The Dark Future Where Payments Are Politicized and Bitcoin Wins
coindesk.com
coindesk.com
That is around when Bitcoin dropped its currency aspirations and went whole hog into being a vehicle for speculation.
Was that when we started to see all the scammy pump and dump schemes around random new cryptocurrencies as well?
The most recent round of dissapointment comes from blockchains being too expensive to use as write only databases, yet people using it for trivial means like crypto kitties.
I predict the next issue will again be unrelated to Bitcoin, but rather non POW coins getting hacked.
Except speculation.
Although the term is "inflation hedged asset"
This was a few years ago, fees are probably higher now... Which negates your insistence that the technology is the value.
Anecdote: I have a U.S. online bank account with no minimums or maintenance fees. Travelled to Europe a few months ago. Took out Euros with the ATM fee reimbursed by my bank and an implied FX spread less than 1% to spot.
I imagine the HN of 1910 would be saying, "The Wright Brothers flew seven years ago and we aren't flying across the ocean yet, clearly aviation is a pointless new technology."
But who knows, maybe the offshoots like CureCoin can do some good without devastating the environment.
Many people haven't updated their opinions since then. Even if they've bothered to keep up, they see everything in the light of those days and never reconsider.
Every cloud application for doing this literally requires you to send your ID to them.
Either way, you're arguments don't make any sense anno 2020.
I'd rather trust my bank, that is regulated than some anonymous thing on the internet.
[1] https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/introducing-chainalysis... [2] https://news.bitcoin.com/chainalysis-and-integra-win-1-25-mi...
+ You can see all the transactions in bitcoin..
(Or actually, read the whole thing, it's interesting, but it's obvious that the experiment really didn't turn out the way it was planned)
Bitcoin set out to implement the ideas of Wei Dai's b-money system and was also inspired by 2008 financial crush. I think Bitcoin is a success from the cypherpunks/crypto-anarchy perscpective and it is the fruits of their discussions/debates.
Don't forget the other major use case: online retail for illegal goods and services. Cash is impractical, and using the conventional payment systems is a good way for criminals to get caught.
Cutting ties with racist militia means that in the future I won’t be able to buy cupcakes across the street, because owner supports different party? That’s classic “where does it stop” argument, used to justify inaction to obviously wrong things, because it could be abused in the future. Omission bias at its best.
Given the author is a fan and won't even risk writing about a more convincing example like sci-hub (I'm assuming out of fear that the publishing industry would come after them for advocating for their illegal competitor), what makes them thing regular folks would take an even bigger risk?
I'm not saying where most of my Bitcoin is.
Right now, these payment processors are deplatforming racists and neo-Nazis who openly advocate for the creation of a white ethnostate. To assume that eventually these payment processors will be successfully pressured into deplatforming moderately-right publications like the WSJ is classic slippery-slope fallacy. There is a huge difference between believing conservative ideas and advocating for violence against ethnic minorities.
> social network Gab, which describes itself as pro-free speech but has high concentrations of toxicity.
Give me a break. Gab is a haven for white-supremacists and neo-Nazis. PayPal deplatformed Gab after a verified neo-Nazi user posted anti-semitism on the site, then shot up a synagogue killing 11 and injuring 6 [0]. "Toxicity" is terribly bad faith argument.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)#2018_Pitt...
My viewpoint is: calling for ethnic cleansing through violence creates real harm (people have been murdered!), so private citizens and organizations should not support people who advocate for ethnic cleansing.
Also, blaming the two party system misunderstands US politics. Most Democratic politicians have not called for deplatforming of white supremacists — it's mostly a leftist idea.
Oh, I wholly agree on that part! It's absolutely not that. I think deplatforming that stuff is good. Good for society, and good because you get to watch them complain about being oppressed.
> Also, blaming the two party system misunderstands US politics. Most Democratic politicians have not called for deplatforming of white supremacists — it's mostly a leftist idea.
