currency conversion was over $1000.

Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#86

Post by phailhaus »

vvpan wrote: post #56

I send money across borders to friends an organizations via blockchain. And millions of other people do, especially in countries with volatile financial systems. I much prefer crypto to anything else in this case. Hearing "no legitimate use case" arguments is awfully annoying when you get objective use from the thing being criticized.

> I send money across borders to friends an organizations via blockchain.

And that transaction is completely public, and can be traced back to both of you.

Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#87

Post by dylan604 »

ilamont wrote: post #54
chasing wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Web hit the scene in 1991. By 2003 how we shopped, worked, consumed media, communicated with friends and family, and interacted with information was in the process of changing radically. A million "little ambitions" to replace catalogue shopping and how hotel reservations were made were transforming how the world worked. Bitcoin hit the scene in 2011. By 2023 crypto's mostly a failed get-rich-quick scheme with a…

> And the deep dark secret at the heart of crypto is that — apart from the get-rich-quick stuff — it's neither particularly interesting nor useful. And it takes a lot of set dressing and hand-waving to make it seem like such. Yep. For an example this week, see "Web3 Can Help Marginalized Communities Share Their Stories" ( https://decrypt.co/142763/web3-can-help-marginalized-communi... ) “You can truly own your IP thr…

>“You can truly own your IP through the whole thing,” Bayne said, highlighting the advantages that Web3 brings to filmmaking. “Your community can be involved through every step, and you don't necessarily need the studios.”

i get you have to have types with very active imaginations to evangelize and get a new thing created, but sometimes, that imagination is just so fanciful that it has the same odds as a snow ball in certain locations. it also makes the speaker just sound completely out of touch and delusional. that comment makes me think someone is quite enamored with the sound of their own voice

Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#88

Post by drcode »

JohnMakin wrote: post #21
leashless wrote: post #9

I've crossed swords with Molly a couple of times. I was the release coordinator for Ethereum, and I've been active in the space a long long time. Here's what it boils down to: freedom is messy. The early days of the dotcom space were filled with carnage of a type which makes crypto look pretty normal. Amazon stock dropped >90% and a trillion and a half in value vanished from the market overall. https://en.wikipedia.o…

But the biggest scandals had nothing to do with the "tech" - the tech at its core is exceedingly simple and the idea has been around forever. This isn't just "tech being tech," this is tech mixing with unregulated finance + hucksters. This isn't just some overvalued tech stock going to zero, its people losing their entire livelihoods and capital based on blatantly false or misleading promises.

Similarly, it's frustrating for many of us in crypto that things like the SBF/FTX meltdown is counted as a failure of crypto, when it was just a centralized traditional platform.

It's hard for me to have too much sympathy for people that were parking a large amount of money at that place and trusting them with it. Who cares what "promises" they were making?

Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#89

Post by lern_too_spel »

vvpan wrote: post #56

I send money across borders to friends an organizations via blockchain. And millions of other people do, especially in countries with volatile financial systems. I much prefer crypto to anything else in this case. Hearing "no legitimate use case" arguments is awfully annoying when you get objective use from the thing being criticized.

Your use-case is breaking money transfer laws. Just like every other use-case, it is far less expensive to break money transfer laws with a centralized ledger. When you make blockchain money transfer comply with regulations, it becomes more expensive than legal money transfer using centralized ledger.

When regulation kicks in (and it will — no government wants its citizens to be fleeced by rogue nations like DPRK and Russia), are there really any legitimate use-cases?

Re: Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great

#90

Post by winkywooster »

shagie wrote: post #25
blakesterz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but be reminded of Fucked Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same?

My favorite bit about Fucked Company is there are archived captures of it from 2002 in the Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/lcwaN0020126/

what's interesting is at the library of congress it looks like it's using the wayback machine (similar ui), but the internet archive has excluded it from their results. also, the library of congress version is not very complete. it only goes back a few pages, and most of the specific announcement pages (all?) don't work.
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