WikiLeaks, Money, and Ron Paul 565
Another day, another dozen WikiLeaks stories, several of which revolve around money. PayPal has given in to pressure to release WikiLeaks funds, though they still won't do further transactions. Mobile payment firm Xipwire is attempting to take PayPal's place. "We do think people should be able to make their own decisions as to who they donate to." PCWorld wonders if the WikiLeaks' money woes could lead to great adoption of Bitcoin, the peer-to-peer currency system we've discussed in the past. Meanwhile, Representative Ron Paul spoke in defense of WikiLeaks on the House floor Thursday, asking a number of questions, including, "Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on WikiLeaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?" The current uproar over WikiLeaks has prompted Paul Vixie to call for an end to the DDoS attacks and Vladimir Putin to break out a metaphor involving cows and hockey pucks.
Trust Xipwire? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't trust PayPal: it's an unregulated global banking monopoly, that routinely abuses its monopoly to steal money from people. It's not insured by the FDIC like a regular bank, so if it goes bust any money in there is going to disappear.
What about Xipwire? Has it demonstrated theft, dishonesty or any other reason not to trust it with money and private info? Is there any reason to believe it won't just do like PayPal (or worse) once it does become big enough not to care, like PayPal?
If I don't trust PayPal, is there any reason I should use Xipwire instead?
Oh my gosh... (Score:5, Interesting)
Ron Paul is my biggest... fucking... hero.
My only regret is that he's not 30 years younger, so that he'd have the energy and lifespan needed to better advance his goals.
The West is too reliant on American services (Score:5, Interesting)
These recent events have shown how reliant we are, in the West, on American companies which do not necessarily hold the same values as us. Unless you want to return to living in a cage, boycotting both VISA and Mastercard is simply not an option, and the same goes to some extent to using paypal. It's surely not a good idea that the American government have such power over money transactions of all countries in the West.
I wonder if this will be recognised by governments in the West, and a new form of electronic transfer be supported as an alternative, as the article mentions, or whether this will blow over and we'll find ourselves in a similar position in the future, but it could involve an entire country that displeases the US government rather just a small organisation.
Re:VISA supports the KKK (Score:5, Interesting)
2600.org points out that if you want to make a donation to the KKK then Visa is everywhere you want to be.
Wow, best example ever. I disagree with many of Wikileak's methods, but I fully support their right to do it. If you want to punish anyone, you find and punish the person who released the information to begin with, where the law is clear and what it was designed to cover.
As an exUSAF guy, I'm hating the direction our country is going. Facist methods of controlling corporations by publicly financing business losses, while the profits are still private. Using the threat of force to get other countries to create trumped up charges to silence someone. Completely unacceptable methods of security in airports that are not only effective and degrading, but are ILLEGAL if outside the airport, and likely inside as well. A corrupt judicial system that favors the rich and corporations.
Re:The West is too reliant on American services (Score:5, Interesting)
I've never understood why America doesn't seem to have an EFTPOS (electronic funds at point of sale) system that doesn't rely on Mastercard/Visa etc. From what I've seen all your 'debit' cards over there are essentially just masquerading as credit cards (i.e. are Visa or Mastercard, with a 16 digit number and an expiry date etc.), just that the funds come from your bank account, not from credit.
In my country EFTPOS is a completely separate thing from MC/Visa debit cards. You get to the checkout, swipe your standard ATM card, type your PIN and you are good to go. But there's no Visa or MC logo on the cards and they don't have a credit-card-like number or expiry date etc. (Note that you CAN also get the Visa/MC debit cards - they are useful for shopping online and overseas trips - but they aren't the only type of cashless payment card).
So where I live it's perfectly possible to have nothing to do with those companies. I don't really use them for anything, other than having one credit card that I basically never use ... just there for complete emergencies etc.
Re:Ron Paul (Score:4, Interesting)
Ron Paul is committed to personal freedom from Federal government interference. State and local government, on the other hand...
Re:Electronic currency (Score:5, Interesting)
You are thinking of a project called "Ripple" by Ryan Fugger. It is another P2P currency system, except not quite the same as BitCoin. I looked into some of these alternative currency systems some time back - they tend to be academically interesting but have weak justifications.
BitCoin is a variant of a system called HashCash. The basic insight behind hash based coins are that they are portable proofs of work, and thus easily checkable as being scarce. Any attempt to create electronic coins needs scarcity so that's a useful property.
Briefly, to create a hash coin you find some data that when run through SHA1 or whatever results in a hash with some easily checkable property. BitCoin uses "N leading digits are all zeros" where N varies over time. The nice thing about this is that the only way to find this data is brute force, so finding them represents real "work" in the sense of burned electricity and CPU time costs. It might seem arbitrary but it's really no less stupid than digging shiny metal out of the ground then putting it in a central bank.
