US sentences crypto expert to 5 years after North Korea blockchain presentation | Hacker News Reader

US sentences crypto expert to 5 years after North Korea blockchain presentation

markets.businessinsider.com

350 pointspseudolus557 comments

According to the original complaint, a few months after being interviewed by an FBI agent on returning from his trip to North Korea, Griffith had the following conversation over text messages:

Griffith: I need to send 1 [REDACTED UNIT OF CRYPTOCURRENCY] between North and South Korea. Other Guy: "Isn't that in violations of sanctions?" Griffith: It is.

A few day later, also in text messages to someone else:

Someone: What interest does North Korea have in cryptocurrency? Griffith: Probably avoiding sanctions... who knows."

It looks like it wasn't just speaking at a conference after being denied permission from the US that got him in trouble, it looks like both before and after the trip he was working on a variety of ways to get the North Korean government more onboard with cryptocurrency, including discussions about mining ventures, moving funds in and out of the country, and offering connections with other cryptocurrency people.

So the title is incredibly misleading?

I've read it as a time reference. He got trialed after the conference.

there are certainly others commenting on this post who didn't read that way. They're posting as if he was literally sent to prison for just talking about crypto.

Yeah, the author of the article could have just as easily titled it "US sentences crypto expert to 5 years after multiple conversations on evading sanctions".

You can draw your own conclusions as to why they went with the title they did.

I think the title implies a causal relationship between the two events.

Edit: In this thread:

> I wonder how the arrest went down, why he took a plea, what the details of his presentation were

>What if he did the exact same presentation in youtube, and in NK they saw that presentation?

Well yes, the executive summary of the article obviously tries to make this look like the US is punishing a freedom researcher for saying things a ten-year old knows:

> The US sentenced a crypto researcher to five years in prison after he presented at a blockchain conference in North Korea.

> Prosecutors say Virgil Griffith, 39, undermined US sanctions imposed on North Korea.

> "The most important feature of blockchains is that they are open" Griffith said in his presentation, according to prosecutors.

> I need to send 1 [REDACTED UNIT OF CRYPTOCURRENCY] between North and South Korea

I find this fascinating. How can you send any crypto between one country and the other? In reality, everyone who is using crypto is doing the transaction in every country where a validator/node is running. There is no concept of "sending BTC between Mexico and the USA". There may be a concept of someone paying USD money to somebody else to write something in the blockchain (i.e. write a transaction that says to move some BTC from Wallet A to Wallet B).

You're probably reading too deeply into it. Remember, North Korea is mostly firewalled off from the worldwide Internet, so that's most likely where the problem begins.

In order for crypto to exist, it has to be on the global Blockchain. There is no isolation via firewall possible.

The Blockchain isn't just some magical thing that exists. If you can't access the global Internet, you can't access the Blockchain.

You're sending cryptocurrency from a wallet belonging to an individual physically present in country A to one belonging to an individual physically present in country B. It's not so much where the wallet is, obviously, but where the people using it are.

You don't even need a validator/node running in your country -- another standard node merely needs to hear about it, run the standard bitcoin-core code for tx propagation to its connected peers (happens automatically ofc.) and it will be included in the next block if network congestion conditions permit miners to do so.

Interestingly, this leads to a startling scenario if you use an 'advanced' client such as Electrum, where you have the ability to create & sign a valid transaction, before broadcasting it. During that time, which is ofc defined entirely by your decision to hold off broadcasting the TXO, the transaction 'exists' but isn't recorded in the blockchain. In fact anyone who can get ahold of that transaction data (not to be confused with your private key) can send it off to the network, and it will be registered in the next block. So a valid transaction, once signed by the corresponding private key, is almost entirely removed from the signor, and the decision to broadcast it can be viewed as a seperate one altogether from signing.

This is indeed fascinating, but is it unique to crypto? Seems like analyzing any electronic transfer like this would get you into a discussion of which bits are stored where on earth. If you're doing something which transfers value to a party under sanctions, and you're publicly announcing that as your intent, then I think courts are unlikely to be interested in metaphysical discussions like this.

Practically, no.

If I were committing, say, fraud, by sending an email from foo@gmail.com to bar@gmail.com, with both me and the recipient being in the United States - even if the connection between the Google datacenters is physically routed through Canada, you'd have a hell of a time convincing a judge and jury that I'm committing international fraud.

The owner of the wallet is what's important, not the implementation detail. The legal system cares a great deal about intent, because it isn't interested in playing rules-lawyer with wise-asses.

Where ever the private keys reside is where the crypto resides. It's pretty simple.

Cool, what jurisdiction is it in when it is a copy of a key in 140 countries? All? None? First to find? It’s anything but simple when it comes to this space.

Fundamentally, law cares about the beneficiaries and intentions, especially as these pertain to rights and obligations. The mechanisms are a technical detail.

The same argument was trotted out when evaluating (in the early days of the web) a crime had committed if 'the internet' had been involved because the internet was global. But that didn't hold any water and I don't think in a world defined by 'endpoints' it is going to matter much here. Who verifies a transaction isn't relevant, who is the ultimate beneficiary and who is the sender are the relevant bits.

When I swipe my credit card at a store, I say "I spent money at the store", not "I transferred bits in a bank's datacenter somewhere"

Colloquially, when people talk about transfers of wealth, they talk in terms of the people who they belong to, not the literal physical manifestation of the transaction.

Source for those curious about this: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/press-release/file/1222646...

It is interesting that the cryptocurrency in question is not named (simply referred to as "Cryptocurrency-1").

Possibly because there are ongoing investigations about it? If this was bitcoin, they would likely state that.

It being eth would seem to match their narrative he was an expert. Maybe it was eth hence their narrative or maybe they redacted it for not being eth.

probably USDT?

Yep starts on page 6 - sure DPRK I'll do this crime for you so that you can blackmail me into further service for the rest of my life.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/press-release/file/1222646...

How far down the "flew 8,000 miles to get there, climbed over the barbed wire fence, licked both his thumbs, and pressed them against the shiny parts labeled 'DANGER! 25,000 VOLTS!'..." rabbit-hole-of-stupid should one have to go, before it's 100% okay for me to stop caring whether or not his sentence was just?

Five years seems pretty mild when you consider the chief purpose of sanctions is to provide an alternative to war as a means of settling disputes. And this man is willfully undermining the ability of his country to levy sanctions.

Surely actively undermining the security of ones country is a serious offense.

> as a means of settling disputes

As a means of forcing someone to unwillingly settle a dispute in your favor that is.

I have no sympathy for North Korea, but sanctions are not an alternative to war. Sanctions are an alternative to bullets.

> Sanctions are an alternative to bullets.

I'm going to have to disagree there. Sanctions once enacted are definitely an alternative to war, after all, bullets all by themselves don't constitute an act but sanctions are an act.

> As a means of forcing someone to unwillingly settle a dispute in your favor that is.

what kind of strange take it is? What do you think war is ?

Someone recently explained their view, that sanctions are akin to siege warfare in days of old. Whether you agree with that analogy or not, there is an underlying valid point that not all warfare requires physical violence. We use the term cyber warfare as another example.

Cyber-warfare is in most instances comparable to sabotage as used in warfare.

I can see the point you're making about sanctions being similar to siege warfare. The main difference being that sieges separate you from your own forces and allies in a way that sanctions don't.

They are more like blockades, they just use diplomacy and legal systems instead of parking ships with big guns outside the harbor.

And I suppose the difference between a siege and a blockade is pretty much whether or not you fire those big guns into the city.

I mean, they're really more like trade embargoes, which have existed for hundreds of years. Thomas Jefferson reacted to the Chesapeake affair, for example, by cutting off all international US trade. In retrospect, probably a pretty ineffective foreign policy choice, since it tanked the US economy and didn't particularly hurt the Brits, who were happy that France could no longer trade with the US. (This occurred during the background of the Napoleonic wars and the Royal Navy impressing US sailors).

They can be analogous to war, but the whole response about"oh no, what sanctions are also war" is just playing rhetorical games.

When people say war, the vast majority of the population will take it to mean boots on the ground, military involved, bullets flying war. The sarcastic

Yes, but when people say war in isolation, the vast majority of the population take that that, rightfully so, to refer to the conventional bullets flying tanks rolling, literally death dealing war.

Axlees post above reads in amazingly bad faith. It's just a "oh, you're not using this nonstandard definition you fool" type sarcastic response to dismiss the point, contributing nothing in itself.

> there is an underlying valid point that not all warfare requires physical violence.

All warfare requires physical violence. If it's not physically violent, “warfare” is being used as a loose metaphor, not a factual description.

> We use the term cyber warfare as another example.

Cyberwarfare not directed at or effectuating physical destruction of materiel and/or persons is merely metaphorical rather than actual warfare, or is part of the information component of a broader war. (OTOH, cyberwarfare can be, in fact, a direct means of achieving physical destruction of materiel and/or persons.)

No, sorry. It doesn’t. You can destroy bridges. No violence there. Yet now you can’t feed the troops.

That is still a form of warfare.

Is destruction of property still violence?

Sanctions aren’t hindering anyones property, it’s just refusing to do business with your hated enemy.

Sanctions are economic warfare.

By that standard, all international intercourse is one or another form of warfare.

When intended to harm one party, yes. When the US technically and financially supported the groups that caused the illegal removal of the previous elected Brazilian president, it was warfare.

When Putin financially supports the French far-right, it’s also warfare.

That’s what he’s saying. Sanctions are war without bullets.

War is diplomacy with bullets.

How are bullets and war different?

Sanctions are war.

It’s war, without bullets.

Sometimes bullets are amongst the items sanctioned, so not necessarily

Is this the vibe you are going with?

https://original.antiwar.com/daniel_larison/2021/05/03/sanct...

Edit: more sauce: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/04/what-are-sanctions-ra...

Is also a Putin line, so take as you will.

More sauce: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/04/what-are-sanctions-ra...

This is a dumb statement every time it's asserted. Sanctions are not an act of war in any sense. Not in theory nor in a pragmatic sense. The distinction between war and other modes of interstate hostility is an important one which we should not abandon. "Sanctions are war" is the same sort of statement as "speech is violence": it's sophistic, and it collapses nuance instead of encouraging it.

"Go beat/kill this guy" is violence, yet it's just words. Putin haven't killed people with his bare hands(at least for a few years...)But who wouldn't call him violent?

If your sanctions cause people to die, of hunger, sickness or anything else, it's violence.

I'm not against sanctions depending on the circumstances, but you're just wrong

If people don't follow Putin's orders, they get imprisoned or executed. His orders are not "just words".

Well only because people follow his orders to imprison those who aren’t following his orders.

The same as the guy in the article was imprisoned by the United States?

EDIT: Putin puts people in jail for not following marching orders. The U.S. puts people in jail for not following sanctions. It doesn't seem logical to draw a distinction on what is or is not warlike (bullets vs sanctions) based on who jails people, since they both jail people who disobey orders. I assume other factors would be more relevant?

> cause people to die, of hunger, sickness or anything else, it's violence

Which would imply famine, poverty, the flu are forms of violence.

This distortion of the English language is so tortured it's just nonsensical at this point.

When one nation causes another to suffer famine, poverty, and a devastating epidemic, that should pretty much qualify as a form of war.

1. "Go beat/kill this guy" is specific targeted incitement.

2. Sanctions are not the same as a blockade. What you're describing is a blockade. To be more specific, suspending trade is not the same an active blockade. I haven't seen any indication to see the current sanctions could even function as a blockade.

Just a note on 1. It’s not incitement when it’s orders. Putin is in a position to give the orders.

Sanctions are saying “we will not trade with you”. Refusing to trade is violence?

Is it violence if you walk past a homeless guy who is hungry and you don’t give him food?

if you imprison every person who gives or sell food to him then it's violence

Politics is just a continuation of war by other means. :)

It really depends on the particularities of the sanctions, the target of the sanctions, the degree of willingness of other states in the sanctioning process, and how the sanctions are enforced. A blockade that leads to starvation and enforced by the threat of overwhelming force against blockade runners is -- and always has been -- an act of war.

None of that nuance is necessary in this case. To be clear, kids: helping a despotic regime with ICBM ambitions evade currency controls so its ruling class can enjoy luxury and fund WMD weapons programs while its citizens literally starve is A Bad Thing.

You can't force someone to trade with you - while being able to trade within your state is a right, international trade is a privilege. This privilege is negotiated at the state level. If you decide to thumb your nose at your trading partners they can stop trading with you, because they don't owe you trade.

If you built an economy entirely dependent on foreign trade for the survival of your own citizens it's best not to bite the hand that feeds, eh? But making sure your citizens survive is your responsibility and yours alone - not that of your trading partners.

Sabotaging your own military's weapons still sounds an awful lot like treason

Sanctions have never ever in human history worked, so more like sabotaging one's placebos...

It at least worked so far in preventing another Korean war. It didn't topple the Kim regime, but South Korea is mostly safe now.

> It at least worked so far in preventing another Korean war.

It would have to work at coercing a final end to the 1950- Korean War before it could have a chance to succeed or fail at preventing another one.

Do you have any sources for this?

Fidel Castro, Kim jong Il, and Vladimir Putin.

Those are the only three instances where sanctions were used "ever in human history"?

Most recent attempts thus most applicable to today’s world. Yes.

The sanctions of the last 8 years have probably played a significant role in diminishing the RF's capacity to effectively occupy Ukraine.

OTOH, Russia successfully elected a POTUS that helped cripple Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.

The sanctions imposed on South Africa in the 1980s absolutely crippled the country and are widely seen as a successful contribution in the efforts of bringing down Apartheid.

> The sanctions imposed on South Africa in the 1980s absolutely crippled the country and are widely seen as a successful contribution in the efforts of bringing down Apartheid.

They played a role, but Western institutions are biased to exaggerate it and gloss over the fact that the sanctions regimes were only adopted after the reinvigoration of the armed struggle fueled by stepped up material and training support from the USSR brought into serious doubt the survival of the South African regime even with continued active support.

The West didn't want South Africa to lose, and wouldn't concede to it losing until the alternative was it losing anyway and armed struggle and support of the Communist bloc being the entire narrative for why, which they didn't like for either international or domestic political optics.

> In regards to the effectiveness of the sanctions, supporters concede that multilateral sanctions have been found to work 33% of the time.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20034049

Does that matter? If someone tried to sell state secrets to another country and their buyer turned out to be a CIA agent undercover and the secrets were fake info planted for them to sell, they still likely will be prosecuted for treason despite all that.

Unless they faked the information themselves and, instead of conning the Russian government they conned the CIA.

A simple google search shows lots of examples, even recent ones, where sanctions clearly worked.

They're doing great at diminishing NK's industrial capacity, which it is hell-bent on using it to manufacture nuclear weapons.

Having nuclear weapons is the only sure way to prevent someone from “liberating” you through an invasion.

Sanctions have absolutely wrecked many hostile countries aconomy, crippling their ability to conduct war. There's a reason why North Korea's army is 50s technology held together by duct tape.

Unfortunately, it creates a lot of collateral damage.

I think we'd have to be in an actual formally declared war with someone first.

This is accurate for a technical definition of treason in the US.

"Sanctions are Economic Weapons of Mass Destruction, We Must Carefully Consider their Consequences": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFCpMOCVdAw

War is simply the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means.

While often treated as a conclusion, its worth noting that that's the antithesis in a thesis/antithesis/synthesis triad.

Sanctions aren't an alternative to war. We like to imagine dropping bombs on someone is less polite than starving them to death, but it's just an illusion.

> Surely actively undermining the security of ones country is a serious offense.

The information he shared in North Korea is widely available online. Perhaps unethical but I wouldn't qualify it as a serious offense.

I'm not sure about the exact threshold, but in this case we have definitely crossed it.

"Man involved in community that regularly gets away with illegal shit surprised when he goes to jail for illegal shit"

I'm definitely not defending him, but I can see why he'd feel confident not getting caught

It sucks but the world seems to punish people who are honest (like this guy) and help people who lie (like everyone who did what this guy did and lied about it). In the same vein, police get away with brutal abuse because they know what lies to tell to justify it ("I felt afraid for my life", etc). But the police would not get away with it if they told the truth, ("They showed me disrespect and I knew I wasn't going to get caught so I beat and arrested them on trumped up charges.")

It similarly sucks that our justice system punishes the clumsy criminals and lets the really skillfully sneaky ones go unpunished. Nobody has yet faced charges for robbing the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

That's why I find the fact that real murder and attempted murder have different sentences to be a grave injustice. Criminals should not receive a discount on their sentence because they happened to be a bad shot or because the good trauma surgeon was on duty that night.

Unfair as it may seem, it's better that the legal system limit itself to actual occurrences and not extrapolate to hypotheticals

Interesting, I see both sides. I agree completely with you that they shouldn't extrapolate. But in the case of attempted murder, wouldn't this just mean proving beyond doubt that someone tried to kill? If there is doubt that the accused meant only to harm, for example, then I get it. But if they provably tried to kill, however you prove that, then I see the argument that it's irrelevant whether they succeeded or not.

