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Emergencies Act Rescinded in Canada

cbc.ca

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Re: Emergencies Act Rescinded in Canada

#41

Post by skyde »

smnrchrds wrote: post #25
kragen wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are indeed very serious problems with Bitcoin, but they are not the problem the parent was talking about.

I disagree. the government can tell (and has told) everyone that certain bitcoins are radioactive, making it hard or even impossible to spend them. There was a Matt Levine article about bitcoin laundering. It is much harder than I thought.

how much harder. If Canadians government make some bitcoin radioactive i’m sure bitcoin trader in china would not mind giving me ETH in exchange for some bitcoin.

Re: Emergencies Act Rescinded in Canada

#42

Post by skyde »

jquery wrote: post #20
kragen wrote: post #8

Another reminder of what Bitcoin is good for. The article currently links to another one that says they froze 200 bank accounts and are now unfreezing most of them: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/emergency-bank-measures-fin... https://archive.fo/lAT62 It's a terrifying reminder of how vulnerable we've become to arbitrary and lawless government actions in our near-cashless society. Previously: https://news.ycombinat…

Bitcoin doesn’t “solve” what is essentially a human problem. No amount of encryption and obfuscation will stop a $5 wrench.

the 5$ wrench in this case is not a good analogy because there is no way to know who own a bitcoin wallet. Thus you don’t know who you should use the 5$ wrench on.

Re: Emergencies Act Rescinded in Canada

#43

Post by nopzor »

skyde wrote: post #40
mmastrac wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin won't help you here: you still need to convert things to fiat to get anything done. And if shops start taking Bitcoin, the government will simply regulate those payments as well. Crypto doesn't exist in a vacuum.

how can government regulate bitcoin if shops start accepting it? Not saying they can’t but i’m just curious what this would mean. It would not be the first time store decide to accept an unofficial currency

the us government creates an insane global appetite for us dollars. they regulate the exchange points, and it’s almost the same thing.

Re: Emergencies Act Rescinded in Canada

#44

Post by rescripting »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #34
lovich wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The federal Canadian government could not direct the police without using the emergency powers and the original police chief seemed to favor the protestors. The police in Canada, just like America, have had no issue cracking down on other protests, and started doing so after Sloly was replaced

So why didn't the Ottowa and Ontario government tell the police to crack down? After all it's the Ottawa residents that were so inconvenienced. Did the city or provincial government instruct them to? Did they refuse?

From what I’ve gathered it’s mostly municipal incompetence.

Ottawa police let them get entrenched, going so far as to offer use of a city owned baseball stadium parking lot which rapidly became a logistics base. They assumed protestors would park their rigs and travel in to the city to protest in a traditional way.

Instead protestors set up camp on downtown streets in a weekend and the local police had no idea what to do. By then it was too late. There were over 8000 people present the first weekend.

Police stated that attempts at enforcement would not be safe, probably because police felt just as threatened as residents did and they simply didn’t have the numbers to break it up.

They then shifted their plan to “maybe they’ll get tired” for two weeks which took us right up to the emergency act being enacted and police being able to muster the numbers required to disperse the protest.

At the provincial level, well, it’s an election year and the premier has an awful lot of voters who agree with the protestors, so he did his tried and true crisis management technique of hiding in a dark room.

Re: Emergencies Act Rescinded in Canada

#45

Post by lovich »

rescripting wrote: post #44
s1artibartfast wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why didn't the Ottowa and Ontario government tell the police to crack down? After all it's the Ottawa residents that were so inconvenienced. Did the city or provincial government instruct them to? Did they refuse?

From what I’ve gathered it’s mostly municipal incompetence. Ottawa police let them get entrenched, going so far as to offer use of a city owned baseball stadium parking lot which rapidly became a logistics base. They assumed protestors would park their rigs and travel in to the city to protest in a traditional way. Instead protestors set up camp on downtown streets in a weekend and the local police had no idea what t…

^this with the additional tidbit that from what I’ve read the police chief at the time was put in place in the wake of the blm protests to help fix relations between the police and the populace of Ottawa, so this may have been a pendulum swing of the police going too easy after they went too hard on the black community.

