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WikiLeaks, Money, and Ron Paul
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.
We don't have to wonder, since the SecDef has said that no US soldiers, missions, or security were harmed or jeapordized by the Wikileaks releases.
So what are they so mad about?
Being made to look like spoiled children, that's what. Being shown to be backstabbing hypocrites. This is the political equivalent of being pantsed on the world stage.
There are a small handful of votes where Ron Paul has voted in a way that would be upsetting to left-liberals (gay adoption in DC comes to mind), but aside from that, I don't think there is anyone in DC more passionately committed to personal freedom than Ron Paul. The strong support for Wikileaks is just another example.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Ron Paul, Julian Assange, cows, hockey, Vladimir Putin and PayPal?
I'm sorry, that's one orgy I don't want to be invited to.
... and then they built the supercollider.
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?
--
make install -not war
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.
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.
2600.org points out that if you want to make a donation to the KKK then Visa is everywhere you want to be.
Vixie makes some good points about the rule of law and how DDOS attacks both by supporters and enemies of Wikilieaks are unjustified. Yet I can't help but wonder what the outcome would be if everyone just went back to business and let the courts settle everything out. Wouldn't this mean that Wikileaks is taken down for now, Assange's ass is ripped up in court for the next ten years, and even if he wins in the end (in the unlikely case he manages to afford a year-long court battle), Wikileaks will have utterly failed to reach its goals?
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.
- Desmond Tutu
Proud member of the Ferengi Socialist Party.
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.
Please, for the love of the written text: read the damn FAQ http://www.bitcoin.org/faq *before* you engage in a discussion about the topic!
The generation of BitCoins is just part of the bootstrapping process, and it's not economically viable to do that to get wealthy (you'd set up an Amazon cluster to make them, you'd pay more than you'd earn). Generation also slows and will cap out at around 21 million BitCoins.
The primary value of BitCoins is defined by how much people are ready to exchange it for, and what you can buy/sell with it, not unlike real currency.
The primary differences are that there is no central bank that can print more money on a whim, and that the transactions are anonymous (kind of, the numbers are broadcasted, but they are not attached to names, only cryptographic keys anyone can make).
In that sense, it is an interesting and promising thing. Could use some broader adoption though, but that's not an over night thing. The current structures are stable enough to use it for practical things already and maybe we'll see it in broader adoption in the future.
I'm not Russian, but I think I understand what he means. Mostly because my country has quite odd social standards and norms sometimes. Let me explain.
You don't care if your neighbors cows make noise, but you want yours to be quiet. So you can strut and brag how well trained your cows are, compared to the dumb animals your neighbor has. The noise doesn't really bother you, but the common agreement is that it is bothering. I admit that's not easy to grasp as a concept.
There are certain "norms", also in my country, where certain things are supposedly "annoying", while others are supposedly "pleasant". Even though few people actually feel that way. If any at all. But convention dictates that it should be like this. Russian convention apparently dictates that you should be annoyed by cows mooing. So if your cows moo, you feel bad and feel like you should apologize to everyone around, because your mooing cows supposedly annoy everyone. Again: Nobody is really bothered by it, but everything is supposed to be. In turn, you don't care that your neighbors cows moo because they don't "really" bother you and you don't really care too much that it "should" bother you.
Of course, he could mean something completely different and it's just lost in translation.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Almost, though I think it's more like: when your animals start making noise, your neighbor starts complaining that you're too noisy, which is hypocritical of them 'cause their animals make just as much noise. The part about the puck is just a colorful way of saying "right back at ya!", i.e. you shouldn't lecture us about free press if you're arresting the only real journalist the West has left (I'm extrapolating a little bit, but that was the spirit of what he said).
weinersmith
If you don't know what Ron Paul's foreign policy views are, here is a handy summary from his book "Revolution": Leave everybody else alone. Some might call it isolationism. Not sure how well that would work, but if that was our policy, then there obviously wouldn't be much to leak about it.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
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. 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.
I'm one of the major third party developers (I wrote DiabloMiner, 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.
Patrick "Diablo-D3" McFarland || http://AdTerrasPerAspera.com
BitCoin is a little complicated to understand the internals of. See the discussion of it further up the thread for what it's doing and why it needs to burn so much CPU time. The thing to understand is that BitCoin eliminates the need for banks to mediate currency transactions on the internet (or at all), and it does so by forming a public, never ending story of money flows in the economy. That story (called the block chain) is extended by having public nodes perform large computations, the fact that coins are generated as a side effect of this process is basically a reward for donating CPU time to the system.
Paypal and Amazon both gave in to US government pressure to eliminate their services to WikiLeaks. Since WikiLeaks depends on internet presence and donations to exist, it's no different than cutting the power to a house. In this case, it signaled to any other internet provider that they would no longer be friends to the US government, which per the norm, acts like a local mafia boss in enforcing its will in the neighborhood.
