From 9d4731cf559f129b6fa1b00eada431e6360f880c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: sdiehl Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2022 07:17:43 +0000 Subject: [PATCH] Article on authoritarian regimes --- claims/authoritarianism.md | 26 ++++++++++++-------------- concepts/immutability.md | 5 ++++- 2 files changed, 16 insertions(+), 15 deletions(-) diff --git a/claims/authoritarianism.md b/claims/authoritarianism.md index 31d5480..e03a1da 100644 --- a/claims/authoritarianism.md +++ b/claims/authoritarianism.md @@ -1,5 +1,15 @@ -# Bitcoin is a means to counter authoritarian regimes +# Bitcoin is not a means to counter authoritarian regimes +Crypto assets are not a safe haven for one’s investments or a a shield against government tyranny. In his whitepaper *Bitcoin, Currencies, and Fragility*, Nassim Taleb writes of the "safe haven from tyranny" thesis: +> By its very nature, bitcoin is open for all to see. The belief in one’s ability to hide one’s assets from the government with a public blockchain easily triangularizable at endpoints, and not just read by the FBI but also by people in their living rooms, requires a certain lack of financial seasoning and statistical understanding — perhaps even a lack of minimal common sense. For instance a Wolfram Research specialist was able to statistically detect and triangularize "anonymous" ransom payments made by Colonial Pipeline on May 8 in 2021 — and it did not take long for the FBI to restore the funds. We can safely assume that government structures and computational power will remain stronger than those of distributed operators who, while distrusting one another, can fall prey to simple hoaxes +> +> [..] The slogan "Escape government tyranny hence bitcoin" is similar to advertisements in the 1960s extolling the health benefits of cigarettes. + +The massive power asymmetries of authoritarian regimes and their control over both traditional payment rails and domestic implies that dissidents attempting to use crypto assets to circumvent repression or capital controls will find it very difficult to move assets or cash out. Without the capacity to cash out the efficacy of their actions is fundamentally limited to external geographic regions outside of the authoritarian regimes. Since no action can effected internal to the regime this fundamentally refutes the argument that crypto assets are an effective tool for dissidents. + +This is best evidenced by the Canadian convoys in 2022 which attempted to take international donations in crypto assets and found themselves and their accounts frozen by both banks and Canadian [crypto exchanges](../concepts/crypto-exchange.md) which blocked transactions under [illicit financing](../concepts/illicit-financing.md) laws. This made using the donations to purchase supplies impossible and undermined the [crypto assets](../concepts/cryptoasset.md) narrative. + +The complete ban of [crypto asset](../concepts/cryptoasset.md) by the People's Republic of China also does not lend credibility to the thesis that [crypto asset](../concepts/cryptoasset.md) are outside the remit of authoritarian controls and their restriction on capital movement and controls over domestic [money services business](../concepts/money-services-business.md). ## References * Bogost, Ian. 2017. ‘Cryptocurrency Might Be a Path to Authoritarianism’. The Atlantic 30. @@ -7,16 +17,4 @@ * Krugman, Paul. 2022. ‘The Strange Alliance of Crypto and MAGA Believers’. The New York Times, 11 January 2022, sec. Opinion. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/10/opinion/crypto-cryptocurrency-money-conspiracy.html. * Xie, Rain. 2019. ‘Why China Had to Ban Cryptocurrency but the U.S. Did Not: A Comparative Analysis of Regulations on Crypto-Markets between the U.S. and China’. Wash. U. Global Stud. L. Rev. 18 (2): 457–89. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1684&context=law_globalstudies. * Wang, Gangjin, Yanping Tang, Chi Xie, and Shou Chen. 2019. ‘Is Bitcoin a Safe Haven or a Hedging Asset? Evidence from China’. Journal of Management Science and Engineering 4 (3): 173–88. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmse.2019.09.001. -* Ottenhof, Luke. 2021. ‘Crypto-Colonialists Use the Most Vulnerable People in the World as Guinea Pigs’. VICE Media. - -## References - -* [@bogost_cryptocurrency_2017] -* [@gerard_salvador_nodate] -* [@analytica_salvador_2021] -* [@gerard_salvadors_nodate] -* [@murray_imf_nodate] -* [@xie_why_2019] -* [@kaiser_looming_2018] -* [@wang_is_2019] -* [@wang_blockchain_2020] \ No newline at end of file +* Ottenhof, Luke. 2021. ‘Crypto-Colonialists Use the Most Vulnerable People in the World as Guinea Pigs’. VICE Media. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/concepts/immutability.md b/concepts/immutability.md index 55c552b..6690626 100644 --- a/concepts/immutability.md +++ b/concepts/immutability.md @@ -1,8 +1,11 @@ # Immutability The property of a data structure in computer science that data cannot be changed once it has been written. Append-only data structures like [blockchains](blockchain.md) are immutable, they lack a delete operation that allows removal of data from the chain. -Immutability has been critized as a vector for abuse and harassment when personally identifiable information cannot be removed from a publicly accessible system. +Immutability has been criticized as a vector for abuse and harassment when personally identifiable information cannot be removed from a publicly accessible system. + +See also [smart contracts](smart-contracts.md) and [pseudonymous](pseudonymous.md). ## References 1. White, Molly. 2022. ‘Abuse and Harassment on the Blockchain’. Molly White. 22 January 2022. https://blog.mollywhite.net/abuse-and-harassment-on-the-blockchain/. +1. White, Molly 2022. 'Abuse on the blockchain'. Guest lecture at Stanford University. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXBZ-BXfCSY 1. Guadamuz, Andres. 2019. ‘All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace: A Critical Look at Smart Contracts’. Computer Law and Security Review 35 (6): 105338. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clsr.2019.105338. \ No newline at end of file