> Apple apparently didn’t put much thought into how its AirTag location tracking discs could be misused by stalkers and domestic abusers.
I’d say this is not really accurate. Apple chose to put detection and warnings in place for when an AirTag is potentially moving with someone without their knowledge, and they had these in place from day 1. Sure, they could have done a better job (especially when it comes to other platforms like Android, which have taken time for Apple to get caught up on), but it’s a stretch to say they didn’t put thought into it. If anything, they could have kept much more quiet about it rather than put tools into place which help detect abuse, but also raise awareness and call attention to it. They made a choice, and the right one at that.
Meanwhile there are plenty of electronic devices available which can be used for stalking purposes and can be bought very cheaply on Amazon (no, I won’t link to any) and give no such warnings from any apps when they are unexpectedly traveling with someone. These are much cheaper and much harder to detect. If someone is genuinely concerned about such abuse of technology that should be equally called out along with Apple. Of course that might not get as much attention as going after a visible company like Apple, but it nevertheless deserves the same level of concern.
Those stalking devices might be harder to detect, but are they as effective as AirTag? IIRC the innovation behind AirTag is that they don't require network connectivity. The devices you mentioned might require cellular network or WiFi, and the former is linked to the criminal's identity and the latter is not available everywhere.
AirTags do require network activity for the location to be make its way back to your phone, with that network activity provided by another Apple device, rather than the tag itself. And, each AirTag must be linked to an Apple account. If you find an AirTag, hold your phone near and it will give you the full serial number and the last four digits of the phone number associated with it. I’m sure Apple has all sorts of additional information, related to that account, that could be given to the authorities.
Weird to premise an article on the assertion that blockchain devs suffer from a lack of...adversarial thinking? "How will this technology be used to harass and abuse people?" is a question that security engineers ask every single day!
> there is very little privacy available once your crypto wallet address is known, because every transaction is publicly visible, and attempts to obscure them often easily unobscured with chain analysis tools
Any good crypto wallet will generate a distinct address for each transaction. (Granted, chain analysis could help correlate addresses, but doing so requires a vastly larger effort and success is not guaranteed.)
> immutable social network content is horrifying given what people post themselves. Imagine if the cringy posts by a twelve-year-old were guaranteed to be available in perpetuity as soon as they were saved
Once your data is on my machine, it is out of your hands forever. This is a fundamental principle, and the alternative is surely more dystopian. Norms must change to accommodate what is a technological fact; the reason they haven't changed yet is because most social technology is still centralized. But people already understand that you can't un-send an email, for example. Why should the rest of the internet be different?
For a technology that is supposedly comes from a privacy and security philosophy, blockchain evangelists and devs DO suffer from a lack of adversarial thinking. It has cornered the market in fraud and manipulation, just look at all of the pump and dump and phishing scams that are perfectly tailored to its design.
Blockchain is built from the ground up to prevent exactly one type of security vulnerability: man in the middle attacks. It is absolutely abysmal at protecting against any other form of attack. Anything that involves, say: social engineering, is fair game. After all it is YOUR fault if YOU leak personal information that can be used to destroy YOUR life. If that ends up in the blockchain its not MY fault, I cant do anything... what do you want me to do? change it? punish someone? oops sorry I cant!
Ultimately this form of thinking is the logical conclusion of "personal responsibility" arguments. Why criticize the system when you can instead pretend the problem is the individual? Crypto doesnt have philosophical issues, you are using the wrong wallet. It isnt MY fault that someone made an NFT containing your home address and bitcoin wallet ID, YOU trusted your information with the wrong service.
The ultimate scapegoat is blaming the end-user. At some point you need to take the L and at least admit these are oversights. Blockchain tech has been around for over a decade and it's had plenty of time to solve these problems but instead it has dug its heels in and said "no all of this is by design and good actually"
> Blockchain is built from the ground up to prevent exactly one type of security vulnerability: man in the middle attacks. It is absolutely abysmal at protecting against any other form of attack.
I wonder where that Man in the Middle attack thing is coming from? Dan mentioned it in his recent video, so he must have picked it up somewhere.
