This is the problem with "no politics at work": work has political salience. Politics concerns regulation of the world and work happens in the world.
Whenever an executive starts complaining[1] about how politics is impacting their workplace I see management incompetence. Politics exists. It exists for everyone. If your company is having an unusually difficult time getting work done in a given political environment, the conditions that are causing that probably have more to do with the company environment than politics writ large.
Prohibition is always a largely ineffective policy. People have feelings about the world. If you can't find a way to make space for those feelings somehow they will make their own space, often at the least convenient moment.
[1] Most recently this was Kraken CEO Jesse Powell
Particularly notable here since Coinbase is famously a "mission-focused" company [1]:
> Coinbase’s mission is to create an open financial system for the world. This means we want to use cryptocurrency to bring economic freedom to people all over the world.
Selling geolocation data to ICE definitely detracts from that mission. Whoops!
> We act as #OneCoinbase, putting the company’s goals ahead of any particular team or individual goals.
The thing I hate about this fake corporate mission is there is absolutely no need for the lie.
Just be honest, hey we started this company, the founders will have disproportionate returns because we were first and control the equity power structure, you will work for us and make less money - even in the event of an exit. Sometimes we will fire you. We will make mistakes. Lets be adults.
Instead its: "In our supreme nobility we sacrifice everything at the alter of the almighty cause, and so should you. Follow in our virtuous foot steps. Ask not what your company can do for you, but what you can do for your company!" ...
"Large institutional investors are, in effect, “Universal Owners”, as they often have highly-diversified and long-term portfolios that are representative of global capital markets. Their portfolios are inevitably exposed to growing and widespread costs from environmental damage caused by companies. They can positively influence the way business is conducted in order to reduce externalities and minimise their overall exposure to these costs. Long-term economic wellbeing and the interests of beneficiaries are at stake. Institutional investors can, and should, act collectively to reduce financial risk from environmental impacts."
> Ask not what your company can do for you, but what you can do for your company!
I once had a CEO literally drop that line in to an email, after berating the dev team for failing to hit an impossible deadline, that he'd pulled forwards over the vehement objections of the VP of Development.
It was the most utterly bizarre, and divorced from reality, email I think I've ever seen from leadership.
> The thing I hate about this fake corporate mission is there is absolutely no need for the lie.
I get what you're saying, and I dislike the deception also, but there is an intention and a purpose behind it.
The mission statement is for recruiting and retention. At a good company, it has some truth to it. Coinbase management understood that companies are supposed to have mission statements, and they may have even understood why. They just didn't understand that mission statements are supposed to be true.
(Obviously a lot of other companies don't get that part either.)
When I see that it always seems to me that the real issue is the CEO has made a conscious choice to pick profit over doing the right thing, and wants employees who dislike this choice to leave. Which is essentially bad for society and why I think most firms in our economy should be co-operatively managed.
I think you're giving them a bit too much credit. I suspect that is what they think they are doing - but IMO they're just being ineffectual. The real villains manage this like any other aspect of company culture. Exxon doesn't ban talking about politics and it hasn't crippled their operations!
>Exxon doesn't ban talking about politics and it hasn't crippled their operations!
Probably because it's not happening there to nearly the extent it happens at big tech companies, partly due to the culture of older companies and partly due to the company attracting a certain type of morally agnostic person. Exxon did not release a statement following Friday's supreme court decision like most tech companies did and did not respond to comment when asked about it.
> When I see that it always seems to me that the real issue is the CEO has made a conscious choice to pick profit over doing the right thing
Just going to toss my hat in the ring and say that I think selling data to ICE falls on the right half of the right/wrong spectrum. Not everyone agrees with your specific take on right and wrong. Sometimes those discussions shouldn't happen in the workplace.
You think people shouldn't discuss this topic (whether to sell data to ICE) at work, but that they should end up on your side of the decision magically? Am I understanding this comment right?
Not the OP and don’t agree at all but “a strong border is central to a strong state, which is central to a functioning state” is a logical argument.
Belief that statehood is evil or that free immigration is a natural right are fairly out of the mainstream. Given that tools that support enforcing the opposite is mainstream.
This a stupid statement thats NEVER been TRUE. No one state has ever existed in utopia its own vacume without immigrants. its a complete falasy without any basis in reality, much like religion, its pushed by the conservatives as a way to maintain repression.
ICE is just a continuation of slavery. If Central/South Americans didnt continue to be leveraged by EVERYONE in the economy then there would be no american dream for them quest over the boarder for.
Countries are defined by their borders, and governments are perfectly justified in using force to control access to their territory. The fact that there is a pathological unwillingness in some industries to comply with immigration law (in collaboration with some politicians and administrators) and a willingness to externalise the costs of their "cheap" labor might have given you the impression that this state of affairs was inevitable or necessary, but it is just a mechanism for corrupt businessmen and opportunistic politicians to gain monetary and political advantage at the expense of citizens, as well as technological progress (an endless supply of unskilled and semi-skilled labor below the market rate removes the incentive to invest and innovate). Factors like birthright citizenship and chain migration further exacerbate these problems.
Crypto deals with digital transactions. There's essentially no geographically relevant scarcity.
Migration impacts all kinds of things which are intertwined with physical scarcities and order- community service funding, housing needs and so forth. Having an orderly process for migration isn't at all related to cryptocurrency; many aren't actually private at all, and for the most part merely allow control over the supply to not be controlled by a central agency like the federal reserve.
Being opposed to unlawful migration would be the equivalent of opposing people generating coins off the chain then forcing them in, creating more than were actually generated by mining. (I may have butchered the analogy, hopefully it at least makes some sense as to why they may not see it as an ironic or hypocritical stance).
That is arguably the CEO's responsibility, and I'm not saying that as a defense, that is a defect of the companies we build. If we don't want CEOs that choose profit over community, then you have to build a society that rewards that, and companies that make it possible.
It seems more like an ethical concern (mishandling customer data) than a political concern.
Ethical concerns should be raised at work, but I believe politics at work should be avoided.
There's no such thing as a group of people who agree about politics. They only think they agree until enough details start coming out.
The question is whether these differences are handled respectfully and people learn from each other, or whether they see it as a moral battle and end up hating each other. In the current cultural climate, the latter seems more likely. And I see no benefit from carrying that into the workplace.
Ethics in the workplace is about your behavior while carrying out your job duties. For instance: lying to a customer to make a sale and hit your quota is unethical.
Politics and ethics can intersect, for instance, if you are writing some graphics software and someone realizes it would make a great missle guidance system. Some people might feel that's perfectly patriotic and be happy to provide it to the DoD; others might never want to work on a weapon. Political opinions lead to divergent ethical codes.
But here with Coinbase it doesn't seem to be an intersection at all. It's unethical regardless of political persuasion.
While you are correct, this is the logic that is used to guilt-slash-shame folks who do not want to get involved into getting involved. It is one of the many sources of intense polarization that we suffer from today, and it forces people to take uninformed stances on things that makes them little more than mindless footsoldiers for causes that need a nuanced touch.
> it forces people to take uninformed stances on things
There are lots of ways to unproductively engage with politics - and I agree that we live in an age of highly visible unproductive engagement. However, banning engagement makes it official company policy that every interaction with politics be uninformed. "It was hard so we gave up" is just not a good sign for your leadership.
> I agree that we live in an age of highly visible unproductive engagement. However, banning engagement makes it official company policy that every interaction with politics be uninformed.
Not necessarily - I don't think engagement is particularly informative. A ban, even a widely flouted one, gives people permission to disengage, and might be valuable for that reason alone (in the same way that e.g. people have argued that monasteries and convents created a good place for asexuals in society, even when their rules were widely flouted).
Either way, the Coinbase employees are now involved with this. They helped build this, they are in this. The discussions may be silenced but "politics" isn't. It's not possible to not be political. This is a great demonstration of that.
Yes one of the main responsibilities of government is to govern the interaction between different entities within the community. If you move then to law, and consider law an arm of government and politics, the vast, vast, vast majority of law is about industry and commercial concerns. By contrast, individuals are actually the governments least concern, and that bias often shows very clearly and even proudly in policymaking.
It's not really political at all. The government is going to get the data one way or another. Or shut down Coinbase and be done with it. It's the survival instinct of a company playing a very dangerous game.
Can you translate that? You're saying leave politics out of work, leave your politics at home, right? Or are you saying the opposite, just bring your personal politics so the workplace?
They're saying neither; they're saying that politics is inextricable from life, and that work is part of life. You can't extract politics from work any more than you can extract personal life from work. People aren't robots.
Crypto's biggest friction point imo has been that people are used to interacting [primarily with centralized services. Average people don't want to manage their own crypto wallet because they aren't used to being the sole person responsible for managing things like that. They don't want all their money to be tied to a single computer, or QR code, or device, they want it tied to an account held by a big company, where all they have to do is prove who they are to access their stuff.
Because of this habit it feels like decentralized services will always end up as a collection of siloed centralized services. And with centralized services you get things like this data selling. Unless there's a paradigm shift in how non-technical people interact with decentralized services things like this are going to keep happening. That said, they're saying they're only providing publicly available data to ICE, but if it's publicly available and non-identifiable, why does ICE even need it, and why wouldn't they be able to get it themselves? (I'm actually asking, if you know I'd love to hear).
It's bigger than that. I think for most people, decentralization is an anti-feature. People do not want all their money to disappear because they lost their laptop on the subway. Being able to call your bank or credit union and have them freeze your cards, reverse fraudulent charges, and restore access to your account is a good thing.
The advantage of crypto over cash is that you can keep redundant copies, or keep portions of a key in different places so there's no single point of failure. It'd be pretty silly not to have backups.
For most people, a friendlier ideal is probably social recovery wallets, as advocated by Vitalik. You can restore access much like centralized services can, except instead of relying on a big company you're relying on your circle of friends and family. You can also include a company or two, if you want, without the company being a single point of failure.
Reversing charges is a different point, which could be accomplished pretty simply with 2-of-3 sigs if there's market demand for it. At the moment, scaling issues have kept crypto from being used much for retail payments anyway (though that's gradually getting fixed).
As for freezing cards, that's something we have to do a lot because we hand over full account credentials to everyone we pay and just trust them to keep those details safe and not abuse them. I've replaced two credit cards due to fraud, and it was a hassle. It boggles my mind that we've had public key cryptography for fifty years and we're still not using it for payments. Never mind blockchains, just upgrading the banking system to use public keys would be a huge improvement.
The central point is that crypto has features most people don’t want (decentralisation, shared public ledger, trustless) which actively sabotage things most people do want - speed, security, privacy, trust etc.
This is a fundamental design error.
Stop comparing crypto to cash, the competitor is centralised electronic bank accounts and credit cards.
Banks use lots of cryptography to secure and sign transactions, including public key cryptography. Some banks now issue numberless cards.
Every single one of these factors is significantly better in Bitcoin than in the legacy payments system. Your proposed tradeoff is not based on reality.
The only one of these things that might plausibly be called "better" for legacy payments is speed, but A) this is no longer plausible at all with lightning and B) any comparable appearance of speed in a legacy payments system is fictitious. The fiction holds up only if you are a "casual" user of the system, transacting in small amounts of money in non-complicated transactions. The costs even of this fictitious speed are high, but they are hidden from casual users.
Bitcoin can handle 7 transactions per second, on average. VISA can handle 1,700.
