VolunTerry @ VolunTerry @monero.town

Posts

2

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182

Joined

2 yr. ago

Great site and good discussion. Thanks.

I was unaware of a few things mentioned, like best practice being to not use Feather with systems like tails or whonix because of the double tor routing. I haven't done this in past, but would never have thought twice about if it in future if it hadn't been mentioned in that comparison.

You're correct in relation to precious metals and other commodities that attain some form of communally accepted value independent of a centralized authority. In that case someone has to physically come take them from you by force or theft as the other poster noted. Or alternatively turn peoples minds collectively away from perceiving value in it to accomplish a similar effect by different means.

As for other physical currency, that can be "revoked" by a central authority like a central bank at will. If they deem it worthless and disable use of it in commerce tomorrow, it's not long before the average person agrees and it becomes only as valuable as the base paper or coin representing it. There is no need to physically seize it, but it has a similar effect as revocation or seizure would in terms of ongoing usefulness of its previous purpose to you.

This can also occur slowly over time via currency manipulation. The USD has lost somewhere in the range of 96% of its value or purchasing power since 1913. This isn't complete revocation, but again, accomplishes a similar goal without the need for physical confiscation.

It is much harder to compel someone to divulge the contents of their mind than it is to confiscate a physical object, whether locked away or tied to their body or not. If your seed phrase or password is memorized or sufficiently disassociated then the threat actor can't simply break into your safe, identify the crypto and take it. It lives on the blockchain and is never really in your possession. You only have the keys to access it. And those keys are much harder to get at than a physical object IF you take the precautions to avail of this benefit that is distinct from self-custodied physical commodities storage.

Hard assets and digital currencies both have strengths and weaknesses that shine in different circumstances. It doesn't have to be an either/or scenario.

Yep, awareness and education are the current stumbling blocks. So many coins and projects competing for attention, combined with the averages persons (often justified) skepticism of the crypto space in general make for plenty of work for the evangelists and educators before we get to far greater levels of adoption.

I personally think adoption will come through harsh lessons and adversity before the realization of necessity for what Monero offers follows.

I wish it weren't so, but that's how most small ideas and projects that don't have large state actors and super powerful monied interests behind them compelling or pushing propaganda for adoption gain main stream acceptance and use.

Haha, love the image. I think everyone feels that way the first time they learn it.

End to end encrypt emails whenever you can too. Now, getting those you communicate with to implement and utilize pgp? That's a whole other battle.

I'm not the original poster, but I tink they may have meant to draw a connection between credit bureaus collecting sensitive personal financial and identity information that can reveal potential targets to criminals and KYC, which has the same danger.

Both collect sensitive financial information and when leaked or leveraged by bad actors could be used to targert well heeled people or low hanging fruit, both in crypto and tradfi.

One of Monero's great strengths is that it helps with this. But a lot of that perceived protection through obfuscation of wallet value is harmed when it is acquired using KYC because that can reveal things like who has how much.

Unlike BTC or other public ledgers, the threat actor would have to hope you still had that much in your possession since they couldn't verify the balance on the blockchain in real time. But if someone had huge amounts of value shown acquired through KYC, even if moved into private XMR wallets, it would be a relatively safe bet that they still controlled enough liquid value in currency or other goods to target.

I think it's prudent to worry about both.

The tyrannical states may have more reach and can choose to either move decisively or boil the frogs slowly using their near unlimited access to funding and try to cloak themselves in some manner of unearned legitimacy that a disturbing portion of the population goes along with.

But if a violent person shows up demanding your property, it really only matters what affiliation they claim if you and your property survive the altercation intact. If you do, then your issue becomes with things like recourse, courts and so on. In the moment of conflict, the group the thug claims to be a member of, if any, matters very little.

Unfortunately, words on paper frequently fail to prevent organizations, public of private, from doing things they are technically not allowed to do. See the security state apparatus of any of the nations around the world including the 5, 9 and 14 eyes, or any number of tech companies that claim and market privacy respective policies only for people to uncover later that what they pitch publicly diverges in spirit from what they do or what is in the actual terms of service.