If you Google the term + blockchain, you'll mostly find some discussion about potential attack vectors regarding wallets. It's not a term used in academic blockchain literature as far as I aware. It's not used in the Bitcoin whitepaper.
Man in the middle has a specific meaning, and I don't see how describing blockchain's main purpose as preventing this kind of attack makes a terrible amount of sense.
Ultimately, what you critique is simply an inherent part of the system. These are not oversights. These are basic consequences of the whole approach. To say "blockchain evangelists suffer a deficiency in not addressing them" is merely saying "there should be no blockchain evangelists".
MITM is a networking term for when an agent in a trust based communication system falsifies data in order to exploit the system. I don't think using a term that isn't directly used in a whitepaper is a flaw in my argument. Decentralization, in general, guards against MITM by using consensus mechanisms instead of trusting any individual link, so blockchains are theoretically resilient against individual agents breaking the rules. That is literally the basis of blockchain tech. What I am getting at is that there are still ways to exploit a system while technically operating "within the rules" and blockchain makes those easier to get away with.
> Ultimately, what you critique is simply an inherent part of the system
YES THATS THE PROBLEM. Systems arent immutable facts of the world. We can change them. Systems are built by people and people can be wrong or at the very least mislead.
I think it would be more accurate to say that crypto/blockchain solves Sybil attacks and the Byzantine agreement problem, both of which were discussed from the beginning.
To say "blockchain evangelists suffer a deficiency in not addressing them" is merely saying "there should be no blockchain evangelists".
Honestly... yes. If there are a bunch of problems preventing digital cash from working and you solve two of those problems then you haven't created digital cash; you've created an attractive nuisance.
Maybe it is possible to misunderstand my comment. I am saying the term seems unused in academic/technical papers around blockchain, which would support my assertion that it is non-sensical to claim that blockchains are supposed to protect against man in the middle attacks.
At this point all of these companies building all of these services on the blockchain are really proving that people want trust based simple services.
Two banks in Italy have launched a crypto buying and custodying services, the customers can't even access their crypto, nor they even want to. And it is doing well. Yet another proof no one cares about blockchain solutions and tgat the problems they solve do not exist.
> Once your data is on my machine, it is out of your hands forever.
The world isn't quite that apodictic. While the worst case may not change, its likelihood can. Information has always had a half-life that people had a general idea of, and that they considered in their decision-making. An effort specifically aimed at creating immutable, perpetual records will hurt both the people who fail to adjust, who will more likely see damaging old stuff coming up than expected, as well as the people who do change their habits, who are forced to restrict their openness and thereby lose whatever utility they used to derive from the previous, more liberal ability to share content.
The mechanism is identical to a change from traffic laws being enforced by cops, where some slack in the system was unavoidable, expected, and sometimes compensated for with higher fines (where the risk of being caught is too low), to some automated system where every single traffic violation is recorded and fined.
I appreciated the perspective of the article. The author is coming from more of a front-end perspective. Bitcoin is a beautiful castle, but you have to climb up through the toilet. What do you think about this statement instead - "blockchain devs suffer from a lack of adversarial thinking regarding the frontend interface".
I am critical of certain aspects of crypto currencies and I'm certainly not a "crypto fanboy", but
> Some cryptocurrency enthusiasts envision a world where cryptocurrencies have replaced dollars and euros (which they refer to as “fiat”; I prefer the term “real money”)
if the author wanted to get their point across, maybe they could have avoided the snarky comment in the article's introduction? Whenever I read this type of statement, there is a switch in my brain that flips and goes "OK what you're going to read next is probably biased". At least in my personal experience, this style of writing ends up diluting the validity of any other statement within the article.
It's an advantage to know someone's agenda so I consider it a good thing. This author and other authors such as Stephen Diehl are known for their negative take on cryptocurrencies and they end up here quite often. You can still read their articles while keeping their bias in mind!
One of them: "I have instead come to believe that [crypto is] so harmful that I cannot ethically continue to ignore them, and must instead do my best to educate and advocate against their wider adoption. I am picking my battles, and this is one of them."
