Luke, I also respect your contributions and have advocated your work
because I believe you come from the heart and your ideals.

Our ideals are not this political affiliation or that ideological dogma.
Our ideals are a shared set of values around openness, fairness,
empowerment of the common user and freedom of information. These values
are the basis for the internet and why it's a success story. They are
also the reasons why the printing press was able to reform Europe taking
power away from corrupt catholic churches who had institutionalised
their religion and turned it into a tool against actual followers of god
who were being misled into following fake rules that were added in by men.

Today we now follow suited men who sell us false doctrine and have
elevated themselves up as beyond mortal men with the mirage that they
hold a secret knowledge or power that we as people don't possess. When
Christ kicked the money changers from the temple and washed the feet of
the poor, it was a statement about who we as people should stand with.
They are thieving from us, the people, everyday and now Bitcoin as tool
is going to bring back technology into our hands. And I'm glad for that.

So tell me, why should I embrace these white knights coming to
legitimise Bitcoin with their surveillance and censorship palming it off
with their gibberish newspeak. These people are real motherfuckers and
what motivates them primarily is greed at your expense.

They don't see Bitcoin as empowerment. They see Bitcoin as convenience,
and are willing to compromise the empowerment aspect for more
convenience. Bitcoin will grow, but the question is in which direction.

I'm confident that Bitcoin will play an established and central role in
our future financial infrastructure. My objective now is to maintain the
integrity long enough for Bitcoin's empowerment aspect to play out, and
grow it in the right directions that give us the power. Just like the
struggles now to keep the internet uncensored and neutral, so too must
we struggle to keep Bitcoin uncensored and neutral.

And it's funny because all this talk of Bitcoin as being
politically-neutral is a way of downplaying the values I've been talking
about above. You can never be politically neutral. That's a fantasy.
Technology embodies values. Satoshi had values.

On 26/04/14 13:11, Luke-Jr wrote:
> 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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