Coinbase is reportedly selling geolocation data to ICE
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
Whenever an executive starts complaining[1] about how politics is impacting their workplace I see management incompetence. Politics exists. It exists for everyone. If your company is having an unusually difficult time getting work done in a given political environment, the conditions that are causing that probably have more to do with the company environment than politics writ large.
Prohibition is always a largely ineffective policy. People have feelings about the world. If you can't find a way to make space for those feelings somehow they will make their own space, often at the least convenient moment.
[1] Most recently this was Kraken CEO Jesse Powell
> Coinbase’s mission is to create an open financial system for the world. This means we want to use cryptocurrency to bring economic freedom to people all over the world.
Selling geolocation data to ICE definitely detracts from that mission. Whoops!
[1] https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-is-a-mission-focused-comp...
The thing I hate about this fake corporate mission is there is absolutely no need for the lie.
Just be honest, hey we started this company, the founders will have disproportionate returns because we were first and control the equity power structure, you will work for us and make less money - even in the event of an exit. Sometimes we will fire you. We will make mistakes. Lets be adults.
Instead its: "In our supreme nobility we sacrifice everything at the alter of the almighty cause, and so should you. Follow in our virtuous foot steps. Ask not what your company can do for you, but what you can do for your company!" ...
And until shareholder supremacy is no longer a thing, anything else is a lie
Support your favorite B-corp, folks
You plebes should just be thankful that you have jobs.
"Large institutional investors are, in effect, “Universal Owners”, as they often have highly-diversified and long-term portfolios that are representative of global capital markets. Their portfolios are inevitably exposed to growing and widespread costs from environmental damage caused by companies. They can positively influence the way business is conducted in order to reduce externalities and minimise their overall exposure to these costs. Long-term economic wellbeing and the interests of beneficiaries are at stake. Institutional investors can, and should, act collectively to reduce financial risk from environmental impacts."
Also https://theshareholdercommons.com/ / https://engine1.com/ that are working to embed this into corporate DNA
I get what you're saying, and I dislike the deception also, but there is an intention and a purpose behind it.
The mission statement is for recruiting and retention. At a good company, it has some truth to it. Coinbase management understood that companies are supposed to have mission statements, and they may have even understood why. They just didn't understand that mission statements are supposed to be true.
(Obviously a lot of other companies don't get that part either.)
I once had a CEO literally drop that line in to an email, after berating the dev team for failing to hit an impossible deadline, that he'd pulled forwards over the vehement objections of the VP of Development.
It was the most utterly bizarre, and divorced from reality, email I think I've ever seen from leadership.
It always portrays the image they would like to have and by default do not, otherwise there would be no reason to communicate it so prominently.
Probably because it's not happening there to nearly the extent it happens at big tech companies, partly due to the culture of older companies and partly due to the company attracting a certain type of morally agnostic person. Exxon did not release a statement following Friday's supreme court decision like most tech companies did and did not respond to comment when asked about it.
Just going to toss my hat in the ring and say that I think selling data to ICE falls on the right half of the right/wrong spectrum. Not everyone agrees with your specific take on right and wrong. Sometimes those discussions shouldn't happen in the workplace.
Belief that statehood is evil or that free immigration is a natural right are fairly out of the mainstream. Given that tools that support enforcing the opposite is mainstream.
Migration impacts all kinds of things which are intertwined with physical scarcities and order- community service funding, housing needs and so forth. Having an orderly process for migration isn't at all related to cryptocurrency; many aren't actually private at all, and for the most part merely allow control over the supply to not be controlled by a central agency like the federal reserve.
Being opposed to unlawful migration would be the equivalent of opposing people generating coins off the chain then forcing them in, creating more than were actually generated by mining. (I may have butchered the analogy, hopefully it at least makes some sense as to why they may not see it as an ironic or hypocritical stance).
ICE is just a continuation of slavery. If Central/South Americans didnt continue to be leveraged by EVERYONE in the economy then there would be no american dream for them quest over the boarder for.
There are lots of ways to unproductively engage with politics - and I agree that we live in an age of highly visible unproductive engagement. However, banning engagement makes it official company policy that every interaction with politics be uninformed. "It was hard so we gave up" is just not a good sign for your leadership.
Not necessarily - I don't think engagement is particularly informative. A ban, even a widely flouted one, gives people permission to disengage, and might be valuable for that reason alone (in the same way that e.g. people have argued that monasteries and convents created a good place for asexuals in society, even when their rules were widely flouted).
Ethical concerns should be raised at work, but I believe politics at work should be avoided.
There's no such thing as a group of people who agree about politics. They only think they agree until enough details start coming out.
The question is whether these differences are handled respectfully and people learn from each other, or whether they see it as a moral battle and end up hating each other. In the current cultural climate, the latter seems more likely. And I see no benefit from carrying that into the workplace.
Politics and ethics can intersect, for instance, if you are writing some graphics software and someone realizes it would make a great missle guidance system. Some people might feel that's perfectly patriotic and be happy to provide it to the DoD; others might never want to work on a weapon. Political opinions lead to divergent ethical codes.
But here with Coinbase it doesn't seem to be an intersection at all. It's unethical regardless of political persuasion.
And cash has significant security advantages over crypto in that it's very hard to remotely steal the dollars from someone's physical wallet or mattress; even if it is relatively easy to just walk up and take them.
Edit: Also, I know cash is the governmental evolution of bank notes which didn't exist before banks, and that the original decentralized currency would be like, pinches of gold or whatever.
https://www.frbservices.org/assets/financial-services/cash/f...
https://www.moneyfactory.gov/services/currencyredemption.htm...
(If the government had a sense of humor that would be moneyprinter.gov heh)
What if it's the middle third of the bill that's missing? Does the 51% need to be contiguous? The links suggest that you only need 51% in total, even if the bill was shredded.
Concretely: Could you take 1/3 from opposite ends of two different bills and present the pieces as 2/3 of three different bills to turn two old bills into three new ones? Putting aside the fact that this would be fraud, of course. Someone must have tried it at some point.
It's a lot easier to steal my cash, or my bank balance, or my securities, or any other physical or fiat asset I own, than it is to steal even moderately-secured Bitcoins.
ICE doesn't know how to get it and Coinbase does, probably.
HTML is free, yet it's common for companies to hire other companies to build with it.
Why run complicated scams when you can run simple scams? Just rug 'em.
For most people, a friendlier ideal is probably social recovery wallets, as advocated by Vitalik. You can restore access much like centralized services can, except instead of relying on a big company you're relying on your circle of friends and family. You can also include a company or two, if you want, without the company being a single point of failure.
https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html
Reversing charges is a different point, which could be accomplished pretty simply with 2-of-3 sigs if there's market demand for it. At the moment, scaling issues have kept crypto from being used much for retail payments anyway (though that's gradually getting fixed).
As for freezing cards, that's something we have to do a lot because we hand over full account credentials to everyone we pay and just trust them to keep those details safe and not abuse them. I've replaced two credit cards due to fraud, and it was a hassle. It boggles my mind that we've had public key cryptography for fifty years and we're still not using it for payments. Never mind blockchains, just upgrading the banking system to use public keys would be a huge improvement.