There's a very large unclaimed bounty for breaking Monero's privacy.
And those two are the tip of the iceberg. Check out Dero for one that's doing smart contracts with homomorphic encryption.
The future of privacy coins, based on these examples, is simply that they work, and will do so as long as the encryption mechanisms do. So we are presented with a question of which applications benefit from public vs private chains.
I don't doubt that anonymous transactions are possible, I want to know if they're actually accomplishing what this person is claiming. They've had plenty of time to do so.
I think it's unquestionable that privacy is generally helpful to victims (or rather, the victimized.)
I think what he might be referring to in particular is that the traditional blockchain and even financial system at large is incapable of protecting at-risk individuals (eg activists), as the former is subject to chain analysis and the latter is subject to the whims of whichever regime has taken power.
There's at least some evidence that Monero is resistant to US government sanctions. They tried to sanction a wallet and ended up sanctioning a transaction hash.
Any blockchain which universally stores media forever puts itself in the category “economically unfeasible/unsustainable.” People pay for that storage and the large and distinct nature of media makes it easy to single out prune. Worst case scenario I replace that block with illegal media with its original block header and no data.
The cost to sustain an illegal media attack such that consecutive blocks contain such data is unsustainable and far easier to ameliorate than a 51% attack. According to this $76k per gigabyte on Eth. https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/872/what-is-the...
> Worst case scenario I replace that block with illegal media with its original block header and no data
How do you alter a block without altering the headers of every other block afterwards? Unless you are capable of second pre-image attacks on modern cryptographic hashes that's simply not possible. What you have is a database, not a blockchain.
You can release a hardfork, such that all participants agree to treat the offending block as a special case. No different from the Ethereum DAO fiasco.
> You can release a hardfork, such that all participants agree to treat the offending block as a special case. No different from the Ethereum DAO fiasco.
How do you get everyone to agree to fork each time someone stores or identifies offending material (or a pointer to such) on chain?
At least in the Ethereum DAO case, everyone had a vested interest in switching to the fork.
You would need a regularly scheduled "Hard Fork Thursday" or similar to effectively address the issue, and that's quite unlikely as this introduces new vulnerabilities.
What I get from this is that all web3 promises are smoke and mirrors. ok your photos arent stored on the blockchain... the blockchain just stores your image URLS.... so then if there is still a traditional repository for content off the blockchain, you now have two points of failure instead of one.
Ethereum is looking at the idea that nodes don’t need to store all the state and can prune historic data after a certain amount of time. They won’t even need to store the entire current state of the chain.
If someone wants to access resources that were pruned (ex: call an old contract), they will submit the state to the network along with a proof that the data is correct. In this model, you’d have to store the illegal content yourself in order to ‘rehydrate’ it into the current state of Ethereum.
I'm not aware of any instances of this but the solution is pretty simple. It's not dis similar at all to the current web. At the end of the day, any node that faces the public is a web server that is serving content, whether it's backed by a Blockchain or not. If it transmits a mentioned "illegal content" then it must cease to do so just like any other web server.
What is the practical solution? Clean nodes. If such web server is in a jurisdiction of said illegal content, it must run a clean node that specifically filters such content to the web. This technology exists today, it's called "moderation", it's just that the backend is a MySQL database, not a blockchain.
I've heard this claim made for many years now about the Bitcoin blockchain data blocks, but usually in the sort of whispered tones in quiet backwaters places on the internet that deal substantially in half-truths, and that which never happened but always is, and such.
As there are a lot of people who are quite opposed to Bitcoin/PoW/blockchain/etc, I assume if it was true, someone would have come up with some indisputable, solid evidence for it, and it would make the tech news rounds for quite some time (there are enough anti-Bitcoin writers and commenters that such a thing would never die, and would be brought up with some links to the evidence in literally every article written about Bitcoin).
As that's not happened, I remain inclined to treat it as rumors and "But if you use this OTP you can get the following out!" sort of trickery.
