evilspammer's comments

evilspammer | 2 years ago | on: Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund is fighting for the future of open source software

I totally may be misunderstanding. I see that developers and miners work with and for each other because of their mutual stake in the network (there is some "trustless." :))

I think if even 1 developer has a court order for them to push to master, it will happen whether anyone wants it to, since GitHub is already known to mindlessly abide by government requests. (see popcorntime dmca)

The people who merge or pull the code have the ultimate decision. But it's a problem. Who is accepting the code and who isn't? The developer can be disallowed from contributing to the code if this change isn't accepted. (Explicitly not "compelled speech" to "not say" something - this would be a gagball.) So the next patch comes. The question of who is forking and is who isn't raises from 50%/50% to 25%/75% until the numerator approaches zero. For the sake of networking the question isn't "whether I want to accept this patch" but "whether I think most people will accept this patch."

So the miners have a endless chain of developers who are asking for this patch or no more patches. For the miners to have leverage with developers they need to be able to take over the code themselves. The next set of developers will have this issue, ad infinitum, unless the cycle is broken somehow.

IMO the solution has to involve zero knowledge proofs which is the closest we can get to preventing rubber-hose legal attacks. Since XMR probably won't gain the traction to become a competitor to BTC, BTC will probably have to integrate it or continue to suffer from problems like this.

edited to add addendum:

The incoming/departing core developers & the open source nature of the BTC codebase also presents an issue. Unless the miners are reviewing each pull indiscriminately, they are trusting the code developers to have merged PRs that they want. How does an open source contribution, blessed by a core developer, become trustless? Anonymity is necessary to prevent core developers from being compelled, but names are necessary for trust of core developers.

evilspammer | 2 years ago | on: Half of vinyl buyers in the U.S. don’t have a record player: study

I think that fidelity is the only important measure in media because it is what lets the author give the purist possible reproduction of their work to the consumer. All media has a level of degredation between thoughts, words, and interpretations, but digital is the one that has the highest fidelity.

Further, if the author intends, they can take their digital and make a vinyl; or record to vinyl, distribute as digital. (caveat: potentially having a double-lossy situation) Once you have a lossless digital you can publish it over two cans and string if you want. So it is quite literally a superset of analog media.

evilspammer | 2 years ago | on: Tell HN: Cloudflare verification is breaking the internet

Cloudflare's decidedly _not_ about keeping the bots out. It's about keeping out malicious traffic. This seems like a tautology, but I'll explain why they are not the same: When I hit refresh in my RSS client and it GETs 250 different servers, on my behalf, is that a user agent or bot activity? How are you going to differentiate the two by their behavior? Some bots are let in, on purpose, like search engine crawlers. Some users are kept out, on purpose, because they use anonymity tools.

Since we don't have chips that detect one's heart's intentions yet, the best we can do is treat bots and user agents the same, and address the problem of malicious activity in other ways. This can be rate limiting, paying per request (i.e. hashcash) or other mechanisms I don't have top of mind. But bot=deny and user=allow is not what Cloudflare does or seeks to do.

evilspammer | 2 years ago | on: Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund is fighting for the future of open source software

> No, that's incorrect. There is no fundamental trust; you were describing control in a coercive sense among the developers by directly asserting that developers have specific control over the funds in the system.

> This is obviously not true, has never been true, and I have no trouble predicting that it will never be true.

IANAL, especially considering the number of jurisdictions involved.

It seems totally possible to me that a BTC developer could be rubber-hose compelled by the legal system to publish a patch, just as they might compel a bank to refund someone's stolen funds. Governments sometimes protect from "compelled speech." But what if the speech is publishing "from=acct1 to=acct2 value=100" to a blockchain? How is that different from a banker being compelled to click a button in their own UI, thats value is the same thing?

Secondly, you are right that people would probably fork and not update if the developers became compromised... then the new developers would have the same thing happen to them and become compromised. As long as the developers aren't anonymous they will be a SPOF. (This is why my initial comment said KYC killed bitcoin - its entire premise fails when it is nonymous.)

Finally, cryptocurrencies as a whole are just BTC, ETH, and a bunch of nothing. Repeated forks of BTC because of legal drama, departing/jailed developers, will rapidly move the BTC forks into the nothing category. Without consensus on a path forward (to fork or not to fork) both sides of the network are diminished. It isn't even clear if Wright's goal is to get 4b, or just to destroy BTC far enough to collect the ashes.

evilspammer | 2 years ago | on: Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund is fighting for the future of open source software

It wasn't a lie. What's the direct counter-evidence for the key ownership? I was not aware of that.

I saw someone comment above that one of the keys in question signed a message saying that they were not Wright, which is a good example for that particular key.

My comment you replied to specifically mentioned a scenario where the key owner did not defend themself. So we are talking about different scenarios.

In any case, I wasn't lying when I posted what I referred to as my thoughts, & certainly do know what I'm talking about. Thanks for the correction.

evilspammer | 2 years ago | on: The Modern WWW, Or: Where Do We Want to Go from Here?

No, but my brevity was unclear. The general population was taught to consider Google to be the Internet (not even just the web.) A couple of examples:

- Chrome obscuring the full URL in the address bar, which makes people use Google Search as if it were the address bar.

- Gmail being so popular that people assume `@gmail.com` is a suffix for all email addresses. You might tell a cashier your email address to sign up for discounts. When you say `[email protected]` they might end up typing `[email protected]` (this is, of course, an example.)

- Web search as a generic trademark "Google it" which most people now take for granted.

When people don't type in URLs but instead "google" everything by query, it's no surprise people conflate these different systems. My point in essence is that people who confuse Google/Web/Internet are just laypeople, not ignorami; they've been subject to a deliberate campaign by Google to make them think that.

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