On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 8:44 PM, Philip Hands phil@hands.com wrote:
Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net writes:
On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 6:15 PM, Jean Flamelle eaterjolly@gmail.com wrote:
This is difficult to express so please bear patience. Ablemanipulators 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-bitco...
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.