What Happens When a Fifteen Year Old Pumps and Dumps with a Net Profit of $800k? (2002)

Others getting away with similar (or even worse) isn't a strong argument that such fraud is OK. Plenty of voices rose up during that fiasco, and rules were changed.

> I think we need to change the web so that nobody but the user has authority over which data is displayed in context with which other data such that platforms cannot prevent critical annotations from appearing next to content (or annotations that simply remove that content)... supposing the user has opted into those annotations. I'm working on such a protocol.

To some extent browsers (i.e. users agents) already do this -- it's how ad blockers work. Naturally large corporations are always looking for ways around this, like using native apps for specifically the things (like social media) that have no reason at all not to be a web page -- or better yet, a feed protocol like RSS with a client app which is independent of the service.

A modern protocol which is basically RSS for social media content would be welcome. Probably even among content creators. But not so much social media conglomerates.

> We just collectively refuse to accept it.

If there are 10 grocery stores in town and 8 of them go along with this, the miners just shop at the other two, or the mine starts selling groceries in the company store. In order to be effective it would have to be close to universal, at which point you're basically reinventing government. Notice how if 51% of people are in on it, you already have the votes to pass a law.

Trying to tag money with the evil bit is also a fool's errand because it's fungible. Suppose that AT&T isn't in on your boycott, so they accept the hundred bucks from the mine to pay their phone bill, and put it in their account with billions of other dollars. Now AT&T is tainted. They're going to pay that money to their employees who will use it to buy everything from everywhere and in two weeks there won't be an account in the country that hasn't been Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon'd into having tainted money in it, or the boycott becomes a self-DoS because there are fewer places you can patronize while respecting the boycott than the miners can.

Conversely, suppose you're not willing to taint money that some huge corporation accepts. Well, now the miners just go to Walmart, who isn't in on your boycott, and use it to buy a prepaid debit card which isn't tainted because Walmart doesn't publish that information, and then use the card to buy whatever they want.

> The law is ridiculous if it only turns on whether you had a lawyer ahead of time to tell you what not to say while operating the identical scam.

You'd be very shocked...

... but that's essentially what criminal defence is about :-/ In a sense half the value of having a defence lawyer is having somebody to remind you not to say stupid things to the police/investigators/prosecution.

Of course it's not really as simple as that, but you'd be surprised at the number of convictions where the prosecution relied on something stupid the defendant said. If (say) 50% of convictions "turns on whether you had a lawyer ahead of time to tell you what not to say", is the law ridiculous? Because that's what it generally is like (not just for securities fraud cases).

PS: for cases where it's particularly easy to feign ignorance/innocence, sometimes the law specifically states that the mens rea requirement is waived (i.e. the intent/knowledge does not matter, or does not need to be proved beyond reasonable doubt). This in turn gives opportunity for defence lawyers to argue this infringes on the right of the defendant to be presumed innocent..

> How else are you going to resist people with enough market power to corrupt your existing government?

How are you going to resist people with enough market power to corrupt your new government?

What are you going to do when the incumbent corrupt government declares your alternate government to be unlawful?

> Is it?

Being fungible is the purpose of money. It's why a doctor doesn't have to find a farmer who needs medical care in order to have lunch.

> I've worked at enough payment provides and been through enough trainings about KYC the OFAC lists and heard enough proposals regarding CBDC's to doubt that that's true anymore.

Are you aware of the effectiveness of KYC? It's basically zero. Because money is fungible.

Suppose Bob is naughty and nobody is allowed to give him any money, but Bob wants to sell iron and buy wheat. Alice wants to buy Bob's iron. So Alice tells Bob she can't give him money and asks what he wants instead. Bob says wheat, Alice buys wheat from someone she's allowed to buy things from, then trades the wheat for Bob's iron, which is a process that involves Alice and Bob but not banks so nobody else knows it's happening. Trying to prevent this is futile but causes a lot of collateral damage and overhead and the people who continue to insist it be attempted should become unemployed.

> When I accept some fiction in exchange for parting with something real, I want it to carry enough metadata to know who I'm helping and who I'm harming by doing so.

And what I'm saying is that the metadata would just be a meshed graph containing everyone in the world.

Let's come back to AT&T. If someone you don't like pays them $100 and then they put the $100 in an account with a billion other dollars from ten million other people, what do you want metadata on money that comes out of that account to say? That the money is from everyone? Because it is. But how does that help you decide anything? All money would say that within a trivial number of transactions because it would quickly end up going through some large institution which mixes it with money from millions of other sources and then sends it back out into the general economy.

re: corruption, the impromptu government in my scenario only exists because a group of people decided to form it by collectively deciding the same way re: which money they'll accept and which they won't. It is legitimate so long as they continue to agree. If it stops being legitimate, then it stops being effective at the problem it was created to solve, people stop agreeing, and poof, it disappears.

The goal is only to make this kind of resistance possible. If it's the wrong tool for the job, stop using it and use something else.

re: incumbents, the assumption is that they're so sclerotic that they can't respond to novel scenarios. If this weren't the case, you could've just used them to deal with the driniking water problem in the first place.

re: fungibility and barter, the idea that "before we had money, we had barter" is often repeated in economics classes, but the anthropological evidence doesn't support it. Before the Roman empire violently asserted that caesar-face coin was more valuable than the metal it was made of, we did more or less what I'm describing. People with shared interests kept track of debts between each other, and people without shared interests refused to do so. It didn't scale super well, but now that we have computers, it can.

re: fungibility and kyc, there are plenty of people who are in jail for at one point having had the wrong kind of money, because it's not fungible.

re: a meshed graph containing everyone in the world

Well yes, that's how we treat money today, but I don't think it's sustainable. It concentrates too fast into the hands of too few. Why play a game in which you were born into a losing position? My generation decided to play, but I don't think that'll keep happening, because every generation has worse and worse reasons to. The French got fed up with their royalty, the children of the future will get fed up with their Quadrillionaires. The French chose violence, I'm proposing something else. A way to make old money into not money without taking anybody's head.

If you opt in to something like this, all that remains is new money--money issued with a purpose (we have this already, money enters the system when loans are granted, those loans were granted because somebody at a bank thought something was worth doing, a mining project perhaps). You don't have to track every single transaction, just the ones where money is created. I think people should have the ability to look at money and decide if its original purpose was a worthwhile one (nowadays the loan reasons are hidden from us). This would create better behavior among those so audacious as to create things and propose that they be treated like money.

For inflation reasons, money will also need to exit the system, so it's not going to hang around forever. As for whether you need metadata on every hand that is passes though from creation to destruction, or whether it's good enough to accept/reject anonymously handled money based solely on the conditions of issuance... that's up to the people. If they deem an abstraction legitimate by being willing to accept it as money, so be it. If not, well I guess we'll need bigger databases or more aggressive demurrage schemes such that the histories don't become unwieldy.

I realize that this all seems a bit outlandish, I must seem like a crazy person to you. But it's clear to me that our system has some very damaging design flaws, and I can't tolerate watching the subsequent harm without at least spinning my wheels now and again in search of an alternative.