There are JPGs, ASCII art, PDFs, religious messages, firmware keys, "illegal" prime numbers and all sorts.
Is there anything worse than that? There are certainly some GPG encoded files in there. Perhaps someone is planning on shorting Bitcoin and is waiting to announce something so evil is stored that possession of the chain becomes a criminal offence is most countries.
I'm certainly aware non-transactional data is stored in the blockchain, I've linked a list of it elsewhere in this post.
However, the specific claim of CP remains, as far as I'm aware, entirely hypothetical. And I'm at least not aware of any legal precedent that says the possession of random data, of which you don't have the keys, and don't have any reason to know the content of it, is illegal.
> Bitcoin’s blockchain contains at least eight files with sexual content. While five files only show, describe, or link to mildly pornographic content, we consider the remaining three instances objectionable for almost all jurisdictions: Two of them are backups of link lists to child pornography, containing 274 links to websites, 142 of which refer to Tor hidden services. The remaining instance is an image depicting mild nudity of a young woman. In an online forum this image is claimed to show child pornography, albeit this claim cannot be verified (due to ethical concerns we refrain from providing a citation)."
I'm sure if you really put your mind to it, you could find and recover the images, but then you'd just have illegal content and that's not very useful, so why dig for it?
By the same, uh, token, could you find a bunch of commits from a large github repo that each form successive parts of the key, post an issue referencing them, and then make that repo - or even all github - illegal in the USA?
If Bitcoin's primary design and purpose to disseminate bluray decryption keys, and provide unfettered access to them to anybody and everybody, and advertise it as such, there may be some kind of an argument to be made.
But as it's not, and there are hoops to jump through, doesn't it make about as much sense as trying to make malls and permanent markers illegal, because someone wrote a bluray decryption key under a mall toilets cistern lid?
Sort of. If someone figures out the right UV lamp will reveal remnants of the marker pen, you'll have to make UV lamps illegal. Or if someone took a photo of the key before it was erased and uploaded it, you'll have to make cameras and the internet illegal.
In our present reality, almost every piece of information - with sufficient intent - can effectively become immutable, owing to our interconnectivity and resourcefulness.
And as I understand it this is the part that matters legally - the law is concerned with that intent.
I often see people claiming an immutable blockchain and all of its users are potentially in violation of the law because someone put something on it that's illegal and therefore everyone around the world with an unwitting copy of that information is breaking the law. But is that how the law works? (Well, when it's working - which it doesn't always, but in general.)
In this example of someone putting illegal content on the Bitcoin blockchain, the system and its users could be more rightly seen as victims of the crime. Just as much as the mall owner is a victim of an act of vandalism, or the github repo's owner.
None of these parties had the intent to host this information.
However if a particular blockchain was specifically created and marketed as a place to host and get bluray keys, and all peers and miners hosting copies of it clearly knew that, then they are showing intent to break the law and would be treated differently.
Now IANAL, and neither is this a perfect metric and it becomes a grey area at times, but as I understand it, this question of intent is fundamental to law and how it's enforced in the real world.
We can think of countless examples of how doing anything else would result in continual and repeated injustices.
Turning an apartment buildings worth of people into criminals would be as simple as putting a piece of paper with a decryption key on it into everyones letterbox.
No. They're the victims of unsolicited mail. It doesn't mean all of them and the postal system should be considered illegal, even if they unwittingly kept the letter in a stack with other junk mail in their room.
It's somewhat common in the UK for people to send each other a couple of pennies, along with a short message, via banking apps. Some banks will block senders on request. As banks have to perform KYC checks, it's also possible to report people for harassment to the police.
I'm not sure how unregulated cryptocoins can do that. I'm sure you can tell a wallet to ignore any transactions from a specific address - but there's no way to prevent those transactions actually being committed to the chain.
Banks and data harvesters are not good guys. The problem with blockchains is, unlike banks, they let people send abusive messages to me? Every time i wade through my Gmail spam folder I see dozens of sexually explicit messages. Every time I open my phone there’s notifications I dont want that I never asked to receive from, among other things, my bank. I’ve had money taken out of my bank account, charged to my credit cards from services that couldn’t take a, “No I don’t remember subscribing to you and I don’t want your services.” I get physical mail for loans I don’t need at rates, stated in misleading ways, that nobody should take. I didn’t ask for these.