Anyway, it's moot imo because I don't believe in a retributive justice system, I think the only concern should be preventing recidivism. But your post has made me think a bit, I'm still not sure what the "right" answer is here

> in the case of attempted murder, wouldn't this just mean proving beyond doubt that someone tried to kill?

I'd assume yes. Otherwise, it would be a charge like gross negligence or assault+battery.

From what I've been told, the reason for the disparity is to discourage trying again or escalation.

If attempted murder and murder have the same penalty, there's no reason for a psychopath to not attempt it again. On the net, it might even be better for them since dead people can't testify.

I've heard a similar argument for why we should lower penalties for drug crimes. When people routinely have enough drugs laying around to be charged equivalently to murder, the law ceases to be a deterrent. There's no additional penalty for more crimes, because we've already maxed out the punishment. It's not like we're going to make them live to 270 so they can serve out their full sentence.

FYI: There is a famous robbery from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990.

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_Stewart_Gardner_Museu...

This might qualify as high treason, as defined in the Constitution rather as used as an insult. The U.S. and North Korea are still technically at war, and this act was definitely aiding the North Korean government.

I’m not sure we really are. The perpetual warfare in the absence of a treaty doesn’t really seem to hold water in a world where South Korea has opened factories in North Korea or the PRC and ROC openly trade.

That said, even if it does qualify, that doesn’t seem to be the charge pursued by the Prosecutors so moot.

Right? Anyone can see this case have too much evidence.

you don't need two brain cells to see that either A) guy was a dumbdumb and nothing he said could have been better than leaning it on tiktok with a dance on top; or B) he knows the stuff and would never say something as dumb as this.

...My guess is that they didn't even had to fabricate this. Having access to all digital data from someone for years, they could probably find that conversation on my grandma's facebook memes if they wanted to frame her instead.

He was imprisoned for teaching. You have to construct quite a mental abstraction for that to be a legitimate criminal offense.

I partially agree but there was clear intent in theory but in practice the action was deeply unethical.

Wouldn’t you go to jail if you taught someone how to plan a murder, with the knowledge they clearly planned on using that information?

He was teaching them how to manipulate distributed database entries that they have the explicit permission to use via their own private keys. If that is anywhere near equivalent to murder then I have a bridge to sell you.

Next up teaching north korea how to farm better and how to dodge sanctions importing fertilizer is bad, because then their people wont starve as much and therefore can do more evil in the world via more energetic soldiers.

Helping the North Korean government do anything is assisting a government happy to let their populous die while resisting sanctions.

I don’t think I compared it to murder from an immediate seriousness perspective, but I’m sure the impact of Bitcoin on NK would cost more than one life’s worth of quality of life (improving the bottom line, helping the country resist sanctions for longer, etc).

Teaching a human being something is not the same thing as helping a government do something.

You know governments are comprised of humans right?

You sound like moral, ethics and laws should work like a child sees the world.

He wasn't just teaching a country to manipulate bits and bytes he purposefully ignored all risks and existing laws to help break sanctions decided against a country based on geopolitical situation guided by matter experts.

You say it like he was teaching the gospel of Christ. Teaching a hostile foreign power how to evade sanctions is a crime for a reason, and if he wants to be a martyr against that principle then let him be one.

Free peaceful expression should never be a crime, as there is no victim and no one is harmed.

Teaching itself is never inherently harmful. Sanctions are authoritarian nonsense.

Come join my free class in which we work through comprehensive instructions on how to make extremely powerful and compact fusion bombs starting from a US-1950s industrial base! It's super interesting! As a capstone project, we'll be building our own ICBMs which take our bombs to any point on the planet with an accuracy of five meters!

By your logic, Osama bin Laden and/or rather the instructors under him were only engaging in free peaceful expression when they were training men how to be engage in war and acts of terrorism against the United States and the West.

There has to be a limiting principle, and we have one in the law: giving comfort and aid to enemies of the United States and exporting controlled technology to sanctioned countries are prosecutable offenses. Sounds scary, but even those laws are limited.

> By your logic, Osama bin Laden and/or rather the instructors under him were only engaging in free peaceful expression when they were training men how to be engage in war and acts of terrorism against the United States and the West.

Yes, that is correct. Teaching people is never directly harmful.

Invoking bogeymen by name is an emotional argument. What I said holds true.

Except that they did so with the intent of engaging in Acts of Terrorism and Warfare against the United States and the West. Intent matters, as does knowledge of intent such as when someone specifically, as a US citizen, teach a country how to use a technology to bypass a sanctions regime knowing they intend to try and use it to bypass the sanctions regime imposed by the United States.

We have a democratically elected Constitutional government which engages in foreign policy. It is not the place nor the right of a private citizen to undermine that foreign policy.

Sooo?

You assume teaching is purely positive?

If I teach someone else my company secrets I only 'teached' or did I share company secrets?

If I go to north Korea did I teach the about some technology or did I just helped a country to circumvent sanctions?

You have a very easy perception of right and wrong if you think that's an acceptable excuse.

Very similar to the antivax people in Germany who broke demonstration laws by saying they just walking.

The bottom. We should all care about justice.

> [REDACTED UNIT OF CRYPTOCURRENCY]

???

Yeah, it doesn't exactly seem like a William Worthy[1] type of scenario.

If you actively aid a country in avoiding financial sanctions† then you pretty much only have yourself to blame when you eventually get thrown in prison for a few years.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Worthy#Right_to_travel...

†: Medical and food sanctions are a different question imo.

I think it is well understood that with the way political hierarchies are structured, economic sanctions always impact the people with the least amount of power before anyone of the insulated power wielding people at the top lose any sleep.

I'm not even sure historically that economic sanctions have ever resulted in the proclaimed goals of the sanctions. How long have we had economic sanctions on NK? Has the result been our stated goals of the economic sanction?

Sounds like some light treason.

I speculate, that there are plenty of North Koreans living in South Korea and perhaps even the US who send funds to the family members in N. Korea. Are they all guilty of evading sanctions regime and can be sentenced to prison? Does this extend to any country that does trade with North Korea? North Korea has a pretty advanced missile program and actively trades in them with many countries including those which are not un-friendly to the US.

I don't know how this makes sense for just making an presentation. On the other hand, I don't know how the Feds will let him get away with sending 1 [REDACTED UNIT OF CRYPTO] between N and S Korea. You cant stop Pakistan or Iran from trading with N. Korea but you can stop an ordinary American. We live in a weird world.

I have learned to expect almost any mainstream media headline with the word “after” to be misleading. “After” does not literally mean “because”, so it’s not a lie. But people read it that way.

“Putin condemned by west after attending anti-Nazi rally.”

“Ted Bundy sentenced to life in prison after misogynistic comment.”

Mods: Better link: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/united-states-citizen-p...

Better title: "United States Citizen Pleads Guilty To Conspiring To Assist North Korea In Evading Sanctions"

or this for the sentencing itself: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-citizen-who-conspired-assi...

Yes, the pleading is from September last year.

Business Insider isn't a great source, but I don't like primary sources: They will be very biased in their own interest. A good secondary source can provide context, information from sources that disagree or have other perspectives or concerns, etc. That's one reason Wikipedia requires secondary sources.

HN guidelines require primary sources.

People can post those alternate views and links to supporting articles in the comments.

This is like... the weirdest post to bring that up on. DoJ announcements are some of the driest, most precisely worded press releases from any organisation on the planet. You could not hope for a better primary source.

When you read "co-conspirators", did you think oh, DoJ is biased, they're using heavily charged terms to make us feel a certain way? They aren't! He was charged with a conspiracy offence. That's what the people he conspired with are called.

Dryness and bias are independent of each other.

Criminal accusations by the government are assumed to be biased; the legal system is built around that: Innocent until proven beyond a reasonable doubt to be guilty, an entirely independent branch of government decides whether its proven, and then that branch relies on 12 civilians.

The US Department of Justice has a long history of bias, especially against non-conformists (maybe not the perfect word to characterize it, but hopefully that conveys it).

Sure. But this is not a "criminal accusation". This is an announcement of the result of the judicial process. A jury convicted this guy, and now a judge sentenced him to 5 years. There are no further accusations being lobbed at him. It is perfectly acceptable to take DoJ's word for what the verdict and sentence were.

It is also perfectly acceptable to take their word for what he has been convicted OF. Convictions are how we write history. We have now answered the following question: did this guy conspire to violate sanctions? The answer was yes. All of the things they detailed in https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-citizen-who-conspired-assi... are things they tested in court and proved. (Very rarely, that process gets it wrong. But it is okay for the average Joe to accept convictions as the truth. It's the best we have. If someone's conviction is overturned, the truth changes. If you no longer have a judiciary of sufficient independence to ensure this, lawyers will stop recommending you believe verdicts, and they'll be screaming about it.)

Beyond that, you did not get ANY more commentary from the DoJ. They did not go on a rant about how Bitcoin's ideological foundations are in defying US hegemonic control over its currency, ultra libertarianism, how this was bound to happen, etc.. You did not get a political statement about how it should be brought within the banking regulations to ensure more transparency by Coinbase-like entities that might be used to evade sanctions further. All of which you may have been given in bucketloads by any secondary source.

Yes, DoJ has a long history of trying to send people to jail, even people who don't deserve it. The feds are very powerful and very smart, and if they indict you for something, the chances of a conviction are very high, because if they're not convinced to a high degree, they do not prosecute. I think there's a place for your rule: you should be careful of believing 100% anything that involves a DoJ accusation but no indictment. I would completely understand Wikipedia's position that they don't use a pure accusation by the government of a crime as evidence of guilt to back up an entry saying "they did X" on Wikipedia. But the rest of it is both newsworthy and consequential, and as I said before perfectly good as a primary source evidencing the facts and outcomes of the judicial process.

I have a few thoughts:

If you don't know how they can mislead you, it only means you are more vulnerable. We don't know what we don't know. Whole worlds of issues and problems can be easily omitted, for example. Trusting any source as described is a fundamental mistake.

But this is really unnerving:

> Very rarely, that process gets it wrong

Why do you say that? That is not my understanding of the process. Look at all the exonerations from death row, cases that receive the most attention and process. Look at all the abuses of minorities and political outcasts.

> you should be careful of believing 100% anything that involves a DoJ accusation but no indictment

Do you mean, 'indictment but no conviction'? Indictments are easy - the old saying is that a decent prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich.

> Convictions are how we write history. We have now answered the following question: did this guy conspire to violate sanctions? The answer was yes.

That's not how knowledge works; we don't get relief from certainty. What we know is that they were convicted. Many accept, whether true or not, that that process is better than any available alternative; I don't know many people who have as much confidence in its accuracy as you do.

From 1976 to 2020, federal prosecutions led to only 11 people executed, and 8 of them were in 2020. https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/IN11474.pdf

In comparison, there were about 1500 from state courts. This makes sense when you realise murder is almost always prosecuted as one of 50 different state crimes. You have missed that I'm specifically talking about the US DoJ. State equivalents are entirely different organisations that I am not commenting on.

> DoJ accusation but no indictment > Do you mean, 'indictment but no conviction'?

No. Your little aphorism is true of many district attorneys but not of the US DoJ. I am referring to, e.g. statements by the FBI, which is a branch of the DoJ. The FBI in particular has a much more questionable history than the DoJ's criminal division, which handles prosecutions.

Finally, on this theme of distinguishing federal prosecutors from everyone else, no, I don't have as much confidence in all criminal convictions everywhere as you might have been thinking. But I have quite a lot in US DoJ's ones. I studied law, but not US law. I do know how they can mislead you. Feel free to take my word for it as far as that goes.

> Your little aphorism is true of many district attorneys but not of the US DoJ.

Why would you say that?

Reposting it from the previous thread:

He is the creator of WikiScanner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiScanner https://www.reuters.com/article/us-security-wikipedia-idUSN1...

He also created Tor2web with Aaron Swartz and used to work for the tor team.

Seems like an interesting guy. It's a shame that this happened.

The situation is kinda similar to the one with Bobby Fischer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Fischer

"In 1992, he reemerged to win an unofficial rematch against Spassky. It was held in Yugoslavia, which was under a United Nations embargo at the time. His participation led to a conflict with the US government, which warned Fischer that his participation in the match would violate an executive order imposing US sanctions on Yugoslavia. The US government ultimately issued a warrant for his arrest. After that, Fischer lived as an émigré. In 2004, he was arrested in Japan and held for several months for using a passport that the US government had revoked. Eventually, he was granted an Icelandic passport and citizenship by a special act of the Icelandic Althing, allowing him to live there until his death in 2008."

It's a shame that he took these actions or that he was punished for them?

For me personally the second. But I am sure that regardless of what we think regarding what he did, we can all agree that it's a shame that someone like that won't be around to work on cool tech due to his sentencing, kinda like with Hans Reiser.

He always had the option to work on cool tech. What he instead chose to do was go to North Korea and educate them on how to use Ethereum.

I think you missed my point. I meant that he will now not have that option.

Sure, but is there a reason to believe he would have done anything different had he been allowed to go on?

I am not sure what you mean by this. As in, work on cool non-cryptocurrency related stuff?

I met Virgil at an academic workshop back in 2014. We went out in Amsterdam. He was a weird guy, to say the least (he’d probably be the first to agree). He was generally quite affable and obviously highly intelligent.

He’s an idiot for this fiasco. But it’s also sad to see him in jail; I don’t see how this benefits society in any way. Five years in prison seems like a disproportionate punishment for an arguably victimless crime. None of us is safer today because Virgil is in prison.

Agreed. This feels like early-90s computer crime sentencing.

Making it easy for someone to bludgeon you over the head with a legal charge is your own fault. But the net impact of the charge can also be useless.

If you were to advice a sanctioned country on how to launder money or evade currency controls you would also be penalized in the same manner.

Explaining how cryptocurrency works is itself advising a sanctioned country on how to launder money and evade currency controls.

Is Wikipedia liable?

This is about sending a message, especially to brilliant minds. No prosecution was involved when Rodman was visiting NK and definitely helped NK with having a highly visible star being personal friend with Kim, but hey Rodman is not a brainiac.

Dennis Rodman didn't break the law by the mere act of visiting North Korea and being friendly with Kim. As far as I can tell, the only time he may have acted questionably was a suspicion of bringing in some luxury goods (https://www.si.com/si-wire/2014/01/24/dennis-rodman-sanction...), but it doesn't seem like that case was pursued.

To an extent, I wonder if this is the fear of the unknown. Here is a guy, who actually seems to understand the 'magic' of crypto. God only knows what he could do with dangerous knowledge like that.

I am not foreign policy, NK, crypto, or national security expert, but it is not about safety. It is about sending a message at a time when US engages in very heavy sanctions effort ( currently against Russia ).

From that perspective, as sad as it sounds even as I type it, Virgil is a sacrifice government makes to send a message.

I too feel his mind locked behind bars is a terrible waste.

What 'magic' is there in crypto.

Besides, cryptography as a munition is a known meme in the right circles. This is textbook what not to do.

> What 'magic' is there in crypto.

Well, there's magical thinking, does that count? ;)

(Also, perhaps it's just me, but I really dislike the term 'crypto'. Cryptography is a genuinely valuable field. Maybe we can call them 'waste-backed internet tokens' or something. When they actually implement Moxie Marlinspike's suggestion[0] of using cryptography rather than distributed consensus as proof of validity, then maybe they can call themselves cryptocurrencies.)

[0] "We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure. This means architecture that anticipates and accepts the inevitable outcome of relatively centralized client/server relationships, but uses cryptography (rather than infrastructure) to distribute trust." (https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html)

His mind behind bars is a total waste but I don't see anything magical about what he did. Replace "unit of cryptocurrency" above with "duffel bag of diamonds" or any other store of value and it's transparently illegal.

He's helping an enemy state to avoid sanctions - countries will always prosecute cases like that.

If he didn't want his mind locked behind bars, he probably shouldn't have done what he did. I'm sure he's a smart guy, but this was not a smart move.

Victimless? North korea is not a victimless country. There's a reason why they are sactioned. He clearly broke a big and important law and knew he was doing it. idk what else one would expect

Yeah I don't see how anyone could consider it victimless. By helping North Korea circumvent sanctions he indirectly has blood on his hands. This is a country that sentences multiple generations of a family to work camps.

The USA has a similar incarceration rate to North Korea, albeit with better conditions.

Nonetheless two wrongs don't make a right.

sure, Im not saying that they do make it right. I am pointing out the conspicuous hypocrisy that people don't feel that they have blood on their hands for paying US taxes, but aiding NK in any way is a mortal sin.

I find this comparison extremely weird.

North korean prisons are described as hellholes whereas US prisons actually seem decent to me (eastern european) if we exclude that you likely won't have the best of company.