Hash coins are not, by themselves, enough to create an electronic currency. They distribute and decentralize the minting process, but obviously to "spend" such a coin you need to transfer it in such a way that you lose it and the other person now has it. Some systems use a centralized registry to do this. I forget the name but one researcher was using a trusted computing/TPM style approach to that, so the registry could prove its trustworthyness to the participants remotely.
BitCoin attempts to decentralize the movement of coins as well via some clever cryptographic tricks. Essentially, to transfer a coin from A to B, the transaction is broadcast and incorporated into a constantly moving proof of work chain. The chain becomes a difficult to forge or tamper with public record of all transactions that have occurred.
So BitCoin can be seen as fundamentally the same idea as metal coins, but transferred into the digital realm and entirely decentralized - no banks required.
Ripple is a very different beast. Ripple networks are also P2P and decentralized but that's where the similarities end. In Ripple, if I do work for you, say I mow your lawn, the fact that you owe me a debt is marked in our Ripple accounts ... and that's it. Now let's say I go to the grocery store and want to buy some food. My debt to the grocery store is recorded in our accounts. I can run up as much debt to the grocery store as they will allow. Finally, the owner of the grocery store goes to your shop and gets a haircut. The owner of the store now has a debt marked to you.
We now have a debt cycle .... you owe me, I owe the grocer and the grocer owes you. Ripple seeks out and destroys this circular debt, thus resetting the system to zero. In a Ripple network, the ideal state of an account is empty: you owe nothing and nobody owes you. The system attempts to trend towards that state.
If Ryan were to read this description he would undoubtably say it was inaccurate, as Ripples design is much more focussed on finding paths of debt.... for instance, if I don't know you why should I merely accept that you owe me $50 for mowing your lawn, when I might not ever get that back? So Ripple attempts to find social connections between people and locate a path of credit lines that can make the transaction possible, eg, maybe you know Bob and I also know Bob, Bob trusts you and I trust Bob thus Bob is willing to automatically back your debt.
Re:Did anyone understand Putin's Metaphor? (Score:4, Interesting)
The Dark Side (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Oh my gosh... (Score:5, Interesting)
Ron Paul is a nutcase of the most epic sort, but at least he's an honest and self-consistent nutcase. He believes in personal freedom from government interference, and self-sufficiency. I disagree with 99% of his opinions, and I think that his policies are both deeply flawed and deeply stupid, but at least I can respect him for his sincerity and conviction.
Rand Paul is a hypocrite of the worst sort. He's a full-scale moralizing dipshit who believes that the role of government is to enforce the will of the religious-right, both domestically and internationally. He has no convictions, no intellectual honesty, no respect for individual rights, and no policies that weren't bought and paid for by lobbyists.
I respect Ron Paul, even though I disagree with him. I have no respect for his idiot son.
Re:Ron Paul (Score:5, Interesting)
Governments absolutely should keep confidential secrets, but trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube once the cat is out of the bag is not only futile, but plainly wrong and, for yet another odd saying, shutting the barn door after the horse. Without evidence that they aided Manning in performing the GaGa transfer, the Wikileaks crew has broken no laws in the US and trying to shut them down/string Assange up is exactly that - trying to limit speech. Our First Amendment rights allow me to recite something that I didn't write - it's copyright I come up against. This is the Government, so no copyright and no foul. The military has the right idea re: removable media - we dun goofed, so let's learn and not do it again.
Re:Electronic currency (Score:4, Interesting)
BitCoin is conceptually simple to use, not much different to what we do today. The headache inducing part is the implementation :-)
But if you want to spend some BitCoins it's actually not that hard. You just fire up the software, select who you want to send coins to (eg from the programs built in address book), how much you want to send and hit go. If the receivers P2P node is online at the time you can also include a message. If it's not, you can still send the money but without a message.
And that's it. That's all it takes. Receiving coins is likewise easy - you just fire up the software, let it synchronize with the network and now you have the coins that were sent to you.
There is one (big) catch. By the very definition of what BitCoin is, all transactions are public [bitcoin.org]. It seems the latest versions attempt to obfuscate the size of the transactions, and there is a discussion in the linked page of how to go further - but nonetheless, the fact that an address you control transacted with somebody is a matter of public record. This is very different to today, where financial transactions are assumed to be secret unless otherwise published.
