Reddit co-founder’s quest for unseizable property
forbes.com
forbes.com
Here's a monkey: https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061...
But what's actually on the blockchain? A pointer to an IPFS URL:
https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmeSjSinHpPnmXmspMjwiXyN6zS4E9zccariGR3...
Which in turn points to a picture again on IPFS.
For this to work:
First OpenSea has to do this work to format it in a human-readable way. If the authorities contact OpenSea, this may be disabled.
Next, the ipfs.io domain has to keep resolving. This can be stopped by the authorities and ICANN.
Next, ipfs.io has to keep returning data at those URLs. That can be stopped by the authorities and whover runs ipfs.io.
And if we work around the need for an IPFS proxy and talk to IPFS directly, then this still only works so long people keep on hosting that image. I don't know how many people is that world-wide, but probably not that many.
Even assuming this survives a hostile government and keeps working, the real-life owner is usually easily found and targeted.
I personally think its useful to qualify your statement to be about improper common uses of NFTs, since few other people knows there is a difference too.
Why you would do that is another question.
That said, (a) NFT infrastructure is notoriously bad and doesn't work as it is now and (b) why on Earth would you do all that just to prove you own a picture of monkey.
Ultimately the govt has shown that private does not actually mean private. you can build a network, business, or even a country and if someone doesnt like it. buh bye. no questions just consequences.
we need a wireless, encrypted, and secure network, we do not have one yet.
until then this is all make believe fun until someone in government finds out they can make money controlling it. and then it gets real, fast.
I'm not saying NFTs are the answer to anything, just that there is more than one way to implement.
NFTs extend past pictures that services agree to honor in their metaverses with contractually enforced royalties.
So I'm not sure if the "depends on external infrastructure" criticism really holds. It does require some participation in the IPFS peer-to-peer network, at least for you to download the content the first time, but that's also trivially true of the blockchain itself.
Some NFTs contain an HTTP URL to a specific IPFS proxy. This one in particular indeed doesn't, which is better.
> but it would be more difficult to take down all the peers hosting that IPFS content
True, but IPFS isn't private. If the authorities want it badly enough they can create a fair amount of trouble.
> So I'm not sure if the "depends on external infrastructure" criticism really holds. It does require some participation in the IPFS peer-to-peer network, at least for you to download the content the first time, but that's also trivially true of the blockchain itself.
IPFS is far more vulnerable than the blockchain. Arguably you're not participating in anything specific when you run a blockchain node. On IPFS you voluntarily mirror content. That means that to provide an extra source of data not only you must run IPFS, but you must voluntarily take the step to mirror this particular file.
So while on say Ethereum there's as many copies of everything as there are nodes, on IPFS it's very possible there's just a single server in the entire world that's hosting that particular data.
Land requires administration and military protection which is an ongoing fee but there are a lot of people who think it should be free. This then requires cross subsidization by income tax which in turn means the GDP must never go down as that would cut into income taxes that pay for land related services which are provided for free.
Here the NFT is kind of like land in that it requires both administration (OpenSea) and protection (Proof of stake). In principle the owner of an NFT would have to pay an insignificant "rental" fee to keep his NFT alive/hosted.
Your government may not be able to seize your property from you, but they also can't seize your property back from criminals. And they still know where you live and have guns, so I'm not sure how much unseizability is gained.
Try to "seize" the belief in the death and resurrection of Christ from one billion believers (or even from one sufficiently devoted).
Even if the story isn't real, it has very real and tangible consequences.
A painting is seizable. But if it is simple enough, it can be recreated from memory. How could you seize it?
Ultimately it depends on what you care about. Often we care about seizable things. But not everything is seizable.
I'm curious if he thinks his "unseizable" digital assets will be worth anything in the event where the US is illegally seizing assets from citizens (which seems to be his reason for "investing" so heavily in digital assets - due to past family history). In an event like that, I'd much rather have food and fresh water supplies than some NFTs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
All though, to be clear, I think the risk of a collapse isn't worth worrying about. It's like prepping for a nuclear war. The chances of happening are tiny and the chances of surviving are even smaller.
Of course gold is still a great option, the most obvious disadvantage is it can be physically seized at the border.
The only real merit is storing value in strictly a stable currency (like USDC) and holding the private key in a secure, hidden location. Even then, if there's any traces (bank routing) to that wallet address, the government or some other institution can legally press to take ownership.
As someone that's been in the crypto scene a very long time, I've come to the conclusion that there's no real alternative to local and federal political involvement to secure a fair economy. Crypto will not save you if politics (or a hostile mega corporation) turn against you.
Another thought experiment is what if a billionaire decides to hide all their money in crypto to avoid taxes or asset seizing?
That seems a lot more important in any case, in that fancy digital assets aren't going to prevent the atrocities mentioned in the beginning of the article.
Currencies that aren't state backed will always have massive fluctuation in value anyway. If you are Argentinean, the USD is a better store of value than BitCoin.
A pump and dump with a good story is still just a pump and dump. NFT's and crypto are for suckers and those who prey upon them.
