Hacker News Reader

Comment by scoofy | Hacker News Reader

When you develop a value exchange that is perfectly designed for facilitating human kidnappings and subverting international sanctions, you should not be surprised when other humans decide they value institutions over this level of personal privacy.

The narrative that this type of value exchange will protect people is as easily argued that it will put others at risk. We have institutions for a reason, and nobody living in a free country should desire such an absurdly dangerous means of value exchange.

At least when you exchange physical currency, it's actually physically difficult for a kidnapper or bank robber to handle the actually physical volume of $1M.

View on HN

Well, paper money is also used for crime. In fact, illegal uses of paper currency are so common, U.S. authorities commonly seize cash from civilians deemed to be carrying too much of it!

In light of this - I think it's rational to remove paper currency from circulation and to move to a digital system where every transaction is tracked to a real person. This could be as simple as using existing banking structures, or maybe some sort of cryptographically-secure, immutable ledger of some sort, tying every transaction back to a real person. Almost like a centralized, managed "block chain".

I'm glad you added the /s for the sake of the person you're replying to.

Paper money is much, much more difficult to use for crime than cryptocurrencies.

Actually it is WAY easier to use paper money for crime than cryptocurrencies.

Aha! How would you know?!

Kidding aside, I have zero clue what the actual adoption rate is for Monero in the seedy underworld of common criminality, so I can't really challenge anyone on this argument.

I can say if I were a criminal, I'd want to keep it as low tech as possible. Given how sophisticated computer forensics is, I don't think I'd be able to keep everything "clean", digitally speaking.

It depends on the kind of crime. Some crime is easier with cash.

For example, many professional bartenders commit tax fraud every day by not reporting cash tips. This is directly facilitated by paper currencies.

It is not "facilitated" by it, that is just because cash tips are given in paper currencies and not in Monero.

If tips were given in Monero, the tax fraud would be even easier.

Uh, why would it be easier?

Governments all over the world are trying to get rid of paper money.

EU (or Germany, sorry I forgot) just passed laws that production of all goods should be traceable from beginning to end.

They are working on it. Nobody shall be able to opt out of the system.

There is one problem: freedom is necessarily also freedom for people you don't like. There's no way to make living free for good guys, and limited for bad guys. Limiting things for bad guys, you also limit them for everyone — hopefully to a lesser extent. By putting a lock on your door so that a burglar won't enter, you also prevent your friends from entering.

There is a certain balance of downsides and upsides of limitations on freedom. If you move the "safety" knob all the way to maximum, you will get a high security prison with creature comforts. Indeed, being watched and tracked at all times, and limited in what you do and where you go, you can definitely be kept out of the harm's way. If you like the motion towards this, welcome to mainland China. (If you want an antidote, re-read the Brave New World.)

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, that is, liberty is a somehow unsafe condition, else vigilance won't be needed. Some people prefer certain upsides of liberty more than certain upsides of safety. Such people founded the U.S., and it still shows here and there. (Not much, of course.)

You're arguing that you aren't free unless you're free to drive a fully armed and operational tank to work, and not be bothered by the authorities. You can value privacy and rule of law, by building in limits to both. Physical currencies do that.

Yes, I think an effectively anonymized digital value exchange is problematic. I prefer physical currency for anonymized transactions because it provides certain physical barriers that make a non-consensual exchange of goods and services difficult, while perfectly facilitating, though often de-anonymizing large exchanges of value.

Something that's perfectly sensible in a state that values both privacy and rule of law. We don't put cameras in your home, we do put cameras in airports and nuclear energy facilities.

Well expressed on cash applying barriers.

Human kidnappings and subverting international sanctions account for what? 0.0001% of all transactions?

So you're saying 99.9% of the population shouldn't benefit from this because there will be a tiny percentage misusing it?

I take it you're against privacy, encryption and gun ownership too then right?

How about saying a large chunk of the population don't want to benefit because there will be a tiny percentage misusing it against them. Lots of rights and freedoms are not wanted because we don't want our neighbors to have them too. We encode them as laws.

I'm for expansive, but limited versions of these things.

I think your love letters should be private from the gov't, I don't think your income should be private from the gov't.

I think nearly everyone should be able to own a rifle, but I don't think any private citizen should be able to own a tank.

There are many aspects of life where I think the costs outweigh the benefits for citizen in society. Since there are trivial numbers of alternatives, I see a highly anonymized digital store of value as bad for the public welfare. The limit is typically where public access to the good is necessary to prevent tyranny, but universal access causing a tyranny of the minority is typically the where things should be illegal.

