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Comment by throwaway0x7E6 | Hacker News Reader

>This is trivially falsifiable: blockchains are being used to facilitate illegal transactions.

yes, and so does the other crypto - cryptography. facilitating illegal transactions, illegal speech, illegal opinions, illegal thoughts. list of users includes terrorists, drug dealers, pedophiles, Russians, antivaxers and so on.

it boggles me how do people fail still fail to understand, after watching our collective liberty being eroded for the past 20 years in the name of combating terrorists and protecting children, that the slippery slope is not a fallacy but a law of nature.

the people and entities who want cryptocurrency gone don't give a flying fuck about things they feed the useful idiots as the rationale to do it.

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But that isn't answering the question. You're just saying blockchains are good "because slippery slope" without mentioning what they actually do.

I thought their answer was very clear: facilitates illegal transactions

this is a good thing because tyrannical governments make all kinds of things illegal, and blockchain removes some of this absolute power to prevent various transactions

Speaking as someone who has been harmed by ransomware, no, it is very much not a good thing. But presuming it was a good thing that I get my data held for ransom, there's no explanation as to why blockchains are uniquely suited to remove some of that absolute power. They appear to be no different from any other illegal digital banking scheme, such as Liberty Reserve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Reserve

Specifically, the "product" is they've assembled a criminal conspiracy to launder money and hide fraud, and they're offering it as a service. When you have sophisticated scammers running them it always takes time for regulators to unravel these schemes; blockchains certainly did not invent this.

> "in some cases, transacting against the law is a good thing"

> "as a victim of ransomware, it is very much not a good thing"

Blatantly fallacious argument, the point isn't to defend ransomware, but to defend other examples of illegality that are justified.

> They appear to be no different from any other illegal digital banking scheme.

One very important distinction is that Liberty Reserve doesn't exist anymore, because they didn't bother to design a technology that enabled them to dodge prosecution.

Neither did various crypto scams. The big exchanges that the regulators will go after are all centralized.

the bitcoin blockchain seems unlikely to ever stop producing blocks until the end of human civilization

another great argument in favor of banning cryptography. no encryption - no ransomware

I love this take because it's almost there but it's narrowly missing the point just to draw a huge straw man. Ransomware is not specifically enabled by cryptography. It's enabled by people providing "money laundering as a service" which is an apt description for cryptocurrencies.

It’s far closer to the truth than you are willing to admit.

Ransomware is primarily enabled by encrypting your files. How they take payment is irrelevant. No encryption (eg: a universe where AES, RSA, ECEIS is broken), no ransomware.

My position is the fallout of ransomware is enabled by people failing to take backups.

No, this is totally wrong, you didn't think this through. They don't need to do that. They could just copy the files to their own machine, delete them, then send them back when you pay the ransom. Encryption certainly makes it easier for them, but the main thing that enables it is money laundering. Which is the primary reason anyone uses cryptocurrency to transfer huge sums of money.

Could sure, but that’s not how ransomware typically works. Typically, it is a non interactive process that is enabled by automated application of strong encryption delivered via a binary payload. It is encryption that puts the user in danger of malicious intent not the payment rails. Before Bitcoin, LR ukash and shady payment card processors handled this. Cryptocurrency is just a better rail, so good guys and bad guys use it.

Is your problem with the network enabling crime? (Internet?)

Cryptocurrency is not a better rail. In fact it is a worse rail for almost everything. But it is the only rail that currently allows people to do this at the scale it does, due to its operators openly welcoming unlimited amounts of money laundering on the network. This has nothing to do with cryptography or the internet. It is entirely about money laundering. Yes, money laundering happened before, that is not an excuse for these networks to allow it to happen in such large volumes and at such great speed that it is enabling this entire new class of ransomware.

POWERFUL TECHNOLOGY!

Indeed!

We should also ban crime too, that will surely stop it. Why not get rid of general purpose computation and global communication networks while we are torching our technological footprint.

the Internet is here to stay. too useful for commerce and disseminating propaganda globally. it will remain, in some perverse walled-garden form

general purpose computation though... I feel it's already on the chopping block. I think we'll see the first signs during the upcoming "cyber pandemic".

They will take my intels amd and rpis from my cold dead hands!

If you're caught committing crimes (like for instance, using the computers to arrange transactions of human trafficking) and you invoke a standoff and shootout with the police, then yes, they probably will. That's true with or without blockchains.

And because I can see where this is going: The takes along the lines of "it's not illegal, I was just flipping some electrons into ones and zeros" is a really bad take, you can do better than that.

Agreed. Crime is not a good thing, and please do not thing I am trying to endorse it. I just know that it exists and will use whatever resources it has access to. I philosophically disagree with denying ourselves something because someone somewhere can do crime.

Now, encryption and by extension cryptocurrency, this is truly revolutionary. They can shoot me in the head, but they cannot read my data, access my devices, or take the money. All that remains is silicon and metal. I like the idea that when I die, everything I have written privately, and every sat I have earned will rest forever, unreachably.

>I philosophically disagree with denying ourselves something because someone somewhere can do crime.

That's not why we should deny cryptocurrency. We should deny it because it is fundamentally bad, it serves no purpose besides scamming and fraud. The technology is broken and can't ever achieve its stated goals except by pure luck, at which point it is no better than any other solutions.

>they cannot read my data, access my devices, or take the money

Yes, they can. A dedicated aggressor (i.e. a nation state actor) will just torture and blackmail you until you give that up. Of course it gets harder for them if they kill you, then they would have to brute force your data. But then why would they need access to your devices, if you were the target they were trying to get rid of? If your private correspondence was with another party, they can also just blackmail the other party into giving up dirt on you. Cryptography can't actually do anything about these classic "meatspace" techniques.

Multisig constructions were created for the torture case. There are unfortunately cases where this has proven true.

I know your opinion re usefulness, noted. It contrasts greatly with my experiences.

Some of us dream up ways to keep the State out, you keep dreaming up ways the State will defeat it. It is a cat and mouse game for all eternity. I am confident we will survive.

No, you are looking at this totally the wrong way. I don't "dream" of the state defeating things. This is basic threat analysis, it does you no good to avoid doing it. Being "confident" that something will happen in the future is not the same as being confident that your current solution will hold, which chances are it will not. Also, multisig is not appropriate for a two way communication (like for instance, a financial transaction), you need three or more parties to make it useful.

Agree about understanding the threat — but I really don’t think I am avoiding the threat model here.

I’ve been philosophizing on the nature of Bitcoin for a long time. You haven’t given me an attack that would defeat this system yet. If you have a valid attack, I would encourage you to circulate it where technical folks can deal with it.

All you are doing is throwing your opinion that it is useless, the state will defeat it, etc. I mean cool, but coiners will not agree with you. There are many others here that have told you their experiences, threat models and uses.

Non-tyrannical governments (ie most governments) also make very harmful things illegal for very good reasons, and a system which can facilitate these harmful things is in itself a harmful thing.

I don't know how you can argue that facilitating illegal transactions is on balance a good thing, unless you also argue that the world would be better off if all currently-illegal transactions were instead legal.

The problem is where does one determine the point of tyranny? You will find that even the most apparently benign governments can turn given the political will of elected tyrants.

I’d say a government that outlaws abortion is a tyrannical overlord with no legitimacy. And yet here we are.

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