I can even take advantage of chargebacks to ensure merchants give me what I paid for. Chargebacks are incredibly customer-friendly - but of course they're good for businesses too as it affords folks a degree of confidence at unfamiliar merchants. And I get various kinds of insurance - they'll even reimburse me if I drop and smash what I bought 90 days after I bought it.
I can even use chargebacks to commit fraud against merchants.
P.S. You think you're so smart for using paypal or something, wait until you set up a business and adversaries falsely accuse you of fraud. No system can completely prevent fraud, but the credit card system is insecure by design and blind to the externalities of fraud.
All you're doing is moving the fraud potential from the customer to the merchant. Without the network and with instant finality, you've left them with no recourse.
Both credit cards and crypto as a payment primitive in isolation are secure. However, that's a very myopic view of a transaction. A transaction extends beyond simply the payment rails. You're leaving customers significantly worse off by forcing them into no-recourse payments with instant finality. Merchants, being businesses, are significantly better able to protect themselves - as they are able to insure against these losses - and the ability to charge back transactions increases the transaction volume at the store because it gives customers confidence in the payment.
[edit] I already have :)
Have what? Committed fraud? Bold statement. How much did you steal and how often?
There's zero basis to believe that crypto reduces the incidence of fraud. Citation needed.
P.S. all transactions rely on some basis of trust between the merchant and the customer. Cryptocurrency doesn't prevent fraud altogether, but it does severely limit the extent and direction of fraud.
P.P.S. (response to your edit)
>Both credit cards and crypto as a payment primitive in isolation are secure. However, that's a very myopic view of a transaction. A transaction extends beyond simply the payment rails. You're leaving customers significantly worse off by forcing them into no-recourse payments with instant finality. Merchants, being businesses, are significantly better able to protect themselves - as they are able to insure against these losses
No, the credit card payment system is insecure because the information you need to authorize a payment is the same as the information you need to receive a payment (give or take a 4-digit PIN). In cryptocurrency (or even non-cryptocurrency, cryptographic payment systems like GNU Taler or DigiCash) there is the distinction between the public/private key.
Also, on what basis are you supposing that all recipients of a payment are merchants? I don't agree with that assumption.
>the ability to charge back transactions increases the transaction volume at the store because it gives customers confidence in the payment.
Cryptocurrencies are (ideally) designed for payments between low-trust parties, like a drug transaction or a donation to a pseudo-anonymous party. Senders are expected to have the same vigilance that they do with cash payments in an alleyway.
P.P.P.S.
>There's zero basis to believe that crypto reduces the incidence of fraud. Citation needed.
Cryptocurrency makes identity theft attacks impossible by having payments signed by the payee (e.g. rather than requiring proof of open source, personally identifiable information)
Cryptocurrency makes chargeback fraud impossible insofar as the attacker cannot conduct a 51% attack or a finney attack.
As for merchant fraud, users are expected to establish business relationships with trustworthy vendors and hold them accountable themselves. If these trust networks work for the DN and private trackers, then it's secure enough for me. You learn about the trustworthiness of vendors directly through the reviews of your peers, and you limit your risk accordingly.
That might work for large transactions, or repeated small transactions with the same vendor (assuming there isn't a major regression of trust), but it utterly collapses at scale and diversity of buyers and sellers who can't possibly vet each other for trust (AKA any modern economy). It also would balkanize/silo trade.
> and hold them accountable themselves.
Sounds a lot like the old "break some kneecaps" approach. There's a reason such accountability mechanisms tend to be utilized in criminal enterprises.
>As for merchant fraud, users are expected to establish business relationships with trustworthy vendors and hold them accountable themselves. If these trust networks work for the DN and private trackers, then it's secure enough for me.
My brother-in-Christ, how are you supposed to achieve mass adoption when you list *as a benefit* that you are stacking the deck in favour of the merchant?
I’d just like to point out that a huge part of the reason credit cards are successful is that I can pay untrusted merchants with relatively low risk to myself. You are describing a massive drawback, bordering on deal breaker.
Moving forward could also mean "designing better decentralized systems that don't require regulation" but that would mean that they would have to acknowledge that the thing they've been throwing their money and voice behind is a faulty prototype not destined for mass scale.
I'll admit that some (many even!) cryptocurrencies make claims about decentralization and security that are not based in evidence. That is fine. I don't believe that cryptocurrency itself is sufficient for freedom/decentralization/security, but that it is necessary. Not all cryptocurrencies will meet my critera, and it's even possible that none do.
Without specifying the implementation, this statement is less than useless. Really, I use the word "zealot" literally, this claim of yours seems to be entirely faith-based.
Occam's razor states that a reasonable default assumption is that they are not self-regulating, and they should be proven so before being described so. It's not enough to want to be self-regulating, it should actually perform that function. How does it do that, today? We speak here of general trends so one-off examples do not suffice...
I believe that this looks simple on paper, but does not really work. And then: this is called service. Coinbase offered a service, that just deals with all the hassle you are describing.
How difficult is it to set up a wallet, then use the same seed phrase when setting up a wallet on another device? If one of your devices gets stolen, make a new wallet and transfer the funds with your other device before they extract your keys.
Centralized systems work great... until they don't.
P.S. Our grandchildren will wonder why we allowed the free world to export the means of surveillance to the third world. The financial system is a huge part of that.
> Centralized systems work great... until they don't.
There has yet to be a decentralized cryptocurrency. We can't even say things like "decentralized systems work great until they don't" because so far they don't exist, and what does has been less than "great".
> Our grandchildren will wonder why we allowed the free world to export the means of surveillance to the third world.
I don't even know what you're going for here? Crypto solves surveillance now? The global, distributed ledger that everyone can fundamentally access because that's the whole point?
As for privacy, the technology has come a long way in the last decade due to the development of Zero-Knowlege Proofs. I can share a few links if you are interested.
A single entity being capable of significant or total disruption of the network.
> As for privacy, the technology has come a long way in the last decade due to the development of Zero-Knowlege Proofs. I can share a few links if you are interested.
I am interested. I'm aware of some progress being made here theoretically, but I have not seen implementations (I do not follow closely at this point).
While I agree with the sentiment, this won't happen. Did the Banana Wars and using the military might to control South America prevent all the American wars in the middle east? Nope. Just as those are forgotten about, we Americans will conveniently forget anything else that puts a bad spot on our record.
But as a customer of several national US banks and having gone through the dispute process dozens of times in my life, in reality, I find that to be completely nonsense. I’ve had to deal with numerous incidents where someone stole my card, and the bank blames me (the customer) and then asks me to prove the money was stolen, only to have them make an arbitrary denial months later. It’s the same bogus argument people make for all kinds of insurance, until you go to make a claim, get denied for some obscure legal text in the policy and find out you were just being ripped off the whole time.
Meanwhile, my own credit card numbers were stolen twice.
I have had many fraudulent transactions or unauthorized charges on various accounts, such as:
* Random charges appearing for no reason
* Clear case of stolen card with a series of unusual transactions.
* Scam websites where I bought a product and never received it.
* One egregious case where someone from a IP geolocated in China brute forced my VNC server password in the middle of the night and used my saved browser credentials to PayPal themselves over $10,000 from my linked chequing account.
