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Comment by scoofy | Hacker News Reader

Again... and I can't stress this enough. The best way to get someone's password isn't phishing, it's threatening to hit them in the head with a wrench. The idea that we can create some sort of libertarian utopia seems blind to the fact that humans are inherently social.

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.

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This probably rates up there with buying an ICBM Silo Condo to sit out the apocalypse. I'm pretty sure if I were hired to guard that condo on a measly salary and the SHTF money would be worthless and I'd be looking at becoming the new owner of that condo and moving my own family in.

OK say I have a few monero wallets. You have no idea how much is in any account or what I've spent on anything, where it's going. How would you know which wallets I gave up? Sure I'll probably hand over $100, maybe even $1000 to some dude with a wrench but I'll die before I give up much more, not to mention you won't even know it was the wrong wallet. And I know this, because I've had a gun pulled to my head before and I decided I'd rather die fighting back than give up my cash -- and good fucking luck getting the key then.

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.

Again... you can do the same thing with offshore bank accounts. If your plan is a novel way to hide money, that's been a solved problem for over a hundred years.

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.

Serious question, what's the best legal option for an American to get a 5 figure offshore bank account? FATCA seems to have made Americans pariahs to the point you can't really get the offshore account (legally or not) unless you're rich. For pragmatic reasons you're kind of left with crypto for sub-$100k sums, although I'm definitely interested in your recommendations.

There obviously wouldn't a legal option in this particular scenario. Though it would obviously be doable. The entire point of this is that the prescriptions are all presumed to be illegal, as the ultimate goal is preventing the state from legally seizing assets.

The idea that a monero wallet would be perpetually legal is laughable under a scenario where the state starts seizing assets.

Buying crypto now while it is legal seems a lot lower risk to me than getting an illegal offshore account. Even if they make crypto illegal later they wouldn't be able to prove I acquired it illegally, and once I acquire it it's nigh impossible to determine whether it's been lost or not.

Again, my point isn't "what do now" it's a conceptual argument as to societies on a forward going basis. Now we likely have no reason to think that our societies are descending into a sectarian and totalitarian nightmare. Thus the vast majority of users of said currencies are likely attempting to freeload of society.

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.

Totally agree. All this bitcoin wallet stuff that's protected by a key is more safe than cash in the ground. When somebody hits you in the head and asks for your encryption key you gonna give it.

But which key is the question isn’t it? why do you assume attacker can know which wallet or address is yours.

because you will tell them while they are hitting you in the head with a wrench.

Why would I have any reason to believe they'd stop after I told them the truth? Read Gulag Archipelago describing tortures by the Soviet regime. When these entities don't know how much information you have, they just beat and beat until they're satisfied it's enough beating that they expect they got the answers. If you tell them everything they keep beating because they think there is more; if you don't tell them everything they keep beating because they think there is more. If they don't know what information you have, whether or not you told all of what you know doesn't have much bearing on how the wrenching goes.

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.

Right now, in the warm state of being able to think calmly about the situation, you'd have absolutely no reason to think they'd stop hitting you with the wrench once you've given in to their demands.

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.

> Why would I have any reason to believe they'd stop after I told them the truth?

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?

Let’s actually try to grow up a bit. All these comments are basically written by Nocoiners who hate crypto. In the real world there isn’t any issue like this, because not sure you guys are aware but anyone sophisticated will be using multisig setups for large crypto holdings.

Also nobody seems to have heard of distress codes. It’s standard in home alarm systems to allow a code which disables the alarm but secretly sends a hostage alarm to authorities. Crypto multisigs will eventually have such setups. This idea that violence will be a more profitable approach when people adopt private currency is simply silly.

Being that an absolute crapload of violence for very small amounts of money happens every single day I'd really like to know what planet you've been on. When someone walks up and points a glock in your face and asks for the pin of your debit card people tend to give it up rather than risk an extra hole in their face.

I honestly wonder if you've actually ever been robbed at gunpoint. The kind of long drawn out process where you have time to instantiate a local crypto wallet and check it out and see if the story must match up is rare, and more like in the movies. And if the robber does not act extremely quickly and keep the tempo of surprise up they will quickly find out they're not the only one with glocks.

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.

All I’m saying is that nothing about crypto will increase that violence. If anything it will decrease it. Bank debit cards don’t have decoy designs or distress codes. Programable private money with heavy competition will bring solutions to this problem not make it worse.

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.

> The best way to get someone's password isn't phishing, it's threatening to hit them in the head with a wrench.

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.

"Oh, right, so tell us the names of the seven others whose password shares we need?", then proceeds to arrest and beat at least five of those seven others.

Did you miss where I said "in undisclosed locations in different jurisdictions"?

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.

Nah I’ll just handover the password to the decoy distress wallet. I’ve paid 45 sats per week to a sentinel service which watches for any transactions from the distress address. I also walk around with latest Apple watch that sends out my last know position every 10 seconds. The sentinel service sees a distress transaction and locates local authorities.

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 idea that we can create some sort of libertarian utopia seems blind to the fact that humans are inherently social.

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 aren't stupid or dense, it's just that their stated motivation isn't their true one most of the time.

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.

For example, is this article about someone with generational trauma using that as inspiration to help prevent future atrocities or is it a puff piece about a rich guy who is motivated by a desire to keep all his assets and landed on the "unseizable property" angle as a more successful story to sell investors now that the sector he heavily invested in has crashed?

It's a PR piece. Most articles that revolve around a single persona are those. They aren't that expensive to produce and pay for either.

I was definitely that stupid and dense during my libertarian phase. It took me a while to start generating counterexamples to the "property rights promote individual liberty" idea, though of course once I started the trickle quickly became a flood, I saw the floodwater all around me, and the gimmick was up.

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.

Yes this is true. I really struggle to find balance with this one.

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.

I think it's really generous to think that they actually understand that libertarian-ism wont work.

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.

Because the state never overreaches and exerts power over people. Jesus christ. Try living in China for a month

This is probably true but in my experience most libertarians are just bigots who think wrapping themselves in a freedom cloak shields their bigotry from criticism.

Thinking more there is probably a great deal of overlap between the people who fit my definition of libertarianism and those who fit yours.

That really is a perfect analogy.

> When a country plans to seize your assets, the goal should be to leave the country, not remain with hidden cryptos.

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.

Libertarian utopia is same dangerous nonsense as communist utopia. It totally ignores human nature.

> The best way to get someone's password isn't phishing, it's threatening to hit them in the head with a wrench.

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.

For those who don't know the reference: https://xkcd.com/538/

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