Plus that only a small amount of taxes go towards the prison system.

> whereas US prisons actually seem decent to me

based on what? Places like Angola or San Quentin are as brutal as any gulag.

Should we compare the %of taxes that go to gulags and military in NK to that in the US? I honestly wonder if they would be favorable

The fragment "albeit with better conditions" is doing a lot of work here.

Quite a bit better on average. At the extremes, the US can be just as bad.

# Prisoners being beat to death

# Prisoners' shackled in restraint chairs being nasally force fed and tortured

# Solitary confinement for 40+ years

Better conditions and due process. Whataboutitists love to conveniently the latter.

Man oh man. You're right for a lot of cases, but in the USA if you're uneducated, poor, and in the wrong place at the wrong time, you can get railroaded by some crooked cops and a plea deal with a crooked DA, and it's going to be small comfort that things aren't usually as bad as in North Korea

Nobody is arguing that the system is perfect. Yes we know bad things happen and there are bad people in the system who prey on others. That's true everywhere and it should go without saying.

It doesn't change the fact that the US is very different from NK and not really at all comparable if we are being intellectually honest.

True unfortunately, but those instances are generally considered to be violations of the spirit of our system, institutions, and rights, at the least, if not also the letter, or exploitation of legal loopholes and technicalities, depending on jurisdiction. And we can publicly raise hell about it, protest, lobby, and elect reps who will work to fix it and close the loopholes.

In authoritarian systems, those instances are in accordance with their system. And while people there do sometimes raise hell about it, sometimes they're ignored, sometimes they're placated, and sometimes they're disappeared, depending on the whim, temperament, and calculations of whoever is in power, with zero recourse.

The two really aren't comparable.

> ... conveniently ignore the latter.

My dyslexia strikes again.

North Korea isn't sanctioned because of human rights violations. The US doesn't even care for its own citizenry sufficiently. Why would American politicians care about the plight of hungry people half the world over?

North Korea is sanctioned because they won't let Amazon, McDonald's, Netflix, BlackRock, Google, and a myriad of other highly destructive and financially motivated corporate entities run amok in their country.

Edit: Downvote it all you want. Nobody will disprove what I've said here.

So your saying being actively at war with close ally South Korea, with enormous amounts of artillery aimed at Seoul, and killing people who commit Lese Majeste, are not credible reasons for being a target of US ire?

North Korea is the enemy because they fought Americans off and held their ground. If you don't understand this, you are incapable of understanding global politics and should direct your energy and attention somewhere else.

Saudi Arabia has death penalty by behading people in front of the masses... and they are invading Yemen. Where are the American "sanctions"?

The US suffered around 58k casualties during the Vietnam war. Nearly as many people domestically are dying each year from opioid overdoses. In 2017, that number was 47k. Now compare and contrast this with 9/11, which killed roughly 3k. If you believe the government's bald faced lies, that should be a great enough loss of life to spur them into action. Yet there's nothing substantial being done to fix this. Keep in mind here that 9/11 is supposedly what got us the Patriot Act and legalized sexual assault in airports.

So not only am I saying the US government doesn't care about civilian mistreatment, they actively encourage it by turning a blind eye to corporate greed. North Korea does bad things, but it doesn't matter because nobody talking about is actually willing to help those people. So they're just pawns for you to signal about. No policy is impacted it whatsoever.

Just look at how the US treats Assange and Chelsea Manning. Starts wars on false pretences that killed hundreds of thousands (Irak). So you could argue that helping the US is in some form also having blood on your hands.

Crypto, Blockchain etc... is apolitical, it can be used for bad and good. Sanctions on N. Korea have starved people there to death.

Personally, I support imprisoning anyone who helps subvert sanctions against a despotic state pursuing nuclear weapons.

Looking forward to see how you'll imprison the German government for continuing to purchase oil from Russia through shell companies like Gazprombank.

lol, this comment is too much.

Well, he's not wrong, really.

May be a bit extreme comment but not completely nonsensical. It is raising somewhat valid point.

Currently Russian regime is not that much different from NK regime. Both are under sanctions. In fact, Russia is more dangerous than NK in current situation. Germany needs fuel and it is essentially financing Russia. The only difference between NK and Russia is that nobody is dependent on NK for anything.

This guy helped NK and went to jail. Germany giving money to Russia (for fuel), it's all ok.

Germany needs those btu's. And the German authorities are invested with the authority and responsibility to make exactly that sort of decision.

Did this guy need to help NK for anything remotely like that sort of responsibility?

> Did this guy need to help NK for anything remotely like that sort of responsibility?

This is what keeps me wondering. I guess that a guy with a doctorate from Caltech and in the current technological context could be making a lot of money legally.

From outside it looks like he is some kind of crypto idealist.

I think you don't understand how sanctions work.

I don't think you understand the worldview of the average american

How is that relevant in the current discussion?

At the moment that is still legal. The German government may decide to change that in the future.

>At the moment that is still legal.

Is the discussion on what is legal or on what is moral to legally enforce? I had read the parent discussion as being the latter.

Both. But if an action is both immoral and still legal, it is then wrong to jail people for it. Fix the law to match the morality.

Germany is not breaking the law there. They are preventing the law from happening, which is something different entirely.

Also, USA does not have jurisdiction over Germany. Nor should have.

No issue with your main point, but "pursuing nuclear weapons" is such a strange and revealing phrase. North Korea has nuclear weapons. They've had nuclear weapons for at least 16 years (probably over 20). The last best chance to roll back their nuclear program was in the mid-aughts, and it didn't work.

Lots of good and useful steps we could pursue to reduce tensions and make an accidental nuclear war on the Korean peninsula less likely, even with a regime as awful as the one in Pyongyang. But being a superpower means never needing to admit we've lost at something, I guess.

So are they just missing ICBM’s then?

That's not accurate, a nuclear capability is not as binary as you make it out to be. In no particular order, there's:

- Having a bomb

- having one that works consistently (NK has conducted tests that likely failed to produce the expected yield)

- having a device miniaturized to go on a missile

- having a missile capable of hitting targets at significant range (reliably)

- solid fuel rocketry (fueling can be a giveaway of an imminent strike on liquid fueled, allowing preemptive action)

- Evading missile defense systems

- MIRV

You can argue that it's oversimplified, but it's definitely not inaccurate.

I'm not even sure it's oversimplified, though. Your list is a good set of things to worry about if you're going to fight a nuclear war. But from a strategic perspective, what matters is whether the capability is enough to deter, and I'd argue that even the lower end of likely North Korean capabilities is plenty, for most scenarios besides an outright North Korean invasion of South Korea. Yeah, the missiles might miss and maybe the bombs won't explode, but are you really willing to gamble with Seoul, Tokyo and Los Angeles?

Anyway --- sure, let's negotiate about missile technology. That'd be great. But those negotiations aren't going to go anywhere unless we recognize that full nuclear disarmament in the near-term is a big ask, and extremely unlikely.

Let's put emotions aside and look at the situation. This man is an expert in his field and possesses a lot of knowledge. He doesn't have to share this information with anyone, but he does so for the advancement and progression of society. Sharing information in this scenario was evidently a crime.

How did we get to the point where knowledge sharing lands you in prison? It's because we have mindless shells of human beings in society, the type of people that would call this man a traitor. Let me set something straight: if you are a citizen of a country, it doesn't imply that you love and support your country. You are likely a citizen simply because you were born and trapped there. If you have an urge to defend and protect an imperialistic, globally-dominating sack of shit like the United States Government, you're part of the problem.

Nationalism is a disease.

You can't completely set aside national ties until everyone else does.

Otherwise, those who still operate with that mind set exploit you.

It's a nice thought, but unrealistic.

It benefits society because Virgil will now likely think a lot harder before attempting to do something so foolish. He thought he was flying under the radar and possibly teaching North Korea how to avoid sanctions.

> I don’t see how this benefits society in any way.

It sends a message to those would otherwise help North Korea (or Russia or Iran) of "don't violate sanctions."

If you helped smuggle $1M in cash across the NK border you'd also be arrested and convicted for helping to evade sanctions. If anything crypto-enthusiasts should be happy to hear that the US government treats crypto as a legitimate means of moving money between nations, and punishes actors accordingly.

I'm glad he's a nice guy based on your interactions, but he knowingly tried to enrich an totalitarian state that has successfully built offensive nuclear weapons and is actively testing ICBMs. That's insanely anti-social behavior which endangers the lives of millions of innocent people in the region. He deserves those 5 years. You can't hide behind the curtain of victimless crypto-evangelism while also admitting in text convos that you're likely helping them evade sanctions.

> If anything crypto-enthusiasts should be happy to hear that the US government treats crypto as a legitimate means of moving money between nations, and punishes actors accordingly.

Cryptocurrencies being easy to move is old news. It would be much more interesting to discover that some cryptocurrency is actually immune to government sanctions.

Monero has shown hints of this. US treasury tried to sanction a wallet and ended up sanctioning a transaction hash.

https://www.treasury.gov/ofac/downloads/sdnlist.txt

> Digital Currency Address - XMR 5be5543ff73456ab9f2d207887e2af87322c651ea1a873c5b25b7ffae456c320;

https://localmonero.co/blocks/search/5be5543ff73456ab9f2d207...

Leaving aside the questions of whether this is a victimless crime, amply addressed by sibling comments, I'd like to point out that people like Virgil Griffith benefit from these sympathetic assessments, in large part for being part of our in-group, but most defendants do not. You wouldn't want to live in a system where these kinds of sentiments actually controlled even more than they already do.

People engaging in acts like this should automatically be no longer considered to be part of the 'in group' but part of another group called 'criminals'. And in this case a very special kind of criminal: one that knowingly aids a regime that is beyond despicable.

If someone is nice but dangerous through lack of judgement, then the nice doesn't matter because the dangerous is still dangerous and has to be dealt with.

He's in prison because he was willing to help hurt the world. It benefits society and we are all safer today because that person was relieved of his ability to act, and because of the warning the example sends to others.

I say that because of the specific factors in this case being about NK, not just because the US (my) government decreed something. IE, I care that he violated everyone else's trust, not that he violated a rule.

I think it's more about just being a high profile victim to send a public a message.

He openly defied the US government after they denied his travel. In a big F YOU, he still went anyway and did his thing. US government cant allow people to do such things so they had to throw him in prison. He should have just 'anonymously' video conferenced in if he really wanted to give the talk. It sucks but thats why he's in prison. Cant make the US government look foolish. He also should never have agreed to be interviewed by FBI agents without a lawyer.

NK has very talented hacking teams that have stolen $400M+ in crypto (in 2021 alone) as a way to fund themselves and evade financial sanctions. Virgil def got put on the US gov radar at which point he certainly became a causality of this cyber war.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59990477

How in the world do you see this victimless? North Korea has been violating human rights in it's own borders and South Korea. It has nukes pointed at Seoul holding it and US troops hostage.

I can't believe he only got 5 years in jail for this. It should've been life imprisonment for aiding and abetting terrorist organizations like North Korea.

Can you say the same for someone caught laundering money for Hamas or ISIS? That it's a victimless crime?

"How in the world do you see this victimless?"

Just because NK has victims does not mean that his actions have victims as well.

"It has nukes pointed at Seoul"

Every nuclear country has their nukes pointed at somewhere. US included.

"holding ... US troops hostage"

I really do not get what you mean by this.

"It should've been life imprisonment"

It is easy to call for absurd amounts of vengeful punishment towards someone that poses no danger.

"for aiding and abetting terrorist organizations like North Korea"

I think that your definition of "terrorist organization" is too wide. Might as well call the US a terrorist organization at that point.

"Can you say the same for someone caught laundering money for Hamas or ISIS? That it's a victimless crime?"

He did not launder money. He just did a cryptocurrency presentation.

> Five years in prison seems like a disproportionate punishment for an arguably victimless crime

It's not victimless: the United States (government) is the victim, albeit one that's not particularly sympathetic.

Just because the victim is diffuse/a collective doesn't mean the wrongs against it are victimless - this is about as victimless as handing over nuclear secrets to another country (in quality, not severity).

I would say the people of NK are the victim of anything that further strengthens the regime there.

What? North Korean government is the most totalitarian, brutal, ruthless state in the world today. You can't just play "there is no victim" card when you illegally help out an enemy government like that. Even if you're ideologically or for some other reason inclined to support NK, you need to understand that being a US citizen makes your actions extremely impactful on world stage. It seems like Virgil was truly in a position to help NK, which makes him responsible.

I think the punishment is not nearly enough. I believe the same thing should be done to people helping Russia evade sanctions too.

This argument would be more convincing if he provided material support to NK and didn’t simply relay publicly available information. It seems he’s been sanctioned primarily for his speech, not selling weapons or purchasing contraband. And it’s not like he was divulging state secrets.

Anyway, the conviction mostly makes sense to me. The sentencing seems disproportionate.

“ I don’t see how this benefits society in any way.” The law breaks down when you start giving exceptions to the law arbitrarily

If it's not arbitrary, then why stop there?

Why not imprison every cryptocurrency developer?, they are all enabling a new way to avoid sanctions, some much better than others

Where do you draw the line so that it's not arbitrary?

Our entire legal system is built on the exercise of line drawing. Where those lines are drawn is the result of debate and compromise. It's never perfect, but it's better than not having any lines at all.

Yeah, a victimless crime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking_in_North_Kor...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_North_Korea

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwalliso

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea_and_weapons_of_mas...

interesting. let's see the CCP's human rights record

Sure, these'll get you started

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_China

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_jails

does buying iphones qualify as treason or whatever

interesting. let's see the United States' human rights record

Don't forget

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_abductions_of_Jap...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_abductions_of_Sou...

So, people shouldn't face consequences for criminal actions because they are nerdy and good with computers? That's not how the real world works. Aiding a dictatorship in evading sanctions is very far from "victimless".

Not surprised: it seems a common theme with crypto evangelists is the application of the blockchain to avoid sanctions. I don't think its deeply ideological (as in anti-America/Pro-NK) - it's more like they view US financial hegemony as a "competitor" to blockchain technology and a hinderance to global cryptocurrency adoption.

Why he would throw his life away like this seems silly. I don't see the point in taking payment for a presentation you could record and upload on youtube which can be readily viewed by North Korea's leadership.

It's the ultimate place any honest monetary cipherpunk ends up at. Either you have government controlled financial systems, or you have decentralized financial systems.

Getting to any middleground is pretty tortured, both technically and morally.

Sort of like "Strong encryption permits a world in which child pornography cannot be tracked" with respect to encryption. It's ugly, but true.

(Said as someone who doesn't care about cryptocurrency enough to have a strong opinion either way)

> Either you have government controlled financial systems, or you have decentralized financial systems.

Some parties control the latter; don't be fooled. The question is, who?

No, I think this is a misconception. Sanctions can work without government controlled money. Prosecuting terrorism or organized crime can be done without government controlled money. Catching tax evaders can be done without government controlled money. Everything can work without government controlled money, it just requires more on the ground police work. All of these things were done without government controlled money not very long ago.

Similar to how the job of police would be a lot easier if every citizen was required to carry a surveillance microphone, their job is easier if all transactions are can be censored and surveilled. But it is not necessary.

For example, sanctions: Find people who are trading with a sanctioned regime by looking at if they are importing goods from there. Very easy. If they are paying for labor (remote IT work or something), you can also catch that. Informants, etc.

Sanctions only work that way in a world that doesn't exist - one with 100% agreement and compliance with sanctions at a nation-state level. The reason monetary controls are so critical to sanctions is that they make it more difficult for the countries that don't want to abide by the sanctions to do bypass them. Not impossible, but more difficult.

I think India's massive trade volume with Russia contradicts you

The US specifically doesn't choose to enforce some of the harsher sanction penalties on India for geopolitical reasons.

You can be pro encryption, but acknowledge that it makes tracking child porn harder is an unwanted side effect, without aiding the child porn creators.

So you can be pro decentralized financial systems without actively helping totalitarian governments to use them.

Sure, but you don't have to go to a child predator conference to advice professional child abusers on how to avoid being tracked.

He likely decided to give the speech in person so that he could spend time in North Korea and develop relationships with government officials for the purpose of future (illegal) business.

I'd say it is deeply ideological. Not necessarily anti-US/pro-NK, but anti-any government and pro market supremacy.

> I don't see the point in taking payment for a presentation

Maybe taking payment was the point!

From Coindesk:

> Judge Castel read a series of text messages and emails from Griffith in which the defendant admits to sharing information with North Korea for the express purpose of helping the repressive Kim regime evade sanctions.

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/12/former-ethereum...

The main lesson of the story is not that he was using crypto, but that he was conscientiously trying to enrich himself by conducting illegal activities with a sanctioned dictatorship.

Personally, if he’s being this blunt about his intentions, then it shouldn’t be a surprise that his actions landed him consequences.

Did his PhD at Caltech under Christof Koch in computation and neural systems, was a super talented mathematician... and then he gets involved in crypto.