In all cases I have filed a dispute with the relevant institution and was fully and promptly reimbursed. In the latter case I had my money back in under a week.
Transaction reversibility is a feature, not a bug!
Which is the problem.
We can all learn to 'press a button'. But it's that time we accidentally 'double click' because we were not paying attention, that is the problem.
And now you want me to give that up, and take on the responsibility myself?
That's not a strong argument in your favor.
Is it better to be cow or a wildebeest? The answer is simple: is life greater than the sum of its individual (hedonistic) parts?
Man has relied on a society since we had tails.
But until then, is there no middle ground between surveilance state and free society?
Everyone trying to do 'their own stuff' is basically, stupid.
We gain immensely by the division of labour: the cobbler makes the shoes, the farmer grows food, the banker manages money. Were you to try to 'make your own iPhone in your back yard' you would fail.
We are 'rich' because of this.
Otherwise, we'd be literally feral monkeys.
Bitcoin has little to do with 'control or surveillance'.
You do not need to 'hold' USD in order to live. You just need to use USD in a 'current account' for purposes of transaction. In that context, monetary policy should not matter that much to you - or even frankly anything the Fed does.
If you only buy dollars when you need the to do something else, then frankly, everything about the USD should be basically irrelevant.
And you can still do most things in cash, if you really want. You can put your USDs under your bed, in the closet if you want.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_reform_in_the_Soviet_...
Having tried it myself, it does work and isn't that hard. Why do you think it doesn't work?
Another example is Cloudflare. If the internet was designed properly, you wouldn't have DDoS attacks in the first place. There would be no one to sell DDoS protection to, no one to rent out botnets to.
You wouldn't even need most web/file "hosting" in the traditional sense if you could just share static files with bittorrent/IPFS.
P.S. The problem dropbox "fixes" is that there is no decent file transfer protocol that is IP agnostic. Using something like bittorrent's or IPFS' DHT fixes this. Dropbox "fixes" this by making file transfer into a paid service
One reason is that such a scenario relies on one of my computers with bittorrent-dropbox to be online for me to access my files elsewhere. Syncing it in the cloud means they are available reliably.
The last time I used IPFS it took four hours before I could access the file just using the hash or even the public gateway after pushing it to several major pinning services.
See? We both can play that game!
Bitcoin has no utility.
It has the 'promise' of utility, which is the current utility it rests upon, making the underlying value quite difficult to determine.
If BTC were to dissapear, the world wouldn't skip a beat, and we would have no need to 'reinvent' BTC.
We would likely to continue to think about and experiment with other things, but as it stands so far, BTC isn't the solution to anything.
There would be no need to 'reinvent' Dropbox, either. People would do so for both regardless of necessity (and indeed have done so for both, ad nauseam) because they find them and the concepts thereof useful or interesting, contrary to what you or I might assert.
Dropbox (Box, Google Drive, etc.) are imminently useful services, almost all of us use them.
If my cloud drive we vaporized, even if I had backups, I'd be livid, as would maybe more than a billion people would be as well.
People pay for cloud storage because it's immensely useful. I share documents with clients every day.
BTC is some surplus money changing hands, bouncing around between owners trading magic numbers, willy nilly. There's no need for it to exist. Even unproductive things like 'gambling' serve the purpose of entertainment at least.
And meanwhile there are migrant workers, refugees, and the like who depend on cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin for basic economic participation. If Bitcoin vanished overnight, they'd be back to being at the mercy of a legacy financial system that shuns them at best and actively exploits them at worst.
There are no migrant groups workers who depend on Bitcoin as a means of banking, it's completely (ridiculously) unsuited to that purpose.
Migrant workers use of innumerable financial services offered to them by banks at home, in their country of work, or one of the myriad of financial services apps made available to them via app stores etc..
There's more to economic participation than just banking (even assuming that what you wrote wasn't a blatant falsehood).
> Migrant workers use of innumerable financial services offered to them by banks at home, in their country of work, or one of the myriad of financial services apps made available to them via app stores etc..
Previously, yes, with predatory fees that make even Bitcoin (let alone any of the umpteen million iterations on its design) affordable by comparison. The working poor lack the bargaining power to meaningfully demand fair treatment from the legacy financial system; for them, a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin provides that fairness.
The bank is just someone else's ledger.
Yes. As a service. Which is what people want.
Nobody wants to run their own bakery just to get a bagel.
I've not heard this before, I will remember it. This is such a good retort.
And some people don't, and it should be possible for them to get ledger-as-a-service.
Why can't there be room for both?
I'm saying they should temper their expectations, if they think that secretly everyone wants to be a baker, and in the future a meaningful fraction will be.
Most people, when they go to a baker and ask for a bagel, will not want the answer "great, so just buy this oven from amazon. I'll show you how to use it when it arrives'.
Cryptocurrency advocates are wrong about what other people want, or will want. They can LARP if they want, but that doesn't mean that it's value to other people.
Non-technical people need things like Dropbox. You not liking Dropbox doesn't change that.
(Or, follow Vitalik's recommendation to use social recovery wallets, which are available for phones and I think have decent UI.)
* Email me photos because they don't know how to add them to a shared google photo album.
* Aren't on Facebook because they can't figure out how.
* Forget their email password so just made a new email account.
* Make a different decision on iOS vs Android every time they get a new phone.
A very large segment of the population behaves in this way. How will self-hosted hardware wallets work for these people?
What do you say when Grandpa calls you (because he doesn't text or email) and asks who to call to recover the money he was defrauded of?
As for Grandpa, I hope he doesn't have a checkbook.
And when Celsius suddenly halts withdrawals to a huge portion of the cryptocoin community, the only answer is "oh, you shouldn't have been using that" or "not your keys, not your wallet" and other such "Advice". Its a fundamentally hostile environment.
I disagree with the rest also - mainly on the grounds that for a normal person, there isn't any benefit and as the OP says, the status quo is preferable
Can you convince the powers that be to allow rooted phones to store card credentials?
> Crucially, iOS itself cannot directly access data stored in the secure enclave, so even if malware could make its way onto an iPhone, it would have no access to the data.
https://9to5mac.com/2020/02/12/apples-secure-enclave/
Even if it's not a perfect solution, it's better than handing full account credentials to every online merchant I use. A dedicated FIDO fob would be even better but the phone is something most people already have.
Even when using traditional card numbers, many banks offer you the ability to instantly mint as many cards as you like, so you can just generate a card for the specific website. Often you can even lock the card number to that merchant after the first payment.
The 'friction' of Bitcoin is that it little to no sense as a currency, and only from a certain fairly narrow perspective might have some advantages.
Nice experiment, but not very useful.
Maybe one day the crypto folks will figure something out.
I'm sure something in there is useful.
This is a fundamental design error.
Stop comparing crypto to cash, the competitor is centralised electronic bank accounts and credit cards.
Banks use lots of cryptography to secure and sign transactions, including public key cryptography. Some banks now issue numberless cards.
Every single one of these factors is significantly better in Bitcoin than in the legacy payments system. Your proposed tradeoff is not based on reality.