> Security
Your bank account is secured with a password. If compromised, you can prove your identity in person at a bank with government documents and obviously physical appearance. Bitcoin has one method of authentication, the signing key, and once you lose it, you have lost your account.
> Privacy
Every transaction you make as well as your balance is public on a blockchain. Your bank account is private only to you and the bank itself.
> Trust
This one is more subjective and I won’t really comment if I trust Chase or Coinbase more, but I will say this is somewhat ironic on a post about how Coinbase is selling IP data to ICE.
Look up Lightning. To be honest, saying this is a pretty reliable reverse-shibboleth that you have no idea what you're on about.
> Your bank account is secured with a password.
secp256k1 is a lot stronger than a shitty bank website.
> the signing key, and once you lose it, you have lost your account
Good thing we have invented backups. Even multisig if you wan to get fancy.
> Every transaction you make as well as your balance is public on a blockchain.
On a pseudonymous address that's difficult to impossible to correlate with an individual, and effectively impossible when using lightning.
> Your bank account is private only to you and the bank itself.
And the state comptroller, and the police, and the bank's advertising partners, and any number of federal agencies, and anyone who looks at frequent bank data leaks, and...
> This one is more subjective and I won’t really comment if I trust Chase or Coinbase more
Do I need to explain why it's not accurate to conflate coinbase with bitcoin, or was this just for rhetorical effect?
> Bitcoin can handle 7 transactions per second, on average. VISA can handle 1,700.
You're not comparing the same thing.
A Bitcoin transaction that makes its way into a block is settled within ~10 minutes and irreversible in ~60 minutes.
A VISA transaction is an IOU between the customer, VISA and the merchant. The merchant won't have settled funds for up to 90 days. VISA settles with the customer anywhere between a day or week, but these transactions are reversible for up to 90 days. VISA settles between bank accounts at best daily.
If we are comparing like for like, use of the Bitcoin Lightning network is far closer to the service offers of VISA, and the lightning network scales the Bitcoin network far beyond 7 tps.
>I won’t really comment if I trust Chase or Coinbase
Bitcoin gives you the option to trust nobody. You are able to interact with the Bitcoin ledger without trusting any intermediary, even if the majority of people will choose not to. This is not an option with the existing financial system.
Bitcoin has Lightning network which is peer-to-peer and is quite fast.
>Security
It is up to you on how to generate your keys. You can use your passport number combined with whatever, you can split your secret between notaries (which would require your ID just like banks), etc.
> Privacy
Bitcoin has Lightning network which is offchain.
> Trust
Here you equate Coinbase with Bitcoin. I think it is wrong to do that, on the brink of logical fallacy.
2. Security - Money guaranteed by banks and governments vs do your own security or trust a dodgy exchange
3. Private transactions vs public ledger
4. Trust - counter-parties from merchants to banks are known and have a stake in the system
5. Fees - free instant transfers vs $1-2 per tx
6. Taxes…
You’re right there is no comparison but it’s not the current payments system which is left eating dust, it’s bitcoin.
The speed you decry as fictitious is there because of trusted counterparties and is very real.
And there’s always a promise of new technology to fix bitcoin but the world has moved on and the only ones left are the moonbois and hodlers, and none of them even care about the currency except as a fairytale to sell it on.
This is a clear indicator that you aren't at all familiar with the payments industry, and probably not familiar with Bitcoin either. There is no extant fiat payment system that settles in 1 second. You are the "Casual user" I was talking about who doesn't know how e.g. credit cards work behind the scenes.
If you want any semblance of payment finality in a fiat system, it's going to take days to months. Bitcoin is ~10 minutes on chain, <1s on Lightning.
> Security - Money guaranteed by banks and governments vs do your own security or trust a dodgy exchange
"Guaranteed" is pulling a lot of weight here. What, exactly, do you think "guaranteed" means?
> Private transactions vs public ledger
"Private" transaction visible to any government agency, the bank's data/ad partners, in any of the abundantly available financial data leaks, vs a public ledger with strong pseudonymity or a totally opaque mesh network on Lightning.
> Trust - counter-parties from merchants to banks are known and have a stake in the system
I trust asymmetric key crypto more than I trust HSBC.
> Fees - free instant transfers vs $1-2 per tx
Fiat transfers are neither 'free' nor 'instant', in any meaningful capacity. Do some research on e.g. credit card settlement cycles. "Months" is more accurate. Credit card (along with most other widely used fiat payment gateways) charge usually something like 25 cents + 2.5%. Bitcoin is (on-chain) a few cents + 0%. Lightning is something like 0.01 cents + 0%.
It only looks cheaper because the details of what's actually going on have been (intentionally, for marketing purposes) hidden from casual users.
> The speed you decry as fictitious is there because of trusted counterparties and is very real.
Again, look up how payment settlement cycles work. You are the type of person I was describing who believes in the fiction. I don't blame you; unless you are a "power user" of the fiat system or have done a lot of research, it's not clear why you would notice.
I transferred money for free in less than 1 second today using ‘legacy’ payments.
The currency I used to do so also didn’t decline or rise in value by 5% in a day, which would have been awkward.
It doesn’t matter to me if banks exchange csv files at midnight to settle that, or what other archaic processes they use, because the verified identities and trust allow that to seamlessly happen behind the scenes without involving customers. The end user experience is all that matters here.
Seems strange to trust your assets with a centralized entity, one of which that can turn you away for any reason when accessing your funds, that charges you for withdrawing at a different bank’s ATM. Further, an asset that has been insanely inflated over the past decade and suddenly raised in value by a central government through mandated interest rate hikes. Yikes!
I use gold, my gold is always worth the same amount of gold. No dumb fluctuation and I have no problem in finding people who will take it. One second to transact? My handing the gold to anyone I choose is instantaneous and can be done in private. Gold solves all these problems, anyone not using it must be naive.
> I transferred money for free in less than 1 second today using ‘legacy’ payments.
As I've already explained multiple times, it's neither meaningfully free nor instant. If you didn't understand that when I explained it in the last post, I'm not sure how I can make it more clear.
As I explained already, it's free and instant to me, that's what people actually care about.
But I think you're also wrong about:
The cost - it really is free, there are no hidden charges on the bank account or for any party involved.
The transaction time - it really is settled that quickly between banks in the UK at least with faster payments. It leave my account and appears in the other one within seconds, sometimes within 1 second.
> There is no extant fiat payment system that settles in 1 second.
In Europe all banks now offer instant wire transfers. (A regulation pushed by the European Commission to counter VISA…)
It’s still often not free (0.75 euros at my bank I think), when 24h/48h wire transfers most often are, but I think I read the goal is for instant wire transfers to eventually be free (by regulation)
It’s really instant! Across any European (IBAN) account.
There’s also a growing use of a standardized QR code for IBAN account numbers, making the scan and instant transfer UX at least possible (but I never saw anyone do that yet)
> The fiction holds up only if you are a "casual" user of the system, transacting in small amounts of money in non-complicated transactions. The costs even of this fictitious speed are high, but they are hidden from casual users.
To be clear, what sort of transactions are you referring to here? If you mean things like buying a bagel, or clothes, or groceries — the vast majority of transactions, for which the system should be optimized — then the existing centralized system is extremely successful.
Yes, no argument from me that the fiat system is adequate for buying a bagel.
If all you're ever doing is engaging in small-scale consumption, there's not a ton of reason you personally would care about or even notice a transition away from fiat payment systems.
Realistically, the UX of payments and money management will not change for 90% of people (who aren't doing anything interesting with money and don't have a lot of it). This is fine; we're talking about swapping out the back-end for people who actually have to deal with it.
The issue, with regard to people who have a lot of money or want to do “interesting” things with it, is that many of us do not trust those people.
So when you say “hey, everything will be the same for you, but it’ll make things easier for those people”, I instantly become suspicious of the change you’re trying to effect. Because, when those people try to get cute with the economy, the upside for “casual users” (aka most people) is low to nonexistent — and the potential downside is very high.
We're giving the keys to our financial system to crypto-bros who we're supposed to 'trust' because they claim to 'understand' how crypto works. Yet their investment advice is to buy and hold, while they pump and dump their ICOs in order to afford their lambos.
> The advantage of crypto over cash is that you can keep redundant copies, or keep portions of a key in different places so there's no single point of failure. It'd be pretty silly not to have backups.
I believe that this looks simple on paper, but does not really work. And then: this is called service. Coinbase offered a service, that just deals with all the hassle you are describing.
Right, and dropbox could be recreated with rsync and some python in a weekend. Just because _we_ can, and have the interest and inclination to do so, doesn't mean it's easy for everyone else.
That's a drastic exaggeration of the effort required. The backup is to write down 24 words. For more redundancy, write them down again on another piece of paper. Put them somewhere safe enough considering the amount you have stored, and you're good. I know people with crypto who are not especially technical, but have no trouble with this.
(Or, follow Vitalik's recommendation to use social recovery wallets, which are available for phones and I think have decent UI.)
I admit I missed that. But backing up your self-hosted wallet is way less technical than rolling your own Dropbox, so I don't think it changes my argument.
I have family members who paid for computer service because Microsoft was so nice to call them after detecting an issue with their computer. But lets get them all cold wallets to hold their money.
I'm not trying to ban people from becoming bakers. You do you.
I'm saying they should temper their expectations, if they think that secretly everyone wants to be a baker, and in the future a meaningful fraction will be.
Most people, when they go to a baker and ask for a bagel, will not want the answer "great, so just buy this oven from amazon. I'll show you how to use it when it arrives'.
Cryptocurrency advocates are wrong about what other people want, or will want. They can LARP if they want, but that doesn't mean that it's value to other people.
Yes. The internet is broken, and a lot of these companies are based on selling "solutions" to these artificial problems.
Another example is Cloudflare. If the internet was designed properly, you wouldn't have DDoS attacks in the first place. There would be no one to sell DDoS protection to, no one to rent out botnets to.
You wouldn't even need most web/file "hosting" in the traditional sense if you could just share static files with bittorrent/IPFS.
Right. I'll bite, how is Dropbox not a _real_ solution to a _real_ problem of "I want to share this file with someone else or somewhere else"? Hate to say it but I feel like the answer is going to involve "web3 fixes this".
Peer-to-peer file transfers will always be faster than having an intermediary. Why not use bittorrent or IPFS?
P.S. The problem dropbox "fixes" is that there is no decent file transfer protocol that is IP agnostic. Using something like bittorrent's or IPFS' DHT fixes this. Dropbox "fixes" this by making file transfer into a paid service
> Peer-to-peer file transfers will always be faster than having an intermediary. Why not use bittorrent
One reason is that such a scenario relies on one of my computers with bittorrent-dropbox to be online for me to access my files elsewhere. Syncing it in the cloud means they are available reliably.
Okay, cool, the majority of Dropbox users I know do not use the product because of speed or because of any IP agnosticism. It's a shame all these users are so stupid and don't use IPFS or bittorrent instead, amirite?
The last time I used IPFS it took four hours before I could access the file just using the hash or even the public gateway after pushing it to several major pinning services.
I've had files sitting on Google Drive for longer than IPFS has existed. Let's not pretend that IPFS/etc is a solution to relying on services that are far older than it.
