Comment by sowbug | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sowbug | Hacker News Reader

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You can generate this list yourself.

Take your favorite payment provider (PayPal, Stripe, whichever bank provides your Visa/MasterCard, etc.), and look at their terms of service. Enumerate all the prohibited usages. From that list, delete illegal activities, of course.

The remaining items on the list are your practical examples of use cases. It's roughly the set of things that are legal, but that big corporations have decided you can't do because they're morally questionable or financially risky.

Stripe has an excellent list of examples (https://stripe.com/legal/restricted-businesses). Here is a selection:

* Pornography and other mature audience content (including literature, imagery and other media) depicting nudity or explicit sexual acts

* Online dating services

* Bankruptcy attorneys and bail bonds

* Sports forecasting or odds making with a monetary or material prize

* Charity sweepstakes and raffles for the explicit purpose of fundraising

* Unauthorized sale of brand name or designer products or services

And so on. All these are legal, but in a cashless society without decentralized currency, they might as well be illegal because no centralized payment processor will allow them.

But hey, Bitcoin can also be used for CSAM, unlike VPNs, Tor, or cash, which is why the HN cognoscenti condemns it.

Besides the payment processor I use allowing these things afaik(but that might be an EU vs USA thing): isn't the point of blockchain that everything is immutable and a full history of every transaction is kept? That means that if your wallet(or w/e you use to pay) is ever connected to you as a person, everyone will know what "morally questionable or financially risky" things you did in the past, which unless you don't care about that will still cause you to be really careful using your money on these type of things(honestly: even more careful than right now probably).

You could be careful to not leak your wallet address of course, but if we'd truly be a cashless society without decentralized currency you'd want to buy your groceries with it too, or order computer parts. What prevents these shops you buy from from having a security issue and leaking your wallet address? You could have a separate wallet per shop, but you need to get money into it somehow which can be traced as well(because it's the blockchain).

Note: I'm not an expert on blockchain/crypto, there might be ways to mitigate this, I'm just legit curious as to how this would be solved in a world like this.

I have two answers, one snarky.

Answer #1: relax, they already know everything about you. With every interaction in society, you leave some combination of name, email, address, purchase history, security-camera footage, license-plate footage, IP address, cell-tower history, credit-card number, Venmo likes, etc. The history of a unit of digital currency certainly helps fill in gaps. But whoever "they" are to you, they already know.

Answer #2: No single tool is a one-size-fits-all answer to privacy. TCP/IP needs TLS for transport-layer privacy, DNSSEC and TLS certs for authenticity, VPNs and Tor for protection against traffic analysis, throwaway accounts to segregate one's personal workstreams, and so on. The privacy of the internet results from an ever-evolving collection of tools.

Bitcoin is TCP/IP for money. It's a pipe that allows transfer of value from one place to another -- that's it. It doesn't provide anonymity, but unlike centralized payment-processing systems, it allows the creation of tools on top of it that could provide a practical level of anonymity. A Bitcoin mixer, for example, is comparable to a VPN.

Note that if VPNs or TLS were invented today, rather than decades ago, the Hive Mind would be demonizing them as tools for criminals and/or the kind of person none of us admits to being (purchasers of porn, etc.). We take a lot of internet privacy tools for granted, mostly because we're accustomed to them, but also because they were grandfathered before September 2001.

> But hey, Bitcoin can also be used for CSAM, unlike VPNs, Tor, or cash, which is why the HN cognoscenti condemns it.

Straw man much?

Pretty sure it's just sarcasm.

Out of interest, why cant VPNs, Tor or cash be used for CSAM? My intuition is that those 4 have more or less the same use cases.

You ain't good at sarcasm (obvious one)

He's right. There's no reason, for instance, that CSAM media can't go on the blockchain as a block - and then everyone plays plausible deniability because the "blockchain is immutable". The internet is written in ink, the blockchain is written in unwashable graffiti that many people are taking pictures of to save their own copy of it at any given time.

I'm pointing out a longstanding inconsistency on HN. Every think-of-the-children argument against cryptocurrency also applies to many privacy-focused tools. The loudest commenters in the HN community are anti-censorship, but they espouse the belief that anyone against censorship of money must be a criminal.

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