• 118 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • Commercial transactions -

    Aaah, the kind of transaction that most transactions are?

    Operated by providers

    Aah, so any business which accept crypto must KYC every one of their customers. This makes accepting crypto especially burdensome, which is half the point of this legislation in the first place.

    So non-commercial transations are fine, as are crypto transactions to non-custodial wallets.

    Unless you’re using the wallet to buy or sell something. You know, the thing people use money for.

    Why does the government need to have every transaction reported to them? Crime is bad because it causes harm. If harm is being caused, that means a person or entity is causing that harm. That means there is evidence. Follow that.

    Police have more surveillance and crime-detecting tools than at any point in human history. Nearly every category of crime, particularly violent crime, is on a decades-long downtrend. We all travel with GPS monitors in our pockets. We all use credit cards instead of cash. We all are recorded by CCTV 90% of the places we go. We don’t need to give them more financial surveillance because ‘crime’.









  • makeasnek@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.mlThoughts on Cryptocurrency?
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    2 months ago

    There’s lots of people who use the dollar and other currencies I don’t like. But I still use the currency. Bitcoin has faithfully kept its fiscal policies and promises for 15 years. It’s money whose supply can’t be diluted through inflation. You can be your own bank. That has never changed. Whatever it originally promised, it’s still doing.





  • Yep. Unfortunately both the left and right in the US seem to have free speech in their crosshairs one way or another. The right with “don’t say gay”, their book bans, and war on drag, the left with the TikTok ban, wanting the government to be able to define and regulate “misinformation” on social media, etc. The long-term protectors of free speech like the ACLU have even done a pivot away from free speech cases because they perceive them as unpopular.





  • makeasnek@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.mlThoughts on Cryptocurrency?
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    2 months ago

    Look up a network map of lightning, it’s not centralized at all. Payments typically route through multiple hubs, just as many Bitcoin nodes may be involved in processing a main chain transaction. Anyone can run a lightning node, and you can choose which nodes you want to use, if you want. There are thousands of them to pick from.

    The lightning channels are secured by the main chain. There is no centralized party who can rug you.


  • Except it’s not, it’s an ad platform.

    Right. So if they sell ads on it, it’s not a speech platform right? Reddit, not a speech platform? The Washington Post? The Guardian? Lemmy, when lemmy instances start running ads, Not a speech platform? Gmail? Not a speech platform?

    Nope, absolutely incorrect, it is indeed just a company being banned.

    It’s not. This isn’t a company that sells cars, they provide an online speech platform. It’s my ability to use the speech platform that gets banned in the process. They can ban TikTok from being able to “do business” in the US, that is different from pulling it from the app store or installing a great firewall to prevent US citizens from accessing their site. And frankly, “doing business” has been an inherent part of speech platforms for decades, selling advertising on speech platforms is how they can exist, all the way back to the days of newspapers and radio.


  • Except they already made Oracle handle all that and they can easily legislate privacy protections without banning TikTok entirely. And, again, it is my right as a citizen to install whatever app I want even if it is spying on me, just like the rest of my apps do. I could film every second of my life and put it up on Facebook or a personal website and the Chinese government could watch it and there’s not a damned thing the US government can do about it.




  • If China is going prevent US companies from doing profitable business within its economic borders I don’t see why the US should allow Chinese companies to engage in profitable businesses ventures within its country.

    1. They get to do whatever they want because they’re a dicatorship. Saying the US government should be allowed to do something “because China does it” is a real slippery slope. 2. We aren’t talking about oil extraction or car sales here, we’re talking about something which is explicitly a speech platform. They are different.

    It’s not just a “company” being banned, it’s the government telling you that you can’t use that companies services for your speech. Imaging the US government banning the The Guardian because it’s not owned by US citizens. That’s the same thing as banning TikTok because it’s not owned by US Citizens. The government has no right to ban newspapers or websites which are otherwise engaging in legally-protected speech. You have a right to hear what they have to say.


  • makeasnek@lemmy.mlOPtoMemes@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    2 months ago

    They are all examples of speech platforms the government targeted because they disagreed with what they were publishing. Because of the precedent set in those situations, the government has even more latitude to prosecute even more speech they don’t agree with. The basis of the TikTok ban is literally it’s “foreign propaganda”. Propaganda is just “stuff the government doesn’t want you to hear”. The right to hear things the government doesn’t want you to hear is one of the most basic rights of human expression. Not just in the US, but in the UN Charter on human rights as well.

    Fear of “foreign influence”? You would find that exact argument being made by the Soviet Union to block US films and books in their country. You would find that exact argument being used in China to block internet access. You would find that exact argument being made in Iran to stop the discussion of homosexuality.




  • Who are they worried China is going to influence? Children, right? If it’s adults, that’s almost more insulting, they think we don’t deserve to be able to see all sides of an argument and are too stupid to discern fact from fiction. We may as well dispense with free expression entirely at that point because the government can just say “you’re too stupid to read this and we’re worried you’ll be influenced, so you can only read the books we’ve pre-approved for you”

    It is every American’s right to think freely, to speak those thoughts to others, and to have others have the opportunity to hear those thoughts whether or not they are “good influences” according to govt. It is wild how easily people are willing to throw that right away for fears of “foreign influence”. What’s next, banning TV shows from foreign countries because they might “corrupt our culture”? Banning books with subversive topics because they will “give people bad ideas”?. This is how the road to fascism begins.


  • Since when is reading newspapers your government doesn’t agree with a right? Since when is communicating with people your government doesn’t like a right? Since when is publishing whatever you want a right? Since approximately 1776. It’s such an important right that it’s literally the first one in the constitution. Because our ability to speak freely and criticize the government is one of the rights that underpins all others. The medium shouldn’t matter, speech is speech whether it’s an app, website, chat server, newspaper, bulletin board, code, painting, drawing, whatever. If the government can just shut down any medium or venue they don’t like because “it’s propaganda”, that basically closes the door to any open criticism of the government.

    We’ve tried not having those rights for the sake of convenience, expediency, or social pleasantness. Tends to not end well. Ask people in Russia or Iran how that “government gets to dictate where and how you speak” thing is going for them. Insane bootlicking going on in this thread.