The timing of who got the kids gloves and who got the truncheon is probably increasing how angry everyone is

Re: Emergencies Act Rescinded in Canada

#46

Post by landemva »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #22
mmastrac wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was pretty clear during the protest that the Ottawa police were unable or unwilling to tackle the protest. Given the breakdown in the ability to restore order, most Canadians agree that the emergency was warranted. Using the phrase "dictatorial powers" to describe a bill explicitly designed to balance rights and forward action is incindiary language.

>Ottawa police were unable or unwilling to tackle the protest I have yet to hear a plausible explanation for why this was. I am very uncomfortable with the idea that the police declining to do their job is sufficient to emergency powers. There should be proportionate responses to illegal behavior. Not even attempting to regulate illegal behavior with the appropriate government response should not be a justification f…

Local police sympathized based on their knowledge of living there. Outside police were brought in because they can abuse the people and then leave and not worry about being shamed. They needed non-locals to do the dirty work.

Re: Emergencies Act Rescinded in Canada

#47

Post by s1artibartfast »

rescripting wrote: post #44
s1artibartfast wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why didn't the Ottowa and Ontario government tell the police to crack down? After all it's the Ottawa residents that were so inconvenienced. Did the city or provincial government instruct them to? Did they refuse?

From what I’ve gathered it’s mostly municipal incompetence. Ottawa police let them get entrenched, going so far as to offer use of a city owned baseball stadium parking lot which rapidly became a logistics base. They assumed protestors would park their rigs and travel in to the city to protest in a traditional way. Instead protestors set up camp on downtown streets in a weekend and the local police had no idea what t…

Sincere thanks for the comprehensive response free of vitriol. It certainly helps paint a more complete picture.

It sounds like the there was a major disagreement between the federal and provincial governments about how to handle the illegal protest, and perhaps more importantly, who will take the heat for breaking it up.

I'm not sure if that makes the outcome more or less of a travesty. It seems the capability do disband the protest was there all along, but prevented by political disfunction and lack of leadership.

Re: Emergencies Act Rescinded in Canada

#48

Post by kragen »

smnrchrds wrote: post #25
kragen wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are indeed very serious problems with Bitcoin, but they are not the problem the parent was talking about.

I disagree. the government can tell (and has told) everyone that certain bitcoins are radioactive, making it hard or even impossible to spend them. There was a Matt Levine article about bitcoin laundering. It is much harder than I thought.

The problem is that, even if you think this is the kind of thing the government should be able to do, they haven't told me which ones are "radioactive". So if someone uses one of those bitcoins to buy something from me, I might have trouble spending it afterwards. Failures of fungibility like that are potentially a big problem for a currency. So far they're only a small problem for Bitcoin, but as these examples show, they have the potential to become significant. That might create pressure to move to a coin like ZCash, Monero, or Mimblewimble which has built-in safeguards against such things.

Re: Emergencies Act Rescinded in Canada

#49

Post by kragen »

jquery wrote: post #20
kragen wrote: post #8

Another reminder of what Bitcoin is good for. The article currently links to another one that says they froze 200 bank accounts and are now unfreezing most of them: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/emergency-bank-measures-fin... https://archive.fo/lAT62 It's a terrifying reminder of how vulnerable we've become to arbitrary and lawless government actions in our near-cashless society. Previously: https://news.ycombinat…

Bitcoin doesn’t “solve” what is essentially a human problem. No amount of encryption and obfuscation will stop a $5 wrench.

Bitcoin does solve it (or, rather, people holding their savings themselves instead of lending them to a centralized intermediary does solve it). When everyone's savings are in the bank, you only have to use the $5 wrench on a single bank executive to take a million people's money. When everyone's savings are in their own possession, you have to use a million $5 wrenches on a million people, one at a time, to take their money, and you don't initially know which of those people has how much money.

I mean, yes, the government can still probably take your money, or for that matter kill you with impunity. But it's a good idea to put some obstacles in their way that aren't merely procedural.

Re: Emergencies Act Rescinded in Canada

#50

Post by kragen »

nopzor wrote: post #43
skyde wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how can government regulate bitcoin if shops start accepting it? Not saying they can’t but i’m just curious what this would mean. It would not be the first time store decide to accept an unofficial currency

the us government creates an insane global appetite for us dollars. they regulate the exchange points, and it’s almost the same thing.

The US government definitely does not regulate the guy downtown who exchanges my dollars for pesos, except in the sense that they could place economic sanctions on him if they decided he was a "terrorist" or something.
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