Sure I'm not arguing that Bitcoin isn't used by criminals. But, to make the obvious straw-man, USD and knives are used by criminals too, should we ban them ?
What's your point? That different places have different social arrangements and tax regimes?
“
Each month the employer pays a considerable amount on top of your salary into the social security fund. The employee also pays a proportion of his gross salary in social security contributions. This fund is then used to pay social security:
allowances in the event of sickness
unemployment benefits
allowances in the event of incapacity for work through sickness or invalidity
allowances in the event of accidents at work
allowances in the event of industrial disease
family allowances
pensions
And what about healthcare? “Healthcare in Belgium is composed of three parts. Firstly there is a primarily publicly funded healthcare and social security service run by the federal government, which organises and regulates healthcare; independent private/public practitioners, university/semi-private hospitals and care institutions. There are a few (commercially run for-profit) private hospitals.”
I imagine this is all very different to how things are in California. So why are you comparing them?
Regarding VAT, at least where I'm from VAT is not levied on essential goods afaik. Secondly, some proponents of VAT claim it is a "fairer" tax than say income tax. One of Andrew Yang's ideas to fund UBI was to bring VAT to the USA (I am aware that VAT does exist to some extents in the States.)
Hand counting can be manipulated too [0], so the idea that we can just move back to it and save our democracy is not accurate (or at least not a complete solution). In other words, dishonest politicians will find ways to exploit our fears even if we use paper ballots.
No one ever claimed that hand-counting is perfect. Is isn't. For example, all of the Chicago ballot boxes that famously ended up in Lake Michigan in the middle of the last century.
But hand-counting works because it's virtually impossible to coordinate fraud widespread enough to actually make a difference. Whereas, if your entire voting system is computerized and all the computers are linked together, causing widespread changes are much more possible.
Also, be aware that Dominion voting systems actually acquired the old "Diebold Election Systems", who were not so secure a couple of years back. (though things may have changed by now, of course)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premier_Election_Solutions
Note that it looks like the states on that list that have “DREs without VVPAT” (electronic machines without a paper trail) are Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Texas on that list, along with some DREs without VVPAT in Kansas and Mississippi.
Since Trump won 7/8 of those states, a conspiracy theorist might suggest that Trump’s team successfully hacked the electronic machines in those states that have no paper trail.
However, there’s really very little reason to believe there was fraud in this election - but those republican states (and New Jersey) should replace their DREs without VVPAT by the next election so that they have a secure paper trail for auditing.
You linked to an abstract of the Russian vote manipulation behind a paywall. That abstract says nothing specifically about hand-count being manipulated.
Hand counting remains the golden standard for voting.
All allegations against Dominion voting machines were pretty much disproved by subsequent manual vote courting. Again, the machines leave a paper trail that allows manual counting for verification. That makes simple handcounting without any assistance more prone to errors and less paper trail as well.
In what world would manual counting have less paper trail?
What is for sure - with voting machines, there is less validation. Hand counting means - all ballots are counted always (by volunteers with all parties invited) - whereas voting machines means a spot-test (in some states), and only a full manual count is when a recount is demanded.
All this to say - I think Dominion did a thorough job - but this all only happened because the election was close. What about those where the election isn't "close"?
Voting by hand takes days, which is why it is only done automatically for close elections.
However, a losing candidate may request a recount after the election. In most states, if the margin is outside of a stated threshold, that candidate must pay for the recount. If there is a discrepancy between the two counts, then a hand recount is performed.
If an election isn't close, then the respective Secretary of State will audit (by hand) a random selection of precincts to verify vote totals match, but this is a security check and generally takes place weeks after the election.
Voting by hand takes days - in the US. Not in Finland, France or the many other countries where voting is done by hand 100% successfully for decades with timely results.
Here's the conundrum - what constitutes what's "out of threshold"? If a voting machine, either by design or flaw, pushes a close vote outside the threshold - then that's a way to bypass the checks & balances and can be exploited by the unethical.
Scale matters. 160 million votes were cast in the U.S. in each of the past 2 elections.
36 million votes were cast in France in the last election.
The U.S. is capable of counting 36 million votes by hand overnight as well, and most votes were once counted by hand in the U.S.
What constitutes what's "out of threshold"? If a voting machine, either by design or flaw, pushes a close vote outside the threshold - then that's a way to bypass the checks & balances and can be exploited by the unethical.
That paragraph is disingenuous. A vote that is outside the threshold for an automatic recount is not a close vote; the margin between candidates is thousands of votes (or more).
If a voting machine has a design flaw or other flaw, that would have been discovered during one of the several inspections and trial runs it was put through before being certified for use. Moreover, many states now require paper receipts of all ballots cast (as a result of Russian hacking of election machines in 2016), so if there is any suspicion of manipulated results, the human-legible ballot receipts can be tallied. States with these types of printed ballot receipts will audit the electronic tallies against hand-counts of the printed ballots on a random precinct-level basis.
> Scale matters. 160 million votes were cast in the U.S. in each of the past 2 elections.
> 36 million votes were cast in France in the last election.