Ripple is much harder to understand and that's why I doubt it'll ever go anywhere. It's an excellent intellectual exercise but in a series of debates with Ryan I had back in 2008 (?) he admitted that a lot of the justifications for Ripple were post-hoc, and the fractional reserve did not have many of the flaws often cited.
Re:Electronic currency (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm one of the major third party developers (I wrote DiabloMiner [github.com], a OpenCL miner written in Java), and at no point has anyone in the community said they don't want to be associated with Wikileaks.
If anything, many of us have asked Julian and his associates to accept Bitcoin so we can donate to Wikileaks.
So, please, don't spread FUD.
Re:Oh my gosh... (Score:3, Interesting)
>>>Rand Paul...believes that the role of government is to enforce the will of the religious-right
Completely false.
If you think it's true then go-ahead and cite where Rand wants to act like a tyrant and force us all to become "religious"..... else your statement has zero validity and is just a lie.
Re:Ron Paul (Score:5, Interesting)
Freedom of speech or not, I like to know when my government is covering up things like contractors supplying underage children to rich Afghanis for prostitution.
http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/2010/12/wikileaks_texas_company_helped.php
Re:Oh my gosh... (Score:4, Interesting)
Wikileaks simply dumped the entire contents onto the web. So far there hasn't been anything really damning about them, except the fact that diplomatic relationships are now shattered across the world.
Why do people keep repeating this complete falsehood? A 30 second visit to wikileaks site and you can see that they have released less than 2000 of the 25000 total cables. Of these 2000 most were released by a major newspaper first, and wikileaks included the same redactions that the newspapers included. Yes, these have shown "damning" information. The difference now vs. pentagon papers is that the wikileaks information damns both parties, and in the mainstream US media if both parties agree then it must be true (Iraq war?). Here is a short list of new revelations found just from the cables (not including the previous wikileaks releases) [1]
(1) the U.S. military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces;
(2) the State Department threatened Germany not to criminally investigate the CIA's kidnapping of one of its citizens who turned out to be completely innocent;
(3) the State Department under Bush and Obama applied continuous pressure on the Spanish Government to suppress investigations of the CIA's torture of its citizens and the 2003 killing of a Spanish photojournalist when the U.S. military fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad (see The Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch today about this: "The day Barack Obama Lied to me");
(4) the British Government privately promised to shield Bush officials from embarrassment as part of its Iraq War "investigation";
(5) there were at least 15,000 people killed in Iraq that were previously uncounted;
(6) "American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world" about the Iraq war as it was prosecuted, a conclusion the Post's own former Baghdad Bureau Chief wrote was proven by the WikiLeaks documents;
(7) the U.S.'s own Ambassador concluded that the July, 2009 removal of the Honduran President was illegal -- a coup -- but the State Department did not want to conclude that and thus ignored it until it was too late to matter;
(8) U.S. and British officials colluded to allow the U.S. to keep cluster bombs on British soil even though Britain had signed the treaty banning such weapons, and,
(9) Hillary Clinton's State Department ordered diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data on U.N. and other foreign officials, almost certainly in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961.
[1]http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/01/lieberman/index.html
Link to a great background piece about WikiLeaks (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Ron Paul (Score:4, Interesting)
The point of legalizing abortions was two fold; 1. why should the state have the right to tell someone what they can do with their body... and 2. simple pragmatism, having abortions illegal doesn't prevent abortions, it just criminalizes the doctors performing them and pushes young, desperate women into back alleys where they so often are mutilated or die.
There's no easy answer. Science can, to some degree, answer the question as to when a fetus becomes conscious, but those who are opposed to abortion are not going to accept that anyways (a lot of these folks are experts at rejecting science inconvenient to their belief system). At the end of the day, if we accept the premise that a fetus is not legally a person to a certain point (and we don't, you don't have to get a birth and death certificate for a miscarriage, and so far as I'm aware, not even for stillbirths, but only live births).
Liberties create uncomfortable situations, but the alternative of the state controlling women and forcing medical decisions on doctors seems much worse.
Re:Trust Xipwire? (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't trust PayPal: it's an unregulated global banking monopoly, that routinely abuses its monopoly to steal money from people. It's not insured by the FDIC like a regular bank, so if it goes bust any money in there is going to disappear.
Exactly. I am fairly certain PayPal employs people to look over accounts with lots of money in them for any excuse to freeze them. That way, even if they can't steal the money outright, they've been able to freeze it for a month and make interest on the cash. Dirtiest company ever.
Re:Ron Paul (Score:4, Interesting)
That's not the point now. The point is to assassinate Assange's credibility so when the bank data shit finally gets to hit the fan, the involved bank will stand up and do whatever it can to get news outlets to shut up about it, lest they side with a "criminal". Do you want to release that info and side with someone accused of rape, hunted like an animal and (insert random other slander here)?
