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ICE Hunts Down Immigrants by Spying on Their Wire Transfers (theintercept.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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[+] [S] -6 points 1 year ago (26 children)

Really? Bitcoin: Worse Than a Ponzi

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago* (18 children)

    The word "investors" is the problem here.

    The word is crypto"currency". The goal would be to completely replace traditional currency.

    Your job pays you in crypto, you pay your electric bill in crypto, you pay your mortgage in crypto, you pay your car payment in crypto, you save in crypto, you buy your Starbucks in crypto. You sell your old game system for crypto, etc.

    When you completely give up on the traditional system and value your life in crypto, your life gets better.

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  • [+] [S] -6 points 1 year ago (17 children)

    Cringe AF. Please stop abusing the anarchist symbol.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (16 children)

    No, I don't think I will, because I'm not abusing it. I am a crypto anarchist.

    I believe in rules without rulers and voluntary human association. Governments are illegitimate due to the use of force.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (15 children)

    Anarchism and capitalism are mutually exclusive.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    However you feel about crypto, its decentralized nature is counter to capitalism.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 year ago* (4 children)
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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    For that so decentralized video, we are actually in agreement. That is absolutely not decentralized, as it is very easy for a government to knock on the door and tell them to do whatever they want, and if they want to continue to exist as a business, they must comply.

    While Monero, for example, still uses proof of work, it is deliberately designed to work on general purpose CPUs, such as the ones you have in your phone, laptop, desktop, etc.

    This completely murders the idea of a mining farm and completely murders the idea of being able to centralize in a place like that.

    There's not one or only a few doors to knock on. There's thousands upon thousands of doors to knock on all across the world. And since it's so distributed, there's not jet engine level noise in one specific area harming the community like this.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    This completely murders the idea of a mining farm and completely murders the idea of being able to centralize in a place like that.

    Does it? Why wouldn't there be economies of scale and advantages of locating near cheap electricity for Monero miners? Why are a million shelf-CPUs quieter to cool than the same computing power in ASICs?

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago*

    It's true that Monero miners would benefit from cheaper electricity. I think more than anything it has to do with the power efficiency. A big warehouse full of CPUs would not be any more efficient than Uncle Bob mining on his gaming PC in his bedroom.

    As for the noise level, I don't think cooling a million CPUs would be any quieter than cooling ASIC chips. I think it's mainly the fact that it's so distributed.

    Uncle Bob might have one or two computers mining in his bedroom, which put off a little bit of noise, but nothing horrible. Where these companies have racks and racks of ASIC chips all in the same place, amplifying the noise upon each other.

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  • [+] -6 points 1 year ago (8 children)
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  • [–] [S] 7 points 1 year ago (7 children)
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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

    Hey, thanks for the read. That was actually very interesting.

    I think a lot of the problems are the shifting of the meanings of words over time, in that words get used in different contexts, in different time periods. For example, socialism is commonly thought to be Marxist-Leninist states like the old Soviet Union, etc., when apparently that's not what it meant at all.

    On a personal level, I don't know quite what the hell I am because I feel as though I could identify with some aspects of American libertarianism as well as anarchism and voluntarism and i like the NAP. i am absolutely opposed to war, see the right to bare arms as absolutely imparative, and hate fiat money because it gives one group of humans the means to destroy the lives of everyone else silently and without most people being able to identify the root of the problem.

    I like Ayn Rands "Atlas Shrugged", Alongside Night by, i'm going to butcher his name, J Neil Schulman, and some of Sek3.

    I am in no way opposed to drugs, but think that individuals who choose to use hard drugs are only hurting themselves. Cocoa leaf tea is one thing. Cocaine is totally different, just because of how much stronger it is. Marijuana is fine because you're not going to overdose and die from it, even if sometimes you might feel like you will.

    With that said, what a person chooses to put in their body and enjoy is none of my fucking business. And I have no say over that, nor should I.

    Another thing I found to be quite interesting was assassination politics and the assassination marketplace for those power hungry people who think they could lord it over everybody else wouldn't be able to do so for very long.

    Edit: a few of the people i have major respect for are Cody Wilson (liberator 3d pistol) J Stark (Fuck Gun Control (FGC) 9mm, murdered by german poliece RIP), Amir Takki (dark wallet) and Edward Snowden (NSA leaks)

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Both the United States and the Soviet Union cracked down on organized labor. The corruption of the word 'socialism' was encouraged by both super-powers, one to falsely associate it with dictators and tyranny, and the other to claim its virtue for itself.

    George Orwell wrote, "Rifles, muskets, long-bows, and hand grenades are inherently democratic weapons." Anarchists generally don't oppose safe recreational drug use, and see addiction not as a criminal act but instead a public health issue. Historically anarchists have flirted ideologically with assassination, but the modern consensus is that the means and the ends of revolution are too closely related to embrace political murder as a tenet.

    It sounds like you're interested in becoming more politically literate. One question to ponder is if it may be moral for people to conspire to assassinate tyrants, is it also moral for people to organize a labor union to prevent tyrants from paying them poverty wages?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    Why organize a labor union to keep the tyrants from paying you poverty wages when you could just submit the name of the tyrant to the assassination market and let somebody take care of it?

