Conversation

Meltem Demirors
@Melt_Dem
1/ loving the rage over
@PayPal
's attempt to censor users, but financial censorship has been the reality for marginalized communities (sex workers, political orgs, niche subcultures, dissidents, etc) forever and isn't new see
@EFF
circa 2016
eff.org
The Kafkaesque Battle of Soulseek and PayPal, and Why Free Speech
Does your business follow copyright law to the best of its ability? Not good enough. At least that was the case for one long-standing peer-to-peer network, which had its payment processing shut down
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Meltem Demirors
@Melt_Dem
2/ whether explicitly stated via their Terms of Service or not, all sorts of companies from
@github
to
@PayPal
to (insert service provider here) engage in censorship and have the right to deny service and access to anyone they choose, at any time, without explanation
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Meltem Demirors
@Melt_Dem
3/ and if you think crypto is immune you're either naive or willfully ignorant currently, 31% of post-merge Ethereum blocks are OFAC-compliant, meaning they censor transactions associated with specific contracts and addresses on a state-sponsored list
mevwatch.info
MEV Watch
Some MEV-Boost relays are regulated under OFAC and will censor certain transactions. Use this tool to observe the effect it's having on Ethereum blocks.
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Meltem Demirors
@Melt_Dem
Replying to
@Melt_Dem
4/ this isn't a criticism of Ethereum, but rather a recognition of a difficult truth trying to build permissionless, distributed systems that are censorship resistant in a political environment that optimizes for coercion and control is really f*ing hard
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Meltem Demirors
@Melt_Dem
5/
@TornadoCash
isn't the first and won't be the last. there are way too many vectors that can be exploited to exert soft and hard power against most protocols / dApps / companies. what are the best approaches you've seen to minimize these design flaws?
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