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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   31474 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022

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It's darkly amusing to be proven right. People thought that technology will disrupt traditional governance, and instead we're seeing bureaucratic sanctions effectively enforced against abstract cryptographic protocols. Social technology and human networking keep trampling over nerdy bullshit.

HN comment

Clickbaity title. As the article outlines inside 63% of currently produced blocks are OFAC compliant. With an ETH block time of ~12 seconds. There is a 1-(.63^n) chance that an OFAC non-compliant block will be included in n blocks. Once you hit 90 seconds, there's a >99% chance that an OFAC non-compliant transaction will be written to the chain.

Maybe it's not quite over? It doesn't seem to be getting much worse.

Kiwifarms

Which now operates in the clearnet without issues, seemingly.

The admin of the Kiwi Farms, Joshua Moon, is blackballed from most credit card payment networks and large crypto exchanges like Coinbase will even block crypto transfers to his wallets if you attempt to send him money through them.

This blacklisting, as well as his site going down for months, is all due to pressure campaigns from activists and journalists, not any legal wrongdoing — he claims to have never been charged with a crime nor has he lost a civil suit.

Bringing cryptocurrency under the same unaccountable bureaucratic blob as our current financial system would further reduce his ability to operate and fund his site. It remains to be seen if the site will even remain up, as this is not the first calm period of things looking stable since the pressure campaign began.

Kiwifarms

Which now operates in the clearnet without issues, seemingly.

How'd they manage that? Things calm down for the admin guy?

They don't. Or rather, they're on the clearnet, but several US Tier 1 providers are still null routing them.

Unforced error of their opponents who have escalated the attack to potentially-internet-breaking levels (again, via social technology).

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