The United States differs from other States only in that it does not overtly tell someone to shut up. It threatens charges. It stays quiet while members of it's government and celebrity punditry call for assassination. It sends a few spooks around to anyone connected with you. It's a base form of terrorism, and differs from the KGB only in that it has to look like an accident if they decide to eliminate you. They like plausible deniability because the miserable pro-authoritarian sycophants like you can pretend that those things don't happen, and you'll continue to support the government regardless of how badly they ignore the laws they are supposed to be following.
Take a look at the latest Nobel Peace Prize winner, Liu Xiaobo. What is the effective difference of the Chinese government throwing him in prison, and the US leaning on Sweden to bring back trumped up charges so Assange could be detained while they build a bullshit case to do the same thing? We just have better PR.
Honestly, you're fucking pathetic. You are everything that is wrong with democracy today, because you don't even know what freedom of speech is, or why it's important. I hope you end up in the society you dream of, protesting the latest corporate takeover of your publicly funded infrastructure from your "Free Speech Zone" like the coward you are in order to keep what little freedom they decide to let you keep for the time being.
From his Inaugural address, formatted for clarity. Notice how many times he uses the word "peace" and how he describes that we should have "honest friendship with all nations".
. . .it is proper you should understand what I deem the essential principles of our Government, and consequently those which ought to shape its Administration. I will compress them within the narrowest compass they will bear, stating the general principle, but not all its limitations:
Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political;
peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none;
the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against antirepublican tendencies; the preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad;
a jealous care of the right of election by the people—a mild and safe corrective of abuses which are lopped by the sword of revolution where peaceable remedies are unprovided;
absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital principle of republics, from which is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism;
a well disciplined militia, our best reliance in peace and for the first moments of war, till regulars may relieve them; the supremacy of the civil over the military authority;
economy in the public expense, that labor may be lightly burthened; the honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith; encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid;
the diffusion of information and arraignment of all abuses at the bar of the public reason; freedom of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected.
These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment. They should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety.
A government will advocate for freedom of the press as long as that freedom is used to embarrass other governments and further it's own interests. Once the those things get turned around and focused on the advocate country they quickly call it espionage and treason. If Wikileaks focused on China and their members were hunted down in other countries and then Jailed in China, the state department would call them political prisoners and demand their release. Citizens of the United States should listen very carefully to what their representative have to say about this issue. It will show exactly what kind of freedom they support. Freedom of speech or freedom to agree.
Seriously, read the Bitcoin technical paper. It's short and easy to read.
Paid Q&A/Research
I agreed with everything in your post--except for one word in your title. Communist!? Seriously?
Overwhelmingly it's been the supposed conservative defenders of freedoms that have been throwing a fit over Wikileaks, or inferring that Assange should be assassinated (one of those clowns was advisor to Canada's current prime minister, who heads the so-called Conservative party).
Call them neo-conservative if you must, as libertarian Ron Paul did in his speech.
Meanwhile, the same neo-conservatives are labelling Wikileaks supporters as leftist, anarchists, socialists, communists, or terrorist sympathizers intent on disrupting the world order. Yet on CBC, Canada's supposed pinko socialist news source (according to neo-conservatives, anyway), comments left on their wikileaks news articles are overwhelmingly in support of Wikileaks.
Seriously, I hope you don't think suppression of freedoms is a strictly "left" trait, the "right" is doing its best to do it better.
This New Yorker article from the more innocent days of June is something that everyone needs to read before they can really make sense of WikiLeaks. It's about what those people actually do, and it's an excellent read. Even if you've read a hundred stories about WikiLeaks, you probably don't have this background and it will change the way you look at their work.
They're not conservative or liberal. They're authoritarian, just like Stalin.
Sure, if you want to go back to before the Revolution communism meant something else, but I'm not trying to convince an academic in some paper. I'm trying to convince a citizen that they're seriously fucking up the whole concept of democracy and the importance of freedom of expression.
Step away from this "left versus right" thing. In reality, what difference is there between Communism and Fascism? Does it make a difference whether a small elite group rules the state which rules commerce, or whether a small elite group rules commerce which rules the state? What if that group is an enlightened oligarchy, or a backwards junta? I suppose you could make a very weak argument that intellectual genocide has more merit than ethnic genocide, but I wouldn't agree. They are both two sides of the same coin: murder to create order.
The measurements of government cannot be drawn on a line graph. Even Canada has been waging it's war on personal freedom through the suppression of drug use, which is the very definition of totalitarianism: prosecuting someone for exercising personal freedom.
No, your interpretation is wrong as well as wired translation. Corect English idiom of Putin words would be "pot calling the kettle black".
Questions to consider:
Below text is quoted, not my own
Number 1: Do the America People deserve know the truth regarding the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?
Number 2: Could a larger question be how can an army private access so much secret information?
Number 3: Why is the hostility mostly directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?
Number 4: Are we getting our moneys worth of the 80 Billion dollars per year spent on intelligence gathering?
Number 5: Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths: lying us into war or Wikileaks revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?
Number 6: If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the first amendment and the independence of the internet?
Number 7: 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?
Number 8: Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in a time of declared war, which is treason, and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death and corruption?
Number 9: Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it is wrong?
Thomas Jefferson had it right when he advised ‘Let the eyes of vigilance never be closed.’
The magical number is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0