I remember conversations with friends only a few years ago in which we would lament how young brilliant minds were eventually going on to work on adtech, and we would sigh and hope that the tide would turn.

Boy, we were not prepared for this tide.

Anyway, the NYSD release gives some interesting details: (https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/manhattan-us-attorney-a...)

  GRIFFITH identified several DPRK Cryptocurrency Conference attendees who
  appeared to work for the North Korean government, and who, during his 
  presentation, asked GRIFFITH specific questions about blockchain and 
  cryptocurrency and prompted discussions on technical aspects of those technologies.

  After the DPRK Cryptocurrency Conference, GRIFFITH began formulating plans to 
  facilitate the exchange of cryptocurrency between the DPRK and South Korea, despite 
  knowing that assisting with such an exchange would violate sanctions against the 
  DPRK.  GRIFFITH also encouraged other U.S. citizens to travel to North Korea,
  including to attend the same DPRK Cryptocurrency Conference the following year.

Smart enough as he was, I'm sure he knew of the terrible human rights track record NK had. That he chose to start helping the NK government evade sanctions, I am not able to muster a lot of sympathy for the guy at this point.

All that education and they still didn’t have the common sense to maybe not go to North Korea

I think there's a kind of naïveté at work here.

He cooperated when questioned after returning from North Korea, only to have his own words used against him when he was charged.

He didn't take sanctions violations seriously enough and when he asked the State Dept for permission beforehand to go, they said no, and he went anyway.

Ergo, not all brilliant mathematicians have common sense.

Robert Jackson, Supreme Court justice and lead prosecutor at Nuremberg: "any lawyer worth his salt will tell the suspect in no uncertain terms to make no statement to police under any circumstances"

> Robert Jackson, Supreme Court justice

While that qualifier is unnecessary (we know who Robert H. Jackson is), and while being a Supreme Court Justice is certainly impressive, Jackson is even more impressive for applying his ideologies and simultaneously writing about them and publishing while serving as Attorney General.

The quote you pull is a good one, but I prefer what I think is a finger wag to all prosecutors, who actually hold the most powerful positions in our government (arguably more powerful than Judges, Senators or Presidents):

Nothing better can come out of this meeting of law enforcement officers than a rededication to the spirit of fair play and decency that should animate the federal prosecutor. Your positions are of such independence and importance that while you are being diligent, strict, and vigorous in law enforcement you can also afford to be just. Although the government technically loses its case, it has really won if justice has been done.

Often enough, a federal prosecutor is seduced by their own ambition for the sake of their record (perversely seen as more important than justice), that their case should be won at all cost, and the process seems to be to unfairly pile on charges to exaggerate the actual alleged crime and induce outrage, and economically disenfranchise the suspect or defendant (often employing civil forfeiture for this effect) so that the defendant can not afford to mount a viable defense, in order to induce a plea deal, which often leads to innocent people accruing criminal records, serving time and subsequently being less able to earn a decent living paying less taxes, and not living as long as they might.

I may have gone around the OT bend, but it seems like the way prosecutors operate in general in serving their own ambitions, against Jackson's recommendations, hurts America's bottom line by synthetically reducing the amount of taxes that can be collected and diminishes or disables that individual's ability to contribute to society. The story of Aaron Swartz comes to mind as a perfect example of this.

While you may know who he is, I, for example, didn't. It's worthwhile pointing it out.

Immediately reminded me of: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Frampton

But in my limited understanding, this seems much more malicious and I’m less inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

I think I agree and I am willing to defend him a little bit here.

Vast majority of US population would be astounded if they learned even a fraction of screening that goes on behind the curtain; that does not even include existence of SARs or differences between jurisdictions.

And they typically don't know, because, usually, those issues touch either sophisticated players with money to spend on defense, or actual designees, who know full well what they are doing. Average US national typically won't even know there is an issue unless in ~80% of cases.

There is an argument to be made that with crypto that line of defense may be hard to swallow. After all, it is designed to avoid government oversight.. but I personally am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Still, the government wants the population to take sanctions seriously. Prosecution is one way to make people take notice.

He was helping the worst dictator on Earth increase his power even more.

Right now there are sanctions against Russia, and some US companies are giving Bitcoin to Russians to help to escape the country, but the US government doesn’t make that illegal, because they are not helping Putin, but the refugees who got stuck in a horrible situation.

Of course US can make sending Bitcoin to Russian people illegal at any time, and then any person will know that they are risking going to prison if they still want to help those people.

> make sending Bitcoin to Russian people illegal

Isn't it impossible? Bitcoins are being sent to random 256bits, not to people. Unless some Russian person reveals some adress and promises that he really owns the key, this kind of transaction may be hard to proove.

It's a public ledger, it's the worst way to make something illegal, many drug dealers found it out too late.

Just an example even if a person doesn't use an address, if a Russian person checks out a HD multisig public key from which other keys may be derived, the sender can get suspicious.

Sounds like he simply didn't support the sanctions and doesn't believe in blind obedience to US law.

There are sanctions that are worthy of criticism - the decades-long sanction on Cuba, for instance, even though I disagree with their regime - but North Korea is pretty transparently a despotic regime that should be opposed.

I have yet to hear a convincing argument how sanctions do anything aside from impoverish the 25 million people living in North Korea.

They don't bring about regime change, They don't impose hardship on the despots, and they don't take away nuclear capability from North Korea.

They limit trade with NK, unfortunately that probably does contribute to impoverishing the people, alongside NK's own practices doing so, but as I understand it the point of sanctions is to stop material aid (trade, gifts, tech sharing etc) that would be used to empower the NK, which includes their military and nuclear capabilities. I don't know if the US itself allows food or medical aid to be sent, but I do know that NK receive a lot of food aid.

Honestly I don't know how to feel about sanctions more generally, whether they help or harm the citizenry - but I'm not convinced that enabling the NK government to transact with crypto would lead to improvements in the regular people's lives, compared with them having greater access to military equipment.

> They don't bring about regime change, They don't impose hardship on the despots, and they don't take away nuclear capability from North Korea.

They haven't yet brought about regime change, They haven't yet imposed hardship on the despots, and they haven't yet taken away nuclear capability from North Korea.

The point is, the world needs regime change, in order to be safer (dictators with Nukes are a very dangerous thing to have on the one and only human populated planet). Without the pressure, change is far less likely.

Strong disagree. Sanctions prevent economic development and change. Constant application of pressure and tensions ensure that the risk is higher than it otherwise would be.

Risk will always be highest if one country insist on destroying the government of another.

> Strong disagree. Sanctions prevent economic development and change. Constant application of pressure and tensions ensure that the risk is higher than it otherwise would be.

It would be startlingly easy for NK to get the sanctions lifted if the wellbeing of its people mattered to it's government more than the continuity of its power. If they lived up to the D in DPRK and stopped crushing its people's access to information they'd be gone overnight. So blaming the sanctions for stopping change or development is disingenuous. Sanctions are just an exclusion from participation in global trade, which NK seem to want no part of anyway (outside of weapons development).

Also, what risk is raised by the sanctions?

They keep the risk of war low, as NK knows it couldn't financially support any kind of drawn out conflict.

They keep the risk from advanced weapons low, as NK is less able to advance their weapons technology.

Sanctions are a nonviolent defensive weapon.

AND was totally fine with large-scale, systematic, oppression and torture (so long as he profits from it).

That's kind of the key ingredient needed to be someone that HELPS KIM JUNG UN.

The sad thing is that smart people are going to crypto because there is easy money to be made and not because they support decentralisation and fighting the government

Doubt it, it's likely more because it's interesting, and there're interesting things to be done with it.

Indeed. +1 to this. The most talented among us could be building a better world, yet they are wasting time in rent seeking schemes.

This guy literally traveled to a repressive totalitarian regime to perform services for them with the intention of helping them evade sanctions. The fact that crypto was involved is incidental.

US has terrible human rights track record as well (Guantanamo, Abu Gharib), .. so as other countries.

I don't understand this response. Are you arguing that it's therefore justifiable to do what Griffith did? If not, please try to justify it without resorting to whataboutism.

No, it is not justifying what he did. According to US law, he is clearly at fault. However, pointing out NK atrocities to have him morally wrong is not appropriate. With that logic, we should be also approving Iran or NK punishment of their citizens when they work with US.

> However, pointing out NK atrocities to have him morally wrong is not appropriate. With that logic, we should be also approving Iran or NK punishment of their citizens when they work with US.

Tht logic only holds if you believe the governments of the US, NK, and Iran are all equally just and legitimate.

If you believe that, I have some crypto that might interest you...

This is the same Virgil of:

- Ethereum Proof of Stake [1]

- King of the Nerds TV Show

- Wikiscanner [2]

Source [3]

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09437 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiScanner [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil_Griffith

This is so sad, how does locking him up for 5 years really helps anyone? or keep anyone safer? He did something stupid maybe, but his work was exploring how digital systems can help bring peace to the world, and he thought a good place for that to happen is NK, so who doesn't agree with that? None of the information he presented was secret, it was all publicly available.

For comparison here is a company that actually facilitated NK building Nuclear Weapons, 145 violations of the law , they got fined $15k more than Virgil and had no jail time. https://www.complianceweek.com/regulatory-enforcement/td-ban...

What a stupid and harmful legal system.

It is obvious that the US penal system is designed for retribution not rehabilitation. Furthermore, you are not allowed to do anything important unless you are affiliated with the Party.

North Korea actively threatens the use of nuclear weapons, offensively, against its neighbors and enemies. There should be no sympathy for this regime or anyone who collaborates with it.

How do we go about improving relations? How do we improve the lives of the people living under that awful regime? How do we give people ways to exit and escape, and have access to the freedoms we have?

Sanctions are one of the few tools the world has against nuclear armed despots. If you're really interested in the questions you ask, I would start here: https://nymag.com/strategist/2018/03/the-10-best-books-about...

The same way that the West won the cold war and liberated Eastern Europe: information.

My parents and grandparents would sit and listen to Radio Free Europe at night, at low volume, so the neighbors couldn't hear and turn them in (years later we found out which neighbors told on them, it was.. interesting). That's how people in communist countries heard the truth and why they eventually overthrew their governments.

If you listen to defectors what made a huge difference for them is just seeing normal life in smuggled tv shows and soap operas. Seeing hard evidence for the fact that other people live far better than they do. The government of North Korea tells people they live a great life and everywhere else is miserable.

The problem is that today, the West has a huge disinformation problem. News networks like Fox routinely lie, politicians like Trump convince their people of things that are obviously false, etc. The truth simply doesn't play as much of a role.

Russia learned this lesson too. There are fervent pro-Putin supporters out there now. This wasn't the case under communism. People generally understood that the system was garbage.

Agreed. And once we finish with North Korea we should turn our eyes to the United States, the country that developed and currently only user of nuclear weapons in combat.

No sympathy for users of nuclear weapons or any country who threatens its use!

… only user …?

Clearly, you are qualified to comment on world affair. /sarcasm

What other countries have used nuclear weapons in combat?

That statement is entirely correct; the US is the only country ever to use nuclear weapons in combat. Everyone else has only ever tested them, or used them as threats/deterrence.

Did a whole nuclear war go by without my noticing?

Not an entire nuclear war, but you may remember the end of the second world war.

you all are being disingenuous by the mere highlighting of “who used nuclear weapon”, as opposed to “who is now able to use”.

But, please do soldier on.

The post read "... only user of nuclear weapons in combat", and you replied, "… only user …?" You chose to leave it at that, and in English, this implies that you disagree with the fact of the two quoted words, "only user", not that you disagree with the point the parent was making via that fact. If it is actually the latter, you should clarify. It's very reasonable for everybody to take your post the way they did, and has nothing to do with politics or dishonesty.

Also, the sarcasm is unnecessary.

Assuming you didn't miss the "in combat" part, this may be an English issue: To be a "user" of nukes here means "has used nukes in combat", not "has nukes for use in combat".

The USA are the good guys so I'm happy they have their defensive nukes all around the world.

Also, the one time when they used their nukes offensively that was actually to save lives.

I appreciate your honesty. That being said I stand by my position. It’s better if no one supports anyone who uses, threatens to use, develop or has used nukes.

Needless to say only a small number of countries fit that criteria.

United States will not be a “good guy” forever.

> Also, the one time when they used their nukes offensively that was actually to save lives.

That's contradicted by the historical record. US intelligence believed that Japan was ready to surrender. The goal of using the nukes was to intimidate the Soviet Union.

> The USA are the good guys

That kind of reductionism doesn't really forward the discussion. The USA is a complex system of interconnected organizations run by constantly churning groups of people. It's a topic that needs to be approached with some level of nuance.

Giving North Korean citizens access to an economy outside their locked down one where they can engage in trade may well be the exact opposite of collaborating with the North Korean regime. This could easily be the most practical and realistic way to destroy North Korean control over its economy.

If those citizens are no longer beholden to the regime for their economic livelihood and that encourages internal organisation as well as more people seeing they have other options, sooner or later that's going to have a corrosive effect on state control of the economic affairs of North Korean citizens.

Frankly the US should be all over encouraging this activity, but given how stupid they have been for all modern history I can't say I'm surprised they're not.

How many times do we have to try this "stronger economic ties will encourage freedom/peace/democracy" theory before we accept that it only serves to enrich those who are already wealthy and doesn't do a thing to preserve peace. It perhaps even does the opposite: becomes a tool of coercion the bad actor can use to manipulate the free economies with which they trade. The free markets get hooked on the cheap $thing provided by the authoritarian government and then we're stuck. Our consumers are fat and happy with the cheap $thing so our politicians look the other way as the evil regime does more and more overtly evil things. Trade makes us more tolerant of the authoritarians' bad behavior. It doesn't encourage the authoritarians to behave better. See, e.g., Russia's sale of natural gas to Europe, China's sale of labor/consumer products to the West, KSA's sale of petrol to the States.

Time and again we do business with evil regimes and pretend it might result in some good. It doesn't. It won't. Let's not keep repeating the same failed experiment.

I didn't claim anything about stronger economic ties between the organisational units of the States in question. I was making the exact opposite claim, that you weaken a closed state proportional to the degree of its closure by using countereconomics to erode the control it can directly exert upon its citizenry.

I absolutely agree with you that trade with dystopian hellholes that provide economic resources the rulers of those dystopian hellholes can use to continue with their strategies is counter-productive and that all trade of that kind should to the maximum degree possible, be stopped.

The kind of trade however that is enabled by peer to peer participants all over the world being directly able to trade with each other for goods and services to the extent the rulers of those dystopian hellholes cannot profit from is another thing entirely, and that is the kind of trade that blockchains can enable. That black market trade sets up competitive and progressively independent organisational units not beholden to the dystopian rulers they would otherwise be and directly compromises their economic power.

Ask a soldier in the Venezuelan army what he thinks of the regime, and then ask a Venezuelan software engineer with the skills and experience in demand that would enable him to work remotely for dozens of well paid jobs transacting in crypto all over the world the same question. I guarantee the responses you get will illustrate my point very clearly.

Vietnam is certainly a lot more relaxed than it used to be. That coincides with the world deciding to do business with them.

So far, the track record of “cut off all interactions with the country until they instate the government we want” doesn’t have a good track record. Iran, Cuba, and North Korea are still doing the same thing they were doing 50 years ago. Thinking another 50 years will change things is insanity. Let’s stop continuing this obviously failed experiment.

Sanctions are potentially effective in the short term. Once they reach the scale of entire human lifespans, you’re just making the people suffer for your own moral superiority.

This is the Merkel-Steinmeier system that was applied to Russia. Bring Russia into the fold economically. Ignore its bad actions. Give it access to money, technology, etc. So that it will become economically dependent with us and then it won't want to attack anyone. Surely as Russians become more economically able they will fight against Putin's brutal reign. Well, exactly the opposite happened.

Look at Ukraine today. People are fighting for their lives while Russians slaughter women and children and throw their dead bodies into wells. That's what the Merkel-Steinmeier approach gives you.

Giving a regime like this money makes the regime more powerful, not less.

> Frankly the US should be all over encouraging this activity, but given how stupid they have been for all modern history I can't say I'm surprised they're not.

The US had been warning Germany to stop its dependence on Russian gas for a decade.

The idea that we should trade with these kinds of regimes is very clearly refuted at this point.

As I clarified above, I am not promoting state to state white market economic activity. I am promoting peer to peer countereconomic black market activity which cripples the control and power of the closed economy with the express goal of destroying the control and parasitism enabled by the closed economy.

"Peer to peer" is a superset of "state to state". There is no technology which will allow a North Korean citizen to sidestep their government's parasitic internal economy without also allowing the North Korean government to sidestep international sanctions.

Which is another way of saying that trade that might be either can't even be effectively policed by the dystopian state if they want to use it for evading sanctions to the extent they're able without simultaneously shooting themselves in the foot.

If they can't police it effectively all the more reason for more people to do it.