The only one of these things that might plausibly be called "better" for legacy payments is speed, but A) this is no longer plausible at all with lightning and B) any comparable appearance of speed in a legacy payments system is fictitious. The fiction holds up only if you are a "casual" user of the system, transacting in small amounts of money in non-complicated transactions. The costs even of this fictitious speed are high, but they are hidden from casual users.
Bitcoin can handle 7 transactions per second, on average. VISA can handle 1,700.
> Security
Your bank account is secured with a password. If compromised, you can prove your identity in person at a bank with government documents and obviously physical appearance. Bitcoin has one method of authentication, the signing key, and once you lose it, you have lost your account.
> Privacy
Every transaction you make as well as your balance is public on a blockchain. Your bank account is private only to you and the bank itself.
> Trust
This one is more subjective and I won’t really comment if I trust Chase or Coinbase more, but I will say this is somewhat ironic on a post about how Coinbase is selling IP data to ICE.
Look up Lightning. To be honest, saying this is a pretty reliable reverse-shibboleth that you have no idea what you're on about.
> Your bank account is secured with a password.
secp256k1 is a lot stronger than a shitty bank website.
> the signing key, and once you lose it, you have lost your account
Good thing we have invented backups. Even multisig if you wan to get fancy.
> Every transaction you make as well as your balance is public on a blockchain.
On a pseudonymous address that's difficult to impossible to correlate with an individual, and effectively impossible when using lightning.
> Your bank account is private only to you and the bank itself.
And the state comptroller, and the police, and the bank's advertising partners, and any number of federal agencies, and anyone who looks at frequent bank data leaks, and...
> This one is more subjective and I won’t really comment if I trust Chase or Coinbase more
Do I need to explain why it's not accurate to conflate coinbase with bitcoin, or was this just for rhetorical effect?
Bitcoin has Lightning network which is peer-to-peer and is quite fast.
>Security
It is up to you on how to generate your keys. You can use your passport number combined with whatever, you can split your secret between notaries (which would require your ID just like banks), etc.
> Privacy
Bitcoin has Lightning network which is offchain.
> Trust
Here you equate Coinbase with Bitcoin. I think it is wrong to do that, on the brink of logical fallacy.
You're not comparing the same thing.
A Bitcoin transaction that makes its way into a block is settled within ~10 minutes and irreversible in ~60 minutes.
A VISA transaction is an IOU between the customer, VISA and the merchant. The merchant won't have settled funds for up to 90 days. VISA settles with the customer anywhere between a day or week, but these transactions are reversible for up to 90 days. VISA settles between bank accounts at best daily.
If we are comparing like for like, use of the Bitcoin Lightning network is far closer to the service offers of VISA, and the lightning network scales the Bitcoin network far beyond 7 tps.
>I won’t really comment if I trust Chase or Coinbase
Bitcoin gives you the option to trust nobody. You are able to interact with the Bitcoin ledger without trusting any intermediary, even if the majority of people will choose not to. This is not an option with the existing financial system.
1. Speed - 1s vs 10 mins for Bitcoin
2. Security - Money guaranteed by banks and governments vs do your own security or trust a dodgy exchange
3. Private transactions vs public ledger
4. Trust - counter-parties from merchants to banks are known and have a stake in the system
5. Fees - free instant transfers vs $1-2 per tx
6. Taxes…
You’re right there is no comparison but it’s not the current payments system which is left eating dust, it’s bitcoin.
The speed you decry as fictitious is there because of trusted counterparties and is very real.
And there’s always a promise of new technology to fix bitcoin but the world has moved on and the only ones left are the moonbois and hodlers, and none of them even care about the currency except as a fairytale to sell it on.
This is a clear indicator that you aren't at all familiar with the payments industry, and probably not familiar with Bitcoin either. There is no extant fiat payment system that settles in 1 second. You are the "Casual user" I was talking about who doesn't know how e.g. credit cards work behind the scenes.
If you want any semblance of payment finality in a fiat system, it's going to take days to months. Bitcoin is ~10 minutes on chain, <1s on Lightning.
> Security - Money guaranteed by banks and governments vs do your own security or trust a dodgy exchange
"Guaranteed" is pulling a lot of weight here. What, exactly, do you think "guaranteed" means?
> Private transactions vs public ledger
"Private" transaction visible to any government agency, the bank's data/ad partners, in any of the abundantly available financial data leaks, vs a public ledger with strong pseudonymity or a totally opaque mesh network on Lightning.
> Trust - counter-parties from merchants to banks are known and have a stake in the system
I trust asymmetric key crypto more than I trust HSBC.
> Fees - free instant transfers vs $1-2 per tx
Fiat transfers are neither 'free' nor 'instant', in any meaningful capacity. Do some research on e.g. credit card settlement cycles. "Months" is more accurate. Credit card (along with most other widely used fiat payment gateways) charge usually something like 25 cents + 2.5%. Bitcoin is (on-chain) a few cents + 0%. Lightning is something like 0.01 cents + 0%.
It only looks cheaper because the details of what's actually going on have been (intentionally, for marketing purposes) hidden from casual users.
> The speed you decry as fictitious is there because of trusted counterparties and is very real.
Again, look up how payment settlement cycles work. You are the type of person I was describing who believes in the fiction. I don't blame you; unless you are a "power user" of the fiat system or have done a lot of research, it's not clear why you would notice.
The currency I used to do so also didn’t decline or rise in value by 5% in a day, which would have been awkward.
It doesn’t matter to me if banks exchange csv files at midnight to settle that, or what other archaic processes they use, because the verified identities and trust allow that to seamlessly happen behind the scenes without involving customers. The end user experience is all that matters here.
I use gold, my gold is always worth the same amount of gold. No dumb fluctuation and I have no problem in finding people who will take it. One second to transact? My handing the gold to anyone I choose is instantaneous and can be done in private. Gold solves all these problems, anyone not using it must be naive.
As I've already explained multiple times, it's neither meaningfully free nor instant. If you didn't understand that when I explained it in the last post, I'm not sure how I can make it more clear.
But I think you're also wrong about:
The cost - it really is free, there are no hidden charges on the bank account or for any party involved.
The transaction time - it really is settled that quickly between banks in the UK at least with faster payments. It leave my account and appears in the other one within seconds, sometimes within 1 second.
In Europe all banks now offer instant wire transfers. (A regulation pushed by the European Commission to counter VISA…)
It’s still often not free (0.75 euros at my bank I think), when 24h/48h wire transfers most often are, but I think I read the goal is for instant wire transfers to eventually be free (by regulation)
It’s really instant! Across any European (IBAN) account.
There’s also a growing use of a standardized QR code for IBAN account numbers, making the scan and instant transfer UX at least possible (but I never saw anyone do that yet)
To be clear, what sort of transactions are you referring to here? If you mean things like buying a bagel, or clothes, or groceries — the vast majority of transactions, for which the system should be optimized — then the existing centralized system is extremely successful.
If all you're ever doing is engaging in small-scale consumption, there's not a ton of reason you personally would care about or even notice a transition away from fiat payment systems.
Realistically, the UX of payments and money management will not change for 90% of people (who aren't doing anything interesting with money and don't have a lot of it). This is fine; we're talking about swapping out the back-end for people who actually have to deal with it.