I think the idea of making unseizable assets is noble, sort of, but the concept of property, and money or value, is social by design. The assets with intrinsic value are wheat fields, oil tankers, and silos of grain... not artistic works.
I think the idea of a digital, anonymous currency, though fraught with problems, can be extended past national (thus cultural) borders, but the same can be accomplished with the banking system. When a country plans to seize your assets, the goal should be to leave the country, not remain with hidden cryptos.
If you find yourself getting beat with a wrench and unable to fight back, you're going to have to accept the beating in and of itself, and accept the fraction of the full truth you tell them has little correlation to what kind of beating you're going to get.
However, in the time itself, your brain would go into it's 'survival mode' and logically tell itself that if you give in to their demands, they'll possibly let you live.
Being able to override that preset state of mind is very hard to do, and why hostage-type situations work; whether you or a loved one is the hostage in question.
They'll probably keep hitting you if you talk. The will surely do it if you stay silent. What use is your crypto once you’re dead?
The idea that crypto currency is flawed and violence will be used by criminals to seize wallets is absurd and that the existing legacy financial system has better solutions! seriously what world are these commentators living in.
Slow, methodical, systematic robbing of any significant fraction of the populace is typical an exercise done by government or de facto government. You know, the people in control of bank accounts in the first place.
Attempting to explain this irrefutable, unquestionable fact to a libertarian is like trying to explain sports to me: they ain't interested and can't understand.
They "get" this, but the actual goal is just to remove power from states and put it in the hands of individual property owners so that they are more free to exert it over people with less power.
Your average libertarian is poor, usually rural and not prosperous. They are generally just marks to the very few libertarians who would benefit from de-regulation and less government overisght.
Thinking more there is probably a great deal of overlap between the people who fit my definition of libertarianism and those who fit yours.
Today I would fully agree with you that the most experienced "libertarians" are actually conservatives dressed up in the clothing of freedom, but there's a sucker born every minute, and the key to bumping this particular sucker out of this particular ideology was not an accusation of crypto-conservatism (of which I heard plenty) but rather a frontal attack on the core ideas of libertarianism as I understood them.
On one hand demanding to be treated as if they are representing views in good faith when they are not is one of the most effective and exhausting strategies of the far right, libertarians included. So I try to identify it and refuse to.
But on the other hand yes, surely a lot of self-identified libertarians "on the ground" are being honest about their understanding and motivations, and it's shitty to dismiss their positions as disingenuous when they aren't.
I doubt it's possible to always get it right, and I'm not comfortable choosing one of those two errors to make exclusively. So I do my best and ask for forgiveness when I get it wrong.
But what if you need to combine that person's password with passwords that are in the heads of 5 out of 7 other people, who are all in undisclosed locations in different jurisdictions?
Perhaps a sufficiently resourced adversary could create a realtime deepfake of you, to attend the property transfer online digital ceremony, but the adversary who imprisoned you would also have to convince all of your friends that you had gone on holiday so that they didn't raise the alarm to warn those keyholders that you are under duress.
If you don’t think this is realistic then perhaps you don’t have a home security system with alarm monitoring. It has a distress code that disarms the system so any attacker believes it is safe but instead simultaneously sends a hostage alert to the local police station. It works well because once I accidentally tested it by accidentally putting in my distress code when I had traveled for 48 hours and was extremely tired. 3 mins later local police had silently approached my home and were looking in the windows with guns drawn.
The other seven people would be known only by their public key, and you'd make contact with them through some onion-routed service. You'd never see their face, and all you'd know is that they were based in a different jurisdiction, where presumably the authorities that are after you don't have strong judicial connections.
If your threat model includes an adversary that is willing and able to kidnap and torture 5 innocent people from different countries around the world in order to get to you, then you're literally OBL or the leader of IS, in which case you have bigger problems than securing your passwords.
Crypto has built much to fend off wrench attacks. Multi-sig vaults, timelocks.
The first line from the article is: "Alexis Ohanian’s ancestors perished during the Armenian genocide and had their assets seized." so I think he has considered the threat of asset seizure by violence.
> When a country plans to seize your assets, the goal should be to leave the country, not remain with hidden cryptos.
Odd dichotomy? A better goal is to leave the country with your unseizable assets, rather than praying that you'll be able to withdraw your account at a time of crisis.
Sooner or later wrenching people you'll get a few "sucidal" cases that get lucky and it's game over. Not a great business model.
If you want to use your hidden money on a day-to-day basis, I think most nations are going to ban this practice simply because it's not a sustainable way to operate a state with a tax basis.
The idea that a monero wallet would be perpetually legal is laughable under a scenario where the state starts seizing assets.
It's a double edged sword, where the only justification for something like monero is a fictional totalitarian state, coming... someday. Whereas, in the areas where totalitarianism exists, all of theses things are already trivially illegal... almost exactly at the rates you would suspect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_cryptocurrency_by_...
It's prepper mentality, and unfortunately, it's being exploited by tons of folks entirely happy to cheat on their taxes.
Yeah. And someone with a zillion dollars is actually well-placed to help some of those people out, or maybe even help countries avoid that in the first place, although that's pretty tricky.
You may not owe techbro billionaires better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
sounds pretty goofy to me.