I think the conditions in which Monero would benefit society existed, the legality of Monero would be irrelevant.

how much damage is and has been done through the traditional institutions/methods/tracking/privacy-invasion you are advocating in totalitarian regimes today and throughout history?

Historical institutions are totalitarian monarchies. The modern democratic institutions are the exception, not the rule.

I'm not saying Monero shouldn't exist, I'm saying those of us in a free society should want it to be illegal in our free society. Again, it's legality in an unfree society is essentially irrelevant to it's practicality.

Making privacy illegal insures totalitarianism

I'll take tyranny of the minority over tyranny of the government any day.

Not everybody lives in a free country, as a venezuelan I can tell you that tyranny can start with the control of money.

I don't disagree.

>Monero seems much better suited as a weapon against real totalitarian regimes. If it is illegal in both a free and unfree society, then it will only have a practical purpose in the unfree society, whereas the free society will have plentiful alternatives.

From another thread. I think the something like Monero can exist, but also be illegal, and that would facilitate making it's practical use only valuable in truly unfree societies.

These are good points, but they all go away if the crimes you're most worried about are the ones being committed by the people who run your institutions.

I can't tell if you are talking about monero or paper currency.

Monero is light years easier for law enforcement to find kidnappers (exchanges, honeypots, network access) than cold hard cash.

Was there a plague of kidnappers when the world used 'absurdly dangerous means of value exchange' like paper currency and gold?

edit: my reply was before you edited to discuss physical currency. $1M in $100 bills is 22lbs. Hardly a deterrent.

The difference with cash is that the criminal (or an accomplice) has to physically pick it up, drastically increasing the risk of getting identified and/or caught. Even if they send an unwitting person, there will be a witness and evidence.

Just because you live in a place where kidnapping isn't common, doesn't mean that it is not is common across the globe.

https://lb-aps-frontend.statista.com/statistics/275545/kidna...

The idea that an email asking for a blockchain currency is somehow more difficult than a dead drop of physical currency is absurd. While there are some merits, this type of value exchange is a dangerous vehicle for facilitating human exploitation. We need to start talking about that fact more, instead of the fever dreams that those of us in the free world somehow live in some faux-totalitarian state, simply because you can't legally purchase MDMA or cocaine.

you kind of proved my point. kidnappers already use cash, and changing that to different mechanism isn't going to increase or decrease the amount of crime. You haven't explained any reason why digital anonymous currency will increase crime or make it harder to catch them.

Evil people use neutral tools for evil purposes. They have been since the beginning of tools.

So stop trying to slow the advance of technology just because some evil people can use it too.

Physical cash requires some level of risk for the kidnapper to get it though, because they physically have to get it in their possession

I'm not against blockchain technology. I'm against creating a systematically anonymous blockchain. Identity and reputation in value exchanges matter in society, both legally and philosophically.

Monero seems much better suited as a weapon against real totalitarian regimes. If it is illegal in both a free and unfree society, then it will only have a practical purpose in the unfree society, whereas the free society will have plentiful alternatives.

If it's illegal in free society, it'll have use there too, as an alternative financial system for those kicked off traditional platforms.

If I have $10k in the bank and I want to turn it into cash, were do I get it without having the bills pass through a machine that scans their serial numbers?

And if you receive that $10k in cash, how do you deposit it without the same risk?

Those institutions that are supposed to protect us are systematically stealing from us without due process via civil forfeiture, and they're doing it on a scale that outweighs all burglaries nationwide.

You shouldn't be surprised when Americans value privacy over institutions. Our institutions are more criminal than our criminals.

>While there are some merits, this type of value exchange is a dangerous vehicle for facilitating human exploitation. We need to start talking about that fact more, instead of the fever dreams that those of us in the free world somehow live in some faux-totalitarian state, simply because you can't legally purchase MDMA or cocaine.

>stealing from us without due process via civil forfeiture

Yea, this is exactly the type of faux-totalitarian nonsense i was talking about in the other thread. If we live in a free society, we can change the types of laws we don't like, and in the case of civil forfeiture, we should, and are, but pretending like one bad law justifies something with these consequences is ridiculous.

Well that's the problem. We don't live in a free society. And there is virtually nothing we can do to change the laws, as the status quo invariably benefits the people in power.

So I'll tell you what. You can work on fixing those institutions if you want. I'll take the privacy while we wait.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com