So when you say “hey, everything will be the same for you, but it’ll make things easier for those people”, I instantly become suspicious of the change you’re trying to effect. Because, when those people try to get cute with the economy, the upside for “casual users” (aka most people) is low to nonexistent — and the potential downside is very high.
Meanwhile, centralized electronic bank accounts and credit cards steadily work to undermine cash itself.
Merely being better than cash isn't much of a selling feature, especially when it's worse than cash in some ways as well: keep your crypto in an exchange and it might get hacked. Keep it offline in a local wallet(s) and it stops being useful as a medium of exchange in most places you'd use cash.
I'm not saying these problems are insurmountable, but if they are then there's still a very long road ahead to get there.
It still hasn't solved basic use cases that have been solved in traditional finance for many decades.
Illegal uses of cryptocurrency are the only real use case that makes any sense. Pyramid schemes, ransomware, illicit purchases, money laundering, asset hiding, tax evasion. That's what has kept cryptocurrency alive, for now.
This ignores the number one lesson of PGP - key management is hard, up there with naming things and cache invalidation. I honestly don’t see how public keys, which are vastly more complicated to use and store than passwords, would be an improvement for the general, non-technical public when getting them to use long, unique passwords is already a challenge. You have to copy over or update your public key with each new computer you get, assuming the account owner even has a permanent computer. What about accessing your account on someone else’s computer in a quick pinch, or on your phone? Coupled with the fact that keypairs would be unable to be force reset (assuming you want to use them to their full potential) unlike passwords, and it would be a disaster.
I will say that minimizing the sensitive information sent for payment with crypto is a huge plus, as the merchant no longer needs to handle the card information to send to the payment processor, but can just accept the transaction hash (with some sort of signature of course).
This also doesn’t really address the issue that Coinbase will still send your info to ICE, of course. Not that banks are any better. But cash is!
You can’t reverse transactions. Once validated and included in a block, the transactions are forever, which is of course one of the main appeals of cryptocurrency in the first place. You would have to get the fraudster to send the money back (potentially covering gas fees) or else there is literally no other way without their signing key (also one of the key appeals of cryptocurrency).
This is a weird way to put it. Transactions include state transitions which modify the state of the global blockchain permanently. Miners (in the case of bitcoin) validate these transitions and publish the block to the chain. If there is a reversal, it must come from the merchant’s account, because only they can produce a valid state transition to “return” (ie send back) your money.
Let me stop you there. There is no advantage. Cryptocurrency is a scam. I've been burned. Many others have been burned recently. Go back to the drawing board and come back in a few years with a valid use and tell me it's still useful for something other than skirting the financial regulations and scams.
Don't scoff at "something other than skirting the regulations" tho. Especially if you live in a comfortable First World country with rule of law and all that.
It's equivalent to saying, people do not want all their money to disappear because they chose to carry all their life savings in a briefcase on the subway and then they lost the briefcase. If you did that, no bank is going to reimburse you. The way to avoid this problem, is to keep your fiat savings in the bank (which means, as some number in some database they keep), instead of in physical bills on your person. It has nothing to do with fiat or TradFi being inherently better than crypto.
Likewise, the way to avoid this problem for crypto, is to not carry your private keys with you all the time (or at least, to only carry them on devices you can afford to lose, such as a hardware wallet that an attacker needs time to penetrate, giving you time to go home and restore/move your funds). Obviously self-custody is still hard and still a high barrier to entry, but from a financial risk perspective, you should only "carry" as much crypto on you as you would be willing to carry as cash in your wallet (which of course you can always lose, and losing it doesn't validate or invalidate the banking industry).
P.S. I'm using a pixel phone running CalyxOS It has a locked bootloader so I am reasonably confident an attacker could not steal my keys. I wish I could say the same about my laptop.
Your comment is disingenuous and seems to be willfully misrepresenting the situation by ignoring that there are two sides
These forms of decentralised digital money are very new; nobody understands the potential for it if it were supported by social structures and education. Currently it exists in an incredibly hostile social environment where institutions are actively harming the user experience.
Before general literacy, written documentation was an anti-feature.
As people gain technical literacy, decentralisation will become more broadly relevant.
Who is more centralized, technologically and literate civilizations or ones in so called 'primitive' states?
> Being able to call your bank or credit union and have them freeze your cards, reverse fraudulent charges
The only reason I've ever had to do this is because traditional payments security is so shitty. Forgive me if I'm not impressed that the fiat payments system has measures to deal with problems that it created.
No one can make a fraudulent charge on my Bitcoin wallet.
The last time Chase detected a fraudulent charge on my credit card, they helpfully did a chargeback on a bunch of other random non-fraudulent transactions without asking me, which led to many hours of bullshit for me to deal with. I had to move insurance companies because progressive stopped letting me pay with a credit card.
If the HN crowd could temporarily look past how crypto is used today to what it could theoretically be, I wonder if more productive conversations could be had.
The crypto economy has slowly started to work its way into the traditional finance system. The only thing that crypto is really good for is having an auditable system of account, which isn't possible in the current financial system with centralized creation of debt.
>where all they have to do is prove who they are to access their stuff.
My prediction is that crypto does indeed become centralized between a few wallets & those centralized wallets can have some form of 'Verification' for reinstating lost keys.
> it's publicly available and non-identifiable,
Because they can combine it with their massive databases and make it identifiable is my guess.
THIS is the reason the central banks are anti crypto.... is it will provide an auditable ledger (irrespective of anonymity) which threatens the money laundering currency. There are other levels of currency laundering that have been used for eons ; 'Art' and 'Humans'. (and the currency used at the even higher levels than that)
To be honest I think we agree, we are just getting caught up in semantics. Whether it is capitalism or tech that's doing it is irrelevant because we have the development of technology in a capitalistic world order. In other words, it is impossible to differentiate when the two are so intertwined.
From the linked Intercept article:
>"Homeland Security Investigations, the division of ICE that purchased the Coinbase tool, is tasked not only with immigration-related matters, aiding migrant raids and deportation operations, but broader transnational crimes as well,..."
One possibility is that ICE could use this to trace the source of remittances being sent back to undocumented worker's home countries. The wire transfer fees are known to be extortionate and there's many crypto exchanges that see an opportunity in disrupting wire transfers for remittances.[1] If this happens then I could see this of being of interest to ICE.
As to "Why wouldn't they be able to get it themselves", it's probably just pure convenience. It's probably more attractive to just spend tax payer money on some expensive off the shelf solution
Incidentally I found this paragraph from the linked Intercept piece pretty damning:
>"The Coinbase Tracer tool itself was birthed in controversy. In 2019, Motherboard reported that Neutrino, a blockchain-analysis firm the company acquired in order to create Coinbase Tracer, “was founded by three former employees of Hacking Team, a controversial Italian surveillance vendor that was caught several times selling spyware to governments with dubious human rights records, such as Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan.” Following public outcry, Coinbase announced these staffers would “transition out” of the company."
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/paymentsweek/2022/04/27/mexi...
