Holochain: End-to-end open source P2P app framework
holochain.org
holochain.org
Store things cheaply, without blockchains or servers, so where is it stored? No infrastructure, so who is paying for it? Oh right if you click a little deeper, there's a cryptocurrency token issued on Ethereum you need to buy in order to buy credits to buy compute time in a marketplace of other people's machines.
Absolutely nothing interesting going on.
Similar to people telling me "No, Holochain is different", other people say this of Safe Network [0]. Just like until now with Holochain I stay away from that, as I just can't tell without thorough investigation.
Uh huh.
I don't know much about holochain, but it's in the camp of crypto/blockchain projects that sound almost unreasonably ambitious (Multivac, ICP, Saito, and Mina are in this camp as well), but I'm staying away from because.. there's a significant chance they're scams, or that the people working on them are in over their heads.
One of these might be the real deal (well.. not Multivac or ICP IMO), and actually deliver something amazing, but I'm staying far away from them until I have a strong reason to believe that's the case.. I don't have time to do a deep dive of every project that promises the moon.
I'm suspicious.
What problem were they trying to solve?
In a lot of ways, blockchain is taking everything wrong with startups, and magnifying it 100x
I see no reason to pay any more attention to this than any other cryptocurrency-related "Grand Vision", or even something like Urbit, until projects have been delivered using it which have useful capabilities that are just not possible without it.
(edit - and given the ICO was 4 years ago now... eh)
2. I mean yeah, I don't really think that's a good thing. I think there's a whole world of middle ground between "tracing everybody's transactions in the open all the time" and "complete, mathematical privacy forever". Personally I think things should be discoverable with an appropriate warrant, for example.
I also don't consider freedom of speech and financial privacy to be equivalent, "criminals" are only a small part of the problem there. Financial privacy in the way proponents seem to want allows everything from total tax evasion to the rich outright buying politicians. However much you think lobbying is bad, and political funding is bad, it could only make it far, far worse.
[0] https://hrea.io/
Just kill me now.
That sounds like the opinion of someone who never experienced living under an authoritarian government.
Further, systems such as these that enable hiding of funds and flows of money are also perfect for abusive, exploitative dictators and oligarchs who want to obscure the source of money they've extracted from their countries to make themselves rich in the west while their people are crushed in poverty.
But sure, it's me not seeing the big picture.
I would say yes that’s absolutely correct considering you are hyper-focused on negative reports and oblivious to situations where such methods aided activists against their tyrannical governments and that includes the plight of Wikileaks against crimes committed by western governments.
https://qz.com/africa/1922466/how-bitcoin-powered-nigerias-e...
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2021/12/22/meet-the-ngo-t...
Vitalik used Tornado Cash to donate to Ukraine to protect the identity of the receiver
https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/155692560223356928...
EU and NA are not exempt of exerting tyranny through financial systems:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerhuang/2019/04/26/how-bitco...
Other than the instance with Vitalik, and I don't consider him anything of a thought leader so much as some sort of idiot savant, there is no mention of mixers there. And regardless - I don't think the solution is either a panopticon or absolute financial privacy, I think we need to have a mature discussion about this as a society (or set of societies) rather than throwing our toys out of the pram when something utterly predictable like Tornado Cash being sanctioned for money-laundering happens.
If privacy is really needed use cash, the difficulty of having to move large quantities of cash around physically is a good limiting factor. If you are worried about banks knowing your transaction history most shops still accept cash.
Privacy is a right, and you don't get to be the judge of when privacy is "needed" or how I exercise it.
Maybe you'd like it to be, but right now it's not the case, basically anywhere, no matter how righteously you assert it. And you're a bit of an outlier if you think it should be. TBH, AFAICT, most folks think things like dark money, tax evasion, terrorist funding, proceeds of crime, proceeds of dictatorship and oligarchy, political bribes etc etc should be tracked and intercepted, so you're going to have an uphill battle trying to establish it as any sort of right.