I don't know if I would jump straight to a grift, it comes down to use case. If people are just dumping random documents, sure. And selling people that they need to back up every picture they have taken on their phone that they will probably not look at again is a bit grifty. However keeping digital copies of important documents is not a bad idea, like a house burnt down situation. Ideally, you maybe have family you can trust to keep a USB with those documents, but that is not always an option for some people.
Dropbox is a useful service. The comment about 'bit torrent' makes little sense. Having cloud storage 24/7 high availability has utility. (Yes, if the interent were designed a bit different, that config might be slightly different, but there'd be some value in Dropbox in there somehow).
Bitcoin has no utility.
It has the 'promise' of utility, which is the current utility it rests upon, making the underlying value quite difficult to determine.
If BTC were to dissapear, the world wouldn't skip a beat, and we would have no need to 'reinvent' BTC.
We would likely to continue to think about and experiment with other things, but as it stands so far, BTC isn't the solution to anything.
> If BTC were to dissapear, the world wouldn't skip a beat, and we would have no need to 'reinvent' BTC.
There would be no need to 'reinvent' Dropbox, either. People would do so for both regardless of necessity (and indeed have done so for both, ad nauseam) because they find them and the concepts thereof useful or interesting, contrary to what you or I might assert.
This is so obviously wrong ... I don't know what to say.
Dropbox (Box, Google Drive, etc.) are imminently useful services, almost all of us use them.
If my cloud drive we vaporized, even if I had backups, I'd be livid, as would maybe more than a billion people would be as well.
People pay for cloud storage because it's immensely useful. I share documents with clients every day.
BTC is some surplus money changing hands, bouncing around between owners trading magic numbers, willy nilly. There's no need for it to exist. Even unproductive things like 'gambling' serve the purpose of entertainment at least.
> Dropbox (Box, Google Drive, etc.) are imminently useful services, almost all of us use them.
And meanwhile there are migrant workers, refugees, and the like who depend on cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin for basic economic participation. If Bitcoin vanished overnight, they'd be back to being at the mercy of a legacy financial system that shuns them at best and actively exploits them at worst.
There are no migrant groups workers who depend on Bitcoin as a means of banking, it's completely (ridiculously) unsuited to that purpose.
Migrant workers use of innumerable financial services offered to them by banks at home, in their country of work, or one of the myriad of financial services apps made available to them via app stores etc..
> There are no migrant groups workers who depend on Bitcoin as a means of banking,
There's more to economic participation than just banking (even assuming that what you wrote wasn't a blatant falsehood).
> Migrant workers use of innumerable financial services offered to them by banks at home, in their country of work, or one of the myriad of financial services apps made available to them via app stores etc..
Previously, yes, with predatory fees that make even Bitcoin (let alone any of the umpteen million iterations on its design) affordable by comparison. The working poor lack the bargaining power to meaningfully demand fair treatment from the legacy financial system; for them, a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin provides that fairness.
That doesn't even make sense. Dropbox and BitTorrent are not providing the same service. Maybe you're trying to compare to Resilio Sync but still wrong.
Non-technical people need things like Dropbox. You not liking Dropbox doesn't change that.
The fact that companies like Celsius, Gemini, even Coinbase and other "cryptobanks" exist, and that people are using them at far higher rates than relatively simple (to us techies) wallets.
And when Celsius suddenly halts withdrawals to a huge portion of the cryptocoin community, the only answer is "oh, you shouldn't have been using that" or "not your keys, not your wallet" and other such "Advice". Its a fundamentally hostile environment.
A large reason people use these services is due to them paying ridiculous and unsustainable interest rates for custody of the crypto atm. That won't last forever.
and when it stops the vast majority of people will have no reason to use cryptocurrency at all and it will go back to being a niche thing for libertarian nerds
This is like the PGP debate in the security community back in the day, where they generally agreed that while this all works great in theory it’s actually a lot of work to do it correctly and mistakes at any stage are incredibly costly so despite the fact that it technically works, it’s never going to be a good solution for regular people.
coinbase offers a service which is completely orthogonal to what he is describing.
How difficult is it to set up a wallet, then use the same seed phrase when setting up a wallet on another device? If one of your devices gets stolen, make a new wallet and transfer the funds with your other device before they extract your keys.
The number one reason for using a credit-card is that your losses are contractually limited. Not only that, they perform automated fraud
detection for you.
And now you want me to give that up, and take on the responsibility myself?
Cattle have all their needs taken care of them by the farmer: they are well fed, they have good shelter, and they are "safe" from predators. It is easy to make arguments for how the cow is better off than his ancestors; In every measurable aspect its life is "better" than that of a wild animal. It all comes at the low, low price of his complete autonomy and freedom.
Is it better to be cow or a wildebeest? The answer is simple: is life greater than the sum of its individual (hedonistic) parts?
I take it you live Thoreau-style, in a cabin in the wilderness completely off-grid? You farm and hunt your own food and do not rely on civilization for any of your needs?
Please just do a little Google/Wikipedia on Adam Smith.
Everyone trying to do 'their own stuff' is basically, stupid.
We gain immensely by the division of labour: the cobbler makes the shoes, the farmer grows food, the banker manages money. Were you to try to 'make your own iPhone in your back yard' you would fail.
We are 'rich' because of this.
Otherwise, we'd be literally feral monkeys.
Bitcoin has little to do with 'control or surveillance'.
You do not need to 'hold' USD in order to live. You just need to use USD in a 'current account' for purposes of transaction. In that context, monetary policy should not matter that much to you - or even frankly anything the Fed does.
If you only buy dollars when you need the to do something else, then frankly, everything about the USD should be basically irrelevant.
And you can still do most things in cash, if you really want. You can put your USDs under your bed, in the closet if you want.
For the audience that reads HN? Probably not that difficult. For the average person who is comparing this to the alternative of a bank where they can just talk to a human who manages all this for them and also get benefits like a credit card with rewards, built a credit score, and have a throat to choke when there's an issue... it doesn't seem like that good of a tradeoff
I keep seeing the argument repeated ad nauseam about how a bank protects from X and Y you and can reverse fraudulent charges and so on.
But as a customer of several national US banks and having gone through the dispute process dozens of times in my life, in reality, I find that to be completely nonsense. I’ve had to deal with numerous incidents where someone stole my card, and the bank blames me (the customer) and then asks me to prove the money was stolen, only to have them make an arbitrary denial months later. It’s the same bogus argument people make for all kinds of insurance, until you go to make a claim, get denied for some obscure legal text in the policy and find out you were just being ripped off the whole time.
I have a lot of friends in the crypto space, and only one of them has lost any to theft. In that case, it was a SIM-swap for funds he had stored on a centralized exchange, rather than an attack on his own wallet.
Meanwhile, my own credit card numbers were stolen twice.
This is surprising to hear, as I have had the opposite experience.
I have had many fraudulent transactions or unauthorized charges on various accounts, such as:
* Random charges appearing for no reason
* Clear case of stolen card with a series of unusual transactions.
* Scam websites where I bought a product and never received it.
* One egregious case where someone from a IP geolocated in China brute forced my VNC server password in the middle of the night and used my saved browser credentials to PayPal themselves over $10,000 from my linked chequing account.
In all cases I have filed a dispute with the relevant institution and was fully and promptly reimbursed. In the latter case I had my money back in under a week.
Transaction reversibility is a feature, not a bug!
What is an "average person"? An average person in a first world country who has access to "trustworthy" financial system?
Centralized systems work great... until they don't.
P.S. Our grandchildren will wonder why we allowed the free world to export the means of surveillance to the third world. The financial system is a huge part of that.
Even developing countries have access to useful financial networks. I did a few projects in Kenya and Cameroon and traveled around Uganda last year, the traditional banking sector isn't great but telco's have filled the gap and it's easy to use mobile money instead (and in a way that doesn't chew up data). Not sure about exporting the means of surveillance, I think it's much more useful as a geoeconomic tool to enforce things like sanctions for a country like the U.S. than it is to spy on the average person.
> P.S. Our grandchildren will wonder why we allowed the free world to export the means of surveillance to the third world. The financial system is a huge part of that.
While I agree with the sentiment, this won't happen. Did the Banana Wars and using the military might to control South America prevent all the American wars in the middle east? Nope. Just as those are forgotten about, we Americans will conveniently forget anything else that puts a bad spot on our record.
Who are these people who are well educated and live in first world countries, competent enough to do these tasks, but also are in a position to benefit from crypto? To me the only (incidental, not at all fundamental) benefit of crypto is if you live in a country with sanctions and you need to get money in/out.
> Centralized systems work great... until they don't.
There has yet to be a decentralized cryptocurrency. We can't even say things like "decentralized systems work great until they don't" because so far they don't exist, and what does has been less than "great".
> Our grandchildren will wonder why we allowed the free world to export the means of surveillance to the third world.
I don't even know what you're going for here? Crypto solves surveillance now? The global, distributed ledger that everyone can fundamentally access because that's the whole point?
I'm not sure what you even mean by that statement that there has never been a functioning decentralized cryptocurrency. I would need you to explain what your bar is for decentralization, and why it's so high.
As for privacy, the technology has come a long way in the last decade due to the development of Zero-Knowlege Proofs. I can share a few links if you are interested.
> I would need you to explain what your bar is for decentralization, and why it's so high.
A single entity being capable of significant or total disruption of the network.
> As for privacy, the technology has come a long way in the last decade due to the development of Zero-Knowlege Proofs. I can share a few links if you are interested.
I am interested. I'm aware of some progress being made here theoretically, but I have not seen implementations (I do not follow closely at this point).
> It boggles my mind that we've had public key cryptography for fifty years and we're still not using it for payments. Never mind blockchains, just upgrading the banking system to use public keys would be a huge improvement.
This ignores the number one lesson of PGP - key management is hard, up there with naming things and cache invalidation. I honestly don’t see how public keys, which are vastly more complicated to use and store than passwords, would be an improvement for the general, non-technical public when getting them to use long, unique passwords is already a challenge. You have to copy over or update your public key with each new computer you get, assuming the account owner even has a permanent computer. What about accessing your account on someone else’s computer in a quick pinch, or on your phone? Coupled with the fact that keypairs would be unable to be force reset (assuming you want to use them to their full potential) unlike passwords, and it would be a disaster.
I will say that minimizing the sensitive information sent for payment with crypto is a huge plus, as the merchant no longer needs to handle the card information to send to the payment processor, but can just accept the transaction hash (with some sort of signature of course).
This also doesn’t really address the issue that Coinbase will still send your info to ICE, of course. Not that banks are any better. But cash is!
In addition to all that you said about key management -- if you do manage to leak your keys and you chose a bad passphrase good luck proving to anyone that any correctly signed transactions were fraudulent/performed by someone else.
Probably the most common vector for crypto theft is phishing people to sign malevolent transactions. So I have a hard time believing that there’s a technical solution to this problem at all — much less with current blockchain technologies.
Crypto is way less secure than a credit card of course, since with a credit card I'm not liable for any fraud, loss or theft. I don't even have to front the charge until the issuer resolves it. As the issuer itself is liable (not me) they are incentivized to detect and stop as much fraud as possible.
I can even take advantage of chargebacks to ensure merchants give me what I paid for. Chargebacks are incredibly customer-friendly - but of course they're good for businesses too as it affords folks a degree of confidence at unfamiliar merchants. And I get various kinds of insurance - they'll even reimburse me if I drop and smash what I bought 90 days after I bought it.
