bigcorp-slave

I am generally a very privacy-minded person, but serious question here: is there any legitimate use case for financial privacy from the authorities? I don’t mean “ideologically, I am upset that the government can see I buy too many pastries”. When we look at cryptocurrency, it is used for a small collection of things:

- Speculation on a high volatility, unregulated market

- Money laundering

- Distribution of illegal material

These all seem like things Im fine with the government having visibility into. Perhaps this is ignorance on my part, but all legitimate uses I’ve ever heard of seem like rounding error next to the above. No one is buying pizza with bitcoin in 2020. The uptake for real transactions seems like it’s near zero.

About the best I can come up with is that financial privacy permits low level lawbreaking for laws generally regarded as stupid or unethical (e.g., marijuana). I think it’s safe to say that people who want to feed their drug habits will find other anonymous ways to to pay, e.g. barter or proxy goods.

The types of folks who are deeply affected by large governments having logs of their transactions are not the downtrodden masses. They’re the moderately wealthy engaged in corruption and trafficking. Cry me a river.

Yeah, reading this guy’s website sets of my bullshit-artist filter pretty hard.

Article might be good but jeez, bad source.

Can someone tell me if I’ve summed this up right?

- Amazon colludes behind the scenes to get a contract proposal that on paper only Amazon can fill (e.g. memory sizing options exactly matching things only AWS provides)

- There is a competitive bidding process without prices revealed and Microsoft wins

- Amazon cries no fair and demands to be allowed to bid again now that they know how much Microsoft bid

- Government re-evaluates the deal and picks Microsoft again

- Amazon decides to make whiny posts about how aggrieved they, as a >1.5T company, are

Wow, this is remarkably shitty of RC. It’s one meeting - If the organization was set up correctly, the new recruit should be able to read notes, or watch a recording.

Definitely will recommend people stay far away from this organization.

This is a pretty hostile post that looks like it violates site guidelines to me. Can you express your point civilly?

Nostromo has been consistently spreading misinformation about the pandemic on HN since it started. When are they going to be banned?

Having a wide and healthy discussion on this site does not require that we entertain people advocating mass death.

The constant refrain that this isn’t a big deal seems belied somewhat by the five hundred thousand dead people.