HSI has wanted to separate from ERO for years, because they feel that no one outside of ICE understands the difference, but it has not happened. I only understand the difference because I spent a few months supporting HSI (and only HSI) as a government contractor, and everyone I interacted with from HSI went to great pains to differentiate themselves from ERO, and clearly considered themselves better than ERO.
IIRC coinbase is just selling a chainalysis tool. ICE is stupid, they aren't going to be able to convert a blockchain into a graph of transactions that lets them track payments from one wallet to another on their own - they are going to buy a tool off the shelf to help them do that.
The fact that it is so difficult to avoid disclosing my personal information tells me just about everyone getting into crypto right now is a speculator.
had to close the bracket
This provides the best of both worlds: positive user experience (especially for less technical users) and reduction of overall centralization. An implementation called MiniMint[1] is already in the works.
People trend to centralization but it doesn’t mean: let’s give up on decentralization and just give one company, or a select few, the keys to the entire kingdom.
besides, as uximproves it will be easy to just use the blockchain directly. like using an on-chain long or short position, or staking some value, rather than only doing it on a centralized exchange.
For financial services like lending and swaps this is great and avoids some of the CeFi and CEX problems we are seeing. For other apps like art sales, public groups, and ENS domain name aliases, it allows ownership of assets to be held non custodially rather than a single company’s servers and records.
They all eventually gravitate towards centralization as they gain mainstream appeal, as the very tangible competitive advantages from networks effects and economies of scale win over the mostly philosophical benefits of decentralization that have always failed to sway the masses.
We see this play out time and again, with email, git, and are already starting to see the same pattern emerge with cryptocurrencies.
Though that is not to say there is no benefit to having decentralized technologies. The fact remains that centralized platforms built on top of decentralized technology have a much harder time locking users in due to the low switching costs enabled by the underlying tech. This is why products like BitBucket and GitLab are still viable today despite the undeniable dominance of GitHub, and similarly alternative email providers like Fastmail and Outlook in the age of Gmail.
We rarely see this in markets built on top of centralized tech. In social networks, for instance, there really isn't any viable competitor to platforms like Facebook and Twitter because switching isn't possible without losing all of your investments in the product.
This low switching cost makes upstarts more viable alternatives compared to in markets built on top of centralized tech, and keeps incumbents on their toes and forces them to keep innovating in order to stay dominant instead of just simply riding high on the strength of their moats. As such I do still think the pursuit of decentralized technology is worthwhile, even if a large degree of centralization in itself might be all but inevitable in the long term.
The everyman ruined crypto just like the everyman ruined software.
> The contract also provides, provocatively, “Historical geo tracking data,” though it’s unclear what exactly this data consists of or from where it’s sourced.
No idea how geo tracking data can be “fully sourced from online, publicly available data”.
Twitter used to give the ability to include the poster’s approximate location with each update.
(There's a whole bunch of caveats here, but that is how it would work at a high level)
First idea was data brokers, who sit on tons of data, including geolocation. But that's not publicly available so... Maybe the "public" part is used for parallel construction rather than giving away the true source?
If true, then all they're doing is analysis of data from the public blockchain. That sounds fine to me - the feds could have done it themselves.
source: I run a competitor to Tracer (https://luabase.com/)
Where's that coming from? Maybe other unspecified "public" sources.
It seems suspicious though, like they are getting it from geolocating IP addresses of their users, and correlating those to transactions -- that is not public info at all. But perhaps they get the geolocation info from some other source unrelated to their users?
Personally if my bank was also in the business of spying on financial transactions commercially... I wouldn't feel super secure about my choice of bank.
That gives you a clue where the user is located.
Are you aware that your (bank-issued) credit card purchase data is almost certainly sold commercially, linked to a unique identifier?
There's companies that buy mobile advertising data and crosslink it to credit card purchase data to track real-world conversions from online advertising.
I say this to reinforce your suspicions, not to discredit them.
2 points :
1. doing analysis form public sources when you can cheat by looking up private information is a very different beast.
2.parallel construction
Let them do it themselves then. Usually “if I don’t do it, someone else will” is an ethically dubious excuse, though it is a good way to make money I suppose
Misleading headline. This is a public blockchain analytics service that has nothing to do with Coinbase's other services.
I think the issue is really just working with ICE, and the ethical concerns that brings up.
Now... you need metrics and analytics over what’s going on with your products. This sounds like something that helps address that somehow, staying anonymous from what it looks like (it says it has no identifiable information linked to people), but even the contract linked makes it hard to understand.
Second, because laws and enforcement thereof in the USA are arbitrary and wielded as a weapon. Coinbase is a crypto company who would get absolutely obliterated by regulation and legal hassle if they don't play ball with the federal government - on the latter's terms, of course. The US federal government expects complete and total dragnet suspicionless surveillance of all electronic payments in the USA. Anyone doing payments in the USA is expected to cooperate fully or face destruction.
The idea that you're free to do anything in the US that isn't illegal is an illusion. Get big or important enough and what you are doing will be made illegal (or existing laws will be reinterpreted to apply to you) if you don't play ball with TPTB. See also: FISA section 702.
The same sort of pressure is applied to Apple, which is why they maintain a backdoor in the end to end crypto of iMessage for the FBI. No amount of money or commercial success allows you to bypass these power structures.
That’s a very large claim to make without any further citation or sourcing. This would be very big news if true.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...
iCloud Backup (non e2e) backs up the endpoint keys for iMessage. Apple knows this is bad and they were going to do e2e backups (like Google does for Android) and Apple Legal killed the project on FBI request.
https://blog.coinbase.com/living-up-to-our-values-and-the-ne...
Complain, I don’t know, about actually having a contract with ICE, perhaps? More meaningful that whatever the article complained about. I would complain about what the quote from the spokesperson really mean, that doesn’t really say what the product does, making us look at the contract to even try to get a proper summary.
Are you familiar with the concept of parallel construction? It's a tactic LEOs use when they don't want to reveal how they actually obtained information. For instance, if they obtain information using method A, but want to conceal method A, they state that they actually obtained the information using method B (because the information actually is, after the fact, obtainable via method B as well, once you know what to look for).
In Coinbase's case the way this would work is Coinbase sources data from their internal databases (method A), and then after the fact they do let's say a Google search or some other public search for the names or whatever they found in their internal databases, and state that all data is sourced from online, publicly available data (method B).
This is how disinformation is spread; not through some conspiratorial plot to confuse, but from fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
I'm curious, however, why did you not make a similar post to the parent comment...in that the parent comment has presented no evidence whatsoever to support the claim that Coinbase is only using publicly-available information, and therefore by your own reasoning the parent poster should not make the claim.
Because both the parent comment and I have read the article, so we both have evidence to support the claim that Coinbase is only using publicly-available information, as that's how Coinbase Tracer, the license to which was reported as sold to ICE for $29,000, works.
If your standard of proof is “somebody wrote something online,” then GP provided you with proof that it’s possible that Coinbase lied.
I literally cannot parse this sentence, can you rephrase?
The topic of this sentence is “the definition of proof.”
All we have here is evidence, which is fundamentally different.
Those are words online! That’s evidence! You cannot refute that someone wrote those words. I know that those are words online because I wrote them! Now you have evidence and testimony.