I don’t think blockchains accomplish what they’re supposed to, but you’re telling me the problem with them is they don’t respect and privacy and allow people to send me unwanted messages? Compared to the status quo? What world do you live in?
In the article she specifically talks about how blockchains are a godsend for data harvesters. I think it's disingenuous to pick out one of her criticisms, ignore the rest and say "that criticism by itself isn't as bad as the alternative".
The author is not even wrong. Public transparent blockchains are a disaster for privacy. Bitcoin is even worse for privacy than the average credit card since the personal information is out there for everyone to see. It gets to the point it destroys bitcoin's fungibility since you can tell each coin apart from their transaction history.
This isn't am inherent problem with blockchains though. Privacy blockchains exist. Monero transactions don't reveal much. There's no way to tell who's sending the money, who's receiving it or even how much.
How do you reconcile this idea with the fact that Bitcoin seems quite popular among Internet fraudsters and scammers (e.g. ransomware)? Or that most Bitcoin thieves are never caught? "Bitcoin is even worse for privacy than the average credit card" is a huge overstatement. You really can't infer that much from looking at the blockchain, especially when there is no address re-use. Even less when CoinJoin is used. You can make some probabilistic guesses at best. Ross Ulbricht, aka "Dread Pirate Roberts", was using Bitcoin extensively and never got identified through the blockchain (he got caught due to a Tor misconfiguration). I'm pretty sure he would have been identified pretty quickly if he had used a credit card merchant account.
> How do you reconcile this idea with the fact that Bitcoin seems quite popular among Internet fraudsters and scammers (e.g. ransomware)? Or that most Bitcoin thieves are never caught?
I believe it's due to ignorance of the increasing risks associated with bitcoin and of the existence of better technology. Smarter criminals are already using Monero.
> You really can't infer that much from looking at the blockchain, especially when there is no address re-use.
You don't even have to infer anything. Just look up a known address and you can see its entire transaction history. There are rich lists which allow you to track whales. You can literally see them deposit the coins on Binance when they're about to dump on the market.
> Even less when CoinJoin is used. You can make some probabilistic guesses at best.
This is not a good idea. The coin anonymizer transactions will be there for all to see. Your money is tainted the second it passes through these systems even if you do it for privacy reasons. Exchanges will refuse these coins and as a result so will everyone else because they won't be able to cash them out. They might as well be worthless.
This sort of anonymizing feature has to be built into the system in such a way that it is always enabled for everyone and can't be turned off. Anonymous money should be the rule and it should be impossible to break it. That way nobody can be discriminated against for protecting their privacy. If you can discriminate against coins based on their origin, they are not fungible.
> Ross Ulbricht, aka "Dread Pirate Roberts", was using Bitcoin extensively and never got identified through the blockchain
> I believe it's due to ignorance of the increasing risks associated with bitcoin and of the existence of better technology. Smarter criminals are already using Monero.
The risk is practically non-existent, they're not getting caught through the blockchain.
> You don't even have to infer anything. Just look up a known address and you can see its entire transaction history. There are rich lists which allow you to track whales. You can literally see them deposit the coins on Binance when they're about to dump on the market.
That shows a misunderstanding of how Bitcoin wallets work. There are some services that claim to track the inflow/outflow of Bitcoins to exchanges but they are very approximate and you can't track individual "whales". If you use a modern wallet there really shouldn't be more than 2 Bitcoin transactions per address (in and out).
> Exchanges will refuse these coins and as a result so will everyone else because they won't be able to cash them out.
That is false.
PS: I know there are blockchains with better anonymity than Bitcoin but please, slow down with the overstatements.
To be frank, whataboutism like this reply is really detrimental to the quality of many discussions around any topic, but particularly when it is about crypto.
Any and all criticism is deflected with “but look at x, they do y which is just the same. Well so what?
