CryptoPunk

With respect to 1, the principle of increasing the anonymity set, and thereby facilitating criminal concealment of funds, is the same, when using cash, and it is on this principle that the parent comment suggested companies that use privacy smart contracts could be sanctioned.

2. is a different issue. Yes the War on Cash is real, and it is extremely dangerous.

>>No, there are no logically valid, non-religious arguments for prohibiting abortion.

There are so many reasons why this is wrong.

Under the Constitution, the tenth amendment clearly reserves powers not expressly enumerated for the federal government, to the people and states, and the only exception to that is powers expressly denied by the Constitution to the states, which defining human life as beginning before birth is not one of them.

Moreover, defining human life as starting at a heartbeat or before birth can be an entirely secular belief, your dogmatism denial notwithstanding.

>>You’ve just demonstrated that yourself, by ignoring the fact that the opinion was based on works of a professional witch hunter and marital rape apologist.

This is just ad hominem / character assassination, and not relevant to this point.

>>When the society realizes they aren’t working properly, it should be possible to fix said courts.

And you're arguing for fixing said courts through illegal acts. Like I said:

If the law is only respected and observed when it agrees with one political platform, it's no law at all.

>>And no, in US there is no working legal process for fixing the court, even in very obvious cases, like a judge protecting its wife, or just being a straight out human waste, like Scalia.

Of course there is a way to fix the courts: legislation can dictate the jurisdiction of courts, and legislatures can appoint new justices to the court, and the legislature is democratically elected.

Of course the latter takes time, as Supreme Court justices are lifetime appointments, but that is the Constitutional process, and that can also be changed if a supermajority vote for a Constitutional amendment.

Your expressions of hatred and disgust toward those who through the Constitutionally legitimate process, became Supreme Court justices, is not a moral argument. It's just a manifestation of the moral superiority complex exhibited by those on the political left who support this subversion of the law.

That would be an extraordinary stretch of the sanctions law, comparable to sanctioning any business that uses cash, by virtue of its effect of expanding the anonymity set that uses cash and thereby assisting sanctioned entities in concealing their transactions.

The laws of physics impose contraints that will make certain traits common amongst intelligence species and advanced civilizations.

We see a variation of this in convergent evolution across distantly related species (e.g. the evolution of wings).

To the best of my understanding, AML law, as currently written, doesn't work like that. It governs those who administer financial services. When originally written it did not apply to cash and was not conceived of with decentralized financial applications in mind.

If the law applied as you suggest, any one using cash could be deemed to be facilitating money laundering by enlarging the pool of anonymized money that criminals use.

blender.io is a centralized service run by people which AML laws can target, since they are facilitating third party transactions, some of which are criminal in origin.

Tornado.cash is decentralized software, and there is no law that can be envoked to prohibit people from using it for their own transactions, unless it can be proven their own transactions are illicit in origin, in which case they can already be booked for the original crime.

This is of course how it should be. We don't need AML laws as any case of money laundering would require an underlying crime that generated the illicit revenue, and proving that crime occurred - which is a prerequisite for proving money laundering occurred - would be sufficient to put that criminal behind bars.

And what we have now are financial surveillance laws misnamed anti-money laundering laws. Their purpose is not to criminalize actual money laundering, which is redundant for reasons just explained. Their purpose is to criminalize services that protect their clients' financial privacy, by:

* not demanding they disclose private financial information to prove their transactions are non-criminal in origin before facilitating them (providing presumption of innocence)

* not requiring them to disclose personal information (KYC) before facilitating their transactions, and

* not reporting that personal information to government surveillance agencies without a warrant (e.g. FinCEN reporting requirements).

I think every one welcomes stopping the flow of illicit revenue, but efforts to accomplish that should not come at the expense of core principles of a free society, like the right to privacy, and the presumption of innocence.

This is especially so given there is considerable evidence that so-called AML laws are highly ineffective despite all the costs they impose in both financial terms and in terms of basic rights:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...

