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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

> Put yourself in the maintainers' shoes — would you be happy to idly stand by when you know your service is being used to actively harm others' lives? [^1] Perhaps you would, and if so, I would be interested in hearing your view.

Yeah, just like Tor, which is also heavily associated and almost exclusively used for illicit and illegal activities; especially by fraudsters, criminals, scammers, tax / sanctions evasion and illegal drug dealers.

If Tornado Cash is not welcome on SourceHut due to the same association of illicit activity, then I should see no exception to the Tor Project hence it's extremely negative enablement of illegal activity going on there should it attempt to get its source code hosted on SourceHut.

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The difference is that projects like Tor were certainly not created with any devious purpose in mind.

Arguments and use cases for anonymity are very easy to come up with.

Blockchain related projects cause damage on two fronts:

- They are commonly created with the explicit goal to scam most people while making very few people rich.

- The tech around blockchains (almost) qualifies as snakeoil. The use cases are nonexistent in the way they are portrayed. This perpetuates some pseudoscience equivalent in the realm of technology. Which is dangerous on its own. Blockchain is like Homeopathy.

No other use case has come up, and any blockchain related project has to simply lie from the get go to even justify its existence. (NFTs; "block chain in gaming" which is total bs from start to finish, portrayed as if they magically make assets appear in other games, which makes no sense whatsoever; block chains where they offer 0 advantages over databases, because a single company keeps ownership and administrative privilege; et cetera)

>- They are commonly created with the explicit goal to scam most people while making very few people rich.

Examples? I'm struggling to come up with examples outside of something like "ponzicoin". The typical token/ICO project has some plausible business model (ie. you're investing in a token that allows you to use this smart contract, which presumably will have demand if the smart contract becomes popular) which makes it hard to call it an "explicit" scam, even if it does turn out to be effectively a ponzi.

Basically most ICOs. Almost anything that mentions tokenomics. Most of these only function when you have an influx of new buyers. This basically includes all that provide a token to use some smart contract. In the worst case, you have a useless token that you can use with a smart contract that does precisely nothing. Apart from having made some people money and providing money for the affiliated companies, even if they have a business model, it would in most cases be better served to function without blockchain. As someone else said, the most compelling use case is independence from banks and other institutions, which is an ideological position that does not serve most business models.

"Lots of stuff is bad and so all of it must be bad" is a weak argument. Look at email: 85% of mail is spam and scam.

If you read beyond the hype the use cases are very clear, even if they are very narrow: disintermediation, decentralization, and making permissionless payments and contracts.

Blockchains like Monero and zcash are pretty good ways to handle anonymous payments across the world, compared to sending cash in an envelope or trusting a third-party with your privacy. If Tor would be allowed on SourceHut even with its negatives, so should Monero and zcash. Monero and zcash were not built with the explicit goal to scam people, and they do provide features that were not easily achievable prior to this technology.

> The difference is that projects like Tor were certainly not created with any devious purpose in mind.

Oh it was. It was created specifically to enable US agents communication with the headquarters. Which is definitely a military/intelligence purpose. And giving general public a tool for anonymity was specifically an exercise in providing a anonymity set for agents.

Tor was created with the purpose in mind of the US spying on foreign countries, but it certainly has many legitimate uses as well.

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