201–210 of 283 posts
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What else could they have done?
They could have done like Telegram in Russia and said that they will not care about that and work on ways to bypass any firewall that could setup the authority to block it.
FYI the EU wide proposal to scan all your private messages using an AI agent on your devices also originated in Sweden by EU Commissioner Ylva Johansson in 2022. > EU Commissioner Ylva Johansson has also been heavily criticised regarding the process in which the proposal was drafted and promoted. A transnational investigation by European media outlets revealed the close involvement of foreign technology and law enfor…
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In addition, simply taking out the on/off ramps, such as Coinbase, would destroy the utility of cryptocurrency as well, since the grand majority of folks dealing in the stuff are only interested in flipping it for more cash money on the other end by finding the next sucker in the chain. Very few people actually care about the principles of Bitcoin and the like. Maybe the core devs and some very early adopters?
Whether it's useful to the current "grand majority" or not / holds the value it does today is orthogonal to whether the technology can be stopped and whether it still provides value to those who continue to use it. I did worry this example would be too political, hence including the BitTorrent example as well.
The actual software and code? Good luck getting that genie back in the bottle now. But, you can certainly hamstring it in other ways, and frankly, that should be good enough. I say this as someone who is absolutely not a fan of the project and find the perverse incentives in PoW especially to be pure garbage, but I am also a realist.
When you have folks like Peter Zeihan declaring that Bitcoin *will* go to zero - that is, I think, the epitome of hubris. We don't know what will happen next, and with our current administration, I'm only seeing Bitcoin become more influential in the interim, much to my chagrin.
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> to own an object means to subject it fully to your own will Not by a long shot. Just a few counterexamples from the top of my head: Destroying currency, altering passports, reproducing copyrighted images. I'm not saying I'm a fan of even more exceptions of that kind, but I don't think there are any particular inherent rights arising from property ownership beyond from what society agrees on there are (e.g. the firs…
> Just a few counterexamples from the top of my head: Destroying currency, altering passports, reproducing copyrighted images. These aren't counterexamples, they prove the rule. A US passport literally has the text "this passport is the property of the United States" printed inside of it, and I imagine the same is true in most countries: you are the recipient of a passport, not the owner of one. The same applies to c…
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I can speak for german law: If you buy something, it becomes your property, and you have full power of disposal ("Verfügungsgewalt") over it. If vendors deny you from exercising this right, they are violating their part of the purchase contract.
Rights are of limited use if there's no practical way to exercise them. Hiring a software developer to change an OS or an app is rarely a practical option for most consumers.
If they were Free, users wouldn't necessarily even need to hire a developer to change their app or OS; those changes would most likely already exist in some form somewhere and the user could simply purchase the modified version.
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There are only a few instances where institutional powers pass judgements that they cannot enforce. Generally doing so makes that institution look weak because it puts them in a position to have their rulings openly flouted. That's at the core of what jurisdiction means. Sweden can fine Signal all they want but if they can't enforce the collection, they weaken their power and foster disrespect.
Singal is centralized? Can't they just block it at the border? I understand VPN or whatever, but if they're serious I hear there's a couple of countries with "pretty good" border firewalls. Doing that would eliminate so many Swedes from Signal... I haven't found a VPN solution for iPhone users in a couple of US states. It's like iphones are actively hostile to the very idea of a VPN. Or at least "self-hosted VPN", ma…
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Also only possible because we use Signal as compiled by themselves and not by trusted third parties from a source kept clean of any future client-side backdoors. The client is open source, right? https://github.com/signalapp (Reproducible builds is a cool technique.)
I have unpopular opinions about this, because Signal has been so hostile to anyone other than Signal themselves being involved. But to be specific: "open source" claims go out the window when they're; 1. Not reproducible (before anyone links me to the "reproducible steps" please actually read them because they tell you directly that they will not create a reproducible output). 2. Able to hide development of mobilecoi…
The MobileCoin work and the source code not being published on the public repository for nearly a year was an extremely ill thought move. It soured my view of Signal as well.
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> Just a few counterexamples from the top of my head: Destroying currency, altering passports, reproducing copyrighted images. These aren't counterexamples, they prove the rule. A US passport literally has the text "this passport is the property of the United States" printed inside of it, and I imagine the same is true in most countries: you are the recipient of a passport, not the owner of one. The same applies to c…
Afaik currency (as in the physical banknote) is actually state property too. What you really own is a promise from the national/federal bank to pay you the value that is written.