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Tracers in the Dark (pluralistic.net)
57 points by BerislavLopac on Nov 15, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 10 comments



Found and liked this on his site:

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Wired magazine has a multi-part teaser about the takeover and takedown of alphabay. Very interesting and gripping. Reads like a crime novel.

Part I: https://www.wired.com/story/alphabay-series-part-1-the-shado...


Got around to reading Closer to the Machine: Technophilia & It's Discontents. It's from 1997, and is kind of a memoir about what it's like being a techie, about the changes happening. It's incredibly hard to tell the book is 25 years old. So much of it seems apt & accurate today.

One character that shows up is Brian, a crypto-libertarian who is obsessed with anonymous money. Ellen has like all kinds of protests & qualms she goes through about how awful & bad this would be.

From the other side, I'm also reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future, (2020) and wow... using blockchain to track & follow & monitor all the money is a huge win for the good guys.


Build a system in which rules don't apply and rulebreakers can't be held accountable, and then be surprised when criminals flood in.


So you mean cash system?

And seriously, criminals will abuse every system, e.g. internet, cryptocurrencies, etc.


> criminals will abuse every system

Yes, of course. That's why systems that constrain activities to socially desirable ones punish activities that tend to abuse the system, and properly reward those that support the system tend to have less criminal activity.


The biggest rule breakers are the ones sitting in the white house


The Welcome to Video takedown was also detailed in a recent Wired article. Crazy, disturbing, and interesting.


Wired article that is an excerpt from this book: https://www.wired.com/story/tracers-in-the-dark-welcome-to-v...


I just googled that and got the wiki article. What the hell? 1.28 MILLION people?!???

The "Welcome To Video" case was a case in which roughly 1.28 million members from 38 countries traded sexually exploitative videos of children through the Welcome to Video website. 360,000 downloads are known to have been made through the website.[1] This was the first case in South Korea where a criminal suspect was found using the Darknet.




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