There are more than religious arguments for prohibiting abortion and the Supreme Court draft opinion on Roe vs Wade has zero religious argument contain therein.

Beyond that, the law says the Supreme Court and legislature decides what is or isn't a violation of the separation of Church and State, not activists deciding for themselves what law should or should not be observed.

>>If the law is working against the society - like in this case - then it needs to be fixed, not blindly obeyed.

There is a legal process for changing the law. What you are attempting to justify is undermining the rule of law with haphazard rationalizations.

You've found a way to rationalize undermining rule of law, by arguing that this exercise of the law is.. not the law.

Like I said at the start: If the law is only respected and observed when it agrees with one political platform, it's no law at all.

I think it also points to compensation for creators, so that they can dedicate their time to creating their works, mattering. I think him being on Patreon, and knowing he can count on income as long as he keeps creating this kind of content, contributes to the quality of what is produced.

I believe when someone no longer needs to concern themselves with financial consequences for taking time out of their day to create content for the public, and knows that there is reciprocity in the relationship between themselves and the rest of the world for whom they produce content, they can dedicate themselves more completely to their craft.

A leak of a Supreme Court draft opinion is an extraordinary breach of judicial confidentiality protocols and severely damages the integrity of the highest court.

Are you saying that the rule of law is already so degraded in other areas that further degrading it with this kind of action is of no consequence and therefore if it happens to advance what you consider to be a good policy then we should welcome it?

I'm suggesting every one would connect directly to the central cluster.

>>I worry about words being switched on a per-copy basis as a trap

So you support leaking Supreme Court draft opinions and prefer leakers not be caught?

You realize the consequences of legitimizing this for the rule of law, right? If the law is only respected and observed when it agrees with one political platform, it's no law at all.

1. That is not a standard definition of racism. It's one a small elite attempts to impose on society and is still mostly unrecognized outside of that.

2. There is no evidence that white people have institutional power over people of other races. This is a baseless assertion that forms the basis of a left-wing racial victimhood dogma.

3. It's also irrelevant. It's not the word "racism" that makes what you're doing bad. It's the fact that you're negatively generalizing people based on a single superficial dimension of their personage. It's bigotry, that disparages people based on something they have no control over, no matter if you want to engage in mental gymnastics to claim it's not "racism".

>>I’ve been dreaming lately of a tor-like network that’s based loosely on the idea of tailnets. Rather than blockchain bullshit, you’d have a direct ring of trust with friends, and then you could set up access policies to forward packets for people you don’t trust, but who know someone you do trust.

The network will coalesce around using a handful of hub nodes for the packet forwarding, and a malicious party need only to coopt that central cluster of nodes to unmask all web users.

The "blockchain bullshit" enables trusted decentralized interaction at scale.

I was responding to zukzuk's argument, that straws have no utility.

Apparently collective bargaining for teachers harms boys' education but not girls'.

https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/negative-ef...

There is no need to make racist generalizations. You could just limit your criticism to social justice activists.

Being able to be less careful, or be a less coordinated person, and yet not spill, has utility.

A drink is far less likely to spill if you use a straw.

With a more optimized contract, the same number of transactions would have been submitted, and the aggregate computational load would have been smaller, leading to less congestion.

Equating CO2 emission with Amazon-rainforest-lit-on-fire is deliberately inflammatory and grossly misleading.

A congestion tax

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_pricing#Impact

The more complex the laws, the fewer people will be willing to learn "what being an employer actually entail[s]", and will instead operate illegally, or not start a business.

The difference in your experience from that of your neighbor is not a case of racial discrimination. Even if this afflicted more black people in general, a racial disparity in the impact of a policy is not evidence of it being systemically racist, so would not validate the claim that the US is systemically racist toward black people.

This can be trivially demonstrated: ten times more men are arrested and incarcerated than women, yet no one would claim this suggests the US criminal justice system is systemically sexist toward men.