You can't look at the failure of the Merkel-Steinmeier in isolation and say "we tried that".

At the same time the US encircled Russia with bases, weapons and nukes. At the same time the US bombed Russian allied states.

North Korean citizens don't have internet access.

I don't think this rationale holds up to the least bit of scrutiny. How would a DPRK citizen hold or transact with cryptocurrency? On their heavily locked down and monitored computer devices on the heavily locked down and monitored national network?

Cryptocurrencies have no way to unilaterally accomplish that.

Bitcoin can’t stop anyone from knocking down your door and taking your belongings. It doesn’t work without access to communication technology. It doesn’t do anything to circumvent barriers to trade in the physical world. Trade requires two transfers. And, you can’t eat a bitcoin.

The only people in NK who have the ability to use bitcoin in trade are the political elite.

You can store crypto in your head, and you can certainly use it to put together funds which would be helpful to escape.

I'd really like to hear how you think that would physically take place.

If you had the ability to relatively risk free assist an NK defector and knew doing so would give you access to large economic reward, why would you choose not to?

How would you send someone in NK cryptocurrency? And if you could, how would they use it to escape?

Why do you think it is that the DPRK places such a priority on emphasizing its nuclear capabilities?

Because the civilized world would bring down the Kim regime, as we certainly should, if we could. Because they have nukes, we can't.

This is getting to be a real problem as 21st-century history continues to unfold.

This sounds like a catch-22/ circular logic.

We would invade and topple the government if they didn't have those pesky nukes.

The government needs to be toppled because they are developing nukes and we don't want them to.

The "civilized" world had plenty of time to do that before NK got nukes, and it didn't. War in Korea would be far worse than peace.

War in Korea would be far worse than peace.

The Korean War saw about 1.5 million civlian deaths, according to [1]. It's impossible to say how many died in the 1994-1998 famine alone, but [2] puts it at "240,000 to 3.5 million" and [3] cites figures of "up to 3 million."

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine

[3]: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/how-kim...

So, no. There are worse things than war. For allowing this situation to fester for multiple generations, history will judge us the way we talk about the "good Germans" who didn't lay a hand on anyone but who also did nothing to stop Hitler.

You're correct, though, in that the North Korean nuclear program is now an ideal excuse for continuing to do what we did before, which was nothing.

We might instead be asking why we let South Korea's TFR drop to 1.0 while NK is maintaining 2.0. We don't know by what criteria history will judge us. (I think my fellow Californians will be judged just fine -- Korea's not our problem.)

Probably because a country that once razed every city in North Korea has spent seventy years threatening them with nukes.

"actively threatens the use of nuclear weapons, offensively, against its neighbors and enemie"

Citation needed. NK nuclear policy is No Preemption understood to be borderline No First Use. Until last month when Japan and South Korea were threatening base strike capabilities in which case NK turned into only retaliation strikes against military targets if attacked first.

>but his work was exploring how digital systems can help bring peace to the world, and he thought a good place for that to happen is NK, so who doesn't agree with that?

Anyone who understands that trying to transfer technology to North Korea that aids in avoiding sanctions is not going to contribute to peace. That a bank got away with doing something similar is of course equally stupid and hypocritical, but doesn't really change the point.

Well it wasn’t like he did this by accident:

> "The most important feature of blockchains is that they are open. And the DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] can't be kept out no matter what the USA or the UN says,"

He intentionally violated the law. Sure, one may consider the law stupid but one should expect to be punished if one blatantly violates it. That’s how laws work, he’s not imprisoned by the whim of a king.

It would be more stupid to violate the law and expect no negative repercussions. There are more constructive ways to reform laws than openly violating them.

> but his work was exploring how digital systems can help bring peace to the world, and he thought a good place for that to happen is NK

Except that North Korea uses that money to build nuclear weapons. Sanctions are the only reason North Korea doesn't have a nuclear arsenal with ICBMs that it can used to threaten the entire world. Giving North Korea access to more money is not good. It does not promote peace.

Locking him up does plenty of good. It means that someone who would help a ruthless dictator build up weapons that could end the world, is not out there doing it.

> For comparison here is a company that actually facilitated NK building Nuclear Weapons, 145 violations of the law , they got fined $15k more than Virgil and had no jail time.

Let's read the article. TD processed $300k. That's.. nothing. I'm sure Kim spends that much on wine every month.

This person was trying to give North Korea a roadmap by which it could evade sanctions with as much money as it wanted. That's far worse.

> but his work was exploring how digital systems can help bring peace to the world

Surely nobody is that naive? Wars and sanctions aren't a technical problem that can be "solved" with a "digital system".

As a neurodivergent person in tech, mentoring and MH support, I've met a number of similarly ND people who are indeed convinced that human scale problems are just issues we've not solved with technology yet.

That is so obviously true that denying it is like denying evolution.

If we had one of the those shields from Star Trek, we wouldn't have to worry about NK.

You should look into MAD, and why the USSR and USA signed a treaty restricting anti-missile defenses. If any country was close to getting ironclad missile shields, it's adversaries would probably act preemptively.

Also look into Jason P Lowery, and Mutually Assured Preservation concept. PoW Cryptocurrencies, specifically Bitcoin, will end all war. Modern war can only be perpetual with loose monetary policy. Fix the money, fix the world. Post MAD, the strategic battle was over post 70s. The tactical, hash warfare battle is the next phase we will have to live through. Eventually we realize we are all on the same Planet Earth team and explore the stars. But for now, this is humanities best hope for peace.

“Bitcoin will end all war”

Now that’s a quote for the ages…

I'm fairly certain that's some sort of elaborate joke I'm not getting. In case you're serious: *bullshit*. There have been wars before there was money, and before there was modern money. WWI is modern ( thatl's where all modern military tech bar drones came to be) and it was while countries were on the gold standard. And it was as "perpetual" as it gets in terms of wars.

No joke. Until the invention of cryptocurrency, the ledger of ownership of all the things had to be enforced by a gun. Physical violence to protect property. People would give their lives to enforce a consensus of ownership. We now have a way that doesn’t need guns. It uses mathematics of cryptographic signatures for authentication and integrity, that is verifiable anywhere and without trusted third parties. This is as radical shift in societies power structures.

I think you are not getting it because you are still in the “silly criminal money” phase. Don’t worry, give it another 3 years and you will be wishing you bought sats today.

Ww1 ww2 all were funded by debasement. All parties did it. It’s a lesson as old as time, but no. Different this time!

You're delusional. At least your username is apt.

So. Your premise is flawed. Violence has been a part of humanity for as long as humanity has existed. Your blockchain doesn't solve shit against violence - if a foreign army attacks your country for resources, they can take it, including your crypto, by sheer violence (insert $10 wrench xkcd here). A government doesn't need to print money to finance a war. And even in your imaginary scenario where everything is on a blockchain, what exactly would stop a militia from creating their own separate currency to pay workers under their control for food and weapons? And then attacking everyone else for more resources? You're fundamentally misunderstanding how humans work.

> Ww1 ww2 all were funded by debasement.

No, they were funded by bonds and loans. That's why economies were crippled, even on the victorious side that didn't endure a blockade. Rationing was deflationary. Are you just making shit up as you go?

You are welcome to ignore it. This is an opt-in ecosystem (for now). Are you sure you don’t want a few sats in case I am right?

Bitcoin will not eliminate the need to own physical property - like cars, real estate, companies, etc. Bitcoin will actually expand war. Today you have a military to fight to protect your physical property. The strongest currency typically has the strongest military. Bitcoin (and crypto) will expand property into the digital realm. So now you will need a larger military to protect with force physical property AND digital property.

Yes they are. Wars are funded via inflation. Bitcoin solves inflation by using computers to allow trading bottled energy online, thereby pulling the funding out from under oligarchs.

> Wars are funded via inflation

That's got to be one of the weirdest things I've ever heard. Inflation is a side effect of war, either due money printing to fund ( rare in non-failing countries, bond issues and loans are much more popular) or, more often, due to supply scarcity ( due to more limited trade, redirection of resources to the military, conscription of men for the army).

Bitcoin does nothing for either scenario. Obviously it doesn't help supply, and no government would limit itself on monetary policy by exclusively adopting bitcoin; and even if for some reason they do, they can still emit bonds and get loans.

That is actually.. a very intriguing ( yet horrifying ) question. Were there any studies of inflationary pressures pre, during, and after a war? My gut tells me it depends on the scale of destruction ( WW2 comes to mind ), but I don't remember reading anything on that subject.

Hm. I'm not aware of anything specifically about inflation, but IMHO it would be very hard to compare due to the plethora of variables - e.g. rationing, destruction, death, all of which would be deflationary.

And what happens if the people can trade without requiring the governments or their monetary policies?

They can't. Unless you limit trade to your immediate vicinity, you'd need government provided and managed infrastructure, customs and what not to trade.

No you don't. If a guy on the other side of the world wants to teach me to juggle via Zoom, and I want to pay him BTC to do that, we can both trade that service directly without requiring a government to intervene.

>thereby pulling the funding out from under oligarchs

Only works if the people have access to the technology.

"As of December 2014, 1,024 IP addresses are known to exist in North Korea"

"North Korea - Population 2014 - 25,057,793"

Trading bottled energy? What? That is a totally dishonest characterization, the energy is not "bottled" it it's burned and never again recoverable.

The coin is the proof that the energy was used. You're effectively trading how much you value energy.

No, that's incorrect. The price of the bitcoin has no relationship to the amount of energy burned mining it; if this were true then Satoshi's wallet would be worthless.

I think the price of Bitcoin does have a relationship to energy consumption. It’s obvious it’s on large time scales. And unless one has a very cheap energy source it will always be cheaper to buy from the market. So it’s a good in the ball park metric, the core issue to transfer value to old coins is that older coins grow exponentially more difficult to undo — so the fact that a few kilowatts could have mined many thousand coins in the early days does not decrease those utxo security and this value. There is an additive value of every block, and while head block at difficulty D virtually upgrades all the blocks before it to D, as you would need at least D+1 to undo just head-1, we build bigger defense walls every 10 minutes on average.

> so the fact that a few kilowatts could have mined many thousand coins in the early days does not decrease those utxo security and this value

utxo security doesn't matter - a unit of bitcoin that expended a fraction of a kWh to be mined is worth the same as a unit of bitcoin that cost hundreds of thousands of kWh to mine, thus the energy spent to mine a bitcoin has no meaning with respect to its price.

There are multiple feedback loops. When energy is expensive, mining slows. This impacts yields from miners, and supply of new coins to the market. Also, there is a point where it is cheaper to buy the coins at certain energy prices; thus cost to produce the coins is a component in their market price. It is ignoring reality to say they are not linked concepts. One can demonstrate this in the myriad of shitcoins over the years — their value collapsed when mining stopped. When people did not want to pay to protect the network.

Exactly which leads which is probably something that will switch over time in various cycles of its adoption.

That's not completely true. As soon as it costs more to mine a Bitcoin than the value of a Bitcoin is worth, nobody's going to mine it anymore. Why would anyone take a loss on that?

> As soon as it costs more to mine a Bitcoin than the value of a Bitcoin is worth, nobody's going to mine it anymore

That doesn't matter. The amount of energy burned to mine the bitcoin that already exists has no relationship to its price in the future - the "bottled energy" characterization is totally incorrect.

Only if you think the price is going to go up enough to recoup your investment, which is by no means certain. It’s a medium of exchange. Smart investors don’t invest in currency for its own sake; they invest in things that have untapped value beyond themselves. I just don’t know how much dark money remains out there to make bitcoin in particular continue to appreciate. And if it depreciates so much that it falls below the production cost, then I think people might be discouraged from producing it because they might conclude that it’s an irreversible trend. It’d be the end of the line.

> Wars are funded via inflation

This is such a weird claim. Did we not have empires and colonies and wars when the world mostly used metal for money?

If anything, the world has been most peaceful since the fall of Bretton Woods. (I attribute none of that to our monetary system versus nukes.)

So if they are, they should be imprisoned?

Maybe you haven't met someone with high-functioning autism. Being naive is essentially a symptom.

Autistic people have to obey the law just like anyone else does. As a community, we should do all we can to help dissuade or prevent them from doing things that would be illegal, much like we hold a child's hand when we cross the street to keep them from running into traffic and being hit by a car.

We should strongly advise naive people not to get involved in either gang warfare or inter-nation conflicts.

All the solutions to your math homework are publically available, you can find plenty of examples all over. Nonetheless, you're not allowed to go to your friend's desk and do it for him.

North Korea is a country under sanction from the international community for... Cartoon-level villainy, but in the real world. Some of the regimes' crimes are unbelievable because they seem too cruel. They remain actively at war with t This man did not give a talk about how North Korea could evade sanctions, he traveled to Pyongyang to teach them. This is pretty close to being the definition of "Treason".

He expressly stated he knew he was helping to evade financial sanctions and you think it's "sad" to punish him for violating the laws of our country?

How does it help anyone? It sets the tone that people who break the rule of law will be punished. It establish that there is real "stick" so that other people do not perpetrate similar crimes with other rogue states.

What if he did the exact same presentation in youtube, and in NK they saw that presentation? What if someone in NK downloaded the open source implementation of that blockchain, participated on it, or even mined quite a few coins?

Could be argued the same about any open source program (and their developers) dealing with encrypted information in any way?

What was the problem? Going in person? Answering questions in the same way that he would do to any other person? Giving a "forbidden hint" that is basically spam all over internet by now?

I don't care about crypto, but I do care about what this precedent implies.

Read the article, he knowingly broke sanctions rules sending money across borders

> What if he did the exact same presentation in youtube, and in NK they saw that presentation?

If it was general information about how Blockchain can be used to evade sanctions, it would probably be fine as long as he was reporting how it could be done and not encouraging it.

> What if someone in NK downloaded the open source implementation of that blockchain, participated on it, or even mined quite a few coins?

Almost certainly not a problem. His tool is legal and he can't control other people taking it and using it to commit crimes.

> What was the problem?

His intention was the problem. The point of his talk was to help the North Koreans use crypto to evade sanctions. In law, intentions matter. There's a massive legal difference between hitting a pedestrian with your car and running down a pedestrian with your car, even if the outcome is exactly the same. The first is an accident, the second is assault.

> What the judge found most damning, perhaps, was a photo of Griffith presenting at the conference, wearing a traditional North Korean suit and standing in front of a blackboard on which it read “No sanctions!” with a smiley face.

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/12/former-ethereum...

> I don't care about crypto, but I do care about what this precedent implies.

That the intentions of the defendant matter? I have bad news for you, you find this Hammurabi's code and the Old Testament

> In law, intentions matter.

This is almost always the sticking point when people from tech misunderstand law.

The fact that computers do not understand intent is fundamental to learning code. I think that leads to a lot of tech folks not groking that one of the primary functions of the legal system is to systematically determine intent.

There's an excellent article that I've read multiple times about this exact idea called "What Colour are your bits". It's written in response to a company that tried to get around the legal system by pretending that intentions don't matter.

https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

That was great!

A lot of the conversations I've had about this involve licensing, especially mixing things developed for the government and things developed independently. I once answered a question with "the answer to that question just changed because a room full of people heard you ask it." That is very disconcerting to computer scientists, but not to particle physicists.

That's what I thought at first too, but no, it's much more ridiculous and openly criminal.

"The document also includes [...] photos of Griffith, clad in a traditional-style North Korean suit, writing on a white board, on which “No sanctions!” was written with a smiley face."

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/11/former-ethereum...

> What if he did the exact same presentation in youtube, and in NK they saw that presentation? What if someone in NK downloaded the open source implementation of that blockchain, participated on it, or even mined quite a few coins?

I guess if he hadn't committed a crime, then he probably wouldn't have been arrested.

The precedent here is that if you deliberately and clearly help a sanctioned company against the laws of your own nation, you will suffer the consequences.

There's nothing here about the random other ways of passively sharing information. It isn't a crime to have posted a video on youtube that gets watched in North Korea. Its obviously a crime to physically go to North Korea and intentionally teach them how to evade sanctions.

What about that is related to the precedent you're talking about? You can't compare apples to oranges and call the apple orange.

I would love to hear from Mr Griffith's perspective on this. 5 years in prison is a BFD. I wonder how the arrest went down, why he took a plea, what the details of his presentation were, so many things.

> I wonder how the arrest went down

At the airport upon return

> Why he took a plea

Because the prosecutor would ask for way more prison time otherwise, the US International Emergency Economic Powers Act charge was pretty solid

> what the details of his presentation were

Information the North Koreans could have found already, even with their limited internet

You have any links for those answers? I appreciate them.

He wasn't arrested at the airport when he returned, he was questioned and cooperated, then was arrested later with evidence partially being what he himself told investigators.

Thanks. I think they want links because they hadn't seen this case before even though the rest of us have been watching this slow motion trainwreck for some time.