Hopefully if people find their employer going outside the bounds of the contract they can catch it, catalog it and hold them to account. Accountability can often be tricky and costly though.

This, but it won't matter if you delete history. They know anyway if the want, and can enable logging it if they choose.

Same can be said for any browser, any app, any connection while on the employers network IF they wished to monitor it. Even if you were able to delete all local browsing history and used private browsing, your employer would still be able to know every site you visit if they wished.

If you've authenticated with your credentials on the device, IT is able to see IPs visited and DNS queries and has access to all sorts of network tools to track, shape and otherwise manage your activity.

It's best to assume that nothing you do on your employers network, even when logging into their corporate VPN from a personal device, is private.

I'm always shocked by privacy conscious people who do not have complete segregation of work and personal equipment and devices.

Could it be designed so users generate and share the vast majority of the content? I'm envisioning something that is mostly self-sustaining once coded if it were simplistic enough so that continued development or features were largely unnecessary short of ocassional bug fixes and maintaining hosting.

It wouldn't need much moderation as the scope of the service would be sufficiently narrow. Could it then be written to limit what type of content was even permitted to be submitted in the first place and where content filters catch anything off-topic?

Just spitballing ideas. Anyway, if you ever found time and had interest, I'd be happy to toss some funds at it in an effort to help cover any development, hosting or maintenance costs.

Some do, some don't in my experience. They will still build a profile on whoever uses the card though. Then they just need to tie that to a real identity later. Are you paying with a card with your name on it? Whether they would invest any time putting the profile together this way or not is another matter. But they could.

It's like the data anonymization claims from big tech. Many claim the data they collect is all anonymized, but lots of researchers and studies have shown how easy it is to deanonymize the data and build strong profiles on individual users from anonymized data.

This isn't a bad idea, but the original poster's setup is much better for privacy. It would be similar to a VPN with shared IPs, so would obfuscate the individual users by lumping in the shopping habits with tons of other users making any profile built on that cards use unable to be tied to a specific person.

As I mentioned in another comment on this thread, even if you were to get a generic loyalty card with no info tied to it, or fake credentials, it will still be attributed to a single person/household where they build a solid marketing profile and may tie it to credit card or other revealing financial or tracking information that is unique to that user.

Yep, I agree. And even if you were to get a generic loyalty card with no info tied to it, or fake credentials as someone else in the thread suggested, it would still be attributed to a single person/household where they build a solid marketing profile and may tie it to credit card or other financial or tracking information.

This is a good idea. If it doesn't exist, someone with the skills should build out an app or service. I don't have the skills or the time, but would definitely donate if someone else took up the cause.

Lots of good responses in here already. Any VPN that is reliant on the use of others resources, federated or not, will require some level of trust.

You can "roll your own" and spin up a personal VPN that you host yourself that may remove some of the trust concerns, but if you aren't building it from scratch or don't audit any source code you use from others, whether foss or not, you are right back to the issue of trust.

Everything has a tradeoff, just like people have pointed out about Tor in this thread.

My advice is to try to balance your needs and concerns by doing research and ask around until you can narrow things down to specific products or services and then dig in anf ask pointed questions about them until you reach a level of comfort and trust that satisfies you.

I guess it probably depends on what the alternatives are. Is it possible to opt-out? What are the repercussions for failure to comply?

Forcing a person born on a particular landmass to be documented or jump through any number of other hoops that enroll them in organizations or institutions could also be construed as compelled association, but the courts and governments of the world clearly don't see it that way.

That gets into the distinction between the legal and the philosophical though, and I don't claim expertise in either field.

State actors view things many individuals and groups use the term rights for as nothing more than privileges that can be granted and rescinded conditionally by those claiming authority over those individuals and groups.

There is plenty of philosophical thought and discussion around the concept of rights, but as with most topics, many seem to have wildly different understandings of the same concept while naïvely assuming everyone is talking about the same thing and understanding it in this same way.

The security state and acronymn agencies are active enemies of liberty and of those they get their funding from and ostensibly claim to serve.

I'll cast yet another vote in this thread for AntennaPod, installed from F-Droid. Switched a long time ago and haven't looked back.