• 0 Posts
  • 87 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle


  • I shouldn’t feed the troll, but there is a teachable moment here.

    Crypto transactions that are direct on a Blockchain, by design, are immutable. Once they are validated in a block, and future blocks are validated on top of that, it is impossible for any entity to change that history unless they control a majority of the validation power of that network. Yes, even the NSA can’t do it. It’s math.

    Yes, if the government wants your crypto, it will get it. But the only way to do that is to obtain your private keys. It cannot reverse a transaction, nor reverse-engineer your private keys from a transaction. Yes, not even the NSA can do it. It’s math.

    Governments do have other tools at their disposal. But those tools must center on obtaining the key. They cannot “hack” it any other way.






  • I’ve used crypto for legitimate transactions in the past. It bailed me out once, big time, when I had to top up a foreign SIM card while abroad and their website wouldn’t take my US credit card. I found a site selling top-up codes that took crypto and sent some from my phone, and I was back in business. (The site was legit, but even if it turned out to be a scam I knew they could never take anything more than what I sent them because of the way crypto worked.) But this was back when people were still using it to transact.

    The worst thing that ever happened to law-abiding people using crypto was when it’s price zoomed up. Because for all those early adopters, every individual transaction now has a considerble capital gain attached. That’s why people don’t spend crypto anymore, because it’s been turned by the market into a Store of Value. (And by developers, but that’s a different thread).


  • This seems to be all about a technicality involving how these sanctions are applied. Sanctions are meant to be applied to people and the companies they run, and a US court ruled that these sanctions couldn’t be applied to a smart contract because it’s just a bunch of code, and not the property of a sanctioned individual. This ruling was made back in November, they are just getting around now to removing the sanctions. From what I can tell, the sanctions against the people involved in running the service are still in effect.




  • Yes, all that is correct, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try anyway. You don’t necessarily need to be correct on the law in America to win, you just need to have the resources to pay more lawyers than the other side.

    It’s hosted on Github, all it takes is a few billable hours for Reddit to send Github a cease and decist letter and … poof … the repo goes away unless Github decides to challenge (and they won’t challenge, nor will they bother asking the maintainer before killing it).

    Did someone make a phone app out of the code? All it takes is a similar letter to Google and Apple to resolve that. Yes, the app developer can challenge it with them, but don’t expect to get very far.

    Just a few billable hours can severely impact the reach of this project, even if the project is fully open source and thus allowed to be forked. You don’t need to be correct to send a C&D letter, in most cases the other party caves right away before challenging it.

    So if you like the project, make sure to maintain your own private copy of the Github repo. It may not be there forever.





  • She’s fake, she can be whatever she wants to be.

    But in the US (and I assume in Canada), many people identify based on where their ancestors came from, even if they came over several generations back, as long as their family still associated with that country’s culture. Because let’s face it, unless you have native heritage your ancestors came here from somewhere.