Credit cards need those systems in place precisely because they are insecure in the first place.
I can even use chargebacks to commit fraud against merchants.
P.S. You think you're so smart for using paypal or something, wait until you set up a business and adversaries falsely accuse you of fraud. No system can completely prevent fraud, but the credit card system is insecure by design and blind to the externalities of fraud.
You seem to be suggesting "systems requiring regulation don't work without regulation" which is true. What you are maybe missing is that cryptocurrencies today, regardless of how much people want it not to require regulation, still do require it to function effectively instead of the pain and suffering we see now. The sooner the zealots admit this to themselves, the sooner we can have productive conversations about moving forward.
Moving forward could also mean "designing better decentralized systems that don't require regulation" but that would mean that they would have to acknowledge that the thing they've been throwing their money and voice behind is a faulty prototype not destined for mass scale.
I believe cryptocurrencies are self regulating. If you want to convince me otherwise, you have to do better than just stating the opposite is true.
I'll admit that some (many even!) cryptocurrencies make claims about decentralization and security that are not based in evidence. That is fine. I don't believe that cryptocurrency itself is sufficient for freedom/decentralization/security, but that it is necessary. Not all cryptocurrencies will meet my critera, and it's even possible that none do.
Without specifying the implementation, this statement is less than useless. Really, I use the word "zealot" literally, this claim of yours seems to be entirely faith-based.
Occam's razor states that a reasonable default assumption is that they are not self-regulating, and they should be proven so before being described so. It's not enough to want to be self-regulating, it should actually perform that function. How does it do that, today? We speak here of general trends so one-off examples do not suffice...
Really? Are you sure? Give it a go and see what happens.
All you're doing is moving the fraud potential from the customer to the merchant. Without the network and with instant finality, you've left them with no recourse.
Both credit cards and crypto as a payment primitive in isolation are secure. However, that's a very myopic view of a transaction. A transaction extends beyond simply the payment rails. You're leaving customers significantly worse off by forcing them into no-recourse payments with instant finality. Merchants, being businesses, are significantly better able to protect themselves - as they are able to insure against these losses - and the ability to charge back transactions increases the transaction volume at the store because it gives customers confidence in the payment.
[edit] I already have :)
Have what? Committed fraud? Bold statement. How much did you steal and how often?
There's zero basis to believe that crypto reduces the incidence of fraud. Citation needed.
P.S. all transactions rely on some basis of trust between the merchant and the customer. Cryptocurrency doesn't prevent fraud altogether, but it does severely limit the extent and direction of fraud.
P.P.S. (response to your edit)
>Both credit cards and crypto as a payment primitive in isolation are secure. However, that's a very myopic view of a transaction. A transaction extends beyond simply the payment rails. You're leaving customers significantly worse off by forcing them into no-recourse payments with instant finality. Merchants, being businesses, are significantly better able to protect themselves - as they are able to insure against these losses
No, the credit card payment system is insecure because the information you need to authorize a payment is the same as the information you need to receive a payment (give or take a 4-digit PIN). In cryptocurrency (or even non-cryptocurrency, cryptographic payment systems like GNU Taler or DigiCash) there is the distinction between the public/private key.
Also, on what basis are you supposing that all recipients of a payment are merchants? I don't agree with that assumption.
>the ability to charge back transactions increases the transaction volume at the store because it gives customers confidence in the payment.
Cryptocurrencies are (ideally) designed for payments between low-trust parties, like a drug transaction or a donation to a pseudo-anonymous party. Senders are expected to have the same vigilance that they do with cash payments in an alleyway.
P.P.P.S.
>There's zero basis to believe that crypto reduces the incidence of fraud. Citation needed.
Cryptocurrency makes identity theft attacks impossible by having payments signed by the payee (e.g. rather than requiring proof of open source, personally identifiable information)
Cryptocurrency makes chargeback fraud impossible insofar as the attacker cannot conduct a 51% attack or a finney attack.
As for merchant fraud, users are expected to establish business relationships with trustworthy vendors and hold them accountable themselves. If these trust networks work for the DN and private trackers, then it's secure enough for me. You learn about the trustworthiness of vendors directly through the reviews of your peers, and you limit your risk accordingly.
> As for merchant fraud, users are expected to establish business relationships with trustworthy vendors
That might work for large transactions, or repeated small transactions with the same vendor (assuming there isn't a major regression of trust), but it utterly collapses at scale and diversity of buyers and sellers who can't possibly vet each other for trust (AKA any modern economy). It also would balkanize/silo trade.
> and hold them accountable themselves.
Sounds a lot like the old "break some kneecaps" approach. There's a reason such accountability mechanisms tend to be utilized in criminal enterprises.
>Cryptocurrency makes chargeback fraud impossible insofar as the attacker cannot conduct a 51% attack or a finney attack.
>As for merchant fraud, users are expected to establish business relationships with trustworthy vendors and hold them accountable themselves. If these trust networks work for the DN and private trackers, then it's secure enough for me.
My brother-in-Christ, how are you supposed to achieve mass adoption when you list *as a benefit* that you are stacking the deck in favour of the merchant?
> As for merchant fraud, users are expected to establish business relationships with trustworthy vendors and hold them accountable themselves.
I’d just like to point out that a huge part of the reason credit cards are successful is that I can pay untrusted merchants with relatively low risk to myself. You are describing a massive drawback, bordering on deal breaker.
your last point isn't true - EMV cards with a chip (modern credit cards) use public key cryptography and don't reveal more than they need to to the merchant. Typing in the card numbers (or swiping it) will slowly stop in the US, as it has in most other developed countries by now.
I disagree with the rest also - mainly on the grounds that for a normal person, there isn't any benefit and as the OP says, the status quo is preferable
Apple Pay is one. Also, in Asia it's very common for a website to display a QR code which you scan with your phone to make a payment, either with your bank's app or with a separate payment platform app. These don't reveal any secret data to the merchant.
Even when using traditional card numbers, many banks offer you the ability to instantly mint as many cards as you like, so you can just generate a card for the specific website. Often you can even lock the card number to that merchant after the first payment.
not cryptographically no (and would be nice to see, but crypto is not the answer). But as a consumer when I shop online I never worry - if I am defrauded the (centralised) bank will give me the money back, that's the solution and it works for everyone
And that's how I ended up having to change my card numbers on file with a bunch of businesses, and why every couple months a purchase fails until I respond to a fraud email. It's a hassle and it's unnecessary, especially when phones have secure enclaves for private key storage. I'm not even arguing for blockchains now, just for using public keys in online purchases.
> Crucially, iOS itself cannot directly access data stored in the secure enclave, so even if malware could make its way onto an iPhone, it would have no access to the data.
Even if it's not a perfect solution, it's better than handing full account credentials to every online merchant I use. A dedicated FIDO fob would be even better but the phone is something most people already have.
The Bitcoin Whitepaper was published almost 13 years ago.
It still hasn't solved basic use cases that have been solved in traditional finance for many decades.
Illegal uses of cryptocurrency are the only real use case that makes any sense. Pyramid schemes, ransomware, illicit purchases, money laundering, asset hiding, tax evasion. That's what has kept cryptocurrency alive, for now.
That's an advantage of crypto over cash. In the US, and probably similar trends in many places, only about 20% of transactions are in cash.
Merely being better than cash isn't much of a selling feature, especially when it's worse than cash in some ways as well: keep your crypto in an exchange and it might get hacked. Keep it offline in a local wallet(s) and it stops being useful as a medium of exchange in most places you'd use cash.
I'm not saying these problems are insurmountable, but if they are then there's still a very long road ahead to get there.
Let me stop you there. There is no advantage. Cryptocurrency is a scam. I've been burned. Many others have been burned recently. Go back to the drawing board and come back in a few years with a valid use and tell me it's still useful for something other than skirting the financial regulations and scams.
If you invested in crypto, yeah, that was absolutely a scam.
Don't scoff at "something other than skirting the regulations" tho. Especially if you live in a comfortable First World country with rule of law and all that.
> Reversing charges is a different point, which could be accomplished pretty simply with 2-of-3 sigs if there's market demand for it.
You can’t reverse transactions. Once validated and included in a block, the transactions are forever, which is of course one of the main appeals of cryptocurrency in the first place. You would have to get the fraudster to send the money back (potentially covering gas fees) or else there is literally no other way without their signing key (also one of the key appeals of cryptocurrency).
Blockchain transactions are really just messages that can optionally include payments. A logical retail transaction that can be reversed can be modeled on top as a series of messages, very similar to how credit card clearing works.
This is a weird way to put it. Transactions include state transitions which modify the state of the global blockchain permanently. Miners (in the case of bitcoin) validate these transitions and publish the block to the chain. If there is a reversal, it must come from the merchant’s account, because only they can produce a valid state transition to “return” (ie send back) your money.
A message can be handled many ways, and a reversal payment protocol wouldn't put the customers funds directly in control of the merchant until the reversibility period is over.
I agree about decentralization as anti-feature, but this is a poor analogy.
It's equivalent to saying, people do not want all their money to disappear because they chose to carry all their life savings in a briefcase on the subway and then they lost the briefcase. If you did that, no bank is going to reimburse you. The way to avoid this problem, is to keep your fiat savings in the bank (which means, as some number in some database they keep), instead of in physical bills on your person. It has nothing to do with fiat or TradFi being inherently better than crypto.
Likewise, the way to avoid this problem for crypto, is to not carry your private keys with you all the time (or at least, to only carry them on devices you can afford to lose, such as a hardware wallet that an attacker needs time to penetrate, giving you time to go home and restore/move your funds). Obviously self-custody is still hard and still a high barrier to entry, but from a financial risk perspective, you should only "carry" as much crypto on you as you would be willing to carry as cash in your wallet (which of course you can always lose, and losing it doesn't validate or invalidate the banking industry).
In an ideal world, every device would be secure enough that the user could afford to lose it.
P.S. I'm using a pixel phone running CalyxOS It has a locked bootloader so I am reasonably confident an attacker could not steal my keys. I wish I could say the same about my laptop.
Decentralization does not necessarily mean loss of trusted asset recovery, it just means more flexibility around who you trust. Earlier in another comment I linked argent, which at the risk of looking spammy I will post again not because I have anything to gain by promoting them but because I think it's legitimately a well thought out system and a model for the future of how this all works.
No one leaves all their Bitcoin on a laptop. Even casual users today most likely have a backup of some kind. The process is easy now; buy a hardware wallet or use a phone app, write down the backup words, done.
> Being able to call your bank or credit union and have them freeze your cards, reverse fraudulent charges
The only reason I've ever had to do this is because traditional payments security is so shitty. Forgive me if I'm not impressed that the fiat payments system has measures to deal with problems that it created.
No one can make a fraudulent charge on my Bitcoin wallet.
The last time Chase detected a fraudulent charge on my credit card, they helpfully did a chargeback on a bunch of other random non-fraudulent transactions without asking me, which led to many hours of bullshit for me to deal with. I had to move insurance companies because progressive stopped letting me pay with a credit card.
Well the promise of crypto is that it can prevent nefarious government surveillance, censorship, inflationary policies, etc.
If the HN crowd could temporarily look past how crypto is used today to what it could theoretically be, I wonder if more productive conversations could be had.