Pretty good rundown here: https://www.thedailybeast.com/crypto-enthusiast-virgil-griff... ---

According to his lawyers, after his North Korean speaking engagement, Griffith actually went straight to the U.S. embassy in Singapore, where he was residing at the time, to tell them all about the experience. He also chose to meet with the FBI in Puerto Rico and San Francisco.

But after extensive talks, the feds instead surprised the technologist by arresting him at Los Angeles International Airport on Thanksgiving Day 2019, while Griffith was boarding a flight to Baltimore to spend the holiday with his parents and sister.

He was indicted months later on a single count of violating presidential executive orders aimed at blocking North Korea from the international banking system as punishment for its repeated threats to nuke the United States.

The arrest immediately generated criticism, as the exceedingly eccentric and devoted community of cryptocurrency enthusiasts cast the prosecution as a crackdown on free speech.

Meanwhile, the federal government played right into that by shrouding the case in secrecy. So many court files were kept sealed that journalist Matthew Russell Lee, who runs the publication Inner City Press, asked the judge to reconsider in a letter that noted, “The sealings and withholding here are unacceptable, and go beyond those requested even in the Central Intelligence Agency trial” of accused Wikileaks leaker Joshua Adam Schulte.

As the case proceeded, Griffith’s attorneys maintained that his travel was “a goodwill speaking trip.”

During his chats with FBI agents, Griffith came clean and offered to help the feds explore his North Korean contacts and activities, according to a source close to Griffith. This source described at length Griffith’s willingness to cooperate with the American intelligence agencies and the potential to become something of a spy asset. Those hopes were dashed when the Justice Department came down hard on him.

Crypto guy who dreams to become a spy get turned down by FBI and gets arrested for 5 years on top?

Interesting story

It's time for everyone's yearly reminder, "Don't talk to the police"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

Literally from the article:

> “I’ve learned my lesson,” Griffith said. “I am still profoundly embarrassed that I am here, and of what I have done.”

But some may hint at 'pay back' for old grievances : June 3, 2009. SFI researcher, Virgil Griffith, created a program called WikiScanner, which tracks computers used to make changes and edits to Wikipedia entries. WikiScanner revealed CIA and FBI computers were used to edit topics on the Iraq War and the Guantanamo prison. https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/media-channel-cia-a...

Come on! The man already got a PhD! Doesn't that count as time served?

Called it. :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21666694

Doing the guidelines sentence exercise is sort of fun, in a nerd-snipey way, and is a way to understand a bit of how federal criminal law works for us non-lawyers.

And what exactly one exercises by doing that?

I'm not sure I understand the question, but the exercise I'm talking about is pulling up the federal sentencing guidelines and working out a guideline sentence.

Tech nerds (like myself) tend to think in terms of software and protocols. "If the server responds with a 200 OK to your request, then that means by definition that it gave you permission!" But this is a reminder that that's basically absurd. The government can actually just lock you up for violating the law and it doesn't matter what the stupid protocol says.

Virgil is at it again.

I met him at a summer school a couple of years ago, a remarkable character. He developed WikiScanner, which exposed the "beautification" of U.S. politician's Wikipedia pages, conducted from the White House and other government building's IP addresses, which was creative and in the public interest.

I'm surprised that giving a talk about blockchain and crypto-currencies would be considered that sensitive, as the whole Web is full of (open source) software and instructions how to use Ethereum, the ETH currency and related stuff.

> Griffith: I need to send 1 [REDACTED UNIT OF CRYPTOCURRENCY] between North and South Korea. Other Guy: "Isn't that in violations of sanctions?" Griffith: It is.

Strange: The Virgil Griffith that I met was very smart, not sure if he would have had such an exchange in an unencrypted medium. He came across as an ultra-tech savvy prankster that had also hacked his high school's payment system (he did not say that because he was prevented under court order, so he just quipped "google me").

Here's an EdTech talks he gave 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymGl84RORLQ

Edit: I was wondering about that strange redaction of "[UNIT OF CRYPTOCURRENCY]". Clearly, as he is working on Ethereum, that one has the ETH currency, so likely it was that. Could the unredacted just say "1 ETH" (not a secret)? Then the transfer would have just been symbolic, not actually evading sanctions at scale. On the other hand if he was (allegedly) talking about 1 million ETH or BTC then it would smell more like a serious crime, assuming for a moment that exchange really happened. [BTW, 1 ETH = ~$3,000 versus 1 BTC = $40,000 at the moment, so the unit makes an order of magnitude difference.]

An interview with a DPRK defector about this: https://unchainedpodcast.com/yeonmi-park-on-why-doing-busine...

why people mess with the government, I do not know

pay your damn taxes! And don't defect sanctioned research to unfriendly enemy states!

It seems like such a low bar! "Don't break federal law by expressly teaching sanctioned nations how to bypass YOUR OWN COUNTRY'S rules" seems like table stakes on passable intelligence.

I cannot believe how many people in these comments are defending this guy.

I really wonder if he knew he could go to jail for this. did he know the risks?

You almost have to wonder if there is more we don't know. I can't imagine anyone person being able to fundamentally alter NK's understanding of Blockchain. Laugh at that country, but there must be a few doctorate level brains that can watch proxied-Youtube.

He knew what he was doing and he took a principled stand on sharing information with a very unsympathetic party. It would be like teaching mobsters how to clean an AK-47 when there is a specific law against it - sure, the law may sound bogus, but you broke it, and you aren't being exactly noble about it.

No, there isn't more, the US would certainly detail it in the indictment if there was. This is obviously a political prosecution against a guy they just didn't like hanging out with guys they don't, and lending those guys a certain legitimacy in the process. He provided NK with nothing of value, as you say, they certainly know about cryptocurrency and have been using it for quite some time now.

Unless NK operatives are totally ineffective when it comes to searching the internet, I have a hard time figuring out how he helped them do something they would have no trouble figuring out for themselves.

From yesterday's Money Stuff (not about this incident):

"Yeah. There is a vein of crypto libertarianism that imagines that you can have money that is immune from the claims of society, but that’s only really true if the rest of your life is immune from the claims of society. If you live alone on a faraway island and have a lot of weapons then sure right maybe the authorities can’t seize your Bitcoins. (Though you also can’t use your Bitcoins to, like, order pizza delivery.) But if they can toss you in jail until you cough up your Bitcoins, then the Bitcoins aren’t doing that much for you."

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-12/will-e...

Not that I'm particularly fond of one mafia gang or the other (yes, the USA government is less damaging to its citizens compared to North Korea - but they are both evil aggressors), but this is a weird hill to die on for Griffith.

Why do something so blatantly illegal? I understand disrespecting the made up laws some idiot bureaucrats come up with, but I don't understand allowing their hired guns to lock you up for 5 years.

Could someone explain why this wouldn't fall under freedom of speech? Sounds like there were not government secrets nor did the expert have a security clearance that would have held him to a higher standard.

If Tor researchers gave a presentation at a security conference on how to install Tor, knowing full well that some would use it to engage in the proliferation of CSAM, would that also not fall under free speech?

freedom of speech is not absolute. it's as simple as that. the guy violated a federal sanction.

except the charges is not on about freedom of speech, not at all, not even close.

The first sentence in the article is "The US sentenced a blockchain researcher to more than five years in prison after he pleaded guilty to conspiring to help North Korea evade sanctions using cryptocurrency."

Asked why what he did wouldn't be protected by freedom of speech, the parent replied "freedom of speech is not absolute ... the guy violated a federal sanction."

I don't understand what you're implying about this thread of conversation - it seems fairly reasonable. The GP asked about freedom of speech - the parent didn't imply this is a freedom of speech issue. They explained why it isn't.

The problem isn't so much the presentation or the content, as it is the transaction. Doing business with North Korea is highly restricted, as it should be, in order to maintain the integrity of US and international trade sanctions against the Kims.

Russia now finds itself in much the same position thanks to Putin, so it's probably a good idea for everyone doing business there to familiarize themselves with economic actions being taken against that regime. Few people in the West ever attempted to do business with Pyongyang, but that's not true of Moscow. There's a lot more legal exposure, much of which will come as a surprise to those affected by it.

> Could someone explain why this wouldn't fall under freedom of speech?

North Korea is under international sanctions and part of that means you can't aid them. Explaining how to launder money and evade sanctions to a general audience is probably fine. Explaining how to launder money and evade sanctions to North Korea is against the law.

You can almost certainly get away with "If I were North Korea, here's how I would launder money" as an academic article. Presenting it in Pyongyang seems like a pretty bright and clear "Aiding and abetting enemies of the US"

If the security conference was in a place sanctioned under the US International Emergency Economic Powers Act, then yes.

He applied for a travel exemption, and was denied. He went anyway. He was charged with that, not the speech. That's how its enforced, for this specific reason. Regulate the intermediary to control the desired behavior. Don't regulate the individual with first amendment rights.

The USA junta will punish you if you go against them, constitution be damned, the judges are on their side.

Freedom of speech is meant to preserve democracy domestically, not be a free for all to aid enemies for profit. Any sane state, including free democracies, would prohibit residents from teaching rogue enemy nations how to avoid sanctions.

I do not think that this is a widely held view. Regarding the US constitution for example, Part of Bernstein v. United States was the complaint that DJB was not able to legally talk to or teach about cryptography to cryptographers and students that are not US citizens. As for the "freedom of speech" as a general concept, I think that it is more of an individualist than a collectivist principle. It does not refer to countries or groups by itself, it is the right for entities to speak freely.

Ermmmm not here. When you can afford to tango with them, they don't take surprising constitutional views actually. That part is in your favor. Its more about affording to get that far, in other cases. This case isn't one of those? He wasn't charged for the speech, he was charged for violating a travel and business sanction after explicitly asking for an exemption and being denied. He went out of his way to hop over barriers placed by the government, and got charged for hopping over after telling the government he was interested in hopping over. They watched him hop over, they didn't charge him for the speech he gave after hopping over. Hopping over isn't a constitutional right.

It is absurd to think that a government (armed group with a pretense of authority) can restrict your freedom of movement like this justifiably. Your individual sovereignty and agency is violated.

Yeah, if he had been willing to take this to appeal we could find the limits of these government powers. But he took the plea and is going in the slammer.

What piqued my interest is that why don't the NK held the conference in place like CN, HK or Macau? Pretty sure they can hook up more talents with much lower risk.

The issue is not the subjective "will this be used for evil", but the more objective "does this violate international sanctions", which it seems to. It has very little to do directly/exclusively with cryptocurrency or crypto in general.

Same reason you can't yell fire in a crowded theater. There are limits to freedom of speech, especially when it interferes with national defense. Schenck v. United States is an interesting case where the supreme court ruled that passing out fliers to encourage resistance to the draft is not protected by the first amendment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States

It’s Time to Stop Using the ‘Fire in a Crowded Theater’ Quote: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...

Three Generations of a Hackneyed Apologia for Censorship Are Enough: https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...

I read the Atlantic article, but I don't think they made a strong enough argument to justify retiring the quote. Regardless of the circumstances that it was first used, it's meaning is still very true. It is still illegal to yell fire in a crowded theater and there are many exceptions to the first amendment. An american citizen cannot verbally harass someone, they cannot share child pornography, and they cannot go around telling everyone how to make a nuclear bomb.

You should read the Popehat essay. The guy is a former Federal prosecutor. He knows what he's talking about.

Moreover, you forgot to read this part of what you linked to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States#Subse...

> A unanimous Court in a brief per curiam opinion in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), abandoned the disfavored language while seemingly applying the reasoning of Schenck to reverse the conviction of a Ku Klux Klan member prosecuted for giving an inflammatory speech. The Court said that speech could be prosecuted only when it posed a danger of "imminent lawless action," a formulation which is sometimes said to reflect Holmes reasoning as more fully explicated in his Abrams dissent, rather than the common law of attempts explained in Schenck.

> An american citizen cannot verbally harass someone...

They can, actually. See the quote from the wikipedia article above.

> ...they cannot go around telling everyone how to make a nuclear bomb.

_Pretty_ sure that they can. It's widely said that any physics graduate student can work out how to make a useful but basic nuke. The issue is _actually building one_, or sending the materials to construct one to a sanctioned nation.

First Amendment protections are _broad_ and exceptions to them have been (historically) carved out with _great_ reluctance. This is a feature, not a bug.

>> An american citizen cannot verbally harass someone...

>They can, actually. See the quote from the wikipedia article above.

No they can’t. Verbal harassment is a crime. Someone can serve a year in jail for it the state of Colorado

> Verbal harassment is a crime. Someone can serve a year in jail for it the state of Colorado

Would you be so kind as to link to the text of the law in question? I expect that a critical part of the law will be something along the lines of "The harasser follows around the harassed, despite requests by the harassed that the harasser desist.", which makes it more than just a restriction on speech. If it's a _pure_ restriction on speech, then I expect that it will not survive a First Amendment challenge.

States can put whatever law they like into the books. States often have laws on the books that wouldn't withstand a Constitutional challenge. For example, even after Lawrence v. Texas, anti-sodomy laws were on the books in _many_ US states. If the state doesn't voluntarily remove a law, it takes expensive, slow court challenges to get rid of them.

For a more recent example of nasty state law that is unlikely to survive long-term, look at the Texas Heartbeat Act.

The fact that a state _really_ wants to prohibit something doesn't override Federal law that asserts that that something is _not_ to be prohibited. But -sadly- those fights frequently have to slog through the courts, so they don't happen nearly as often as they should.

“ (1) A person commits harassment if, with intent to harass, annoy, or alarm another person, he or she:

…

(b) In a public place directs obscene language or makes an obscene gesture to or at another person

…

(2) Harassment pursuant to subsection (1) of this section is a class 3 misdemeanor; except that harassment is a class 1 misdemeanor if the offender commits harassment pursuant to subsection (1) of this section with the intent to intimidate or harass another person because of that person's actual or perceived race; color; religion; ancestry; national origin; physical or mental disability, as defined in section 18-9-121(5)(a) ; or sexual orientation, as defined in section 18-9-121(5)(b) .“

https://codes.findlaw.com/co/title-18-criminal-code/co-rev-s...

I think most people believe that the "yelling fire in a crowded theater" precedent came from an actual case about someone yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater.

As opposed to being a hypothetical situation invented to justify the use of state violence to silence anti-war protestors. No one goes around saying "you can't be against a war!" when that is the actual precedent that was set in that case.

I feel like you're having a kind of knee-jerk reaction to the fire example - your criticism makes sense when it is being used to justify some censorship (because legal != moral), but the GP is asking why this case isn't covered by the federal concept of free speech, literally speaking, for which the fire quote is a totally valid example of speech having negative effects that outweigh the value of that specific example of speech (regardless of whether the legal origin of the example is apocryphal, since overturned, etc).

I.e. the GP didn't ask "how is this not a violation of the spirit of free speech", they asked, "why this wouldn't fall under freedom of speech" (so it's not really "a Hackneyed Apologia for Censorship" in this case).

Funnily enough passing out said fliers is exactly what I believe "freedom of speech" is meant to protect.

I was under he impression that NK already had a rather sophisticated cryptocurrency capability and was already using it to evade sanctions, as well as for criminal operations. I mean, anyone who can install software can send/receive cryptocurrency, it's trivial. This seems more like a political prosecution than about any material harm the guy did.

If he was trying to help the DPRK government, I have no sympathy for him. But if he was trying to help innocent people get around sanctions I kind of feel different. I've always felt uncomfortable with sanctions affecting individuals who had nothing to do with the reason the countries being sanctioned.

Here's a NY Times from the time of the arrest which has many relevant details:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/02/nyregion/north-korea-virg...

It's interesting to note that this guy is a graduate of Caltech, the same university as Hal Finney that many people believe to be the founder of Bitcoin[1].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_bitcoin

i wonder if he thought he had a 1st amendment defense

Probably the kind of thing you should go over with your lawyer first.

He would have been better served by the 5th amendment.

It's really astounding the lengths people will go to in order to rationalize their dealings with tyrannical regimes, but yea North Korea is obviously also bad.

How to make a supervillain, step 1

Jokes aside, after 5 years, I'm not sure how he will not hold a serious grudge (if he didn't have one already) against the USA.

I think he pretty clearly already didn't agree with the USA since he ignored the fact that they told him he couldn't go and violated sanctions. I'm pretty sure they aren't worried about him "holding a grudge".

I think it would be smart to keep an eye on people who hate the USA, especially when they demonstrate capability and intent.

Wait the title calls this guy a cryptography expert but nowhere in the article is that mentioned again? He just seems to be a cryptocurrency researcher?

That's an unnecessary flamebait title. He wasn't sentenced for a presentation, but for evading sanctions.

If North Korea did this, it would be further proof that they're a dictatorship. But alas, where they have their ruthless dictator, we have our* rule of law.

*I am not American.

I wish I get to see in my lifetime that this vicious misuse of moral values by the US finally ends, but I am not optimistic. By misuse I mean pretending that certain actions are done on moral grounds, while looking the other way when they or their allies do the same things.