The founding fathers almost all believed slavery was wrong but they were born into a society where it was a core institution and it wasn't obvious how exactly to reform it.

Entitlement principles are why the West was the 1st place in the world to abolish slavery and then went about and abolished it throughout the world.

>>and 'systematic racism exists' - which of course it does

Systematic racism only exists today to positively discriminate against people belonging to so-called disadvantaged races, at the expense of those belonging to so-called privileged races. That's why White and Asian kids are discriminated against in college admissions.

>>Okay... the thing is that you can't give the state the ability to enforce property rights and simultaneously not give the state the ability to confiscate assets arbitrarily, because it's the same ability in both instances.

To some extent that's true, but it could still be true that certain limits on the state's power to seize private property make private property rights more secure overall, because:

1. You can increase the cost for the state to seize private property, which would make it less likely that the state does so in cases where there is less justification, i.e. when doing so violates private property rights.

2. You can make it so that the state can only seize private property when a person reports a theft, by denying the state the ability to engage in mass-surveillance over who owns what. This limits when the state can seize private property to when private property has been stolen, and largely prevents it from seizing private property when it has not.

Cryptocurrency has both of these effects.

Labor's share of compensation dropped from 0.63 to just under 0.60. That's not 15%.

>>people find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Because capitalism is literally people being secure to own and exchange what they produce. The end of capitalism would require pervasive government control to deny that right, and of course I'll assume it's Marxism that's motivating these calls, because it almost always is, and the economist who's being fawned over by leftists in the comments under this post is a Marxist.

>>The CSMonitor article you linked to cites 3 reasons for the dramatic drop in world poverty, with a move to "more market-based economic systems" about the closest thing they offer to "capitalism".

1. "more market-based economic systems" is 100% "more capitalism".

2. Here are two other sources that echo the widely held conclusion that the spread of market institutions, like private property rights, played a pivotal role in the decline in poverty:

https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bill...

>>So sure, at some point during the development of a capitalist economy, you will see a stronger correlation between productivity gains and wages. However, that's not the case in the USA since sometime in the late 20th century.

That is still the case with the US today:

https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/sources-of-real-wage-stag...

If you look at advanced economies, you see Hong Kong and Singapore ranking number 1 and 2 in economic freedom indices, and having social welfare spending as a percentage of GDP far below the OECD average.

And they massively closed the gap with the Nordic countries in per capita GDP, while leapfrogging them in quality of life metrics like life expectancy.

You see the advanced economies massively increase social welfare spending over the last 60 years:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...

And you see both per GDP capita growth and wage growth stagnate over that period.

By all indications, capitalism is the best ruleset for facilitating economic growth, and the experience of advanced economies like the US confirms that.

>>You're confusing authoritarian governments with limitations on capitalism.

I am not. Economists specifically cite the liberalization of the economy as a major contributor to the decline in poverty, through its positive impact on the rate of economic development.

>>In modern times unrestricted capitalism keeps doing the same: from sweatshops all over Asia

Before sweatshops, the quality of life in those countries was much worse.

>>Nestle literally dissuading mothers from breastfeeding in developing nations which led to widespread problems like, you know, children dying

That can be dealt with perfectly well within the rules of capitalism, which encourages prosecution of fraud, and impartial civil courts where bad actors can be sued.

This is also an anecdote, and says nothing about the broader impact on capitalism, which is captured by statistical evidence like the rate of poverty.

The economists, who study this, overwhelmingly disagree. There are numerous examples given in the three articles I cited of a transition to greater capitalism being associated with more rapid economic development and poverty reduction, and you made the unsubstantiated claim that these are cherry-picking.

There is no evidence at all to support the idea that redistributive social programs, or regulations, accelerated poverty reduction. The exact opposite is indicated by the data.

I'm happy to compare actual data and case studies with you, but it appears that you are not willing to have a meaningful debate on this.