You can't have the good parts without the bad. Most people hate banks. Russians dont like not being allowed to withdraw their money from ATMs and being restricted from foreign exchange. Merchants don't like being scammed by fraudulent chargebacks. People don't want the risk that their funds are stolen by the custodian.
Your comment is disingenuous and seems to be willfully misrepresenting the situation by ignoring that there are two sides
These forms of decentralised digital money are very new; nobody understands the potential for it if it were supported by social structures and education. Currently it exists in an incredibly hostile social environment where institutions are actively harming the user experience.
No, as people gain (technical) literacy, decentralization becomes less relevant, because literacy and legibility are the enablers of higher forms of centralization and organization.
Who is more centralized, technologically and literate civilizations or ones in so called 'primitive' states?
Thanks for saying this. A lot of the crypto peeps seem to think that we'd all carry around cash if we could, and it's simply not true. People don't use much cash anymore because it's not convenient. There's a reason cash went away for the most part.
This isn’t an issue if you have any form of backup and you have something like FileVault enabled on your computer. Which, I know, is asking a lot compared to the average proficiency of users. But it’s also really not so hard that people need to throw up their hands and say it’s unworkable.
If instead of random
hashes, you could generate wallet keys based on biometrics or some other aspect inherent and unique to an individual this could work. But you would be leaking a lot of information for others to reverse engineer your key.
I don't think that would work as biometrics aren't deterministic AFAIK. That's why operating systems with encrypted storage like Android (and presumably iOS) don't allow you to unlock them with biometrics on startup.
People are used to "manage it myself money" - it's called cash and most people do not want to carry large amounts of it around or have it at home.
And cash has significant security advantages over crypto in that it's very hard to remotely steal the dollars from someone's physical wallet or mattress; even if it is relatively easy to just walk up and take them.
When I was writing my comment initially I wrote a comparison between individual crypto wallets and cash, and how centralized banks spawned from people not wanting to be the only one responsible for their large amounts of cash, hence banks, but I removed it because my comment was already running long. We're totally on the same page.
Edit: Also, I know cash is the governmental evolution of bank notes which didn't exist before banks, and that the original decentralized currency would be like, pinches of gold or whatever.
> if you have 51% of the bill or such you can get it replaced
What if it's the middle third of the bill that's missing? Does the 51% need to be contiguous? The links suggest that you only need 51% in total, even if the bill was shredded.
Concretely: Could you take 1/3 from opposite ends of two different bills and present the pieces as 2/3 of three different bills to turn two old bills into three new ones? Putting aside the fact that this would be fraud, of course. Someone must have tried it at some point.
US currency has serial numbers printed on both sides of the bill, and while you might be able to cut it up in such a way that they aren't included, I believe they also put it in the watermarks, so even if there is a strategic way to cut it that hides the watermarks and serial numbers, I think they'd start to catch on before you made much. It's an interesting thought experiment though. How many banks would you be able to try it at before they caught on?
Right, but this happens so rarely. If someone breaks into your home and finds 49% of your cash, they're taking ALL of those bills which would be irrecoverable.
Which a large reason why people use banks. Even if someone breaks into the bank and steals the exact bills you deposited, you don't lose any money. Crypto is closer to cash in that it's anonymous but not private, with the advantage being you can send money wherever you want in the world without mailing an envelope of cash. But like cash if you send it to the wrong place, or someone finds it, it's gone. The decentralization is great because it means no single entity can say "That's it, you can't send money to XYZ anymore" but the usecase is still smaller than cash (maybe not forever), or a bank account (probably forever).
Are you joking, or do you really think that cash has superior security properties to asymmetric key management?
It's a lot easier to steal my cash, or my bank balance, or my securities, or any other physical or fiat asset I own, than it is to steal even moderately-secured Bitcoins.
US law enforcement have been using data brokers to do an end run around requirements for warrants and other elements of due process for a while, as well as getting the data cheaply; I wouldn't be surprised if those drivers exist here.
There is definitely a level in between 'all my stuff is owned by coinbase' and 'all my stuff is owned by me, behind a private key I have to manage'. For example, there are non-custodial wallets where the wallet is still yours and can't be claimed or blocked by some third party that do have social recovery mechanisms that just require you to trust a few people in your life to cooperate to help you if you lose your wallet. I think these kinds of services are going to be very useful if crypto achieves wide adoption.
One very interesting technology for semi-trusted setups in the Bitcoin space is federated Chaumian mints[0].
This provides the best of both worlds: positive user experience (especially for less technical users) and reduction of overall centralization. An implementation called MiniMint[1] is already in the works.
>" That said, they're saying they're only providing publicly available data to ICE, but if it's publicly available and non-identifiable, why does ICE even need it, and why wouldn't they be able to get it themselves?"
From the linked Intercept article:
>"Homeland Security Investigations, the division of ICE that purchased the Coinbase tool, is tasked not only with immigration-related matters, aiding migrant raids and deportation operations, but broader transnational crimes as well,..."
One possibility is that ICE could use this to trace the source of remittances being sent back to undocumented worker's home countries. The wire transfer fees are known to be extortionate and there's many crypto exchanges that see an opportunity in disrupting wire transfers for remittances.[1] If this happens then I could see this of being of interest to ICE.
As to "Why wouldn't they be able to get it themselves", it's probably just pure convenience. It's probably more attractive to just spend tax payer money on some expensive off the shelf solution
Incidentally I found this paragraph from the linked Intercept piece pretty damning:
>"The Coinbase Tracer tool itself was birthed in controversy. In 2019, Motherboard reported that Neutrino, a blockchain-analysis firm the company acquired in order to create Coinbase Tracer, “was founded by three former employees of Hacking Team, a controversial Italian surveillance vendor that was caught several times selling spyware to governments with dubious human rights records, such as Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan.” Following public outcry, Coinbase announced these staffers would “transition out” of the company."
Almost certainly the is the OTHER half of ICE: ICE is two organizations, Enforcement and Removal Operations (what is widely thought of as ICE, they focus on civil deportations) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). HSI is targeting actual crimes that occur across borders, not deportations. So international money laundering, plus smuggling goods, drugs, people, etc. As a quirk, they are the agency that brings the most possession and distribution of underage sexual materials charges against US citizens (because so much of that involves bouncing to foreign servers etc.). They are a legitimate law enforcement agency that focuses on crime that goes across borders, and their interest in the blockchain should be obvious and clear- pretty much every crime I listed above is currently being done on the blockchain.
HSI has wanted to separate from ERO for years, because they feel that no one outside of ICE understands the difference, but it has not happened. I only understand the difference because I spent a few months supporting HSI (and only HSI) as a government contractor, and everyone I interacted with from HSI went to great pains to differentiate themselves from ERO, and clearly considered themselves better than ERO.
This really is the eternal struggle of all decentralized technology:
They all eventually gravitate towards centralization as they gain mainstream appeal, as the very tangible competitive advantages from networks effects and economies of scale win over the mostly philosophical benefits of decentralization that have always failed to sway the masses.
We see this play out time and again, with email, git, and are already starting to see the same pattern emerge with cryptocurrencies.
Though that is not to say there is no benefit to having decentralized technologies. The fact remains that centralized platforms built on top of decentralized technology have a much harder time locking users in due to the low switching costs enabled by the underlying tech. This is why products like BitBucket and GitLab are still viable today despite the undeniable dominance of GitHub, and similarly alternative email providers like Fastmail and Outlook in the age of Gmail.
We rarely see this in markets built on top of centralized tech. In social networks, for instance, there really isn't any viable competitor to platforms like Facebook and Twitter because switching isn't possible without losing all of your investments in the product.
This low switching cost makes upstarts more viable alternatives compared to in markets built on top of centralized tech, and keeps incumbents on their toes and forces them to keep innovating in order to stay dominant instead of just simply riding high on the strength of their moats. As such I do still think the pursuit of decentralized technology is worthwhile, even if a large degree of centralization in itself might be all but inevitable in the long term.
Decentralized just means that you can roll your own if you want to.
IIRC coinbase is just selling a chainalysis tool. ICE is stupid, they aren't going to be able to convert a blockchain into a graph of transactions that lets them track payments from one wallet to another on their own - they are going to buy a tool off the shelf to help them do that.
Mr. Gensler put it succinctly; Every large system trends towards centralization.
The crypto economy has slowly started to work its way into the traditional finance system. The only thing that crypto is really good for is having an auditable system of account, which isn't possible in the current financial system with centralized creation of debt.
>where all they have to do is prove who they are to access their stuff.
My prediction is that crypto does indeed become centralized between a few wallets & those centralized wallets can have some form of 'Verification' for reinstating lost keys.
> it's publicly available and non-identifiable,
Because they can combine it with their massive databases and make it identifiable is my guess.
>>"The only thing that crypto is really good for is having an _auditable system of account_, which isn't possible in the current financial system with centralized creation of debt."
THIS is the reason the central banks are anti crypto.... is it will provide an auditable ledger (irrespective of anonymity) which threatens the money laundering currency. There are other levels of currency laundering that have been used for eons ; 'Art' and 'Humans'. (and the currency used at the even higher levels than that)
In a fantasy world where all currency/transactions were on a bitcoin ledger, the average citizen could analyze the data and find all the government black ops funds. All those transactions from the CIA to terrorist groups or whatever would have a spotlight on them over night.
The centralized nature of these oligopolies is a property of capitalism, i.e. capital consolidates power. You are saying that search, storage etc are centralised because of the tech? Why are they any more centralised than the other (pre-internet) examples I mentioned?
ahh, i was looking at those company's 'as tech'. In the sense of technology, not internet company's we see today.
To be honest I think we agree, we are just getting caught up in semantics. Whether it is capitalism or tech that's doing it is irrelevant because we have the development of technology in a capitalistic world order. In other words, it is impossible to differentiate when the two are so intertwined.
That seems fine to me, it’s well worth it to have the option for freedom and control even if it means also having the option of a third party service for the less adventurous types.
It is easier to build centralized on top of decentralized than the other way around. This is the whole idea.
People trend to centralization but it doesn’t mean: let’s give up on decentralization and just give one company, or a select few, the keys to the entire kingdom.
besides, as uximproves it will be easy to just use the blockchain directly. like using an on-chain long or short position, or staking some value, rather than only doing it on a centralized exchange.
Zk rollups are about as fast as visa network - and recursive zk snarks can scale further if needed. The benefit is that they inherit the security of the main network - users can withdraw tokens from them trustlessly, and at no point can the rollup owner steal user funds or block them from withdrawal.
For financial services like lending and swaps this is great and avoids some of the CeFi and CEX problems we are seeing. For other apps like art sales, public groups, and ENS domain name aliases, it allows ownership of assets to be held non custodially rather than a single company’s servers and records.
The biggest friction point for me was being required to verify my ID to create an account for most crypto services. If I can't be anonymous with crypto, I see no reason to go through the hassle of adding a new payment method to my wallet.
The fact that it is so difficult to avoid disclosing my personal information tells me just about everyone getting into crypto right now is a speculator.
I think you are wrong to say this is just because of a ‘habit’ people have around managing their money; I would say it is more of a preference. It isn’t that people are just USED to those things, they actually want them.