Bad behavior within another system doesn’t absolve the system under scrutiny from criticism.
Not at all. Pretending that a new technology is somehow exposed to new problems not present in old technology is disingenuous and frames the overall problem narrowly. Take an example from the author: “anyone can airdrop nfts to someone and it will show up in their wallet for them to see before they know what it is.” And? This is no different from getting emailed a similar picture, it’s not hard to track where it came from if investigators are so inclined, unless privacy measures also available in web2 are used.
The place this ends is not about crypto currency, if you really want to stop all “harm” on the internet you end up in a society where encryption is demonized. I wonder what abuse and harassment will be irrestistable to corporations and governments who completely deny you privacy or digital autonomy. And we are worried about problems that already exist with or without crypto? Give me a break.
> This is no different from getting emailed a similar picture, it’s not hard to track where it came from if investigators are so inclined, unless privacy measures also available in web2 are used.
This. Simply.
The road to hell is once again paved with good intentions. From email, to the blockchain.
Sent "f*_this_s*coin_to_the_ground" to everyone that had more than about $10 worth of NEM.
It was highly satisfying to use their own network to message people about the dishonesty of the developers after they tried to censor me on every other platform.
The entire premise of the article is flawed. Blockchains aren't at all as "take it or leave it" as it's being portrayed as. In fact, the exact opposite compared to traditional web services.
Yes you can send a token or NFT to anyone on the chain, yes as far as the data layer is concerned that is "immutable". That however does not prevent you as a user to forgo your access/freedom to an entity that knows best for you, just like we do everyday in traditional web services, social media, banking institutions etc.
What does that look like? The underlying data layer (the blockchain) is public and open source. A "moderation" company can build their own middleware that filters data, throws out spam/harassment etc. Then, your node or wallet consumes and interacts with this middleware instead of the base layer. Now you have successfully incorporated abuse/harassment moderation without having to worry about the blockchain at all. If someone sends you something undesirable, you never see or interact with it.
At the end of the day, blockchains give you *the option* to have your freedom, they do not force it upon you. The same can't be said about the traditional tech.
So this is the modern narrative of "decentralization"? Just rely on trusted middlewares? What's the utility of the trustless blockchain behind it. Moreover, middleware or not, it's still on the chain and accessible to everyone.
Usenet had killfiles and email has spam filters. Decentralized systems (and some poorly-run centralized systems) need client-side filters and it's time for the crypto/blockchain/Web3 community to start developing them if they want to be taken seriously.
No this isn't the modern narrative, it's the stop gap solution for individuals that don't have the capacity to adapt to a new paradigm or have particular concerns (e.g. abuse)
The utility is still right there for whoever wants to take advantage of it, but they still have the option to forgo part or all of the trustless nature.
It doesn't matter if the "offending data" is sitting on a computer somewhere (that's all a blockchain is) what matters if it's accessible and as I mentioned, it's up to the blockchain nodes to transmit it or a user to consume it. Both of which can be solved if needed with middleware.
I'm sorry but having the "freedom" to ignore abuse and harassment is not a solution at all. If someone releases e.g. revenge porn of you, whether or not you can personally see it will be 100% irrelevant to whether or not it is abuse because clearly other people still can.
You're welcome to say that you prefer these tradeoffs in your monetary systems but please don't try to say that it's somehow better at handling abuse. It is objectively worse.
There are plenty of ways to distribute and obtain revenge porn. Nothing unique and especially nothing efficient about blockchain. Blockchain isn't some special higher power, from a data perspective it's not substantively different than a server with media on it.
It's not the job of the software protocol to address social/legal problems. That's the job of governments and law. If the law in particular jurisdiction prohibits certain illegal content, then the node operating in that jurisdiction will be compelled to follow it, blockchain or not.
It is objectively better because one has an option and the other doesn't.
What option do you have if twitter _does not_ filter out media that you deem bad?
Conversely, what option do you have if twitter _does_ filter out content that is not objectionable to you?