The funny part about all this is that nobody is claiming that they know that Coinbase is lying about this contract. It’s all been entirely hypothetical (hence the word “maybe.”)
What evidence or proof have you seen that there exists no possibility of a corporation lying about their relationship with a controversial government agency?
Since the article is already based on a leak (or something that is presented as one), one would expect that if this was the case, there would at least be an anonymous source claiming so.
Given that all the article is mentioning is "they're selling blockchain analysis software", it's very plausible that that's what they're selling. When the feds want specific info on a specific address/account, they're going to get a subpoena and get KYC data and logs anyways.
I don't know why we should assume good faith on coinbase's part when the same group of people working on this used to sell spyware to human rights abusers.
Are you referring to Neutrino?
https://decrypt.co/36608/coinbase-ceo-reflects-on-neutrino-a... > Armstrong said that after realizing that Coinbase could’ve hired some “black hats,” he insisted on first speaking to Neutrino staff to find out how much of this was true. After assessing the situation, he sacked some of the ex-Hacking Team members but did not specify who.
> All of the key people who had “some kind of question mark or reputational or values issue” were let go from the company, he said. While some lower-level engineers who “were not the decision-makers and weren’t as culpable” remained with the company
Regardless, I don't trust Brian on this. This is the same guy who shit all over his own staff for being "whistle blowers", claiming that these things have to stay in house. Coinbase failed to do their due diligence, bought a company that made spyware, and then claimed that they fired some people but never clarified who. He also explicitly said he only fired some of the "hacking team" that was responsible for the issues, not the entire team itself.
At the end of the day there's absolutely no reason to take them at the word here, and plenty of reason not to.
You say that Coinbase is selling geolocation data to ICE, which is exactly what the headline says.
If Bob is found standing over a bleeding corpse with a smoking gun in his hand, would it be a misleading headline to say "Bob found standing over bleeding corpse with smoking gun in his hand"?
That just happens to be designed by some very fine people:
> In 2019, Motherboard reported that Neutrino, a blockchain-analysis firm the company acquired in order to create Coinbase Tracer, “was founded by three former employees of Hacking Team, a controversial Italian surveillance vendor that was caught several times selling spyware to governments with dubious human rights records, such as Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan.”
First, Coinbase has a no-politics rule. I wonder where this falls. Since it's something business-related, I imagine it's fine to discuss internally, but this is an example where (if I was at Coinbase) I'd feel the no-politics-rule does the company a disservice. I'd be pretty mad if my company was selling to ICE and I wasn't allowed to say anything about it.
Second, it always amazes me how little these ICE contracts are, and how quick big companies (like Github) are willing to burn their credibility over such a relatively small amount of money.
This is how ideology works, it the things you believe subconsciously, which make you think that the dominant political project is natural, neutral, uncontroversial, even external to politics.
You know the type. The ones that distract from the core mission of a company. The ones continuously creating outrage and division, the ones doing walkouts, leaking documents and data, constantly stirring up shit and poisoning morale.
It's typically a very small minority, and these companies decided to get rid of them, and codified this as "no politics". Had these people been more reasonable and professional about political aspects of business, surely the blunt instrument of "no politics" would be unneeded.
In any case I'd say the issue is often not about having the particular political opinion, it's about translating it into a type of activism that does damage, by creating internal division, distractions, generating bad PR, etc. These things can spin out of control, forcing business leaders to pick between multiple evils.
ICE is a client that wants to utilize Coinbase services. Coinbase "core mission" is making money. As such, servicing ICE is completely within their "core mission".
You as a consumer may drive your car to the grocery store, fill up your cart, have lunch at some junkfood place and drive back home. You've now committed countless harmful acts if you were to trace back the supply chain of everything you consumed.
But now you don't care. It's all hypocritical virtue signalling.
Sure, nobody can make sure every single thing they touch, up and down the supply chain, is pure good. But don't act like you have no agency. If everyone makes small improvements when confronted with them, combined it adds up.
"Sure, nobody can make sure every single thing they touch, up and down the supply chain, is pure good."
The above is an agreeable statement, but in reality a cop-out. Doing better means putting in a lot of effort and giving up comforts, something I see extremely few people do at any serious level.
Another example: I saw some lady freak out on Twitter as she saw some ridiculously oversized pickup truck in her street. Filming it, harassing the driver, and loudly calling for such cars to be banned.
She has a point. The problem is though that there's very few such cars. If we're so serious about caring about climate change, it would be way more effective to ban the sale of TVs over 55".
And now...surprisingly few people are interested in the planet anymore. She doesn't want to give up even an inch of comfort, literally.
So that means you just don't care. You only care when it doesn't affect you.
Still you're right, any progress is good progress but at the same time I'm tired of this style of politics. Always claiming perfect morality whilst there's close to none.
Some people may find it controversial to sell to ICE specifically. Anyone is free to believe that, but they are just optics. Any institute or company you dislike is going to use a wide array of COTS software, and you won't stop that. They'll probably also use electricity and order sandwiches. It's ridiculously ineffective to try and "cancel" any institute by means of suppliers.
If you have a problem with ICE tactics, engage in real politics rather than Twitter politics.
Further, I'd argue that before judging there has to be more clarity on what this tool is used for. Maybe it tracks down narcos, money laundrers, human traffickers, the like. Things that might align with your politics, instead of oppose them. Or perhaps they do use it in unfair and harmful ways. We simple don't know, at least I don't.
As for the geolocation part, Coinbase's claim is that they never sold customer private data, and that it's all on-chain. If that is true, then at best it's a lame action. Not to mention that your location data is shared all day every day.
> Coinbase’s mission is to create an open financial system for the world. This means we want to use cryptocurrency to bring economic freedom to people all over the world.
It’s not clear to me how selling geolocation data to ICE is within the scope of the mission. In fact, it seems to me that it actually hinders it.
And remember, it’s (allegedly) not just talk for Coinbase. They’re mission focused. They pushed out employees who didn’t agree with it.
The geolocation part is still not clear to me. They claim to not have sold customer data, so that means said data is on the blockchain itself, or can be derived from it. If that reading is correct, even the word "selling" is incorrect.
Further, an open financial system does not mean a total lack of regulation or tracking of bad actors. I would also assume that "economic freedom" is less applicable to criminals, assuming the tool is used for that.
In my opinion, the reason these companies are willing to shed vast amounts of credibility for cents on the dollar is a systematic mistaking of asset dividends for asset value, which is reified into the organizational culture -- because no one in the C-suite really knows better, not-knowing is selected for, and ultimately becomes a requirement for individual careers to progress.
The dynamic is easier to see in other parts of the economy. While the rent that a fancy house can earn, say, does in fact speak to the value of that house, the fact that it is available for rent in the first place also impacts the value. For literal houses, this offset can be overcome, but for something like your credibility or your integrity, it's lethal.
But that doesn't matter if your boss doesn't know this. All that they see is 'number go up'. Then, often, your number -- be it salary or rank or both - goes up too. And six months later, when the consequences of the firesale become clear, it's too late for the employer -- but not for you, the architect of this terrible idea! You've already augmented your own income, and you can go back on the job market asking for equal-or-better compensation.
