81–90 of 227 posts
This is impressive analysis, but have I overlooked the laundering part? Money laundering is providing an explanation about why it is clean, not hiding the reason that it might be dirty.
Most of the crypto world operates on "assumed clean" (blacklist) thinking so you don't have to fully clean anything.
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and when the crypto passes through a government’s address it magically becomes clean :)) so the whole blacklist concept is dumb because the same funds have to be reset, but the old chains of transactions are still being passed around as if its a “gotcha” but theyre really irrelevant quickly and reintegrated back into the economy quickly
I don't see what's dumb about it. It seems like blacklisting is the digital equivalent of "I don't want to do business with criminals" - I wouldn't knowingly buy anything from a thief, or from a store that knows some of its suppliers are thieves. If law enforcement has seized the property and auctioned it, then the criminals aren't profiting, so I don't mind.
Even if "your" tokens are perfectly clean, straight from an artisanal miner running their rig purely on solar surplus or something like that, their value still derives almost exclusively from crime use cases, hidden behind no matter how many layers of zero-sum speculation.
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What makes you think the same equipment would have the necessary mechanics and capacity for realtime mass-filtering? Even in America, I imagine there are many other budget priorities competing for a limited spook-fund, that would displace a "national censor-wall but indefinitely inactive and secret just in case we need it someday."
You know how the internet and things like Tor are products of the Department of Defense? The State Department has been using the internet (and anonymization tools like Tor) to organize dissidents in foreign countries for various purposes, often coups. One example is the Arab Spring[1]. I'd wager they are very afraid of someone doing it back to them, and might have some capability in place. Even if it's just to shut t…
For one, they're would be an enormous backlash if it were to somehow effect the many American businesses which rely on network access and have significant clout in our system. Most of the countries that have tried such things either (A) don't have the economic exposure or (B) limited the outage-scope to zones without the same stakeholders.
Another aspect is that such coarse interruptions are a lot easier to accomplish through a bunch of NSL-weilding lawyer-agents contacting ISPs, rather than spending money building dedicated hardware infrastructure, in advance, in secret, to support a Giant Red Button.
I'm not saying there's no possible Motive, but it's no substitute for Means and Opportunity.
Serious question, if the United States decided to unilaterally cut North Korea off from the Internet, how hard would that be to do? Could we just knock out a few cables? North Korea pretty much only uses the Internet for scams Or to make money in violation of sanctions. They certainly don’t allow their citizens to use it for anything else, and they don’t allow their citizens to leave the country because they would ne…
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In much the same way the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it, financial networks consider lost opportunity due to regulation as damage and route around it. People will assume I mean buying drugs, but actually, I mean: - when I had $10k in my US bank account but couldn’t access it while traveling because I ran afoul of whatever KYC at Western Union after losing my bank card; or, - today, when…
> Society views the fascistic impulses of those in control stifling innovation and growth as damage You think society sees financial regulations as fascistic impulses that stifle innovation? Where do you get that from?
> Society views the 1:[fascistic impulses] of those in control 2:[stifling innovation and growth] as damage
I say that people who run our societies are fascists — and their impulses for control [1] then cause a stifling of innovation and growth [2]. Which a five minute conversation with someone that does business will convince you of better than I will.
However, you got cause and effect reversed in your reading: I said that fascists are stifling innovation with regulation, not that regulations are fascistic.
I also carefully said lost opportunity — because regulations become routed around precisely when they introduce more cost than benefit. Eg, some regulations boost opportunity by creating stable business environments.
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Only an American would ever entertain this idea without being at least a bit tongue in cheek about it. The US doesn’t own the Internet.
Out of interest I looked up who controls the DNS root servers: Europe (2): RIPE and Netnod AB. RIPE is Europe’s RIR, run as a conference by European ISPs. Netnod is a Swedish ISP. Asia (1): Project WIDE, part of the Tokyo Institute of Technology. US (9): Verisign, Cogent, NASA, US Department of Defense, US Army, the University of Maryland, ISC (as in the Bind9 people), ICANN itself, and the University of Southern Cal…
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Most of the crypto world operates on "assumed clean" (blacklist) thinking so you don't have to fully clean anything.
To be fair so does most of the traditional banking system.
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And a shady third world casino will happily provide that proof document in return for a 13% cut of your winnings.
I still think you’d get under an investigation (at least from the tax authorities, but I can imagine police too) after years of years consistently depositing millions of wins in your bank account.
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> when I had $10k in my US bank account but couldn’t access it while traveling because I ran afoul of whatever KYC at Western Union after losing my bank card; or, Why would you first stop be western Union if you lost your bank card? Ignoring my confusion as to why you didn’t have a credit card handy, or a phone with a banking app handy if you’re well off enough to have $10k in the bank. Why would your first thought b…
How do those things help? I had both a credit card and a phone; you can’t get cash with NFC. I was stuck using credit card services and cut off from most of the economy of the primarily cash-based society I was visiting. To the extent merchants accepted digital payments, it was primarily in their local banking app. > OF COURSE it set off all sorts of red flags with your bank. Do you not understand why I regard me sta…