If I'm understanding your complaint correctly, that is covered on the section on state domination. When ledgers are public, enforcement of restrictions on purchases is easier than with cash, because all purchases are trivially traced.
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Replying to @enkiv2 @sonyaellenmann
Yes, but in the modern world very few people make cash transactions of appreciable value. And cash substitutes, like detergent, aren't good as money (they're liquid, but not in the right way
). Also: who says the ledger needs to be publicly auditable?1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @asglidden @sonyaellenmann
The bitcoin spec does. Any alternate currency not based on a public ledger would not be subject to that problem, and many alternate currencies aren't, but no major cryptocurrency is.
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No public ledger means no independent verification of transactions (i.e., no mining). Satoshi wasn't stupid: he made this trade-off intentionally, because between the state and *everybody*, *everybody* is a bigger threat.
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The reason detergent is used as money is that it's a good cash substitute: 1) plausible deniability 2) no ledger 3) stable price 4) difficult to fake 5) easy to offload in exchange for currency of your choice (I'm pretty sure I covered all of these points in my essay)
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Digital currencies exist that don't have all the problems I outlined (for instance, paypal has a private ledger, so you can trade secrecy for trust in a single organization). They're not "cryptocurrencies" because they diverge from bitcoin's public-ledger model.
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Digital currencies *could* exist that eliminate all of these problems while still being distributed. Implementing negative interest & periodic jubilees is straightforward in some models. They would need to diverge from the public ledger model - no longer meaningfully 'blockchain'
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Replying to @enkiv2 @asglidden
Seriously, check out zero knowledge proofs. You can have a public ledger, POW mining, *and* financial privacy. It'll be easily usable in 1-3 years. Monero isn't bad either (different technical tradeoffs though).
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Also look at Grin! Neat monetary policy there
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Replying to @sonyaellenmann @asglidden
A ZKP-based system would absolutely solve the public ledger problem. It would also produce a structure that's different enough from the bitcoin model that it's arguably not a cryptocurrency at all in the way that's understood -though for once the 'crypto' part would be meaningful
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I would have trouble taking that argument seriously. "cryptocurrency" is older than Bitcoin (see egold) and Bitcoin/the Bitcoin white paper aren't the last word.
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I remember egold. I remember people calling it 'digital cash'. I don't recall anybody ever calling it a 'cryptocurrency', although I wasn't active in cypherpunk circles at the time.
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Anyway, I *did* specify 'public ledger cryptocurrency' through most of the article, & I consider fungibility to be the larger problem with exit (because exit from state domination is a less-meaningful exit than exit from the existence of debt), so this is sort of a tangent.
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