The link should be changed to https://theintercept.com/2022/06/29/crypto-coinbase-tracer-i.... Current Coindesk article is a poor rehash of the Intercept article, which is a lot more clear. The key question remains unanswered, but the original article at least points that out:
> The contract also provides, provocatively, “Historical geo tracking data,” though it’s unclear what exactly this data consists of or from where it’s sourced.
No idea how geo tracking data can be “fully sourced from online, publicly available data”.
IP addresses are publicly available in cryptocurrency networks, tied to rough geolocation, and ephemeral. Coinbase could have been collecting historical IP address logs of the networks as one idea
> No idea how geo tracking data can be “fully sourced from online, publicly available data”.
First idea was data brokers, who sit on tons of data, including geolocation. But that's not publicly available so... Maybe the "public" part is used for parallel construction rather than giving away the true source?
My imagination can get pretty wild, but I can't even begin to imagine how they could do that without severely bending the definitions of "Coinbase user data" and "public sources" to the point of breaking.
You can keep track of the IP address that you hear first announce a transaction. If you have enough nodes logging this across the bitcoin network, and someone connects a node running on their personal compute to the network in order to initiate a transaction, then you can basically have the location data for the person who initiated that transaction.
(There's a whole bunch of caveats here, but that is how it would work at a high level)
I'm sure it is tracked by interested parties, but I doubt you would be able to find it publicly, because why go through the trouble of running a bunch of nodes just to give your special information away...
> “All Coinbase Tracer features use data that is fully sourced from online, publicly available data, and do not include any personally identifiable information for anyone, or any proprietary Coinbase user data,” the spokesperson told CoinDesk.
If true, then all they're doing is analysis of data from the public blockchain. That sounds fine to me - the feds could have done it themselves.
The article claims geolocation data, which you aren't going to get from the public blockchain.
Where's that coming from? Maybe other unspecified "public" sources.
It seems suspicious though, like they are getting it from geolocating IP addresses of their users, and correlating those to transactions -- that is not public info at all. But perhaps they get the geolocation info from some other source unrelated to their users?
Personally if my bank was also in the business of spying on financial transactions commercially... I wouldn't feel super secure about my choice of bank.
> Personally if my bank was also in the business of spying on financial transactions commercially... I wouldn't feel super secure about my choice of bank.
Are you aware that your (bank-issued) credit card purchase data is almost certainly sold commercially, linked to a unique identifier?
There's companies that buy mobile advertising data and crosslink it to credit card purchase data to track real-world conversions from online advertising.
I say this to reinforce your suspicions, not to discredit them.
It's public data, but it's time consuming to get the data "ready for analysis". Instead of doing this prep work yourself, you can pay someone else (in this case Coinbase) to do that part.
Let them do it themselves then. Usually “if I don’t do it, someone else will” is an ethically dubious excuse, though it is a good way to make money I suppose
"All Coinbase Tracer features use data that is fully sourced from online, publicly available data, and do not include any personally identifiable information for anyone, or any proprietary Coinbase user data."
Misleading headline. This is a public blockchain analytics service that has nothing to do with Coinbase's other services.
> This is a public blockchain analytics service that has nothing to do with Coinbase's other services.
Are you familiar with the concept of parallel construction? It's a tactic LEOs use when they don't want to reveal how they actually obtained information. For instance, if they obtain information using method A, but want to conceal method A, they state that they actually obtained the information using method B (because the information actually is, after the fact, obtainable via method B as well, once you know what to look for).
In Coinbase's case the way this would work is Coinbase sources data from their internal databases (method A), and then after the fact they do let's say a Google search or some other public search for the names or whatever they found in their internal databases, and state that all data is sourced from online, publicly available data (method B).
Since the article is already based on a leak (or something that is presented as one), one would expect that if this was the case, there would at least be an anonymous source claiming so.
Given that all the article is mentioning is "they're selling blockchain analysis software", it's very plausible that that's what they're selling. When the feds want specific info on a specific address/account, they're going to get a subpoena and get KYC data and logs anyways.
I am not making a claim, I am laying out how the process could hypothetically occur, hence the use of "would" in my post.
I'm curious, however, why did you not make a similar post to the parent comment...in that the parent comment has presented no evidence whatsoever to support the claim that Coinbase is only using publicly-available information, and therefore by your own reasoning the parent poster should not make the claim.
> Coinbase Tracer allows clients, in both government and the private sector, to trace transactions through the blockchain, a distributed ledger of transactions integral to cryptocurrency use.
Because both the parent comment and I have read the article, so we both have evidence to support the claim that Coinbase is only using publicly-available information, as that's how Coinbase Tracer, the license to which was reported as sold to ICE for $29,000, works.
I think the person you’re talking to is theorizing about the possibility that Coinbase may not be completely honest in their statement about the nature of the service they provide to ICE. The article does not provide proof aside from repeating Coinbase’s statement.
If your standard of proof is “somebody wrote something online,” then GP provided you with proof that it’s possible that Coinbase lied.
I’m not sure how this is unclear. If Coinbase wrote a paragraph about their practices and that paragraph is “proof” of their practices, why wouldn’t another party writing a paragraph constitute “proof” of their position?
The topic of this sentence is “the definition of proof.”
Okay, there are words saying that “maybe Coinbase’s work with ICE is more sinister than they divulged.”
Those are words online! That’s evidence! You cannot refute that someone wrote those words. I know that those are words online because I wrote them! Now you have evidence and testimony.
The funny part about all this is that nobody is claiming that they know that Coinbase is lying about this contract. It’s all been entirely hypothetical (hence the word “maybe.”)
What evidence or proof have you seen that there exists no possibility of a corporation lying about their relationship with a controversial government agency?
Rational thinkers accept corporate press releases as canonical truth, got it. Even mildly considering the possibility of being lied to is a sign of poor coognitive function. This is a very enlightened view of the world, I hope one day to reach this level of intellect.
Privacy is important because these hypotheticals are enabled by the lack of it, you don't need to ask if, to give a more extreme example, unrestricted backdoor access to your account login to law enforcement agencies has been used for arbitrary surveillance, you demand that these things not be done so you don't have to find out years later.
>Coinbase Tracer, formerly known as Coinbase Analytics, has faced controversy before. The branch of the exchange responsible for the software’s development emerged from Coinbase’s 2019 acquisition of blockchain intelligence firm Neutrino, whose executive team previously worked with a startup that sold spyware to several governments, including Saudi Arabia, known for human rights abuses.
I don't know why we should assume good faith on coinbase's part when the same group of people working on this used to sell spyware to human rights abusers.
https://decrypt.co/36608/coinbase-ceo-reflects-on-neutrino-a...
> Armstrong said that after realizing that Coinbase could’ve hired some “black hats,” he insisted on first speaking to Neutrino staff to find out how much of this was true. After assessing the situation, he sacked some of the ex-Hacking Team members but did not specify who.
> All of the key people who had “some kind of question mark or reputational or values issue” were let go from the company, he said. While some lower-level engineers who “were not the decision-makers and weren’t as culpable” remained with the company
I literally quoted the article that this entire page is about, and I'm also obviously referring to Neutrino seeing as how I directly quoted them. Please read the articles before telling people they need to share more.
Regardless, I don't trust Brian on this. This is the same guy who shit all over his own staff for being "whistle blowers", claiming that these things have to stay in house. Coinbase failed to do their due diligence, bought a company that made spyware, and then claimed that they fired some people but never clarified who. He also explicitly said he only fired some of the "hacking team" that was responsible for the issues, not the entire team itself.
At the end of the day there's absolutely no reason to take them at the word here, and plenty of reason not to.
This is still a problem even if their product only uses public data. Coinbase has access to non-public data, which they can use to validate any analysis or algorithms. Until they explicitly say that no private information was ever used to validate the analytics, it's reasonable to assume they're doing so.
Or, Coinbase's statement that it "sources its information from public sources" is misleading. After all, the blockchain does not provide geolocation data. So what public source would that come from? That's why this article was written: because it looks like a company selling its users' geolocation data but claiming not to. Publicizing that fact may lead to an outcome where we know for sure, one way or the other.
If Bob is found standing over a bleeding corpse with a smoking gun in his hand, would it be a misleading headline to say "Bob found standing over bleeding corpse with smoking gun in his hand"?
Doesn’t matter much: Damage done; you can even see from other comments here already. They probably didn’t check the so called contract linked, much less the article itself which is pretty, pretty light on any kind of legitimate details.
Complain, I don’t know, about actually having a contract with ICE, perhaps? More meaningful that whatever the article complained about. I would complain about what the quote from the spokesperson really mean, that doesn’t really say what the product does, making us look at the contract to even try to get a proper summary.
I’m assuming that the implication of the title is that Coinbase is using the location data of its active users; data that it obtained through geo-locating user IPs; IPs collected from the necessary exchange of information over TCP/IP. That’s how I read it first. The story is a little different. You could imagine a title saying that “Coinbase is collecting third-party location data and selling it to ICE” closer to the report.
I would guess just having a lot of blockchain experts on staff, and since the blockchain is pretty much an open, unencrypted, public ledger; analyzing it is a pretty natural and not entirely unethical thing to do.
I think the issue is really just working with ICE, and the ethical concerns that brings up.
First, begs the question does not mean raises the question. You mean to use the latter.
Second, because laws and enforcement thereof in the USA are arbitrary and wielded as a weapon. Coinbase is a crypto company who would get absolutely obliterated by regulation and legal hassle if they don't play ball with the federal government - on the latter's terms, of course. The US federal government expects complete and total dragnet suspicionless surveillance of all electronic payments in the USA. Anyone doing payments in the USA is expected to cooperate fully or face destruction.
The idea that you're free to do anything in the US that isn't illegal is an illusion. Get big or important enough and what you are doing will be made illegal (or existing laws will be reinterpreted to apply to you) if you don't play ball with TPTB. See also: FISA section 702.
The same sort of pressure is applied to Apple, which is why they maintain a backdoor in the end to end crypto of iMessage for the FBI. No amount of money or commercial success allows you to bypass these power structures.
iCloud Backup (non e2e) backs up the endpoint keys for iMessage. Apple knows this is bad and they were going to do e2e backups (like Google does for Android) and Apple Legal killed the project on FBI request.
Yes, to me this would be a better addition to the article, explain the tool real goal.
Now... you need metrics and analytics over what’s going on with your products. This sounds like something that helps address that somehow, staying anonymous from what it looks like (it says it has no identifiable information linked to people), but even the contract linked makes it hard to understand.
I'm guessing this started in good faith as a way to track down money launderers and other nefarious users and naturally ICE caught wind and demanded access as well. Coinbase is proudly apolitical so it has no reason to refuse compliance with an alphabet agency.
That just happens to be designed by some very fine people:
> In 2019, Motherboard reported that Neutrino, a blockchain-analysis firm the company acquired in order to create Coinbase Tracer, “was founded by three former employees of Hacking Team, a controversial Italian surveillance vendor that was caught several times selling spyware to governments with dubious human rights records, such as Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan.”
First, Coinbase has a no-politics rule. I wonder where this falls. Since it's something business-related, I imagine it's fine to discuss internally, but this is an example where (if I was at Coinbase) I'd feel the no-politics-rule does the company a disservice. I'd be pretty mad if my company was selling to ICE and I wasn't allowed to say anything about it.
Second, it always amazes me how little these ICE contracts are, and how quick big companies (like Github) are willing to burn their credibility over such a relatively small amount of money.