The difference here is that the fundamental promise of blockchain is that there is no trusted middleman, so it is not possible even in theory to prevent abuse without subverting the purpose of the whole system. For existing web2 systems, we can argue at the edges about which things are handled correctly, but at least the mechanism is there.
by definition, there is no middleground that can the same level of freedom while also offering less freedom (via censorship)
now, IPFS (not a blockchain, obviously) gives node owners control over the content they want to host. it's definitely not as free as a traditional blockchain, but it's probably closer to what you're looking for
It's a question of whether or not you believe freedom of speech is worth the risk somebody somewhere will say something you don't like. At one point people seemed to believe this worth the risk and freedom of speech was good. Now, little by little people are attacking this. Choose safety over freedom and you will be giving your freedom to someone you have no control over, but now they have the freedom to control you.
This concern about harassing messages is particularly relevant as data aggregator Etherscan just announced their new messaging feature "Blockscan Chat". I'm unclear on how it works but it's the first time I've seen such accessible tools for blockchain users to message eachother: https://chat.blockscan.com/start
That said, even in this beta there's an easy to reach option to "Block user". Nice work Etherscan!
On how that chat works; you sign a message to Blockscan's server to prove ownership of your key, then it's just un-ecrpyted chat with messages stored Blockscan's server and you public key as your username.
So much text with so little content. Not talking about taproot upgrade, using discrete log contracts instead of hash time lock contracts, signature aggregation, half signature aggregation, coinjoin, and a lot of technologies that take many years of research and development to improve privacy.
personally i think its a problem that a technology that is supposed to be the "future" requires so much institutional knowledge to even begin to discuss privacy improvements. If you want go write your own article that explains these technologies to the average twitter user and see how long it ends up being.
I don't disagree with you at all. That's why it's the future, not the present. I started buying Bitcoins when there were no hardware wallets, and I know many people who lost them in different ways (me too). Building up a debit based system when our current financial system is credit based is super hard and risky for the early investors.
You can just wait until most bugs get fixed and these features get implemented in the next 10 years. You'll have less upside potential, but another mature system to choose from.
While I won't critique the article, I will critique this response: why bother being on a discussion board if you're not going to discuss or if you're going to ban discussion? You post to a discussion board, you risk discussion, even if contributors to the discussion don't fit your idea of the model participant.
No one is "banning" anyone. When people discuss abuse, your best move is to listen, get informed, listen and get informed. "Critique" is literally the least useful response.
As soon as I read about how web3 will set us free from the tyranny of centralized corporate or governmental power, I mentally add “…so that highly motivated social misfits can abuse people and commit other crimes without interference.”
Hey hacker news, let's acknowledge this is a really important and well-thought out exposé of a serious flaw in blockchain (on par with Maxie Marlinspike's recent dive into web3 IMHO) and show our colors by sending to the top.
As for Moxie, it seems that the authors criticism also heavily applies to both Signal and MobileCoin.
I don’t think the author would like to know how the abuse of both projects by ‘criminals’ is happening; even worse when MobileCoin is a privacy coin like Monero. Good luck tracing the sender.
Like the internet, email and now blockchain, the road to hell has been paved with good intentions, until the criminals came along abusing Signal and MobileCoin.
I’d say this is not really accurate. Apple chose to put detection and warnings in place for when an AirTag is potentially moving with someone without their knowledge, and they had these in place from day 1. Sure, they could have done a better job (especially when it comes to other platforms like Android, which have taken time for Apple to get caught up on), but it’s a stretch to say they didn’t put thought into it. If anything, they could have kept much more quiet about it rather than put tools into place which help detect abuse, but also raise awareness and call attention to it. They made a choice, and the right one at that.
Meanwhile there are plenty of electronic devices available which can be used for stalking purposes and can be bought very cheaply on Amazon (no, I won’t link to any) and give no such warnings from any apps when they are unexpectedly traveling with someone. These are much cheaper and much harder to detect. If someone is genuinely concerned about such abuse of technology that should be equally called out along with Apple. Of course that might not get as much attention as going after a visible company like Apple, but it nevertheless deserves the same level of concern.