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This hasn't been the best week for WikiLeaks, to put it mildly. Coinbase has shut off the WikiLeaks Shop's account for allegedly violating the cryptocurrency exchange's terms of service. In other words, the leak site just lost its existing means of converting payments like bitcoin into conventional money. While Coinbase didn't give a specific reason (it declines to comment on specific accounts), it pointed to its legal requirement to honor "regulatory compliance mechanisms" under the US' Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
This doesn't prevent WikiLeaks from accepting cryptocurrency, but it will have to scramble to find an alternative if it wants to continue taking digital money from customers buying shirts and coffee cups. Unsurprisingly, the organization is less than thrilled -- it's calling for a "global blockade" of Coinbase, claiming that the exchange is reacting to a "concealed influence."
Source: https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/21/wikileaks-loses-coinbase-account/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @08:06PM (5 children)
The problem is interfacing with the old system, not Bitcoin.
Then, you introduce a straw man; nobody said that Bitcoin is currently a good replacement for the entirety of the old system. However, that doesn't stop the world from moving away from the old system towards Bitcoin, slowly but surely, inexorably, as a way to avoid the Tyranny of an absolutely-controlled, monopolistic, governmental currency.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @08:59PM (1 child)
"the AC"? You are that AC.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @09:57PM
No. YOU are that AC.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday April 23 2018, @11:51PM (2 children)
No, the problem is that the old system is the one with the people with guns and the power to put you in gaol insist that all currency shalt be used in the approved manner, and if the new system hopes to survive it shalt pay homage to the people with the guns and the power to put you in gaol. Which includes Bitcoin, which when it crosses for conversion in the USA meets FINCEN. And you don't fix that problem, if a problem it is, with technology.
And my "straw man" is the point of the argument. Tyranical or not you must lay your head down somewhere. In that place is an authority who says what you shall and shalt not use for currency, and if you want to use something else they shall control how you are allowed to use it. You might not like that, but that is reality. That might change some day, but until it does you will reckon with the people with the guns and the power to put you in jail. One way or another. (Or you might become them, and learn why the old system is the way it is and why you will fight the new system - aka what happened to most of the hippies from the 60s.)
In terms of Wikileaks: It doesn't want Bitcoin, though it will accept it - especially if it gets donations that it would not have otherwise. But it, along with any sane money-taking entity, wants a currency with which it can negotiate for the services for which it needs. (Or that can be invested for the prospect of obtaining even further negotiable currency later.) Which is not Bitcoin or any cryptocurrency, sorry to burst your bubble. It is now just trying to ride a sentiment wave since their bubble of easy-conversion was burst by backroom strongarm pressure of the US Government.
As was pointed out: If all it wanted was Bitcoin all it would have to do is establish a paper wallet public address and say, "Hey! Send them here!" It wouldn't need a processor and the blockchain would just record all those transactions to that offline wallet address. Oh, but it can't do that! Because it needs that money in actual usable currency. So it needs a converter, and it makes far more sense to let that converter take the transactions than have to pay conversion fees from a paper wallet (which would still require a converter). So it calls out, "Meanie!" in the hopes that it can again find a source that will convert without falling awry of currency transaction law.
At any rate, before one processes transactions of scale, one will come to terms with the people who have the guns and the power to jail you for disobedience.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @12:23AM (1 child)
All those with entrepreneurial spirit and a respect for the rights of the individual (especially in the face of authoritarian Tyrannies) left your country long ago for the United States.
The world was never moved forward by men of your ilk.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday April 24 2018, @05:12PM
Lol. Nice troll attempt. It would work better if you knew anything about me, but you don't.
Advancement never comes without cooperation. Cooperation never comes without structure. Structure never changes without adjustments, and those adjustments never occur unilaterally without disruption of some sort. And disruption isn't always good. It isn't always bad, either. But the system already exists and thus there is a built-in conservancy against disruption - disruption must prove itself.
You can have independence and change and growth and entrepreneurship. But not without realistic recognition of the way power currently is. Those who try to change it unilaterally usually find differently when the power structure exercises that power. And the world gets more crowded every year - the places in which a person can set off and establish their own independent power without bumping someone else's nose are shrinking.
So, since you have all the answers: How do you stop money laundering and the financing of terrorism in the cryptocurrency environment without proceeding as the governments have done to place the strictures they have? I await your response and predict some form of anarchy as a reply.
This sig for rent.