Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

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> Especially living in a corrupt authoratarian system, even only those two outweight all the bad sides (tx fees, scalability, PoW environmental effects) for me. It does more good than it harms in the big picture.

More accurately, it could if it actually worked but since it doesn't all you're doing is paying more for lower quality of service. A key concept to understand is that when blockchain sales people say “no authority” they mean “except the miners, software developers, exchange and oracle operators, and the governments which have jurisdiction over them”. Just as real-world censorship is far more often based on after the fact consequences rather than preventing someone from speaking first, consequences can be applied retroactively to anyone who participates in illegal transactions and blockchains very helpfully publish a full list of transactions so the authorities don't miss anyone.

We're seeing this right now: technically, someone in Russia can make a Bitcoin transfer since the Russian government hasn't chosen to block the protocol at the network layer but when they do so they are finding that many companies won't participate in those transfers and since the history is public that can extend to any downstream transactions based on the transferred funds.

> More accurately, it could if it actually worked but since it doesn't all you're doing is paying more for lower quality of service. A key concept to understand is that when blockchain sales people say “no authority” they mean “except the miners, software developers, exchange and oracle operators, and the governments which have jurisdiction over them”.

Critics like to say "it doesn't work", then the next day complain about how it enables a ransomware plague. You can't have it both ways. The fact is it clearly works.

This isn't to say it's magic; it doesn't protect you from bullets any more than it makes you coffee. It is not a magical unicorn; just finding a reason why there might still be censorship somewhere is not a valid argument.

Free speech laws work even if Facebook deletes your post, or you a fired, or sometimes someone doesn't appeal their conviction. Your argument about "miners, developers or exchange operators" existing is not any more valid than this one is.

It worked as long as nobody was trying to go after it. That's been changing and as we've seen the parties involved have plenty of real-world presence which various authorities have been able to take advantage of. This is why the absolute claims about “free speech” are simply reflecting a deeper misunderstanding: it's true that nobody can stop you from making a Bitcoin transaction unless they block the protocol entirely but the retroactive consequences deter people quite effectively, very similarly to how to even very authoritarian states can't prevent you from saying something in public but can very effectively make it too risky for most people to do.

> Free speech laws work even if Facebook deletes your post, or you a fired, or sometimes someone doesn't appeal their conviction. Your argument about "miners, developers or exchange operators" existing is not any more valid than this one is.

Free speech laws generally don't apply to private companies like Facebook, who are generally given a high level discretion for how they choose to run their communities. The same is true of a blockchain network: the implementers and operators set the policies and since these systems are based on money that generally means that you're getting the rules which the major players either want or are required to implement by the governments with jurisdiction over them. That last part is key to understand: maybe a protocol allows you to make a transaction somewhere but the cost/risk shifts considerably if the recipient knows that they won't be able to use it in most places and every potential buyer can easily tell that it's on a list of tainted tokens.

> It worked as long as nobody was trying to go after it. That's been changing

I see no evidence of this. Authorities have been going after crypto-currencies users very effectively ever since the early days of Bitcoin; from the first darknet market takedowns, to arresting people on LocalBitcoins because they didn't register as money transmitters.

It sounds like we agree on the limitations of a ledger, but saying it "doesn't work" simply because the physical world exists and governments can arrest you, attempt to track you, make rules for exchanges and merchants etc is nonsense. Of course they can.

They can equally block encrypted chat apps, VPNs, prevent device makers from allowing them onto the hardware, force backdoors, effectively threaten people who use them, or spy on your communications locally.

None of these things mean that encryption doesn't work, or that it isn't useful.

It's true that encryption is useful despite not being perfect but there's an important bit of missing context: blockchain systems are being sold as suitable protection for people “living in a corrupt authoratarian system” and that changes the risk calculations considerably.

If you live in a relatively open democracy, the knowledge that your encrypted chat app could be attacked by the police isn't a huge deal because there's a legal process protecting you but that trade off changes considerably if you are at risk from a hostile government. Systems which require you to leave a public paper-trail for the authorities, for example, are too risky to consider and something more privacy oriented is still a significant gamble — especially since in such an environment it's likely that you'd be at risk simply having it installed on your devices unless you were certain that it made no identifiable network activity. If I lived in China now, for example, I would not want to risk having something like a VPN client or Signal installed on my phone if the police stopped me or started linking DNS lookups to ISP customers.

I could perfectly think of a scenario where there is an anonymously deployed "faucet" contract with some logic that distributes its coins to various L2 protocols or maybe some form of future shards, and enables people to interact with that contract's currency on those upper protocols whereas anyone can claim those coins by only paying gas. And anyone could participate anonymously by doing a little mining over VPN/Tor in a pool with a freshly generated wallet for a little Ether that can be used for gas, and again submit their transactions containing any speech they like using again VPN/Tor and not interacting with those wallets with any KYC-enabled exchange.

Sure, gas fees aren't that low to cover with "a little mining" but I'm sure there will be a middle ground between with more gas available for anonymous posting and optimizing gas use for these actions, with some volunteers over the world incentivizing free speech contract interaction with lower gas fees just like people volunteering to participate in Tor network.

While we're not there yet, I see it very hard to trace any transactions that way.

> again submit their transactions containing any speech they like using again VPN/Tor and not interacting with those wallets with any KYC-enabled exchange.

That last part seems like the key challenge to me: what you described isn't cheap and it only works to the extent that you can do business with people who aren't following KYC. That makes it more likely that the entire service will be tainted because the non-trivial cost means that people aren't going to use it if they don't need to.

The other problem is that durable records are inherently risky. Your use of such a system isn't just a question of whether someone can see the transactions immediately but whether it'll retroactively become de-anonymized — the public blockchains are right out there but if you're trying to use a private L2 system you now have another party you're placing a lot of trust in — not unlike the questions about how you'd be able to trust a VPN provider or Tor nodes not logging your traffic.

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