Precisely. My point was that the original article and much American political discourse has trouble distinguishing between the Democratic party and "leftists". And different groups of leftists - that often can't get along. It also kind of exists in the opposite direction, in that centrists aren't fascists. That's the distortion, and I think the two-party system makes the tribalism much worse than it needs to be.
Secondary question: When is a slippery slope a fallacy and when is it not? There's lots of things we consider it good to ban because allowing it is a slippery slope, like when the administration justified using torture in exigent situations.
> When is a slippery slope a fallacy and when is it not?
Wikipedia has a section on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope#Non-fallacious_...
In my opinion, slippery slope is a fallacy when there is not a clear demarcation. If the US government says "we need to torture in exigent situations" I worry about slippery slope because it's easy for the definition of "exigent" to change when convenient. On the other hand, if the US government said "we use torture for people who have been in contact with ISIS and have been convicted of murder," then the criteria are provable facts that create a clear line. I would still disagree with the use of torture, but my disagreement would be on ethical grounds, not that there is a slippery slope.
If payment processors say "we won't process payments for platforms who knowingly host content that advocates for violence against a race of people" — then it's not a slippery slope. When a line is clearly demarcated, there is a mechanism for changes in the policy to be examined (and just because a policy changes that doesn't mean that there is a slippery slope; sometimes changes are justified!).
One could argue that the line could be capriciously moved; however, I would want some sort of evidence or justification that it might be.
The arguably canonical modern example of a "bad slippery slope" argument is "if we legalize gay marriage, then what is next, bestiality?" but according to your definition, because it would need a "mechanism for changes in the policy", that is not a "slippery slope" argument.
Slippery slope arguments are valid if 1) there is no demarcated line ("extingent circumstances") or 2) there is a demarcated line, and there is good justification for why that line might change.
Legalizing gay marriage is a clearly demarcated line. There is no justification for why gay marriage being legalized will lead to bestiality being legalized, so it is an invalid slippery slope argument.
:(
Because as it is now Paypal can ban you for whatever reason you want.
When you become global and directly affect people's livelyhoods it should be illegal to cancel people just like that.
The "it's a private business it can do whatever it wants" argument simply doesn't apply anymore (unless you want to end up with corporations for nations since you now have to bow down to private corporations if your opinions are not acceptable. In other words: corporations own your mouth, they own your speech, you cannot go against privot corps. Nightmare fuel. Well you can go against them but you will then lose all of your income which is centralized in a few global corps who also most likely share data on dissidents).
Every country in the world has analog public financial instruments, and most have or are developing digital instruments. We don't really need to use a Switzerland's worth of electricity to move money around.
Today, we still can’t easily and frictionless send money to a website. Just think about what this means for online journalism.
That you mention “checks” suggests that you are a person living in the US. I can tell you that even as a European, I often hit a paywall where I couldn’t even pay if I were willing to go through the hassle of paying by credit card.
PayPal helps a bit but having one centralized service means there is no real competition.
And even if you can pay, you have to give your full name, address, phone number, and credit card number in order to be able to pay. Then the merchant has to pay a ~3% fee to accept the payment, run your personal data through some machine learning algorithm to try and prevent someone from using your stolen credentials, and still receive chargebacks some percentage of the time.
I really wish there was a widely adopted payment system that acted like cash on the internet (instant, irrevocable, low fees, privacy preserving, stable value). Crypto actually has a chance at solving this, but nothing so far actually checks all of these boxes as far as I know.
No, PayPal cancelled Gab because a verified, active user murdered 11 people and injured 6 others in a synagogue shooting. The same user constantly posted neo-Nazi and anti-semitic hate speech.
"Thought-crime" is a bit too charitable for a neo-Nazi murderer, don't you think?
Before you argue that Gab did nothing wrong — 100% they did. They gave the shooter a platform and credibility for ideas that should have died with WWII.