Hacker News Reader

Comment by splix | Hacker News Reader

Imagine a person who lives in a dictatorship country and used it to send a donation to an opposition journalist. Because otherwise he would go straight to jail. Is it a good use of such a service or bad?

I personally think that's the point of privacy. To protect people from the government. Otherwise it easily becomes a tyranny if they have a full control and visibility over the citizens.

View on HN

It’s extremely irresponsible to suggest someone use cryptocurrency in such an environment. The public ledger is a godsend for the secret police giving them evidence for retroactive prosecution and good odds de-anonymizing people, receiving funds from a notorious money laundering site could be used to persecute the journalist, statistically nobody has adequate opsec to conceal their use of these applications, and having sent them tokens would obligate them to take on additional risk converting them into something useful.

Cash is much safer because the risk is only at the time of transfer.

Maybe it's irresponsible, but so far is the best working approach.

How you send the cash, btw? By mail? How do you ensure that post office is not going to learn who is the sender of the envelope with cash?

Something with that many serious problems can’t be best even if you have a profit motive to pretend otherwise.

Re: cash - if you think about the problems I listed, you can see how it’s better in each case, all stemming back from not creating a permanent public ledger of potentially risky activities.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com