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Terrorists cause far more physical harm than all of crypto will ever do. Do we ban Signal and Telegram repos so that we can "protect the people"?

Drew has the absolute right to ban crypto from his platform, but it is a piss take to try and justify it as being a societal harm.

I'd like to hear more about your view, but I don't quite see how what you said applies. My point is that, _if_ you considered cryptocurrencies to be nothing other than a scam, it makes sense to ban them on account of the harm they cause to others. Your examples of Signal and Telegram are not the same thing at all, as they are general communication platforms also used for many things other than terrorism. If there was such a chat app specifically made for and exclusively used for terrorism, then yes, I think banning it is the way to go on the grounds I mentioned above. Can you elaborate more on the details you think we disagree on?

> Put yourself in the maintainers' shoes — would you be happy to idly stand by when you know your service is being used to actively harm others' lives? [^1] Perhaps you would, and if so, I would be interested in hearing your view.

Yeah, just like Tor, which is also heavily associated and almost exclusively used for illicit and illegal activities; especially by fraudsters, criminals, scammers, tax / sanctions evasion and illegal drug dealers.

If Tornado Cash is not welcome on SourceHut due to the same association of illicit activity, then I should see no exception to the Tor Project hence it's extremely negative enablement of illegal activity going on there should it attempt to get its source code hosted on SourceHut.

The difference is that projects like Tor were certainly not created with any devious purpose in mind.

Arguments and use cases for anonymity are very easy to come up with.

Blockchain related projects cause damage on two fronts:

- They are commonly created with the explicit goal to scam most people while making very few people rich.

- The tech around blockchains (almost) qualifies as snakeoil. The use cases are nonexistent in the way they are portrayed. This perpetuates some pseudoscience equivalent in the realm of technology. Which is dangerous on its own. Blockchain is like Homeopathy.

No other use case has come up, and any blockchain related project has to simply lie from the get go to even justify its existence. (NFTs; "block chain in gaming" which is total bs from start to finish, portrayed as if they magically make assets appear in other games, which makes no sense whatsoever; block chains where they offer 0 advantages over databases, because a single company keeps ownership and administrative privilege; et cetera)

"Lots of stuff is bad and so all of it must be bad" is a weak argument. Look at email: 85% of mail is spam and scam.

If you read beyond the hype the use cases are very clear, even if they are very narrow: disintermediation, decentralization, and making permissionless payments and contracts.

Blockchains like Monero and zcash are pretty good ways to handle anonymous payments across the world, compared to sending cash in an envelope or trusting a third-party with your privacy. If Tor would be allowed on SourceHut even with its negatives, so should Monero and zcash. Monero and zcash were not built with the explicit goal to scam people, and they do provide features that were not easily achievable prior to this technology.

> The difference is that projects like Tor were certainly not created with any devious purpose in mind.

Oh it was. It was created specifically to enable US agents communication with the headquarters. Which is definitely a military/intelligence purpose. And giving general public a tool for anonymity was specifically an exercise in providing a anonymity set for agents.

Tor was created with the purpose in mind of the US spying on foreign countries, but it certainly has many legitimate uses as well.

>- They are commonly created with the explicit goal to scam most people while making very few people rich.

Examples? I'm struggling to come up with examples outside of something like "ponzicoin". The typical token/ICO project has some plausible business model (ie. you're investing in a token that allows you to use this smart contract, which presumably will have demand if the smart contract becomes popular) which makes it hard to call it an "explicit" scam, even if it does turn out to be effectively a ponzi.

Basically most ICOs. Almost anything that mentions tokenomics. Most of these only function when you have an influx of new buyers. This basically includes all that provide a token to use some smart contract. In the worst case, you have a useless token that you can use with a smart contract that does precisely nothing. Apart from having made some people money and providing money for the affiliated companies, even if they have a business model, it would in most cases be better served to function without blockchain. As someone else said, the most compelling use case is independence from banks and other institutions, which is an ideological position that does not serve most business models.

> There are people here who seem to take the view that businesses hosting the content of others ought to absolutely protect their "freedom of speech", no matter the content. I disagree.

I also disagree, so long as competitors that disagree with such decisions are also permitted, and so long as the entity in question is not monopolistic or is acting as some kind of widely used utilities for speech. On some issues dissent isn't permitted, and there are many cases where some platforms are arguably acting as utilities.

I agree with you! There's an interesting discussion to be had there in the general case. SourceHut being easily self-hostable means this isn't an issue in this case.

It’s a political statement. I don’t think declaring “inaction is political” makes it so. Sounds like sloganeering.

Inaction is a political position in support of the status quo. It is the equivalent of saying "I am fine with this".

I disagree with this. Inaction is merely an acknowledgement that we can't be informed, effective activists on everything. I'm pretty much disengaged from political activism these days, because I don't want to be manipulated into joining the human equivalent of a botnet. Instead I focus on the one area (accessibility for disabled people) where I'm actually knowledgeable enough to have an informed opinion, and where I can actually do something meaningful.

Edit to add: Also, accepting the status quo on some things, even if one doesn't think it's ideal, may be necessary to be maximally effective in one's primary area. So my main open-source project in the area of accessibility is maximally permissively licensed (the MIT/Apache dual license typical in the Rust community), is hosted on GitHub, and targets proprietary platforms first, because I care more about accessibility than any of these other things.

I have no problem with this specific decision though.

It seems to me like the disagreement isn't as big as you make it out to be. This is an instance where the maintainer of a business has strong views that they consider well-informed on the social impact of an issue, and there is no pragmatic barrier to taking action according to their values, so they are doing this. Inaction in this case might be reprimandable, but I am not saying that I reprimand them or you for neglecting other social issues or anything like that. I am sympathetic with the idea that we cannot all have well-informed views on everything, and that we might not want to act based on half-baked views. I think there is a subtle and interesting discussion to be had there.

Thank you for your work on accessibility! :)

Fair enough. I think Drew is right to value issues such as environmental impact and global wealth inequality to the extent that his company turns away some software projects, even free software projects. I mainly replied to his comment because, taken out of context, that kind of argument can be used (and IMO sometimes is used) to pressure people into taking a stand on a particular issue of the moment.

adding to that it is difficult to engage in political activism without getting into partisan politics which is undesirable to some.

There are billions of political issues on Earth. Do you think if someone isn't protesting against water spoilage in some random village on the opposite side of the planst, then they support it?

To clarify, I would narrow my statement, perhaps, to something like this: "inaction [regarding a subject with which you are familiar and are in a position to act on] is a political position".

I'd say issues which meet this definition are still way too numerous to be active about all of them.