I've said it before and I'll say it again; "apolitical" really just means "supporting the status quo."
This is how ideology works, it the things you believe subconsciously, which make you think that the dominant political project is natural, neutral, uncontroversial, even external to politics.
I don't agree. The "no politics" path taken by a few companies (Coinbase, Basecamp) is a blunt response against overexcited activists.
You know the type. The ones that distract from the core mission of a company. The ones continuously creating outrage and division, the ones doing walkouts, leaking documents and data, constantly stirring up shit and poisoning morale.
It's typically a very small minority, and these companies decided to get rid of them, and codified this as "no politics". Had these people been more reasonable and professional about political aspects of business, surely the blunt instrument of "no politics" would be unneeded.
What about selling geolocation data to ICE? Do you think it's part of the "core mission" of Coinbase, or a distraction? Don't you think that this, too, creates outrage and division? That it "stirs up shit" and poisons morale?
It most certainly is not a distraction. Coinbase provides a blockchain analysis suite and sells it. It's within mission at face value.
Some people may find it controversial to sell to ICE specifically. Anyone is free to believe that, but they are just optics. Any institute or company you dislike is going to use a wide array of COTS software, and you won't stop that. They'll probably also use electricity and order sandwiches. It's ridiculously ineffective to try and "cancel" any institute by means of suppliers.
If you have a problem with ICE tactics, engage in real politics rather than Twitter politics.
Further, I'd argue that before judging there has to be more clarity on what this tool is used for. Maybe it tracks down narcos, money laundrers, human traffickers, the like. Things that might align with your politics, instead of oppose them. Or perhaps they do use it in unfair and harmful ways. We simple don't know, at least I don't.
As for the geolocation part, Coinbase's claim is that they never sold customer private data, and that it's all on-chain. If that is true, then at best it's a lame action. Not to mention that your location data is shared all day every day.
Just to make sure we’re on the same page, here is Coinbase’s mission:
> Coinbase’s mission is to create an open financial system for the world. This means we want to use cryptocurrency to bring economic freedom to people all over the world.
It’s not clear to me how selling geolocation data to ICE is within the scope of the mission. In fact, it seems to me that it actually hinders it.
And remember, it’s (allegedly) not just talk for Coinbase. They’re mission focused. They pushed out employees who didn’t agree with it.
Well, I think the open part is covered. It's an open block chain and it's not surprising to have analysis tools to work with the blockchain. These types of tools are used by exchanges, federal agencies, even divorce lawyers.
The geolocation part is still not clear to me. They claim to not have sold customer data, so that means said data is on the blockchain itself, or can be derived from it. If that reading is correct, even the word "selling" is incorrect.
Further, an open financial system does not mean a total lack of regulation or tracking of bad actors. I would also assume that "economic freedom" is less applicable to criminals, assuming the tool is used for that.
This is not my opinion but instead how I view the Coinbase company's perspective. I'm playing the neutral party here.
ICE is a client that wants to utilize Coinbase services. Coinbase "core mission" is making money. As such, servicing ICE is completely within their "core mission".
Puppy Kickers LLC is a client that wants to utilize Coinbase services. Coinbase "core mission" is making money. As such, servicing Puppy Kickers LLC is completely within their "core mission".
You make a joke out of it, but this is how business works. You provide a customer a product or service and generally are not responsible for whether your product is used for good or bad. An incredible array of generic products can be used in harmful ways but are generally available.
You as a consumer may drive your car to the grocery store, fill up your cart, have lunch at some junkfood place and drive back home. You've now committed countless harmful acts if you were to trace back the supply chain of everything you consumed.
But now you don't care. It's all hypocritical virtue signalling.
I run a business. You're allowed to pick morals over money.
Sure, nobody can make sure every single thing they touch, up and down the supply chain, is pure good. But don't act like you have no agency. If everyone makes small improvements when confronted with them, combined it adds up.
I agree, the only thing I have an issue with is hypocrisy or lazy politics.
"Sure, nobody can make sure every single thing they touch, up and down the supply chain, is pure good."
The above is an agreeable statement, but in reality a cop-out. Doing better means putting in a lot of effort and giving up comforts, something I see extremely few people do at any serious level.
Another example: I saw some lady freak out on Twitter as she saw some ridiculously oversized pickup truck in her street. Filming it, harassing the driver, and loudly calling for such cars to be banned.
She has a point. The problem is though that there's very few such cars. If we're so serious about caring about climate change, it would be way more effective to ban the sale of TVs over 55".
And now...surprisingly few people are interested in the planet anymore. She doesn't want to give up even an inch of comfort, literally.
So that means you just don't care. You only care when it doesn't affect you.
Still you're right, any progress is good progress but at the same time I'm tired of this style of politics. Always claiming perfect morality whilst there's close to none.
That's not my call to make, I'd say its highly context dependent. Some politics may be very relevant to a line of business, others less so.
In any case I'd say the issue is often not about having the particular political opinion, it's about translating it into a type of activism that does damage, by creating internal division, distractions, generating bad PR, etc. These things can spin out of control, forcing business leaders to pick between multiple evils.
Totally agree; I'm against any company having a no-politics rule. Everything is political, for better or for worse, and enforcing it is really just enforcing your own political beliefs.
Is it? By no politics most would just mean don't talk about Trump or Biden or pro choice vs pro choice or pride day or other things like that, most of which don't affect business in direct way and is divisive. It doesn't mean don't involve any kind of politics.
Coinbase made $1.17bn last year. A $1.36M contract from each of ICE, ATF and the FBI doesn't even come close to covering their Superbowl ad budget.
On average, people have varying levels of appreciation/distaste for government agencies... but I think regardless of your stance, it's an easy argument to say ICE falls high on the list of disliked government agencies.
Having worked at a big tech company, I can report that there is an intense, career-making-or-breaking individual imperative for managers to prove the 'value' of soft assets like credibility or popularity.
In my opinion, the reason these companies are willing to shed vast amounts of credibility for cents on the dollar is a systematic mistaking of asset dividends for asset value, which is reified into the organizational culture -- because no one in the C-suite really knows better, not-knowing is selected for, and ultimately becomes a requirement for individual careers to progress.
The dynamic is easier to see in other parts of the economy. While the rent that a fancy house can earn, say, does in fact speak to the value of that house, the fact that it is available for rent in the first place also impacts the value. For literal houses, this offset can be overcome, but for something like your credibility or your integrity, it's lethal.
But that doesn't matter if your boss doesn't know this. All that they see is 'number go up'. Then, often, your number -- be it salary or rank or both - goes up too. And six months later, when the consequences of the firesale become clear, it's too late for the employer -- but not for you, the architect of this terrible idea! You've already augmented your own income, and you can go back on the job market asking for equal-or-better compensation.
Since the number of companies suffering from this acculturated cognitive bias is greater than 1, you can in effect ping-pong between two such companies while gutting both, making larger and larger paycheques with each bounce.
This process is even easier if you work for a really big company, because then you don't even have to change employers! You can just change divisions every six months. The next reorg is right around the corner.
Credibility-for-sale is apoptosis, pure and clean, and it's lucrative to induce, even by accident.
FYI ICE does a lot of good work too like fighting child sex trafficking in other countries. ICE does a lot more than just immigration enforcement within the US borders.
Talk about scope creep... and it happens here for the same reason as in business: contract inflation. The government is more than happy to throw money at contractors and the more they ask for, the more they get, generally.
This suggests that HSI only focuses on transnational crime, while ERO is "entirely immigration". In actuality, HSI also works on immigration. From an article linked to in the Coinbase article that this thread is about:
>According to ICE, HSI agents “encountered 97 individuals who are subject to removal from the United States” during its execution of a federal criminal search warrant at the meatpacking plant.
I actually tried editing it specifically not to suggest that while still reflecting the underlying reality, sorry. Suffice to say, meat packing plants and undocumented labor are not HSI’s priority, ERO is consumed by them.
It’s a big issue, ERO can’t even perform their own workplace raids/political stunts so they co-opt the serious agency for it whenever the winds in DC blow the right direction.
Blown in part by the infamous “ICE union” of course, while hilariously, the HSI agents performing the stunts aren’t even unionized.
But because DHS is, has, and will probably continue to be in disarray merely confronted with its daily agenda, it’s always going to be a “bad time” to look at finally separating the two.
>ICE ERO (Enforcement Removal Operations) = brownshirts, entirely immigration
>Two separate agencies with two separate missions, and this is about HSI.
Folks keep mentioning these separate groups within ICE. Which makes a great deal of sense if you actually say the words that make up ICE: Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
ERO == Immigration (the issues surrounding folks coming into the country)
HSI == Customs (the issues surrounding stuff coming into the country
Broadly related but distinct areas of enforcement.
>>...fighting child sex trafficking in other countries...
-
I know this isnt a topic HN likes, but F that statement.
--
I won't go into what I know of the USG and child sex trafficking (a victim) -- but its ridiculous to think that ICE does anything but protect and enable child sex trafficking.
As a child in the 1970s sex cults enabled by the CIA were a thing. (I am living proof of this, see the interview and statements about 'the purple people' (only clue Ill leave you.))
---
Look at Haiti.
I could write a book, but wont, about how just insanely pedo-ruled the USG is.
Have you ever looked at a badge of a sheriff?
This is what Swartz died trying to reveal, not JSTOR.
Sure have! There are all kinds of different badges, some with very simple designs and others with lots of great detail. This is a very, very vague piece of innuendo that does nobody any good if you're hoping that we'll research it ourselves.
This reminds me of what my chief legal council told me when I was negotiate a deal with another company for data services who we were really friendly with at the time. The gist: "Even if it is your best friend, you need to have very firm legal boundaries on what you are giving them access to as you don't know who will run the company or what their pressure points will be in the future and how they might use your data against your wishes".
I don't trust legal solutions. They can only provide redress when someone is caught, but it's just so easy to snoop without being caught. Only possibilities are keeping the data on machines you control, or using encryption.
if it was that easy, writers wouldn't have to rely on misleading headlines like this one. They are not selling their data, they are selling a tool that process publicly available data.
title: "Coinbase is reportedly selling geolocation data to ICE"
content: "All Coinbase Tracer features use data that is fully sourced from online, publicly available data, and do not include any personally identifiable information for anyone, or any proprietary Coinbase user data."
Thanks for pointing this out, I didn’t even know about the existence of these deals. I’ve had a Coinbase account for a while, but based on this I’ll be moving everything to a private wallet and closing my account ASAP. I have no desire to do business with a company that would do this.
When Coinbase was created/founded, Uber had just launched in Chicago, didn't have UberX and wasn't the brand it is today. Looking at Google Trends data (https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Uber), the peaks of interest happened in 2016 and in 2019.
So no, the goal of Coinbase before/at launch was unlikely to have been "The Uber of Crypto".
That poem was published between Coinbase's B and C rounds. By that point Uber had done a series E with a post-money valuation north of $40 billion. If Coinbase wasn't looking at that with envy and trying at points to cast their story in the Uber mold for investors, I'd be amazed, because most other startups of the time were.
All these comments are about how this effects cryptocurrency in this or that way but the truth is, this story is not about cryptocurrency. It is about banking company doing bad things like all banks do regularly. It has almost nothing to do with cryptocurrency. The finance bros at the edge of the ecosystem are often mistaken for cryptocurrency by the speculator class.
