CryptoGhost

This whole situation is a great example of why you should avoid politics / politically charged statements in the workplace all around. No one's mind about anything was fundamentally changed. People got upset and stressed out and wasted a bunch of time. People had their employment status impacted. It was just an overall negative episode. When people say something that is problematic or borderline, the response should be "end the thread" and everyone moves on with their work.

Comparing Bitcoin to a credit card payment isn't really a fair comparison. (Since if people really like the credit card model so much you can build credit card like things on top of the Bitcoin network) A more apt comparison would be to an international wire transfer which costs $15-$40 and takes a few days to complete.

Lots of Bitcoin critics really struggle with the subjective theory of value (which is also the basis of Marginalism and modern mainstream economics). Nobody believes in stuff like labor or intrinsic values outside of a few marxist holdouts.

No one is putting the proverbial gun to academic researchers heads to use these publishers.

The point being this is completely discretionary. It's not comparable to say Gold Certificates in the USA where it gave you title to actual gold coins you could redeem. Holding USDT gives you title to nothing other than USDT itself.

> Tether is backed. It isn’t a fraud.

Both of these can be true. But it is also true that Tether cannot be redeemed for USD (owning USDT does not entitle you to exchange for USD) and it has never undergone a hard audit. So while the entire project can be a good faith effort its also entirely possible its worth a lot less than $1USD for 1 USDT

I was skimming through it and couldn't really find any smoking gun about them missing any hard deadlines for content removal. If you take a site like Reddit, it can take days before all violent / threatening language is removed from a given thread. A lot of the content AWS uses as exhibits is borderline, so its not as simple as approve some auto filter. I am assuming Parler just took on the scale of weeks to months to fail to remove some bad stuff but it would great to see that in writing to confirm.

> This entire comment thread can be asterisked with “for now”.

Which is true but its also important to not jump the gun so people can give coherent arguments for/against currents events.

Take Amazon for example, there is significant internal pressure to run the company based on a specific set of (for lack of a better word) progressive values but at the same time there is also a big part of the company that is customer focused and puts themselves in their shoes to try and deliver results and the politics of the day is just noise to them. Who will win in a few years time ? Can't say and the future is still unwritten.

You must decouple in person interactions from site content. So you can have a site filled with philosophy, historical analysis, generalized activism tips, technical information, etc but not a site that directly facilitates in person meetups or calls to action or plans real world activities.

You don't even need to do that. The actual key to running an extremist / subversive / hate / unpopular website is NOT connecting the site to any in-person activities. As long as your website is just some text floating out there in the network there is a lot of wiggle room. Sure, companies like Google or WordPress will ban you if they don't like you, but you can still get service from Cloudflare, major web hosts, or domain registration without jumping through a bunch of hoops.

But then you have cases where people leak private group chats (either from bad opsec or insider jobs) and people face the ban hammer.

It's a fair distinction. Applications that have private messaging systems that have exchanged all sorts of bad / illegal content to parties haven't been cancelled by their hosts or held up to such high moderation standards.

crypto-anarchy is coming to solve the first 3 for sure. The last one is a little bit more difficult but not impossible.

I have to give AWS some credit for this exchange with the customer. Normally in a situation like this the hosting company will never give you specifics and just ban your account. The fact that they specifically point out which user generated content is specifically breaking ToS is a refreshing change of pace.

It's also hard to argue whataboutism as more and more news and political websites shut down comments and user generated content and easily finding posts from nutjobs gets rarer.