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Comment by dannyw | Hacker News Reader

A vague, extraordinarily broad, and difficult to interpret statement is absolutely a disaster.

You might not like cryptocurrency, but this is akin to the infrastructure bill having a provision classifying anyone "responsible for and regularly providing any service effectuating encryption of information" as a munitions-dealer -- with wide downstream implications on (1) open source software, and libraries like OpenSSL, etc, and (2) vague enough to cover pretty much every webmaster who uses TLS certificates.

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Disaster for whom? If the side effect of this ambiguity is a mass exodus from crypto who loses out apart from speculators and the black market?

I'd feel a lot more sympathetic if crypto uses cases didnt predominantly fall into those two camps (as is the case for cryptography).

Ambiguous laws are intrinsically harmful, so it is all citizen who lose out, who will be living under a legal regime that keeps on gradually degrading as people forget the principles it was built on.

Here’s an example of an ambiguous law:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The 1st Amendment is extremely clear. The only ones calling it "ambiguous" are those looking to invent exceptions to it out of whole cloth. "What, 'no law' whatsoever? Clearly the authors and the representatives who passed this amendment couldn't have possibly objected to my reasonable proposals, so there must be some subtle nuance of interpretation at odds with the perfectly plain and unambiguous language."

If you think the definitions of religion or the press aren’t ambiguous I don’t know what to tell you, and that’s before we get into the exact meaning of the concept of “establishment”

In the context in which the text was written the meaning was perfectly obvious, since it was directed at exactly the sorts of abuses they'd just finished fighting a war over. "An establishment of religion", for example, referred to establishing an official state religion. "The freedom of speech, and of the press" was literally about speaking to each other and owning and utilizing printing presses—the use of "the press" as a general term for journalists didn't start until around 1921[0].

It's really much simpler than people make it seem.

[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/press

I agree that ambiguous laws are a bad idea in general. I still don't see how all citizens lose out when most are explicitly unaffected though.

First they came for 'taxes' then they came for 'guns' and then they came for anything they wanted.

Developing Open Source software is not “services”, unless you have a customer paying for it.

Plenty of open source projects receive funding for their work. Just running ads on your site to defray hosting expenses can be enough to get you classified as a commercial service these days.

Sure, but by “service” I mean “service to someone”, not “a commercial service”. It’s about who you work for and what for, not whether you provide a commercial service at all.

In case readers don't remember:

https://www.google.com/search?q=encryption+munitions+1990s

And of course the t-shirt:

https://www.google.com/search?q=perl+rsa+munitions+t+shirt

To be fair, proof of work crypto does impact electric infrastructure, although it’s difficult to pin that on the negative or positive side of neutral because the cheapest electric rates possible include provisions for demand response / shut offs. The biggest operations will generally be trying to negotiate the cheapest rate possible, but that’s not a given. Proof of work very much affects the generation side (generation costs for all customers, greenhouse gas emissions, etc) in the net negative though. The only exception to this would be on off-grid installations or installations on >100% renewable networks with complete demand response for the crypto and no other alternatives for exporting that power elsewhere. Even then it’s creating useless waste heat, but meh. For what it’s worth, I’ve owned Bitcoin and others in the past but now that I’ve had to deal with the impacts directly in my industry I’m definitely over my infatuation.

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