> The U.S. is capable of counting 36 million votes by hand overnight as well, and most votes were once counted by hand in the U.S.
I don't understand this argument. In France, a population of roughly 67 million people can count 36 million ballots by hand overnight. That's 1.86 people per ballot.
In the US 328 million people cast 160 million ballots. That's 2.05 people per ballot.
Since counting is done at each individual polling place, what's actually keeping the US from doing the same as France? It's not like they're shipping around all of the ballots to one place, and they're limited by geometry and ballot distribution to volunteer counters. Create a polling place per 10,000 people, and within X miles of everyone. Smaller polling places would finish faster, but the big polling places don't really have to scale past what European countries already count successfully every election.
Voting in France is like a rain spread out over the country, because the population is more spread out across geographic centers. It's easier to handle votes.
Voting in the U.S. is like a series of scattered torrential downpours, because more than 70% of the population lives in a metropolitan area. It's not simply a matter of the number of bodies, at the scale the U.S. metro areas deal with you have significant concerns about the physical logistics related to moving that many ballots that much smaller, less dense countries do not have.
Yes, it can. The U.S. government has in fact seized Bitcoin directly and sold it at auction several times. It is arguably the single largest non-exchange seller of Bitcoin in Bitcoin's history.
Money can only be seized if the safe is found. And the combination is handed over by a willing party.
The difference is that money is actually more secure because you don't have a public ledger telling you that it exists and who owns it and how much of it they own as you do with the public cryptos like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Crypto is magnitudes more accessible. I can travel to any country in the world with an encrypted usb drive of my seed words, and no one is wiser. OR even upload a file to the internet and forego carrying anything at all. A government can try to censor transactions belonging to an address, but we don't have good precedent to see how the network will behave. Miners in other jurisdictions have no reason to follow someone else's censorship.
A government could seize miners, and given that ~50% of the world's Bitcoin mining capacity appears to be located in one country, that might give them considerable leeway to rewrite the blockchain to their liking.
Did you mean "soft fork", or are you thinking of a different concept I'm not familiar with?
Forks can and have been used to deal with isolated malicious incidents, but do you think they can be successful against an actor in extended control of a substantial part of the hash rate?
Perhaps one the main reasons is that a large number of people use multiple devices or even multiple browsers on the same device. Not sure how SSL client certificate authentication accommodates that.
This proposal is clear and thoughtful, I like it.
However, I didn’t see an explanation of how this would help addressing abuse (or other illegal activity) directed at third parties - someone who is not participating in a particular group. E.g. a group that shares child pornography.
It is obvious that the members themselves would not report it. Likewise, relying on reputation does not make sense - in fact, their reputation could be inflated by the satisfied members.
"Meanwhile, communities which are entirely private and entirely encrypted typically still have touch-points with the rest of the world - and even then, the chances are extremely high that they will avoid any hypothetical backdoored servers. In short, investigating such communities requires traditional infiltration and surveillance by the authorities rather than an ineffective backdoor."
I found that part lacking as well, but then I remembered that it's not the protocol's job to solve crime. As matrix indicated in their opening statement, to try to solve for the .1% could irrevocably damage the 99.9.
It's not like law enforcement doesn't have options. I'll use cp as an example. Off the top of my head they could host honey pots and social engineer their way towards cp content creators, analyse cp media for artifacts that could lead them to a location. Legislators could create laws that throttle human trafficking by ending drug wars, opening borders, and providing universal social services. Etc.
But to drag an algorithm into this is the wrong approach for the reasons matrix listed.
I agree, I think crime fighting requires tools that operate at the user level.
So an infiltration bot: We have the technology today (gpt-3 level dialog) that could infiltrate criminal social networks, gather evidence, build credibility and power, and then help shut everything down.
The system itself cannot provide this, but an ai-human actor could.
Of course, this technology is scary: What I think is not a crime - like complaining about the government - is a crime in other places.
Thankfully we don't insist that every real life meeting room monitors and reports our activities. Kind of amazing to me that we don't insist on a better justification other than "because we can" when it comes to virtual spaces.
Without filtering rules and sub-communities that are following them, it's just one big soup of encrypted stuff. Once you have people self-selecting into groups, the suspicious ones are going to stand out more and then those can be infiltrated directly. Cops do this already, anyways, joining leftist/rightist organizations, offering things "for sale" on Facebook that will attract certain groups, joining tech communities via consultancies, &c.
I, of course, don’t have all the context of your wife’s situation. However, it seems like she could register a company that provides writing services - and, therefore, be unaffected by this law? If a person is actually engaged in a business independently, they won’t have to change their status. Lyft and Uber drivers don’t own independent businesses.
“The person is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business of the same nature as that involved in the work performed.”
Below median and average in all states, actually. The data here only shows median but I did it for average as well. https://hackernews.hn/item?id=23374398
You can already do that right now. You can already file a lawsuit for a stupendous amounts because the cop looked at you the wrong way. Would the cop get prosecuted? No.
Losing qualified immunity doesn't mean that cops will automatically be at fault for anything you desire. The laws would still exist.
