Amir, I think you contribute much to bitcoin, and I value that. But Bitcoin is
*not* libertarianism. Bitcoin is *not* anarchism. Bitcoin is *not*
"volunteerism". Bitcoin is *not* a movement for financial freedom - or any
political movement at all. Bitcoin is a technology, which can and should be
embraced by people of any political affiliation. Adoption by people with views
contrary to your own is not an attack on Bitcoin, it is growth.

On Saturday, April 26, 2014 5:33:48 PM Amir Taaki wrote:
> I get what you're doing, but we both know that really isn't the case.
> Allaire speaks from his heart, and they hired Mike Hearn.
> I don't think we'll ever know the whole truth as that's not how these
> proprietary cultures work.
> Check this quote by him:
>
> "A lot of the safeguards that businesses and consumers take for granted
> in their everyday interactions and payments don’t exist in bitcoin [...]"
>
> or
>
> "if your goal is to ensure widespread adoption of bitcoin, there needs
> to be rules around its use, he says, arguing that it’s not good enough
> to imagine bitcoin can exist above society."
>
> This doesn't sound like descriptions of systems that empower users to
> self-regulate. This is the exact speech used behind many surveillance
> and censorship tools to push them on us. Things like "anti-fraud"
> blacklists or researching correlation techniques on consumer activity.
>
> If this tech is developed it will be deployed or pushed upon places like
> Coinbase. Coinbase is the only business (or US?) in the valley with a
> banking relationship which they have due to a special relationship with
> JP Morgan and one of their bankers on their board.
> And that's where these products that work against their users will come
> into play. Maybe the industry doesn't have enough balls, and big Bitcoin
> businesses with a large following (CoinBase, BitPay, ... whoever) start
> "self-regulating" by spying, tracking and censoring their users.
>
> On 26/04/14 06:31, Peter Todd wrote:
> > On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 10:37:11AM +0100, Amir Taaki wrote:
> >> reducing the risk is newspeak for censorship
> >>
> >> protection against fraud is codeword for surveillance.
> >
> > Maybe it is; maybe it isn't.
> >
> > I hope Circle is just implementing all the decentralized technologies
> > we've been talking about for ages that let people chose on their own
> > terms how to reduce the risks involved in their transactions; best case
> > is all this talk about moving Bitcoin away from its libertarian roots is
> > just PR material. After all, Dark Market is an example of that approach,
> > yet could also be marketted as "bringing Bitcoin into the mainstream
> > with anti-fraud, lower costs, greater privacy safeguard, and protection
> > against identity theft".
> >
> > I'm not very hopeful that's the case, but lets hold off on the torches
> > and tar until they publish hard details on what exactly they are doing.
> >
> >
> >
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