subsistence234

the conversion (between crypto and fiat) is the problem. you can't convert more than a couple hundred euros without KYC.

>How exactly do you measure what is what on crypto with mixers and anonymous currencies?

you add up all the transactions on the blockchain and subtract all the transactions connected to wallets of centralized exchanges.

>you mean via Bitcoin? You know there are other coins.

"god of the gaps."

tl;dr: you originally claimed there is nothing we can know (and that therefore we should assume without evidence that money laundering via crypto is a huge problem). but there are a few things we can know.

>And if there was crypto, they would be far more efficient at doing what you describe because they don't even need to pay for the planes

They would however need to find people that can sell bitcoins to them.

Let's say a corrupt dictatorship wants to turn their $1T of criminal/stolen assets into BTC. How are they gonna do that?

>Money laundering

They don't need bitcoin for that. Smuggling money into the US (the by far largest global destination for laundered money) via crypto requires the exact same amount of criminal effort (false identities, mules,..) as smuggling money through regular bank transfers, because nowadays all crypto exchanges that are allowed to interact with US banks must establish the identity of their customers same as a regular bank.

So that leaves P2P trades. Their volume can be estimated (in fact: upper bounded, by adding all trades on the block chain and subtracting those corresponding to trades on known centralized exchanges.) It's about $200B per year.

As for money laundering, the range of estimates of global volume per year is pretty wide, ranging from $20B to $5T. If you compare research from the 90s and today, you'll notice that the estimates have not changed, meaning: similar methodology applied to current data will yield estimates that are close to the estimates from the 1990s, adjusted for inflation.

If the low end estimates are true, then money laundering is not a serious problem and using it as pretext for destroying civil rights is a joke, so let's go with the UN's reasonably big estimate: $800 billion - $2 trillion.

In that case, even if *ALL* P2P bitcoin trades were criminal, they would still only amount to 10%-20% of global money laundering.

Finally: The total BTC market cap is ~$400B, half of that has not been traded since 2015. Given the risk affinity of career criminal and the inherent volatility of criminal enterprise and given the historical rise of BTC, don't you think at least 10% of mone launderers would keep at least 10% of their money laundering transactions as crypto instead of cashing all of it out into USD? But they wouldn't keep them on exchanges. Looking at the blockchain data, it's difficult to make that work *UNLESS* only a small amount (less than $100B) money laundering happens via crypto.

Almost every serious recent scandal that goes against dominant hegemonic interests was "a crazy conspiracy theory" until the day when the evidence for it became overwhelming, then it switched instantly into a "nothingburger", "everyone always knew it was true," old news. The most important thing, both before the switch and after, seems to be to prevent people from talking about it.

>I don't want to be callous towards the abuelitas and students and remote-working

but their suffering is a sacrifice you are willing to make for the good of our blessed tax authorities.

not only on hackernews, also on reddit and twitter. all following a similar script.

good point, we gotta keep discussion of this topic hidden, so people don't get any weird ideas about questioning our blessed three letter agencies or the holy MIC.

>queerness is very much still edgy

Something that people advertise about themselves on their linkedin profiles in order to get better job offers is the opposite of edgy.

Counterculture is when you have the same tastes, consumption habits, and political beliefs as a mid level HR manager at a Silicon Valley tech company.

Counterculture is when most of your beliefs align with what the Raytheon PR pushes out. That's how you punk in 2020s.

I would love it if my ethnic group were more widely known.

>Consider empathy.

You're not really asking for empathy. Neither of us is the arbiter of right and wrong. You have an opinion, so does everyone else.

Well, it's easy money. Whether they actually care... who knows?

What does the vast majority of Native Americans (ca three million people), or specifically the members of Apache tribes, think?

>The survivors of that genocide are asking we stop doing that.

No they aren't.

Three people are asking. Three people, who most likely didn't survive anything, and just realized that extortion is easy money.

_______

Vote on it!

Let's ask the actual members of the Apache tribes today how they feel about the name. We both know this is gonna be like "latinx" -- only white people (with lots of "education" and rich parents) care about this stuff.

Vote on it!

If half of all members of current Apache tribes want the name change, it should be changed.

But we both know that less than 1% of actual native Americans feel slighted by the name, there's a larger percentage that like it.

> the people involved

Who are these people? They're certainly not representative of Native Americans overall. Just like demanding the use of "latinx", 99% of the supposedly affected minorities either don't care or would prefer to leave it as is. This kind of activism is by and for white people, especially the kind with lots of family money, lots of "education" but few marketable skills.

> The Irish Software Foundation was named from respect for the Irish people, well-known for their fighting spirit and perseverance against hundreds of years of adversity.

oh no that would be horrible I bet the Irish would be so mad.

It's a diversity shakedown. Extortion racket.

Yeah, nice principles, unfortunately a bogus threat is enough to make CF compromise them.

Irrational rebellion is a puberty thing. Normal adolescents outgrow that phase by age 16. The loudest Oberlin "rebels" are in their mid-20s, some in their 30s and 40s.

See the wikipedia article to learn what actually happened, the Oberlin statement and the NYT article are misleading:

An employee took a photo of the shoplifter in the act of stealing, the shoplifter got angry and assaulted the employee for this. That's when then the employee tried apprehending the shoplifter.

Assault, not petty theft. Also, doesn't violence turn theft into robbery?

It's not about speed. It's that in courts of law there's something called "due process" -- important safeguards designed to prevent injustice, e.g. the right of the accused to defend himself or herself.

The court of public opinion runs on emotion, with a loud enough megaphone accusers don't need to prove anything, and publicly traded companies are slaves to bad PR.

"hate speech" has no coherent definition, it's whatever the people with enough power to impose discourse limits don't like to be said.

>If it's not faithful to the source, then it's just on the same level as unknown author

Yeah, kinda pointless to buy IP, only to then hire producers that don't understand what made the source material good.

There are many successful protection rackets going around that work by generating bad PR and threatening more bad or worse PR, unless you donate to them and/or hire them as consultants.

If KF are guilty of defamation or other crimes, go after them in court. Don't try to bully cloudflare into acting as executioner of your demands.

"Hate speech" is ill-defined, basically it's just "speech that people with enough power don't like." and what that is can changes at any time.

Many people more intelligent than you (and me) have spent many decades thinking about this issue. E.g. if you can show in court that KF is defaming someone, you can go after them, or if you can show they're involved in other illegal activities. But "I don't like some of the things they're saying on their own forum" is NOT a valid reason.

In a courtroom you wouldn't get away with absurd hyperbole like this. It would hurt your case more than help. No wonder the activists want to avoid court and rule through social media where hyperventilating emotional blackmail is pretty effective.