Good. Sanction busting for one of the most evil regimes in the world is reprehensible.

The warrior sliced off yet another head. The Hydra wailed and spat its venom, taking scarce notice of the loss. Another head was already growing in its place.

Punishment avails only when the lucrative prospect of crime is diminished by said punishment.

The US government is attempting to slay Hydras with a spoon.

Are crypto currencies affected by export regulations on cryptography?

Sure, but NK not already using crypto would be news to anyone.

I thought free speech is a holy thing for US citizens. So speaking abroad about something that is not classified secret is a crime?

He should be in jail for longer. What a traitor.

Imagine knowing literally anything about north Korea and wanting to help that government. He should be put away for life for aiding crimes against humanity.

What if the news about NK is not entirely unbiased? (I have no proof either way, just asking the question)

Edit: People are taking my comment wrong. I am asking this because there are a lot of assumptions people have, I know almost nothing about NK, and the comment I replied to seemed somewhat irrational, a little reactionary and certainly vindictive.

There are many different sources of information about what goes on in NK, including people who have escaped from there.

True: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkUMZS-ZegM

No news sources are entirely unbiased, even when they make an effort to be.

Regardless, we know a lot from NK from multiple sources. The main reason we don't know more is because of how closed that dictatorship is.

Or how closed we are to them? There is no media unbiased about them in the west. But I do know you can travel to NK and see for yourself.

That said, it is easier to know things about Portugal than NK. They are definitely doing something to hide information. I'm just trying to say that any image based on the media from non friendly country is bound to be wrong. No matter how much different sources you have.

> But I do know you can travel to NK and see for yourself.

My understanding is that tourists in North Korea only see what the government of North Korea wants them to see.

Here's one (admittedly potentially biased) source that claims as much:

"Tourist travel to North Korea is only possible as part of a guided tour. Independent travel is not permitted. If you are not prepared to accept severe limitations on your movements, behaviour, and freedom of expression, you should not travel to North Korea." [0]

[0] https://wikitravel.org/en/North_Korea

We are not closed to them. The relationship in terms of how much each country sees inside the other is highly asymmetric here.

> But I do know you can travel to NK and see for yourself.

No you cannot. You'll be chaperoned everywhere and only shown things they want you to see.

you can travel to NK, but you might end up like Otto Warmbier and come home a couple years later braindead. (he stole as a propaganda poster a souvenir, but brain death after a year of brutal torture seems.. extreme.)

you're also not allowed to travel without a guide.

also, given the videos I've seen taken by tourists when they've been able to sneak away from their minders, NK does not look very happy.

There's a difference between "media companies may have conflicts of interest or ideological bents" and "every single proposition ever stated by a journalist is specifically false".

it is true that a lot of mainstream media outlets that people consider "probably biased but overall trustworthy" just regurgitate talking points from the State Department, law enforcement, etc as fact.

One only needs to read the CIA's Wikipedia page or the CIA's own website to understand how embarrassing of a failure of thought and journalism it is to trust these institutions

You can know that North Korean government does bad things but still be against sanctions. It is not self evident that broad sections help the situation or the people of NK.

Exactly. Sanctions against Cuba, Iran and NK have achieved very little. They might even be helping keep the status quo in those countries.

You're assuming the goal is some sort of democratic revolution rather than keeping the economies of those countries constrained so they have less money to spend on weapons.

Interesting implications for the case of Cuba. If so, their primary crime is being a country in close proximity to the USA. So much for arguments of respecting national autonomy.

Refusing to trade with a country is not a violation of their national autonomy.

This. A lot of people seems to think that the USA bans everyone in the world to trade with cuba, even if they could buy an Havann Club in the store.

While USA does not ban everyone from doing trade with Cuba, USA does ban everyone who trades with Cuba from doing trade with the US.

You can clearly see how this creates insentives for not trading with Cuba and instead trading with the far larger market next to it.

If Cuba refused to trade with anyone who traded with the US, would you say that Cuba is violating the national autonomy of the US?

Yes, however the severity of the violation is dependent on the influence of the violator. Cuba's violation would be wrong but mostly meaningless compared to the US's.

Would it not be a violation of Cuba's National Autonomy to force them to trade with partner's that they did not wish to trade with?

Yes, but I don't see how that's relevant. Not banning trade doesn't force the countries to trade, it just gives them the choice.

> Not banning trade doesn't force the countries to trade, it just gives them the choice.

And the choice made by the US is to not trade with Cuba or anyone who trades with Cuba - it's their right to make this choice.

It's not. They're free to choose who they trade with, using who that country trades with as a decider violates their autonomy.

You're just framing the violation as a choice and saying it is their right to make that choice. Sure, they also have the right to make the choice to invade Canada, but actually invading is obviously violating their autonomy.

Okay let's use a specific example:

I decide that I don't want to trade with Country A because they are producing weapons that they plan on using to attack me with. Now let's say Country B is trading with Country A, and I think they are trading components being used to produce the weapons in Country A.

Is it a violation of Country B's autonomy for me to decide to not to trade with them because they are trading with country A?

If I believe that anyone who trades with Country A is supplying them resources to build weapons to attack me, and I decide to not trade with any Country who is trading with Country A, am I violating the autonomy for all of those countries?

>Is it a violation of Country B's autonomy for me to decide to not to trade with them because they are trading with country A?

Yes.

>am I violating the autonomy for all of those countries?

Yes.

The clearer example would be imagine country A attacked me, would refusing to trade with country B violate their autonomy? And the answer is still yes, but both country A and B are already violating your autonomy so it's a justifiable violation.

With your example, I wouldn't say producing weapons clearly violated your autonomy, but that's a completely different argument.

Not just the US, but also the third party.

shouldn't countries be allowed to decide whom to trade with? if so, doesn't that extend to countries being allowed to make their own rules of trade, including not trading with those who trade with unfriendly nations?

> shouldn't countries be allowed to decide whom to trade with?

One have to distinguish country and its citizens. Sanctions is not just 'country decides whom to trade with' but 'country restrict freedom of its citizens to trade' and that is rather significant infringement of freedom and as such it has to be justified by its necessity.

A lot of countries do international trade with Cuba. USA is not banning everyone who trades with Cuba. I can go to any licor store in my country and buy a bottle of Cuban ron, for example.

The US penalizes any country giving foreign aid to Cuba, and prevents its membership in International Financial Institutions like the IMF.

Any company in the world doing business in Cuba is also sanctioned by the US and it's employees are barred from entering the US.

You may be able to buy a bottle of Cuban rum at your liquor store, but that store can not do business in the US, use US banks, and the senior employees may be barred from traveling to the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helms%E2%80%93Burton_Act#Summa...

> Interesting implications for the case of Cuba. If so, their primary crime is being a country in close proximity to the USA. So much for arguments of respecting national autonomy.

I believe their primary crime is being a country in close proximity to the USA, that is unfriendly to US interests, and at least once offered the USSR, a then enemy of the US, to host nuclear ICBMs on their territory so they could more easily target Americans.

It’s not like the US randomly and unilaterally decided to sanction Cuba, nor is it like thousands of Cubans fled the country by any means possible to end up seeking asylum in the US for no reason.

> to host nuclear ICBMs on their territory so they could more easily target Americans.

... After the United States invaded it!

It's weird that you forget to mention the Bay of Pigs in this history lesson. It's not like Cuba randomly and unilaterally decided to host ICBMs...

Doesn't matter. Like Clint Eastwood said, "deserve's got nothing to with it".

And here I thought that since march of this year, we're of the general impression that countries have the right to defend themselves, and to seek external allies when bullied by a bigger neighbour...

We didn't invade after the Cuban Missile Crisis; in fact, Cuba remained closely aligned with the USSR until the end of the USSR. If Russia merely sanctioned Ukraine, nobody would be discussing this. Your rebuttal is facile.

The invasion is one of the things that caused the CMC. Leaving that (as well as the CIA campaign of sabotage and terrorism against Cuba) out of the context is incredibly misleading.

If the US simply sat around on its hands and sanctioned Cuba, and left things at that, nobody would be discussing this. It went way, way, way beyond sanctions.

What point are you trying to make? The invasion of Cuba was idiotic, I agree. It has nothing to do with our foreign policy afterwards, which is not subject to rules about fairness.

>which is not subject to rules about fairness.

I think this is the point everyone agrees on. You are right that "deserve's got nothing to with it"

IT is just obnoxious when most of rhetoric and discussion is about fairness, equality, and high minded ideals when directed outside the US.

Might makes right. Given that, coherent discussion on how and when to use that power is best served by dropping the rhetoric.

Once you accept the US can embargo Cuba to keep it impoverished for personal gain, Then, you can ask if the US should continue doing so.

We should not continue the Cuba embargo. It serves no public policy purpose. We should continue and enhance sanctions on North Korea, which actively works to destabilize the rest of the world, unlike Cuba. Iran is a trickier case, but on balance the world would be better off with more normalized relations with Iran, and its trajectory forward after normalization would very likely be better than it is with sanctions. The opposite is true of North Korea.

You can disagree with any or all of this, but the underlying point is: we are within our rights to coordinate sanctions on any country for a diversity of reasons.

>You can disagree with any or all of this,

I really appreciate you staking concrete positions on the countries. I mostly agree, but am on the fence about north Korea.

>You can disagree with any or all of this, but the underlying point is: we are within our rights to coordinate sanctions on any country for a diversity of reasons.

I think this is where we differ. Modern sanctions means we take everything that the opposition cant militarily stop us from taking. We seize bank accounts, ships, planes, loaned assets, all without respect for ownership.

In the might makes right context, yeah, we are within our rights. But this is in the realpolitik sphere where I have the right to murder every person that cant stop me.

If there was a real system of international law, I'd have more sympathy for this position. But there isn't.

Sanctions always involve balancing interests, and it's worth calling out that they have costs even when we believe we're right. But the balance of interests for all of humanity strongly favors sanctioning the DPRK.

> Might makes right.

Yes. This is true. We live in a US hegemony, enhanced globally by the fall of the USSR. This situation may change in the future, it may not. When we initially sanctioned Cuba we were primarily able to do so because Cuba geographically exists within the US sphere of influence. Now the entire globe exists within the US sphere of influence.

I don't think my earlier reply to you qualifies as "rhetoric". I was replying to the implication that the US just unilaterally decided to sanction Cuba for no good reason. The US had a good reason, it is pretty obvious what that reason was, and it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that Cuba's actions resulted in sanctions (and could have resulted in much worse). It is also, frankly irrelevant, that it was precipitated by the US doing something stupid.

Personally, I think we should have dropped the embargo on Cuba a long time ago, probably in the 90s. But that's not the case right now. It certainly wasn't a mystery to anyone why it started though.

Sanctions on Russia and sanctions on North Korea are both not only "might makes right", but fully justified within multiple different deontological frameworks. It is absolutely true that there is realpolitik afoot here, but that does not also preclude the possibility that the outcome is justified and fair.

Honestly, I'd love to hear/read some thoughts as to why dropping sanctions on North Korea would be beneficial to /anyone/ in a real way.

>Honestly, I'd love to hear/read some thoughts as to why dropping sanctions on North Korea would be beneficial to /anyone/ in a real way.

The most obvious benefit would be to the 25 million North Korean people. Lifting of sanctions would allow economic activity alleviating poverty and malnutrition.

The comparison is striking.

Kennedy ordered a naval "quarantine" to prevent missiles from reaching Cuba. By using the term "quarantine" rather than "blockade" (an act of war by legal definition), the United States was able to avoid the implications of a state of war.

After several days of tense negotiations, an agreement was reached between Kennedy and Khrushchev. Publicly, the Soviets would dismantle their offensive weapons in Cuba in exchange for a US public declaration and agreement to not invade Cuba again.

When it came to Russia and Ukraine, the US refused ultimatums to stay out of Ukraine, and Russia did invade Ukraine a second time.

> Russia did invade Ukraine a second time.

In the real world, Russia never stopped the first invasion, it just consolidated, worked to advance, and then massively escalated.

And they are now looking to do the same thing again.

Sure, depending on if you definition of invasion requires advancement, or if occupations counts.

> the US refused ultimatums to stay out of Ukraine

Which is just a pretense. On different days, the "special military operation" has been to avoid NATO bordering Russia (which it already does in the Baltic), "remove Nazis", "fix Lenin's mistake of separating Ukraine from Russia", "free Donbass and Luhansk" and probably others that I forgot.

And anyway, US didn't do anything (this time). Ukraine has a right to join NATO if they want, without asking uncle Vladimir beforehand.

>Ukraine has a right to join NATO if they want, without asking uncle Vladimir beforehand

by this standard, Cuba has the right to have Russian nukes pointed at Washington DC. But we all know that the US would wipe Cuba off the face of the earth and kill every civilian there before that happened.

They are still under sanctions 70 years later for playing that game and assuming they have territorial autonomy.

Why would Ukraine or Finland be any different from the Baltic states with respect to joining NATO?

We can only speculate why Russia was willing to fight over Ukraine and Georgia but not the baltics. One obvious difference is time. Russia had 18 more years to get in a better position to stop Ukraine joining.

The Baltic path to joining was also much faster, announced in 1999 and complete in 2004. The Ukrainian membership was announced in 2008 and had a many decade lead time because Ukraine was expected to tackle many internal issues of corruption and human rights first.

A separate factor is size, population, and location. Ukraine is larger and may have a more strategic position to take out planes and nukes heading to central Europe.

It sounds like we basically agree. I just find it a timely discussion with respect to Ukraine and the fact that the US positions nuclear assets all over the world.

Since whataboutism is so hugely popular in threads involving Russia, let's talk about the nuclear SRBM dispenser formerly known as Kaliningrad Oblast located between Poland and Lithuania (that's in Central Europe). Kinda makes those American gravity nukes stationed in West Germany look old-fashioned.

The whataboutism is strong because the hypocrisy and double think is so pervasive.

Many people believe in moral exceptionalism when it comes to USA foreign policy when the vast majority of the time it boils down to the same self-interested realpolitik as other countries.

TO AYBABTME:

>It's not hypocritical to want "your" side to win, and it's not from a lack of moral standing when you're motivating this taking-sides with "well, I like and wish democracies on people more than I like and wish brutal dictatorships on people". Yes, it's a "our side is better than theirs" but I think hard and yes, our "side" is indeed better than NK's, Russia's, Iran's, Cuba's. I could contort myself in saying that our side is only better insofar as it makes me ~believe that it's better, behind a veil of fake democracy. But then that's be contortionism, and not a down to earth, pragmatic look at it.

>All sides in this stuff will play realpolitik and use their armies and kill and what not. But at the end of the day, where do you want to live? In which of these regimes is life preferable?

I agree that this is the correct framework to think about things, discarding the chaff of what is fair, good guys, and bad guys.

However, I don't think that where I would want to live translates to my country can do no wrong.

For example, I would rather live in the US than Cuba, but I don't think that warrants an invasion and regime change in Cuba. I also don't think it warrants sanctions on Cuba.

I think life in the US is better than most countries, but I have a moral and logical framework that usually opposes foreign intervention and coercion.

That is to say, I don't think the US has an moral obligation to be the world police and initiate regime change around the globe

> I believe their primary crime is being a country in close proximity to the USA, that is unfriendly to US interests, and at least once offered the USSR, a then enemy of the US, to host nuclear ICBMs on their territory so they could more easily target Americans.

You do understand that if this is the bar under which nations can take drastic actions (up to and including fiascos like Bay of Pigs and assassination attempts), US criticism of the adventurism of others (e.g., Ukraine) has to be much more measured. For instance, it is fine to violate the sovereignty of nations, just maybe in a more limited way, etc.

How many countries on earth, do you think, had hostile foreign arms on their soil (e.g., the US) within the past 60 years that their neighbors might find threatening?

> How many countries on earth, do you think, had hostile foreign arms on their soil (e.g., the US) within the past 60 years that their neighbors might find threatening?

A lot. And the threaten countries all abso-fucking-lutely want to do something about it.

Cuba can have their national autonomy, but other countries have no particular obligation to trade with them.

The primary "crime" which originally led to the imposition of sanctions on Cuba was that they nationalized assets owned by US entities without paying compensation. Now you could perhaps make a case that the Cuban government had a moral right to do that, but regardless of who was right of wrong it was certainly contrary to US interests. We don't want to set a precedent for allowing countries to get away with stealing US assets.

Cuba was far from an innocent victim but a very active opponent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_Cuba#Post-...

One might argue that their primary crime is having a few thousand ex-Cubans with outsized political power and a very long grudge.

As far as I've seen, no one else cares about Cuba or sanctions.

I do not think it is relevant today, but during the Cold War their crime was being all buddy-buddy with the USSR and offering to host some of their nuclear ICBMs.

The USSR is long dead though, and nobody is asking Cuba to hold on to WMDs for safe keeping, so the continued sanctions make no real sense in 2022.