Relevant quote from the article that headline readers may miss:
> Coinbase spokesperson Natasha LaBranche directed The Intercept to a disclaimer on its website stating “Coinbase Tracer sources its information from public sources and does not make use of Coinbase user data.”
Closing the coinbase account has been on my TODO list for a while now, and this article/headline was the little push I needed to get off my ass and do it.
Once Coinbase legally noted if they go bankrupt their customers would go bankrupt the crypto craze took a nosedive. When markets went down during COVID so did crypto but it shot up pretty quickly. So far not seeing that and personally after being reminded I could lose all my money if they went bankrupt Im less then thrilled to jump back in.
"Our mission is to increase economic freedom in the world. Everyone deserves access to financial services that can help empower them to create a better life for themselves and their families."
If you didn't thing corporate missions statements were total bullshit before...
All things considered this one is pretty good too...
Mission first
Our mission is ambitious and important. We don’t engage in social or political activism that is unrelated to our mission while at work. We seek to make the workplace a refuge from division, so we can stay focused on making progress toward the mission.
...or...
Customer focus
We are deeply focused on solving our customers' problems with technology, by enabling them to acquire, store and use crypto. We strive to be the easiest to use, most trusted and most secure platform. In every decision we make, we ask, "How does this create more value for our customers?"
The contract also provides, provocatively, “Historical geo tracking data,” though it’s unclear what exactly this data consists of or from where it’s sourced
I bet it’s source IP address geo location for transactions.
HSI's mission is to investigate, disrupt and dismantle terrorist, transnational and other criminal organizations that threaten or seek to exploit the customs and immigration laws of the United States.
This isn’t the deportation agency, it’s the investigative arm of the DHS (and that they hate the deportation agency & confusion between the two is putting it lightly).
>Why do they have geolocation data in first place? For what and how do they use it?
Having set up a Coinbase account (although I haven't actually used it...yet), they required me to provide documentation about who I am, where I live and prove it with a government issued ID (in my case, a driver's license). As such, any transactions I process through my Coinbase account can be tied (and presumably information about them provided to law "enforcement") are tied to the identity details I provided when creating such an account.
I always use TOR when connecting to Coinbase, so their IP logs don't have any Geo-location information about me.
That said, once I actually purchase some crypto and use it to purchase stuff (cannabis) that's actually legal in my state, but transportation across state lines is illegal.
As such, if the recipient of crypto (even if -- and I will -- I move Coinbase purchased crypto to my own private wallet) is investigated/arrested and the wallet used to accept my crypto, the purchase side of that transaction can absolutely be traced back to me, from the "drug dealer's" wallet, to my private wallet and back to Coinbase.
Presumably that can be foiled through "mixers," but I'm not sure if that could obfuscate a single transaction as I describe -- perhaps someone more knowledgeable could comment on that.
That's (IIUC) how the blockchain is supposed to work -- all transactions are public. Assuming that some government entity wanted to prosecute the customers of the above hypothetical "drug dealer," obtaining court orders for Coinbase crypto accounts wouldn't be hard at all -- as the argument would be that there were illegal transactions and we need to identity of those involved in such a transaction.
IIRC, there was an article[0] (this isn't the one I read, but has the relevant info) a while back about HSI finding purveyors of CSAM[1], and those who paid them with crypto were traced through the public blockchain -- and arrested/charged.
Presumably, there are limits to how much manpower would be applied to a few packages of "Dope Rope"[2] or an ounce of "OG Kush"[3], but if you purchase crypto from a legal entity, they can (and under the right circumstances, will) be compelled to provide information about you when presented with a warrant/court order.
The upshot is that unless there's some way to obfuscate blockchain transactions (Mixers? See above), there's nothing to stop government entities from forcing legal exchanges from giving up their customers' PII, which they already have -- no special tools required.
You could take your crypto to a non-KYC exchange like TradeOgre or Bisq, trade it for a privacy coin like Monero/Zcash/Firo, churn the coins, then trade it back. Boom, ownership chain broken.
Blockchains are a public database of all transactions. Law enforcement don't even need a warrant to get access to literally everything that has ever happened. Why anyone would think that a system like that offers any actual privacy is beyond me.
Coinbase's service is a paid service, which uses analytics to distill that information for LE. So, while true that the "information" is publicly available, the signal-to-noise ratio is abysmal, and Coinbase offers a valuable service that LE would otherwise have to implement themselves.
Ergo, Coinbase is effectively in the "police and surveillance technologies" space while they operate this service.
Your comment seems like a disingenuous attack rooted in sour grapes rather than principles.
Stock options are regulated and less new, but they are also sophisticated, poorly understood by the average people, and manipulated easily.
The idea that traditional financial markets are 'fair' to the common man is pretty naive: many brokerages intentionally front run their customers or charge unconscionable fees, and the market is rife with non-fiduciary investment advisors who sell products based on what provides the largest kickback rather than what's in the best interest of their customer.
I have to agree. If small fish want risk-free options, society offers banks that are heavily regulated and insured. Indeed, the insurance like the FDIC only protects the relatively small actors in the financial system.
Society also offers us the freedom to choose how we invest. That means taking a risk and I think Coinbase always made it clear that the area was very risky.
Facilitating access to various investment options, including direct speculation, is what stockbrokers do. Why is your grief falling specifically on the Coinbase?
For example, in my Fidelity account I can, if I am so inclined, day trade GBTC, buy low volume penny stocks of sketchy miners and do a lot of other things that are not recommended by the mainstream financial analysts.
> There is simply no underlying value within any of these coins. Why would a sane person invest in them?
I remember hearing the same arguments against Ebay and other e-commerce companies: this is all vaporware, there is no physical value (meaning bricks and mortar storefronts), we should prohibit people from investing in all of those, etc.
I personally would not touch most cryptos with a 6' pole, but that is just my opinion. We should still allow someone who believes in this space to invest their own money the way they see fit. My 2c.
Nah. The average person was and should have been prevented from investing in Ebay until they were a publicly traded company, which required Ebay execs to share with the public enough information to have a hope of correctly valuing the investment.
Even if you don't care at all about individuals getting fleeced by scammers, there's a societal reason. We need investment capital for growth, and we need it to be reasonably sanely allocated. If some people raising capital can lie and others have to tell the truth, that puts truth-tellers at a structural disadvantage, meaning more money for fraud, less money for good investments, and a strong incentive for everybody to lie in equal amounts just to keep up.
Worse, over the long term, markets with high levels of scamming mean that most people learn to stay out of them entirely. This leads to even less capital for good investments plus society-wide misallocation of capital. E.g., people just keeping money in their mattresses. So long-term economic growth is harmed for a generation or two. Because even if you clean up a market so it is safe, it takes a long while for people to forget previous pain.
So as a society, we want what America had for decades: strongly regulated financial markets so that the average joe has a variety of safe investment options. For the few who really want to invest in the risky stuff, they can go out and get a Series 65 exam to prove they know what they're doing. [1]
OK, I should have been clearer on what I have been arguing with. Specifically, you expressed this sentiment a few times:
> Even if you don't care at all about individuals getting fleeced by scammers, there's a societal reason. We need investment capital for growth, and we need it to be reasonably sanely allocated
Anytime people start talking about what is acceptably sane and what is not and start restricting investments based on this characterization we create self-reinforcing, traditionalist setups that suffocate everything else.
I don't think that's true at all. The US has one of the most tightly regulated securities markets in the world. But it also has one of the most innovative economies. And our markets are strong enough that foreign companies work to list here to take advantage of the amount of capital available. That apparent contradiction is easily resolved: strongly regulated markets create the kind of trust that draws in the investment capital necessary for innovation.
> The US has one of the most tightly regulated securities markets in the world. But it also has one of the most innovative economies.
I agree with this. However I wonder if this is driven by the setup of the 30+ years ago, when US was effectively the only game in town for quick financing of the innovation (accidentally, when it was a lot less regulated). Such setups, if they work well, can keep going for decades before a slow erosion makes them fail.
I think the litmus test will be the way the US handles upcoming economic challenges. Will it be able to keep innovating or will we just keep throwing money at what worked in the past and do not better than average (which, I suspect, will not be good at all). We will see.
It's pretty crazy Coinbase makes it hard to know your total losses/profits. I imagine it's somewhere in the app, but it's not top level like in any other trading/investment app.
That’s generous. Slot machines aren’t negligently money losing. They’re designed to suppress your risk aversion and play into your greed and desperation.
>To see thousands of Americans who can't afford to lose their savings lose it to Coinbase due to wilful negligience, incompetence.
This is a weird take. Coinbase isn't perfect but I don't see this as a valid criticism. Coinbase are equally responsible for thousands of Americans becoming richer than they ever dreamed of by providing them easy access to the crypto world. Coinbase is a trading platform, losses and wins are to be expected.
There are much worse things too. At least with crypto you only lose as much as you put in. Adjustable rate loans can (and do) completely wipe people out. I'd argue those are far worse than pretty much anything in crypto.
EDIT:
As of a month ago they still do (at 2x anyway.) Also that still has a ceiling on it. Yes if you leverage your entire life savings you can get in trouble but at that point I don't think it matters what you're securing the loan with, that's just extremely irresponsible.
And again, it's the debt that's causing the issue.
> Already somebody committed suicide after losing their money in coinbase and there will be more. Anybody who invested, guided, allowed this to operate is directly responsible.
You realise what you have just said was total nonsense and it isn't exclusive to Coinbase? It's no different to losing all your money on a SPAC stock with a stock broker that allows trading it.
One difference is that Coinbase itself chooses the coins that are available for trading, whereas a stock broker just gives you access to shares traded on an exchange.
I.e. Coinbase is both Schwab and NASDAQ for crypto. And they've certainly (ab)used this power by listing shitcoins that conveniently were owned by the same VCs that had invested in Coinbase itself.
Speaking of the SPAC loophole, that's being plugged by new SEC regulations. Crypto companies wouldn't be happy to have their tokens be under the same regulatory framework, but probably they should be.
I don't think that's a fair comparison in saying it's doing the job of both just because coinbase self regulates which coins it allows. Their markets and pairs are based on internal risk calculations. DOGE coin was allowed relatively late onto coinbase. Monero is still not supported on coinbase. Schwab does similar with penny stocks and you have to do an interview with a trader in order to be able to do naked calls/puts or advanced straddles as well as trade on margin. Schwab will help you make otc trades on penny stocks that aren't listed on the main exchanges.
Not listing Monero is definitely not a good financial decision. That's the currency darknet markets are shifting to. Monero also crashed along with BTC and ETH, it doesn't look decoupled. And crypto markets haven't meaningfully decoupled from the securities market either.
is the implicit assumption here that coinbase is selling data to ICE leading to the deportation of poor immigrant families, who you are presuming are On The Blockchain?
Or are they selling data that likely helps better understand drug/human traficking networks? Is selling data that helps with the latter considered bad??
Whenever an executive starts complaining[1] about how politics is impacting their workplace I see management incompetence. Politics exists. It exists for everyone. If your company is having an unusually difficult time getting work done in a given political environment, the conditions that are causing that probably have more to do with the company environment than politics writ large.
Prohibition is always a largely ineffective policy. People have feelings about the world. If you can't find a way to make space for those feelings somehow they will make their own space, often at the least convenient moment.
[1] Most recently this was Kraken CEO Jesse Powell