Mailchimp Slams Door for Crypto Content Without Warning
beincrypto.com
beincrypto.com
Sounds fair.
If you’re going to offer a service to people, you have an ethical obligation to protect them from harm.
That looks different for different customers.
A downside of crypto is that nobody is ensuring you against losing the money. No FDIC or identity theft insurance.
Combine that with the supposed anonymity, and you have a major security risk.
The company is currently being sued by people affected by such a hack, so this isn’t hypothetical.
This is like the 900th time I have seen this. Crypto doesn't seem to be able to 'fade away 100% completely' does it? So I think that it is here to stay on the condition that there are a compliant few cryptocurrencies and projects after clearer regulations, indicating that not all of them will survive.
But the whole point of this is that Mailchimp and Intuit are responsible for this data breach and suspending a wave of accounts without warning doesn't solve anything.
I have already said that 90% of NFTs will fail and not all of them will survive many times before [2], and only a certain few crypto projects will survive, even past regulations.
The 'people' you are referring to were expecting all 20,000+ crypto or NFT projects to survive this crash which is just delusional as expecting all internet startups created during the dotcom boom to survive after the collapse in 2000. As you can see what I said months before in [0], [1] and [2] tells you that I am not part of the 'people' you speak of.
As always, I expect only a few crypto projects to survive this crash and regulatory clarity.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28912714
They are still here and doing fine? I'm afraid dubious media reporting and wishful thinking has given you the wrong idea of what is going on.
This is a very common trend I see when speaking with cryptocurrency advocates. When asked to point to success stories or real world use cases, 9/10 times the answer is related to some other cryptocurrency scheme: a swaps smart contract or a decentralized market maker, wallet software, etc. It seems like most of the use cases for cryptocurrencies are just more examples of the snake eating its own tail.
The NFTs that artists minted in the boom in early 2021 are still being traded across different platforms, curated in physical exhibitions, indexed and hosted by multiple competing companies, and talked about in online magazines and podcasts. Sales on OpenSea and other platforms continue to pay royalties back to creators and sometimes non profit charities that they set in splits. Hundred-year-old art auction houses are now in competition with open source platforms that take nearly a hundred percent less commission on sales, have a lower barrier to entry, and provide higher artist royalties.
Blockchain hasn’t given us flying cars or replaced corporations or whatever boosters say, but it has given us some new tools to imagine transactions and ownership differently than just whatever Stripe is doing.
NFTs are basically a digital variation of the physical art market....with all that that implies, such as money laundering and wash trading: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/29/business/art-money-launde...
While some view the art world with scorn on HN, I don't think it attracts anywhere near as much derision as crypto and NFTs.
>>>When asked to point to success stories or real world use cases
I use crypto to make micro-loans to a friend in the Philippines, who occasionally runs into cashflow problems with her small used goods business.
Regarding your friend, I’m curious to know how competitive crypto is for your use case. Western union charges about 2% to transfer $5000 from the US to the Philippines and can deposit directly in a bank account. I understand that international wire transfers are comparable. Services like remitly appear to be even cheaper. How does crypto compare in price and convenience?
That is absolute extortion. I sent ~0.05 BTC in May and the transaction fee was 0.067%. Eyeballing the transaction screenshot she sent, she wasn't getting hammered on the exchange rate to pesos either (via coins.ph). There was some KYC involved (sender name/address required to release the funds on her end) that slowed us down a little. It wasn't a requirement several years ago. I bet we could have fed the form fake info but didn't want to risk the funds being frozen, she needed cash in hand in less than 24hrs to purchase new inventory.
I have a hard time seeing how crypto-commodity projects, with their near the extreme libertarian beliefs, will jive with society's expectations around money and assets. That being said, there will be a few things that come out of the space, like formal verification, that will be incorporated into other software.
Then we will look back on this era and wonder what the heck people were thinking.
Are you aware of this? If not, you might consider googling "molly white blockchain abuse"
Tornado was shutdown because they were knowingly supporting sanction violations. The developer was arrested in a country that does not have the same freedom of speech we do in USA
The crypto commodity community will have to learn that they are part of the larger society and accept that they will not always get things their way. If you want things to change, you'll have to adjust how you approach these differences, and more than likely give up some of the absolutist views to meet in the middle.
The code was taken down by a private company, freedom of speech is not protected on GitHub or Twitter. Additionally, American laws do not extend to other countries. It was the Dutch who arrested him.
You should start by understanding the basic facts and relations and not engage in hyperbole like "knowingly publishing open source software, that would be scary" because this is not at all what happened here.
I appreciate your optimism about freedom of speech being unaffected but this is not as cut and dry as an individual running a money laundering business, if that is what you think Tornado Cash is. We do not hold Tor exit nodes responsible for the illicit activity on the dark web and we definitely do not hold Tor developers responsible.
Some talking points raised here:
He's actually wrong in that it executes on the ethereum blockchain. It actually executes on Optimism, a layer-2 solution, and they are quite concerned for their own situation.
He also says that there aren't people tied to it, but who was collecting the contract fees (beyond gas)?
The first reports on this situation originated from non-crypto sources so it should be easy to find them. A lot of the more in depth discussion is coming from crypto camp because it negatively affects all those users and their privacy.
