The tradeoffs between centralized control and permissionless primitives are better explored elsewhere, but the dangerously high costs of depending on a fickle intermediary for all transactions should be clear to any informed observer.
Consider a Russian citizen unable to flee Putin's wartorn regime because all personal life savings and assets have been frozen.
Just as private communications make some tradeoffs for not acquiescing to the surveillance state, so permissionless value transfer makes tradeoffs.
This is very well put. If you believe the trade-offs of permissionless and private communications (as granted by cryptography) are worth-it and you don't think similar trade-offs to value transfer are worth-it (as granted by cryptocurrencies) you have to be able to explain how you are tracing the risk-reward in both cases to arrive at different conclusions. I'm not claiming it's not possible but certainly some very fine-tuning of the weights involved is necessary to reach different conclusions.
The average opinion (as in, the most oft-repeated or most popularly represented through upvotes) in HN maintains opposite conclusions. Which is an interesting observation.
It's been explained countless times. The world has come together and numerous societies have agreed to not give money to North Korea. There is no comparable discussion or agreements about restricting communications among individuals. It's asinine to ignore all of the history and turmoil of North Korea, just about as asinine as creating a crypto currency for the espress purpose of funding the Kim regime.
Hello, I read your twitter thread. While privacy is absolutely important, your reasoning is fundamentally flawed. In the context of financial transactions, we know from a ridiculous amount of history with banking regulations that it's not ordinary people who benefit from having complete privacy and anonymity in all matters. It's criminals and fraudsters who lie and misrepresent themselves to conceal the source of their funds and their activities. They'll gladly continue to use their privacy as a weapon to disguise themselves and further rob and steal. There is no other group that benefits as much from being able to transfer large amounts of money secretly. This can be verified over and over again, ask any traditional company that processes international remittances.
It doesn't really matter what kind of political activism you believe you're engaging in: the reality is, these nasties are the main people that benefit. They absolutely love what you're doing. Anyone involved in cryptocurrency, even tangentially, is complicit in this fraud because it's the only way these currencies have any significant value to begin with. And it will continue to happen for the indefinite future, because even with this new move ETH will still have no capital controls to prevent any of the massive market manipulation that happened over the last few years, that drove tons more fraud and ransomware and also resulted in the recent crash.
A system that tries to give privacy but does nothing to stop fraud is just creating worse problems under the false guise of helping people. I ask that you please stop working on these things and please stop promoting them until you can dial the whole thing back to rectify this situation. Any kind of "censorship resistance" without fraud prevention is not going to work. If enough people put their heads together they can solve this, but it will not happen with any of the supposed "privacy solutions" you mentioned. Yes, I'm aware the traditional finance system also has many of the same problems. It's not helping to recreate the exact same system but with even more layers of technical debt around it, which is essentially all you'll be able to do with any of the suggested tools.
The system you have built specifically and explicitly provides much less cover to the Russian citizens than it does to Putin's regime, who will gladly adopt it and then turn around and use the proceeds to further oppress, murder and destroy. It is a net loss for privacy.
The tradeoffs between centralized control and permissionless primitives are better explored elsewhere, but the dangerously high costs of depending on a fickle intermediary for all transactions should be clear to any informed observer.
Consider a Russian citizen unable to flee Putin's wartorn regime because all personal life savings and assets have been frozen.
Just as private communications make some tradeoffs for not acquiescing to the surveillance state, so permissionless value transfer makes tradeoffs.
Also recommend a thread writeup on the importance of privacy I put together: https://twitter.com/0xfoobar/status/1502083084052836354