[Arm-netbook] Urgent statement on Cryptocurrency ethics

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 8:44 PM, Philip Hands <phil at hands.com> wrote:
> Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net> writes:
>
>> On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 6:15 PM, Jean Flamelle <eaterjolly at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>         This is difficult to express so please bear patience. Able
>>> manipulators of money do exploit the interest in cryptocurrency to
>>> affect the prices thereof,
>>
>>  yep, i know. there's no way to regulate or prevent the blatant
>> insider trading and pump-and-dump scams.  interestingly, mining is
>> inviolate.
>
> I've no idea why you think that -- it seems to me rather like saying
> that farming poppies is automatically ethical, regardless of whether you
> expect anyone to harvest the crop and perhaps sell it to people who
> then profit and spend the resulting income on weapons, say.

 there's a key difference [or there was until those abuse-links were
noted...] which is that the transactions are [or were] "neutral".
the "money" (the mining reward) was literally created out of thin air,
i.e. was not being received as part of a transaction from criminals,
not being received as part of drug-dealing, or in exchange for a
contract on someone's life or anything else clearly unethical...

 *and* in addition [up until those abuse-links were noted] there was
no way to know if the transaction(s) were quotes good quotes or quotes
bad quotes.

 even _with_ such links (which people will now have to add filters
into crypto-mining algorithms in order to discard them), you can
clearly see that anyone putting such links is "bad" (and choose not to
include them in a block being mined) however for everything else not
so identified they *are* unidentifiable.

  that lack of identifiability makes mining "neutral" rather than
"specifically good" or "specifically bad".


> Anyway, never mind that -- this seems timely:
>
>   https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/20/child-abuse-imagery-bitcoin-blockchain-illegal-content
>
> erm, oops!

 sigh yehhh... and they paid transaction fees to put them there.  main
problem is, distribution of or ownership of bitcoin has now become
illegal in many countries... whoops...

l.