[Cryptography] Banks are not all the same, My Identity definitely not Satoshi Nakamoto

[Alfie John]

This whole thread has gone the way I thought it would...

> On 21 Oct 2024, at 10:02, Bill Stewart <billstewart at pobox.com> wrote:
> 
> One of Bitcoin's original goals was to be able to do money transfers both local and international at much lower cost than credit cards,
> because there isn't a non-payment fraud risk or book-entry costs.
> (Volatility's not a big problem because you can avoid it by cashing out after every transaction, assuming the original goal of low cost had worked and assuming you didn't need to batch them up to obscure your transactions.)
> 
> It ... turned out not to scale, once BTC grew enough to be a non-trivial financial player; even block size issues led to a mess for a while

Bitcoin - it was a good start and it's not perfect, but it kicked off a revolution. In a world where working globally remote becomes more and more the norm, crypto is the obvious solution.

> JohnL> But more to the point, #2 is actually banking without KYC or AML.
> It's banking without knowing the other bank's customer (or the other customer's bank.)
> Depending on how you buy and sell cryptocoins, your bank might or might not know who you are.

Citizens United essentially legitimised money = speech. But at a more basic level, if you were to use a paper and a pen to calculate hashes and then read out loud your results in the town square, money and speech evidently become one. Yet I think there would be an overthrow of government in the US if the police went around locking up town criers yelling out hashes, and mandated that every private conversation people had in their homes had to be recorded so that the authorities could monitor for AML and other crimes.

tl;dr: either

  - Money is speech and thus should be protected
  - Speech should be monitored, restricted, and policed

Choose one.

Alfie

--
Alfie John
https://www.alfie.wtf