Since the number of companies suffering from this acculturated cognitive bias is greater than 1, you can in effect ping-pong between two such companies while gutting both, making larger and larger paycheques with each bounce.
This process is even easier if you work for a really big company, because then you don't even have to change employers! You can just change divisions every six months. The next reorg is right around the corner.
Credibility-for-sale is apoptosis, pure and clean, and it's lucrative to induce, even by accident.
Today, it's ICE.
Next year, it can expand to include the ATF, and perhaps after that, the FBI.
On average, people have varying levels of appreciation/distaste for government agencies... but I think regardless of your stance, it's an easy argument to say ICE falls high on the list of disliked government agencies.
Sources:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/10/coinbase-coin-earnings-q1-20...
https://www.marketplace.org/2022/02/14/how-much-did-cryptocu...
-
I know this isnt a topic HN likes, but F that statement.
--
I won't go into what I know of the USG and child sex trafficking (a victim) -- but its ridiculous to think that ICE does anything but protect and enable child sex trafficking.
As a child in the 1970s sex cults enabled by the CIA were a thing. (I am living proof of this, see the interview and statements about 'the purple people' (only clue Ill leave you.))
---
Look at Haiti.
I could write a book, but wont, about how just insanely pedo-ruled the USG is.
Have you ever looked at a badge of a sheriff?
This is what Swartz died trying to reveal, not JSTOR.
Sure have! There are all kinds of different badges, some with very simple designs and others with lots of great detail. This is a very, very vague piece of innuendo that does nobody any good if you're hoping that we'll research it ourselves.
ICE ERO (Enforcement Removal Operations) = brownshirts, entirely immigration
Two separate agencies with two separate missions, and this is about HSI.
>According to ICE, HSI agents “encountered 97 individuals who are subject to removal from the United States” during its execution of a federal criminal search warrant at the meatpacking plant.
https://theintercept.com/2018/04/10/ice-raids-tennessee-meat...
It’s a big issue, ERO can’t even perform their own workplace raids/political stunts so they co-opt the serious agency for it whenever the winds in DC blow the right direction.
Blown in part by the infamous “ICE union” of course, while hilariously, the HSI agents performing the stunts aren’t even unionized.
But because DHS is, has, and will probably continue to be in disarray merely confronted with its daily agenda, it’s always going to be a “bad time” to look at finally separating the two.
>ICE ERO (Enforcement Removal Operations) = brownshirts, entirely immigration
>Two separate agencies with two separate missions, and this is about HSI.
Folks keep mentioning these separate groups within ICE. Which makes a great deal of sense if you actually say the words that make up ICE: Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
ERO == Immigration (the issues surrounding folks coming into the country)
HSI == Customs (the issues surrounding stuff coming into the country
Broadly related but distinct areas of enforcement.
Edit: Fixed formatting.
implying immigration enforcement is a bad thing
I do think we need control of our borders though in order to enforce things like tariffs, restrict prohibited items, human trafficking etc...
title: "Coinbase is reportedly selling geolocation data to ICE"
content: "All Coinbase Tracer features use data that is fully sourced from online, publicly available data, and do not include any personally identifiable information for anyone, or any proprietary Coinbase user data."
The transaction history is obviously from the blockchain (by design) but did IPs tied to transactions maybe leak at some point?
That’s seems pretty important. If it’s public, it’s public.
So no, the goal of Coinbase before/at launch was unlikely to have been "The Uber of Crypto".
The notion of "Uber for X" was already such a cliche by 2014 that people were joking about it in general-audience publications: https://qz.com/311217/poem-theres-an-uber-for-x/
That poem was published between Coinbase's B and C rounds. By that point Uber had done a series E with a post-money valuation north of $40 billion. If Coinbase wasn't looking at that with envy and trying at points to cast their story in the Uber mold for investors, I'd be amazed, because most other startups of the time were.
That's true, you did say "when Coinbase got started", which I took to mean before the official launch, which must have been sometime before 2012.
But, seems I misunderstood, so my bad.
> Coinbase spokesperson Natasha LaBranche directed The Intercept to a disclaimer on its website stating “Coinbase Tracer sources its information from public sources and does not make use of Coinbase user data.”
Thanks OP.
If you didn't thing corporate missions statements were total bullshit before...
Mission first
Our mission is ambitious and important. We don’t engage in social or political activism that is unrelated to our mission while at work. We seek to make the workplace a refuge from division, so we can stay focused on making progress toward the mission.
...or...
Customer focus
We are deeply focused on solving our customers' problems with technology, by enabling them to acquire, store and use crypto. We strive to be the easiest to use, most trusted and most secure platform. In every decision we make, we ask, "How does this create more value for our customers?"
I bet it’s source IP address geo location for transactions.
This isn’t the deportation agency, it’s the investigative arm of the DHS (and that they hate the deportation agency & confusion between the two is putting it lightly).
Having set up a Coinbase account (although I haven't actually used it...yet), they required me to provide documentation about who I am, where I live and prove it with a government issued ID (in my case, a driver's license). As such, any transactions I process through my Coinbase account can be tied (and presumably information about them provided to law "enforcement") are tied to the identity details I provided when creating such an account.
I always use TOR when connecting to Coinbase, so their IP logs don't have any Geo-location information about me.
That said, once I actually purchase some crypto and use it to purchase stuff (cannabis) that's actually legal in my state, but transportation across state lines is illegal.
As such, if the recipient of crypto (even if -- and I will -- I move Coinbase purchased crypto to my own private wallet) is investigated/arrested and the wallet used to accept my crypto, the purchase side of that transaction can absolutely be traced back to me, from the "drug dealer's" wallet, to my private wallet and back to Coinbase.
Presumably that can be foiled through "mixers," but I'm not sure if that could obfuscate a single transaction as I describe -- perhaps someone more knowledgeable could comment on that.
That's (IIUC) how the blockchain is supposed to work -- all transactions are public. Assuming that some government entity wanted to prosecute the customers of the above hypothetical "drug dealer," obtaining court orders for Coinbase crypto accounts wouldn't be hard at all -- as the argument would be that there were illegal transactions and we need to identity of those involved in such a transaction.
IIRC, there was an article[0] (this isn't the one I read, but has the relevant info) a while back about HSI finding purveyors of CSAM[1], and those who paid them with crypto were traced through the public blockchain -- and arrested/charged.
Presumably, there are limits to how much manpower would be applied to a few packages of "Dope Rope"[2] or an ounce of "OG Kush"[3], but if you purchase crypto from a legal entity, they can (and under the right circumstances, will) be compelled to provide information about you when presented with a warrant/court order.
The upshot is that unless there's some way to obfuscate blockchain transactions (Mixers? See above), there's nothing to stop government entities from forcing legal exchanges from giving up their customers' PII, which they already have -- no special tools required.
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/child-porn...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_sexual_abuse_material
[2] https://bigbearmountainorganics.com/product/dope-rope-thc-in...
Ergo, Coinbase is effectively in the "police and surveillance technologies" space while they operate this service.
This is such a sweet headline!
Or are they selling data that likely helps better understand drug/human traficking networks? Is selling data that helps with the latter considered bad??