> The USSR is long dead though

Someone is attempting a revival just now.

We should end sanctions on Cuba and Iran, and maintain them on North Korea. Consistency is not one of the premises of sanctions.

The point of sanctions is not to help the people of NK. The point is to starve their military of resources and reduce the threat they pose to the US and our regional allies. If the people of NK are harmed in the process then that's just unfortunate collateral damage. And no one is under any illusions that sanctions alone will result in regime change or eliminate the threat entirely; sanctions are just one essential component of a broader strategy.

You can be against sanctions without actively supporting an enemy of the state.

Lol what if by spreading crypto knowledge in totalitarian states, you give people in those states a viable way to preserve their income and assets in a way that no other asset class can? Imagine someone trying to protest or escape a regime imposing capital controls on citizens such as North Korea or Canada. What if, those citizens could simply memorize or encode a 12-24 word phrase that could preserve their net worth against all forms of tyranny? What if by doing so, you create the conditions that lead to the eventual collapse or reform of said totalitarian state?

That's not the case with North Korea. Most people don't have access to computers, let alone the internet, so they can't use crypto for their personal finances.

Really? Most households have a cell phone, though internet access is spotty.

The phones can't be used as general-purpose computers. Access to smartphone apps is tightly controlled.

https://www.businessinsider.com/north-korea-smartphones-2018...

> Despite having connection to an intranet, North Korean smartphone users have to download apps at physical store locations where they can get apps approved by the North Korean government.

To use crypto for their personal finances, they wouldn't need general purpose computers and government approved apps could be sufficient. Though it's possible that they would be backdoored preventing the kind of economic freedom the poster was describing.

For the record, I don't think North Koreans are using crypto for their personal finances, I just disagree that they are unable to.

You sound like someone who's never lived outside a western first world country.

Like those folk who pushed crypto as the saviour of the average Venezuelan. I mean, your next door neighbour doesn't understand bitcoin, how is someone in the third world who has never used a computer supposed to figure this shit out, and why should anyone trust crypto at all when most of it is scams?

> What if, those citizens could simply memorize or encode a 12-24 word phrase that could preserve their net worth against all forms of tyranny?

... What if, they then LOST ALL OF IT in an instant because of a scam, a random crypto-market fluctuation or because it just becomes worthless because they have no way to ever translate it into something of value, let alone actually spend the "currency".

Yeah, sure. Guess how Kim Jong Un financed his nukes and ICBMs. Aided by people like this guy and through state sponsored ransomware attacks. Now imagine Russia using the same strategy. They're already using weapons from Iraq smuggled through Iran against Ukrainians.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/iran-backed-militias-in-iraq-r...

He was presenting his "crypto knowledge" to the totalitarian state.

You're implying that he's helping the citizenry directly and not the state itself. I think that's a dubious claim when it's a conference hosted in Pyongyang.

> Lol what if by spreading crypto knowledge in totalitarian states, you give people in those states a viable way to preserve their income and assets

JFC. They don't have income or assets to begin with. Why TF else do you think they're stuck in those shitholes? The ones with money already left.

Sanctions have achieved nothing but isolate North Korea, ruin the lives of generations of innocent people and entrench an authoritarian ruling class. Sanctions are a crime against humanity.

I'm no lawyer but I can only dream that they might find more stuff to throw the book at him but somehow i doubt this.

How you go and help a country that your own country is at war with, starves women and children, sends a prisoner's entire family to prison camps for three generations where do all sorts of horrible things and spend only 5 years in prison.

People have been sent to prison far longer just because they had a bag of weed on them.

The santions are resposible for starving women/children. Should he be in prison for helping children eat?

With all due respect, that's the point of sanctions. You've brought it up as some sort of gotcha. It's not. They're a means to cripple the war-making ability of a nation without actually bombing them into submission or shooting them. As such they're not just placed on a nation for fun or random purposes.

To say look North Korea is evil they don't feed women and kids misses the fact that this is a policy we did for whatever justifible reason. Kids are not eating and dying because of choices we made.

Kids are not eating well because NK leadership spends all the country’s money on themselves and the military in order for them to stay in power.

If your neighbour beats his children and constantly threatens to shoot your house up, you are not morally obligated to spend money at their restaurant.

If you prevent the next door neighbour from bringing in food because you have a fued with them you can't turn around and say look at those kids not eating. It's because you live like kings.

They spend money on military not to supress the local population, they do it to protect themselves against you.

You are morally responsible for your choices including preventing kids from eating.

I don't understand your argument.

It seems based on some premise that North Korea is only bad because other nations are "mean" to it.

Many authoritarian regimes have historically used food availability as a weapon against their own populations. North Korea clearly is one such regime.

There is no private enterprise in North Korea-- I don't know what you think lifting of non-food covering sanctions would do other than further strengthening a rogue state that has no intentions of having anything other than a perpetual slave caste.

That doesn't stop trade with Saudi Arabia so it can't be used here.

> The santions [sic] are resposible [sic] for starving women/children.

This is a lie, and if you think NK leadership is going to be spending crypto on food for their populace you're deluded.

If you think the Sanctions will either change the NK government or slow their weapons program I have an apartment in Shanghai to sell you

If you think filling the coffers of the North Korea, a country with a caste system that mandates certain people have limited food access, will improve the lowest caste member's lives then I've one in Pyongyang to sell you.

That's like saying the judge is responsible when a man is experiencing a bad time in jail, instead of the man being responsible because he commited the crime which put him there.

A judge is responsible for decisions around sentencing and prision conditions. The choices they make have a big impact on whether prison will be successful in reforming a person. Sending 16 year olds to adult prison or decisions around solitary or conditions (no visitors) or type of prison can have a huge impact.

Lol, what. You really read to read my message again and if your takeaway remains the same then good luck fixing your brain.

Why would a prisoner having a bad time in jail be an acceptable outcome?

Prisons are not there to punish. Do you believe they are?

Sorry what. If I go to jail and feel bad about being there since it means I can't meet my kid, then the judge is to blame? What the actual fuck is that level of stupidity. Be better than that, dude.

Fat Tony : Bart, is it wrong to steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving family?

Bart : No.

Fat Tony : Well, suppose you got a large starving family. Is it wrong to steal a truckload of bread to feed them?

Bart : Uh uh.

Fat Tony : And, what if your family don't like bread? They like... cigarettes?

Bart : I guess that's okay.

Fat Tony : Now, what if instead of giving them away, you sold them at a price that was practically giving them away. Would that be a crime, Bart?

Bart : Hell, no.

International trade is a privilege not a right. If you want to thumb your nose at the international community on whom you rely to provide basic sustenance to your people you should prepare to have a bad time. Or figure out how to sustain your population without trade. But either way its the responsibility of NK, not the world, to find a way to feed the people of NK. That can be by participating in the world order and benefiting from trade, or by figuring out how to grow enough food at home.

It is neither a right or privilege given by a power higher than yourself. It is a decision by a group of powerful countries who influenced, bribed and threatened others to get everyone to partipate. It jails citizens who provide information on cryto trading.

It is no one's responsibility to feed anyone. People don't have a right to exist. People do whatever they can to survive around the world.

The countries that have decided to force these kids to die to further their geopolitcal goals are responsible for those decisions. Maybe they die for a better future for all or maybe they die because their lives don't matter to the countries preventing food from reaching them.

Throughout history many countries

> It jails citizens who provide information on cryto trading.

I wish (kidding), but no, it jails citizens who travel to foreign countries to explain how to evade sanctions to people who would benefit from that information.

> It is no one's responsibility to feed anyone. People don't have a right to exist. People do whatever they can to survive around the world.

That's not what I said. I said that this obligation extends domestically. It may be good, nice, and moral - heck I support it - to save anyone you can on earth. It may even be a moral imperative but your obligation first and foremost is to your own at home.

> The countries that have decided to force these kids to die to further their geopolitcal goals are responsible for those decisions.

All I'm saying is if you rely on the relationships with others to survive probably don't poke them in the eye?

If you're dangling from a bridge, suspended by a rope, and some burly guy catches you. You realize you don't like his face. So you throw sand at him. He lets go of the rope, and you fall. Who's at fault? You could say it was the guy who let go of the rope. But for the love of all that is good and holy, why are you throwing sand at the only person keeping you alive?

Nobody owes you trade. Whether that's right, wrong, good, bad or anything else, it's fact. States would be well served to keep that in mind. It doesn't usually come up until the "and find out" part of "screw around and find out" happens.

The sanctions are intended to exacerbate the destitution and starvation in North Korea in order to provoke political upheaval. They are also just the current strategy, and have been ineffective from a humanitarian perspective.

I wouldn’t undermine them personally, but I understand how a rational person could come to believe it was even a moral obligation to do so.

The sanctions are to slow the nuclear weapon program and that an ally (south korea) has to spend less on defense.

Two questions:

1) Why SK spending less on defense is a good thing for US?

2) Now that Russia is under even more sanctions, why not share some rocket tech with Kim and accelerate their program?

> intended to exacerbate the destitution and starvation

What support is there for this statement?

I’ll rephrase. While the intent is to topple or pacify the government by starving the regime, this strategy essentially requires the suffering of the people. Happy and content people don’t revolt or push for political change.

We are openly doing this to Russia right now, rooting for the economic collapse and stark decline of living standards.

In both situations we assume that making life much more difficult for the people now will achieve our goals.

If he were smuggling in food, sure, but I struggle to see how helping the North Korean government use crypto is going to lead to the people eating better.

Quoting one of the lawyers who helped draft sanctions law:

https://freekorea.us/sanctions-nkspea-faq/

""" Section 207 of the NKSPEA contains broad exemptions for food imports and humanitarian aid, and provides for waivers for humanitarian reasons, or when a waiver is important to the national security or economic interests of the United States. The Treasury Department has also published general licenses permitting humanitarian aid. """

And yet they still starve, it is almost like crippling economic systems but allowing shipments of rice is not humanitarian at all, but more a "face saving" position so they can claim they are not the baddies

It's almost like the place is run by a dictator who would take food out of the mouth of his own people to fund a nuclear weapons program that serves no purpose other than to keep him in power.

It’s exactly like that, but that was always the most likely result and hardly a surprise. The sanctions are meant to drive a wedge between the regime and the people.

Hmm if only there was an economic system or currency that could be used outside the control of authoritarian governments...

I wonder what we would call it.....

The USD - crypto is an amazing tool for authoritarian regimes looking to evade sanctions. Assuming that's where you were trying to go, you totally misunderstand the problem. People in oppressive regimes can have all the crypto in the world but, if every time they use it to buy food, there's a guy with a gun who takes it for the regime, then it's even more useless than it's normal Monopoly money status.

Can't NK get all of this content from YouTube lecture videos?

it's hilarious to see reddit/HN types spit out neocon warhawk soundbites like that when something hits a nerve

Help evil people, go to jail. I don't see a problem here.

We should imprison the entire US tax payer population then xd

If the national security of the country is going to be in trouble because of a presentation then uh, lol.

This is wrong on so many levels. The U.S. doesn't get to decide who gets to use blockchain, or whatever technology.

The U.S. did not decide who gets to use it. The U.S. punished a U.S. citizen for violating national law. That's very different from deciding who gets to use a technology.

And what was the purpose of said law again? If i increase the price of cars by a 1000x, am i not deciding who gets to buy and then use one? I'm making it harder to buy cars with the intention of less people using it, just like carbon taxes and the like.

This is a weird event that it's going to take me a long while to form an opinion on. I just... don't know what to say or think about this. That isn't a thinly veiled condemnation. I genuinely don't know what to think about this but it's clearly something that needs to be evaluated very critically and involves so many things that are so... of their time and place.

The founders of this country are rolling in their graves. Every part of this story. All he did was go to another country and spread truthful information.

> "The most important feature of blockchains is that they are open. And the DPRK can't be kept out no matter what the USA or the UN says,"

This is conspiracy? Is telling someone that a gun can kill now considered conspiracy to murder, too? Is it really the stance of the US government that North Korea knew enough about cryptocurrency to hold a cryptocurrency conference, but that they wouldn’t have been capable of evading sanctions if not for this man speaking this sentence?

And while I’m at it, free citizens should not have to ask permission from the government for where they are allowed to go. In free societies, if the other country lets you in you can go.

We are not a free country. Half of a decade! Over 5% of his life, gone. Unbelievable.

Some of the founders of this country were responsible for the Alien and Sedition Acts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts

Seriously, the weird veneration we have for the founders is very bizarre mainly because once they got in power, they largely acted like any other ruler.

I don't think their intent was ever to act unlike a government. But then again who can really divine intent? All we can do is live by laws.

But even a self-limiting government has to play politics internationally, and that requires a specific set of tools. I don't see anything here that trips alarms to me.

Their practical actions clarified and tempered their espoused dogma. Wise individuals are frequently misunderstood thanks to the ambiguity of language, and listeners reasonably prefer assumption over nuance.

It may surprise you, but providing information to sanctioned entities that could help them avoid sanctions is something Treasury does not like and it is explicitly listed as something that could land you in trouble.

It does not help that Virgil, with his own words, seem to indicate that he was aware that this could help evade sanctions.

In a sense, it is a little like openly saying you are aware this car was used for robbery. Obviously, we can easily argue that is not a good comparison at all, but in essence that is what is happening.

Helping mass murderers with Nuclear Weapons avoid sanctions that are in place because they are ... mass murderers, is the issue here.

Not arbitrary knowledge.

Nobody is being arrested for giving Crypto talks otherwise.

All he did was go to another country and spread truthful information.

So did the Rosenbergs. So did Ephialtes of Trachis. I know we've been enjoying a few decades of touchy-feely existence but collaborating with the murderous enemies of your nation traditionally gets you hanged for treason. Five years is a relative slap on the wrist.

> All he did was go to another country and spread truthful information.

Compare these two statements:

"Mr. Kim, you can transfer money between bank accounts using wire transfers!"

and

"Mr. Kim, if you wire money to this bank account and paper the transaction in this specific way, no one will know you are evading sanctions!"

Both are "spreading truthful information." One is illegal, and one isn't. I think most people can figure out which is which, and I don't think that just changing the underlying medium from "bank account" to "crypto wallet" muddies the issue at all.

I think you're over-reacting. Stories like this tend to be rorschach tests, and it's easy to see what you believe in these vague details.

In fact, it appears he was helping NK avoid sanctions by using crypto, in an effort to increase crypto acceptance in NK.

The details are (apparently) in the original complaint. Bad journalism/summaries strike again?

> It looks like it wasn't just speaking at a conference after being denied permission from the US that got him in trouble, it looks like both before and after the trip he was working on a variety of ways to get the North Korean government more onboard with cryptocurrency, including discussions about mining ventures, moving funds in and out of the country, and offering connections with other cryptocurrency people.

Well you’ll have to forgive me because TFA mentioned none of that.

TIL: Articles on the internet can be misleading or outright wrong ;)

Nothing to forgive. TFA was probably written to provoke as much reaction as possible, as is common nowadays. The way it's structured, it can get people who oppose the action and people support the action engaged by either calling it a just decision (what a traitor!) and a silly oversight (He was just giving a talk!).

>The founders of this country are rolling in their graves. Every part of this story.

Some of them were put in their graves, for similar reasons - treason is treason.

> All he did was go to another country and spread truthful information.

This is nearly a non-sequitur. Analogous to, "All he did was goto another country to take advantage of the lower age of consent," which is objectively true, but blatantly illegal.

>This is conspiracy? Is telling someone that a gun can kill now considered conspiracy to murder, too?

Yes, telling someone the whereabouts and function of a lethal weapon in the known context of a premeditated murder is obviously conspiracy.

>Is it really the stance of the US government that North Korea knew enough about cryptocurrency to hold a cryptocurrency conference, but that they wouldn’t have been capable of evading sanctions if not for this man speaking this sentence?

If the argument here is "how can the mouse be charged for moving the mountain," then that is excusing, trivializing, and absolving actions unduly. How little treason is too much? Just a couple national security secrets okay?

>And while I’m at it, free citizens should not have to ask permission from the government for where they are allowed to go. In free societies, if the other country lets you in you can go.

You actually do not need a passport to leave, or come back, from and to, the United States. You may find it isn't frictionless, however.

>We are not a free country. Half of a decade! Over 5% of his life, gone. Unbelievable.

I agree, he shouldn't be locked up. He should had been sentenced to hanging, from the neck.

"treason is treason"

I find the idea that someone who has not pledged their allegiance to a particular country can commit treason against said country to not make much sense.

"Just a couple national security secrets okay?"

He shouldn't have access to any such secrets afaik.

"I agree, he shouldn't be locked up. He should had been sentenced to hanging, from the neck."

I understand that it is easy to say such things online, especially since it is hard to humanize someone that you have only seen being talked about in various sites, but I think that you treat human lives way too cheaply, especially for something as minor.

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