
Privacy and control need to be put back into the hands of the individual - merkleme
https://decentralize.today/privacy-and-control-need-to-be-put-back-into-the-hands-of-the-individual-301c4c318ef8#.u3sba968w
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jbpetersen
Article is actually a lengthy pitch for YAC$ (yet another cryptocurrency)

It's another anonymized coin that appears to have fancy chat/marketplace
support in the main wallet application as a flagship feature.

~~~
creshal
I don't understand how blockchain applications can ever be considered
"anonymous", when there's a public ledger and everyone knowing your wallet
address can track all your transactions.

~~~
kqr
I guess you could own several wallets for different purposes?

~~~
creshal
Enigma fallacy. Tracing that back to a single owner is hard for humans, but
trivial to do for computers.

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tomp
> Earlier this year the Brazilian government used the courts to block WhatsApp
> for 72 hours as it seems they did not like being unable to peer into the
> private communications of their citizens. This happened again just a couple
> of weeks ago and it seems what the government cannot control should be
> blocked or even banned.

It's very hypocritical when an American criticises foreign "corrupt,
oppressive" governments for "peering into private communications" by using
_public_ legal means against US corporations, whereas the US government has
done exactly the same thing (using legal and illegal means) but you just
didn't know about it (because most Internet companies are based in the US).

[I'm not sure that the author is an American, but there are undoubtedly many
Americans that share this attitude.]

~~~
rmc
Remember: if you're a non-US citizen outside the US, then the US Constitution
protection against search (4th Amendment) doesn't apply to you! We have no 4th
Amendment protections!

~~~
jnbiche
I'm as opposed to mass surveillance as anyone on HN, but I've been surprised
by this kind of reaction. Why are non-citizens surprised at this lack of
constitutional protection? Are there actually _any_ countries whose
constitutional protections apply to non-citizens and/or non-residents? I think
that would be pretty cool and progressive if it were the case, but I'm not
aware of any.

~~~
furyg3
I've said it before, but why WOULDN'T a country provide protections and rights
to non-citizens (residents or not) that it outlines in it's constitution?
After all, the US founding fathers believed it to be "self-evident, that all
men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights". If it is always wrong for a government to do certain
things, then clearly it is wrong for a government to do those things no matter
to whom they are done.

Morally it's clear that you should treat others by the standards that you
believe to be universal.

A government's ability to guarantee and protect these rights is, of course,
limited by its geography. Other people may have different value systems which
mean they protect a different set of rights than those defined in the US
constitution (although the DoI does declare them to be 'unalienable'). But
that's not what people are talking about when they talk about US government
spying internationally. The US government violates rights it considers to be
universal, and many of the people who's rights are violated are in countries
with similarly enshrined values, and also who's countries are not at war with
the US.

~~~
justthisonetime
And I call BS when I see it. A nation state is morally responsible to it's
citizens to uphold the law and order and protect it's citizens [from threats
internal and external]. This is funded by the tax money collected by the state
from it's subjects. Nation state may, willingly provide protections and other
services reserved for it's citizens to others. But concept that it must or
should is flawed at heart. World today remains a hostile place and the game
for supremacy remains as strong as ever.

~~~
GunboatDiplomat
This is obviously true. It's equally obvious that the neoliberal consensus is
opposed to this and seeks to substitute a globalist fantasy.

------
unicornporn
Domain: decentralize.today. Published on: Medium.

Seriously, it isn't THAT hard to at least host your blog outside the
centralized disservices. You could argue that reach is negatively affected. It
probably is. But if everybody (and that includes the outlets promoting
decentralization) just swallows the bait, how can things ever change? (Wo)man
up!

~~~
pjmlp
Having been raised in a country enjoying the first winds of freedom after a
dictatorship of 44 years, I wonder how serious this kind of blog posts are.

Sometimes they look just doing activism from the couch.

~~~
maglavaitss
Anything that raises a flag and makes people think and consider alternatives
to FB, Google, printed money, etc, is good activism. Whether it's from the
couch or the armchair, is irrelevant.

~~~
pjc50
_FB, Google, printed money_

One of these things is not like the others.

~~~
iamdave
I don't think their point was to make precise and completely congruent
analogues of these three topics.

~~~
pjc50
It's more that I don't want sensible concerns about privacy in online services
diluted by monetary theory that's at best "fringe".

~~~
Hondor
The article identifies the risk that printed money will disappear, replaced
with a few large credit card companies and banks so the government can monitor
everyone's use of money. Since we're clearly already heading in that direction
bit by bit, I wouldn't call it a fringe theory.

~~~
zanny
It is only fringe / extremist / conspiracy theorist when its a problem I don't
_personally_ have (or have not exerted the mental energy to fully understand).
If it is affecting my life, it is serious mainstream business we need to take
seriously.

That is a fundamental problem with online discourse. People put on blinders on
singular crusades when reality is the combined effects of many, many forces
influencing one another. Topically, the anti-encryption movement by
governments is tied to broader totalitarian leanings by many traditionally
republican states in the west, which has hundreds of influential aspects in
all kinds of fields of business and society. And those leanings have
correlations in everything from fearmongering to economic uncertainty to long
running campaigns by certain interests that have lasted decades.

And then we get trapped in this rat hole of arguing over what is "serious" or
meaningful, when in hindsight we can historically recognize almost all of
history is the combined effect of _many_ influencing factors not apparent at
that moment in the past.

------
agroot12
The first half lists lots of state actions against encryption, the second part
advertises the shadow project, a blockchain based anonymous currency,
communication and commerce platform:
[https://github.com/shadowproject/shadow](https://github.com/shadowproject/shadow)

------
rini17
Has anyone of these activists ever considered the appalling inability of
average person to manage private keys properly? Whether it is Bitcoin, pgp,
whatever else, using private keys on own hardware where noone else has access
to is absolute prerequisite of successful decentralized crypto. Yet the
privkeys keep getting leaked,stolen,lost(including Zimmermann's pgp
key),cracked(due to generation by buggy software) without any good solution in
sight.

~~~
danieldk
You will have a hard time stealing a private key remotely from a good hardware
token.

(Of course a compromised machine can be used to sign using a hardware token,
but that's a different level of compromise than getting the private key.)

~~~
rini17
Obviously the token can be stolen,too. Also,people all the time _voluntarily_
allow others to use their tokens if convenience demands it.

Your comment is also a good example of how the concern 'people can't manage
privkeys well' keeps getting handwaved away, with sad results.

~~~
david-given
Sounds like the obvious solution here is to provide a blessed and convenient
way for one person to allow another to use their tokens in a limited fashion.

What's the actual use case here? What are people wanting to do when they do
this?

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tbarbugli
The right title should be: how to loose all or most your money by using crypto
currencies

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lsiebert
I worry about specific implementations of software for decentralisation. You
can ban or block an app, arrest it's creators, but it's a lot harder to ban a
protocol that has a number of different implementations. Maybe there isn't
enough resources for that, maybe encryption and privacy tech is hard enough
that more than one implementation isn't possible at this moment, but I think
it should be a goal.

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martinko
The article mentions shadow cash. I've never heard of it, but why would
someone use it over bitcoin or perhaps monero?

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xyzzy4
Printed money is decentralized and anonymous in the cash form.

~~~
etatoby
Anonymous yes, decentralized no. The bill in your hand is printed by a central
authority, is given value (or taken away, at their whim) by that same central
authority, is protected by law, and is technically not even your property.
It's the opposite of decentralized.

~~~
xyzzy4
It's decentralized because you don't have to communicate with a centralized
authority in order to make a transaction.

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david90
Not only on contents on global sites, China did lots of censorship on the
local sites content.

