• 2 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I am also worried about that.

    There’s a limit to what you can do when the house and senate refuse to impeach a president who is obviously breaking the law constantly, and when the justice department sees itself as the president’s lawyer.

    We can acknowledge that additional power granted to the executive branch of the US government cannot be said to be safe, and that limitations on its power must be more blunt in order to be reliable. Use of money that lacks buttons for them to cut people off is potentially one such blunt limitation. I also find the way people have been protesting pretty inspiring, I think it helps.


  • Why should it make your life worse? It could, but that shouldn’t be the assumption. The older I get the more I value any memories I can feel the same about now as I did back then, because most of it fades into nothing, only the most intense emotions have staying power. What you hate defines you just like what you love defines you, grudges are important for holding on to your humanity.

    Of course it’s good to come to terms with things, and therapy helps, but I strongly object to the idea that the mature thing to do is entirely let go of old resentments and never share them, the opposite is true.









  • If you’re arrested, you have various established rights, like being innocent until proven guilty, jury of your peers, need for the circumstances of your arrest to have been legal, need to charge you with a crime and let you see a lawyer to continue holding you, etc. Debanking, afaik, is more of just something government agencies do at their discretion. Sometimes it’s even done without any overt process at all, financial institutions are simply given vague warnings implying they should cut certain people or organizations off, and they proactively comply.

    To give the example of civil forfeiture, there your money is assumed to be criminal until you prove in court that it is not, a reversal of the standard and infamously easy for corrupt cops to abuse.



  • In some ways it might be less serious, but that isn’t its only notable property. There’s also the way it bypasses many of the protections and assurances we have about the latter, like due process. The ability to silently, invisibly, and unilaterally shut down political adversaries etc. is dangerous, and there isn’t much reason to think it will be used only where there is legitimate justification (again, consider the sanctions against ICC judges for trying to hold war criminals accountable). It is entirely reasonable for people to want to preserve ways to defend themselves against this type of nonphysical state violence.



  • I think they will stick with companies like USDC and just keep a leash on them. These stablecoins have freeze functions, the government can take charge of those if they want, and it’s potentially a major source of demand for US treasuries in an environment where US debt keeps looking like a worse bet to everyone, since the legislation mandates full reserves and specifies what those reserves can be denominated in.

    Not that any of this is especially a good thing imo. The value of crypto is permissionless money, stablecoins are not that and have centralized controls, at least the popular ones the law approves of.