Wikileaks' "power" and its threat hinges on its credibility. If that can be eroded away, it doesn't matter anymore that they leak the bank data. Nobody will care. Nobody will believe it. Nobody will report it.
Re:Ron Paul (Score:5, Interesting)
So then wikileaks shows up, bares naked the diplomacy which appeared untouchable, the best in the world. And they start a hunt, maybe with old style wanted posters. And they arrest the guy and I did not see one call for protest. So go ahead and put on the blog of the planalto (brazilian newspaper) the first protest. That this is against the freedom of expression on the internet. So that we can protest because the man was using only that which he himself had read. And if he read something because somebody else wrote it, the guilty is not the one who divulges it but the one who wrote it in the fist place.
So instead of blaming the one who exposed it, blame the one who originated the stupid documents.
Therefore to wikileaks, my honest support and my protest against the oppression to freedom of expression...
Youtube video [youtube.com]
Re:Ron Paul (Score:4, Interesting)
Which nation? Australia? That's where Julian is from.
What specific information in the thousand or so cables published to date has endagered the security of any nation?
That's not how (sic) works. You put (sic) after what I actually wrote to indicate that you believe I spelled it wrong, but are leaving it that way to maintain the integrety of the quote.
Getting the quote wrong, then putting (sic) after it kind of defeats the purpose of using (sic).
Re: "the laws of the United States" see above.
You're joking?
I wasn't familiar with the case, so I went to Wikipedia. Here's an excerpt from the article about Steven J. Rosen:
So you've actually brought my attention to another case that illustrates why it is important to speak out against the attacks on WikiLeaks, and ensure free speach and freedom of the press is vigorously defended whenever it is attacked by the government of the day.
I should have just stopped reading your comment there.
Re:Ron Paul (Score:2, Interesting)
In democratic countries to adhere to the principles of democracy it should be a democratic choice as to whether a government can keep secrets, the nature of the secrets they can keep and for how long they can keep them. The underlying principle of a democracy is that the people are the government not their elected representative, whom just represent the people at the public venues government.
Point of fact, no government should ever keep a secret from the people if that secret whether alone or in conjunction with other secrets would have a material impact upon the public choice of their next elected representatives.
Take for example nonsense like Russia and Georgia, the interpretation that one report from an unreliable and biased source (Georgia) is considered unreliable but 10 reports from the same unreliable and biased source is now reliable because there are more reports, so simply bending the facts of the case with crazy logic to suit political masters at home in their election campaigns, obviously should have been made public because it would have a material impact upon elections.
Re:Ron Paul (Score:2, Interesting)
Scarily enough ... there is a Federal Acquisition Regulation that covers child labor, and how government contractors aren't supposed to be using child labor, but for things like bamboo, beans, bricks, sugarcane and teak.
See FAR 52.2123
Re:inflation (Score:2, Interesting)
This is rich. You can't distinguish inflation from deflation, the master economist you! Inflation is when you devalue a currency versus the value of goods (i.e. prices increase), deflation is when the value of the currency increases versus that of goods (i.e. prices decrease). In this case the "dollar's" value has increased so that another unit (of much smaller denomination) has to be introduced, bread that used to cost $1 now costs $0.75 or 75 of the new units that are smaller then the original. The price went down, not up.
You are so in love with your own smugly irrational ideology that basic arithmetic escapes you. a) no we would not, there is no need to "materialize" anything beyond the normal mining and exploration - the point of using a natural resource as a reference is scarcity - less mining the better, b) no, we would simply add a new sub-unit to $1 dollar, called cents. Should that prove insufficient, we would divide the cents into smaller sub-units, etc. The amount of gold that corresponds to each new unit would simply decrease as compared to the unchanged old units, the finite limit being an amount being small enough to be measured practically, at which point we would switch from gold to much more difficult to obtain (i.e. scarce) material and repeat the process, c) no such thing would have been needed.
But at no point in time would the amount of gold (or whatever reference resource we use) assigned to $1 dollar (or any of the smaller sub-units) change! And that is the crux of the whole thing: at no point there is a devaluation of any of the old units. In order to increase the circulation of the currency, prices of things would have to decrease: its called "progress" and "raise of the standards of living", those two things that proponents of fiat currencies positively loathe (for everyone except themselves that is).
The wholly unwanted inflationary pressure would actually be introduced by mining and that is why resources like gold are ultimately too common to make a perfect currency, other, better reference materials would have to be found that are much harder to obtain yet.
As soon as you figure out that highly complicated arithmetical thing called "division" you will discover them.