    The more unpopular you are as a human being, the shorter your expected lifespan, because the reward for you not existing would increase proportionally to how much of an asshole you were.

    The next person knowing that the workers are why the last person was deposed would be a hell of a lot less likely to pay poverty wages and become unpopular since they have an incentive to live.

    Personally, I've never followed or paid very much attention to politics as I see it as a pointless endeavor. The way our political systems are set up these days, they will get what they want and fuck what the people think.

    I think there are a group of people that go into politics who are just pure evil and do so in order to have control over other people. I think there are some people who go into politics actually thinking they can change the system and have absolutely no idea that they don't matter in the grand scheme of things.

    Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts, absolutely.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)
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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I think scale is the problem.

    With something like national politics, for example, the politicians can be thousands of miles away from you and really have no accountability to you as an individual.

    In state politics, the politicians may be a hundred miles away or so, but that's at least a doable trip, and you are able to make your voice heard better than you would if the politicians were a thousand miles away, because you can actually make that trip.

    The mayor of your city and your city hall are probably only going to be about 20 or 30 miles away at the absolute maximum and you can very easily get to that local meeting point and make your voice heard on issues that affect you.

    I've had the idea for a while that something like the United States is just too big to effectively work. Also, the smaller a country is, the less war making power it tends to have, so somewhere like the United States or Russia could wipe out the entire human population of the planet, whereas a place like Ethiopia could affect a war locally but would not be able to affect a war across the world.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 year ago

    Why organize a labor union to keep the tyrants from paying you poverty wages when you could just submit the name of the tyrant to the assassination market and let somebody take care of it?

    The more unpopular you are as a human being, the shorter your expected lifespan, because the reward for you not existing would increase proportionally to how much of an asshole you were.

    What are some ways that you can think of where a scheme like this could have undesirable results?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Okay buddy. Whatever you say.

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  • [–] [S] -2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Why bitcoin is worse than a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme by Robert McCauley

    Brazilian computer scientist Jorge Stolfi is one voice who has contended this. His view is based on the following observations:

    1. Investors buy in the expectation of profits.
    2. That expectation is sustained by the profits of those that cash out.
    3. But there is no external source for those profits; they come entirely from new investments.
    4. And the operators take away a large portion of the money.

    All of this rings true true. But in calling bitcoin a Ponzi scheme, critics are arguably being too kind on two counts. First, bitcoin doesn’t have the same endgame as a Ponzi scheme. Second, it constitutes a deeply negative sum game from a broad social perspective.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Bitcoin = Monero in your mind. They aren't the same, not even close.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    Bitcoin = Monero in your mind. They aren’t the same, not even close.

    LOL. I understand they are very different entities.

    | Bitcoin | Monero | |

    |

    | | Proof of work | Proof of work | | Uses a blockchain ledger | Uses a blockchain ledger | | Extremely volatile exchange rate | Extremely volatile exchange rate | | Unregulated | Unregulated | | Price easily manipulated by wealthy investors | Price easily manipulated by wealthy investors | | "HODL" - unrealistic expectation that the endgame is general use as currency | "HODL" - unrealistic expectation that the endgame is general use as currency | | Heavily driven by FOMO | Heavily driven by FOMO | | Uses obscene amount of energy per coin | Aspires to use an obscene amount of energy per coin to prevent another 51% attack | | Ledger has become so large it is unwieldy to store and transfer | Ledger 200+ GiB, constantly expanding | | Represents an ecological catastrope | A currently smaller part of the ecological catastrope | | Most popular currency used to facilitate human trafficking | Has features that should make it more attractive for use in human trafficking | | Difficult and annoying to use | Even more difficult and annoying to use | | Available on most cryptocurrency exchanges | Available on fewer exchanges | | Claimed by early proponents that transactions were 'anonymous' but now frequently the subject of blockchain analysis | Proponents claim transactions to be anonymous | | Pre-mining began January 2009 | Pre-mining began April 2014 | | Advocates behave like people in an MLM cult | Advocates behave like people in an MLM cult | | Represents the vain hope to individually escape catastrophe while the world burns by using theoretically clever but practically unworkable technological solutions that create further social problems, while the real, difficult though not intractable social problems of government abuse, economic instability, and authoritarianism continue to increase because resources for real social solutions are starved of resources | Represents the vain hope to individually escape catastrophe while the world burns by using theoretically clever but practically unworkable technological solutions that create further social problems, while the real, difficult though not intractable social problems of government abuse, economic instability, and authoritarianism continue to increase because resources for real social solutions are starved of resources | | $116,760 / coin | $270 / coin | | 20M coins | 18.5M coins | | Logo is a circle with the letter "B" | Logo is a circle with the letter "M" |

    One of the hilarious details I discovered while researching this is that according to the US Government Accountability Office report "Use of Online Marketplaces and Virtual Currencies in Drug and Human Trafficking" in 2022,

    Representatives of two analytics firms and one exchange also noted that illicit actors use privacy coins less frequently, as they are more difficult to obtain and are supported by fewer exchanges compared to Bitcoin, making it difficult to convert funds to government-issued currency.

    So whatever benefits Monero claims to have in protecting the privacy of illicit activities, the people who could face real time in jail don't consider the benefits worth how extremely annoying it is to use.

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