A human paid to deploy these contracts, a human keeps the fees. This is not a "fully autonomous" contract. It is not an attack open source. There is a difference between writing code and running code, or making it runnable. Blockchain creates new scenarios we hadn't considered before, but common sense can still be applied.
A more reasonable assessment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA8slTX2tyE
The only fees taken are relay fees, which can be anybody - not necessarily the developers. The conversation steers back to whether it is illegal to run a Tor exit node and whether it is illegal to develop Tor the open source project. Tornado Cash can be republished without relay fees, with zero governance, no token, would that be acceptable?
If you support evil, there will be repercussions. Your participation in the pool is sufficient material support. We have laws, adjust to obey them or risk getting in trouble.
What is sad is that you use and reuse hyperbole as a talking point
not morally, ethically, or legally
Typically this is followed up with a misunderstanding of the DVD-CSS decision, or a misrepresentation of Marilyn Hall's decision that code is speech somehow means code is free speech, but I'll bite. What precedent do you imagine holds that code is somehow free speech?
Please understand that I'm going to look it up and I'm going to push back.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-estab...
The debate is pretty settled that code and language should be protected by 1st amendment as free speech. Based on this precedent, we should not be cheering on the barring of the open source project and it’s developers.
It is less clear if the execution and use of code should be free speech, and how to regulate code and language when the sole goal is illicit. Like anarchist cookbook, 3D printed guns. But to argue this, you will have to argue the sole goal of Tornado Cash is to aid in illicit behavior. There are many licit users of the protocol, like with Tor, who just want to seek privacy in their online communication.
The issue comes down to whether sending and receiving private keys in an encrypted way over the internet should be protected or not.
> or a misrepresentation of Marilyn Hall's decision that code is speech somehow means code is free speech
Predictably, you referenced Marilyn Hall's decision that code is speech, and misrepresented it as support that code is free speech
Literally exactly what I said you would do
Do you disagree with the widespread reporting on the outcome of this case?
https://www.britannica.com/event/Bernstein-vs-the-US-Departm...
> Bernstein v. the U.S. Department of State, landmark legal decision (1996) that set two important precedents in the field of digital technology. First, it ruled that U.S. government regulations that barred the export of encryption software were unconstitutionally restrictive; second, it declared that software source code can be a form of protected free speech.
and
https://casetext.com/case/bernstein-v-united-states-dept-of-...
> The district court found that the Source Code was speech protected by the First Amendment, see Bernstein v. Department of State, 922 F. Supp. 1426 (N.D. Cal. 1996) ("Bernstein I")
The Tornado Cash case is all about money laundering, the fact that there was code to automate the process is besides the point.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect
The bigger problem is whether republishing the source code would make you a target of the sanctions. If a user republishes the source code on Ethereum, pirate bay, Gitlab, or another host then it is reasonable to assume their actions might be interpreted as “supporting the Tornado Cash project” which makes them a target of the sanctions. If a user modifies the code and republishes it probably will fall under same risks.
https://harvardlawreview.org/2020/02/the-establishment-claus...
Sad that Bitcoin didn't start with the Monero obfuscation/fungibility technologies.
What always amazes me is the crypto-haters who speak so authoritatively about how crypto is bad/useless, while being borderline clueless about how it's used in the real world.
^This will have to suffice. I've read juicier reports but they are SECRET//NOFORN. You'll have to take my word for it that the Ukrainians are using web3 payments for some...surprising activities.
Eh... I use it every day. And I'll continue doing so.
So this seems like a manifestly reasonable action that is hard to criticize. All these crypto-libertarians seem to love the free market until it makes a decision they disagree with, I wonder why?
> Dear @Mailchimp,
>
> Thank you for deplatforming some of crypto’s most reputable brands in the past 48 hours, including @MessariCrypto and @decryptmedia.
>
> You’re proving our point.
>
> Mailchimp - and all speech censors - must be destroyed.
Even so-called ethical and professional crypto-adjacent companies always seem to be anything but after even cursory research.
Being one step removed from a crime doesn’t give you clean hands. Selling shovels in a Ponzi gold rush is just as suspect as directly engaging in fraud.
[1]: https://twitter.com/twobitidiot/status/1557481836154175488
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180403195541/https://mailchimp...
> Some industries have higher-than-average abuse complaints, which can jeopardize the deliverability of our entire system. Nothing personal, but in order to maintain the highest delivery rates possible for all our customers, we can’t allow businesses that offer these types of services, products, or content:
>
>[...]
>
> Also, we cannot allow businesses involved in any aspect of the sale, transaction, exchange, storage, marketing or production of cryptocurrencies, virtual currencies, and any digital assets related to an Initial Coin Offering, to use MailChimp to facilitate or support any of those activities.
I'm sure no serious customer is within this group as far as they're concerned
“It doesn’t matter” is what Mailchimp would say to former customers who are unhappy that they have been deprived of a vector to perpetuate Ponzi schemes.
And to the tiny fraction of crypto businesses that can’t be fairly described this way, I’m sure it’s not the first time that being part of a largely criminal and fraudulent sector has had this sort of consequence.