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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?
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make install -not war
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.
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.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
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.
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.
Vixie's fallacy is that the law is impartial, and that the rule of law does not favor either side but instead wants to distribute "justice".
That's not the case.
The law always supports the side that makes the law.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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
Wikileaks did not dump the entire contents onto the web. It released less than 2000 out of the 250,000 it holds and those it did release were redacted and published first in the newspapers.
The claim that Wikileaks simply dumped everything is a lie spread by the media.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/10/wikileaks_media/index.html
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.
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.
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.