And as we've seen with tornado-cash - if you deliberately build systems that enforce it, working around the law by making transfers that can't be traced, you don't magically solve the 'problem' of the law applying to you. In fact you probably create more.
Yes, yes it is. It might be that you are okay with that being violated, but it does not mean that it stops being a right, and it does not mean that people should accept losing it away.
> Absolute/mathematical financial privacy in particular we're talking about.
If you believe that, feel free to stop using WhatsApp or whatever e2e encrypted system you are using right now.
> dark money, tax evasion, terrorist funding, proceeds of crime should be tracked
Can governments make their best effort to track all of that? Sure. Does that mean that law-abiding citizens should lose their rights over it? Absolutely not!
Honestly, citizens like you that want to normalize State Surveillance concern me more than any "darknet hacker" ever will. Didn't you learn anything with the Patriot Act?
> working around the law by making transfers that can't be traced
No. No one making a transaction using tornado cash is "working around the law". Using tornado cash (by itself) is not a crime.
Making payments online without being worried that people can access your whole transaction history is crucial for it to be a viable alternative. Please stop with this absurd FUD and stop associating privacy with "something only for the interest of malicious actors".
But it's not a right. If something is not a right in any jurisdiction on earth, the idea that you have this right is a philosophical exercise, not something based on any sort of reality. You can’t really even claim it’s being violated if this absolute right to financial privacy is not enumerated anywhere and never has been.
> it does not mean that people should accept losing it away.
They've never had such a right to lose.
> If you believe that, feel free to stop using WhatsApp or whatever e2e encrypted system you are using right now.
Speech and money are not equivalent.
> Does that mean that law-abiding citizens should lose their rights over it?
Rights they don't have?
> Honestly, citizens like you that want to normalize State Surveillance concern me more than any "darknet hacker" ever will. Didn't you learn anything with the Patriot Act?
Citizens like me who think that, with appropriate warrants and appropriate circumstances, the state ought to be able to access financial information relating to serious crimes? Citizens like ... basically everyone?
> Using tornado cash (by itself) is not a crime.
Except it pretty much is now, as a sanctioned service. So there's that.
> Making payments online without being worried that people can access your whole transaction history is crucial for it to be a viable alternative.
The fact that your blockchain solution can either give total transparency to everyone, or absolute, mathematical privacy that can't be broken even under warrant, is a problem for your blockchain system not the rest of us and not the legal system.
> Please stop with this absurd FUD and stop associating privacy with "something only for the interest of malicious actors".
How about you please stop this FUD? How about you stop throwing around accusations about normalising state surveillance at people who don't agree that absolute, unbreakable financial privacy under all circumstances is a good plan? How about you engage with arguments about what your needs are and why you consider them reasonable, with a backdrop of acknowledging the harm done, instead of engaging in the usual, boring, facile, black-and-white thinking that if I don't agree that a service that North Korea can use to hide a billion dollars is a good thing, I must be for total state surveillance?
How about some fucking subtelty of thought?
You are the type of person that harms the fight to enforce the core rights described by something like the ECHR by calling any action you don't like by a government "against my human rights". It's reductive and harmful.
The privacy rights enshrined in the ECHR (sorry I'm not familiar with what rights are granted to US citizens, i guess they are those in the US Constitution) are those of correspondence (WhatsApp etc.) and to have a private family/private life (no Stasi listening devices in the plant pot).
Both of these have an exception for targeted use as a part of a criminal investigation.
You may not agree with the definition, and Tornado Cash is a core human right as far as you are concerned, which is fair enough. But there is no legal authority to enforce this, as there is with something like the ECHR where there are a large number of countries who have placed the convention into their domestic laws.
> Both of these have an exception for targeted use as a part of a criminal investigation
The problem here is that the people who are not part of a criminal investigation are presumed guilty by mere usage of a tool.
They make it sound like Agent smith shows up and destroys the bad data.
And ideas?
The devices are Androids in remote areas without stable internet.