this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2024
713 points (86.9% liked)

Technology

60070 readers
3596 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

35 crypto companies got together to make a change dot org petition called "Bitcoin Deserves an Emoji".

F that

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'm not a Bitcoin or crypto expert (though I remember news about a decade ago about unrelated data, including pictures, ending up in the ledger. Maybe they fixed it?) Rather I think about what I'd want in a currency that we don't have in state-backed currencies.

And yes, anonymity of transactions is one of the, money laundering is about justifying gains to a surveillance state on the grounds that only state-approved transactions should be allowed. Like the internet, the economy is and should be bigger than the regional states we have, unless you want Hollywood telling you what content you are allowed to watch and how many times before your license expires.

One of the problems with state-proprietary banking systems is that they can be manipulated for political purposes. It's nice when this means depriving dicks of their money (say Putin and Russian Oligarchs) but it's not very nice when it's used to silence journalists who embarrass the ownership class (e.g. Wikileaks) or is used by industrialists to block competition (e.g. the MPAA and RIAA arranging for the freezing of Kim Dotcom's assets, and those of Megaupload, which was about to release a new music distribution system).

The point is to create a currency that states cannot control or regulate.

Yes, there are matters like the black market. CSAM transactions have become more difficult to trace while cryptocurrencies are stable, but I suspect these can be addressed piecemeal when we actually confront problems like drug abuse and porn production. As it is, the people who do the most damage, cause the most cost and death have enough influence on state regulators of currency so as to not need to launder money. (Though they may fold conflict diamonds into ones mined from legitimate sources.)

[โ€“] go_go_gadget@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

You said the Bitcoin ledger is mutable. It's not. You said Bitcoin isn't anonymous and that's mostly true because it's pseduo-anonymous which can be fully anonymous if you want it to be.