Okay, sure, let's do this. "nomadic identity" 1. No one has ever even come close to explaining how using a did: uri is supposed to work2. Even assuming it works, no one can explain how it's different than oidc3. Even assuming it was different, what hap...

bumblefudge

@hrefna @risottobias @ariadne @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus yeah that's not actually that different from my personal stance, if you can believe that. i've even written some of those "guides" (bitches gotta eat!), but no one wants to read a fair, balanced, realistic guide to what they actually bring to the table in the short term-- that libertarian "sovereign citizen" rhetoric really sells, and scifi about how cool it will be AFTER every user gets cheap commodity tooling for managing keys

bumblefudge

@ariadne @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus i am here talking to people about FEPs because i have a contract with a public FOSS agency to support activitypub design, particularly around portability mechanismS (plural) and conformance testing. no one who works on crypto cares at all about activitypub, they're funding bluesky, nostr, and farcaster (at rates of investment about 100:1 the non-zuck funding for the fediverse, i might add), those clients would never pay me to be here.

bumblefudge

@ariadne @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus fwiw i don't take money from proof-of-work clients, i never have and i only started working with ethereum projects AFTER the proof-of-stake transition was greenlit. i would never block someone for being skeptical of cryptocurrency, but i do block people for telling me i am morally inferior to them because (checks notes) "i work in crypto"

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

@by_caballero @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus even proof of stake projects are problematic. cryptocurrency has caused many harms besides the proof of work blockchains, for example the millions of people who have suffered data loss due to ransomware.

i won’t paint you with the sins of the criminals profiting from your work, but will note that your work enables a criminal ecosystem which could not exist with traditional finance.

i have been approached by cryptocurrency businesses, it was fairly straightforward for me to decline their job offers.

bumblefudge

@ariadne @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus getting warmer but you're still pretty confident that a bounded ecosystem exists that i'm directly contributing to. which software job is completely guilt-free? if i only took government grants (as opposed to supplementing them with higher-paying contracts with VC-backed companies whose direct impacts I'm comfortable with), would that put me on the other side of the good/evil line? if i worked in google's open source division?

bumblefudge

@ariadne @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus forgive me if this sounds like sealioning but i think criminals will profit from any work you do in software, period, regardless of whether the source is MIT or Apache-2. there aren't good companies and bad companies, the equity in all these companies gets mixed into a giant evil insurance policy called capitalism and none of us are doing 100% innocent work, period.

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

@by_caballero @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus your argument is effectively that there is no ethical employment under capitalism. this is probably true.

but cryptocurrency has directly harmed millions (and, in the case of proof of work projects, the planet too). the team working on, say, google chrome probably hasn’t, although they have certainly pushed the needle in directions favorable to google.

bumblefudge

@ariadne @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus i think there are long-term consequences to a global market for search engines and browsers dominated by a single incumbent in both, and i think there are long-term consequences to alphabet and meta cornering the market on advertising and bleeding the publication industry 90% in one decade. i don't mind if people disagree about which problem is more urgent, that's just a subjective question of strategy.

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

@by_caballero @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus i agree that it’s problematic, but i think the millions of people who are getting screwed over by ransomware is a more urgent issue

bumblefudge

@ariadne @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus my argument is that there is no OBJECTIVELY ethical employment under capitalism. we might actually agree on lots of these topics, just don't tell me i'm objectively wrong in the few corner-cases where we disagree on strategy (or tactics)

bumblefudge

@ariadne @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus yeah ransomware is real real bad, i totally agree. censorship-resistant payment channels are extremely dangerous, and i don't actually think they're a net-positive addition to the world. but politics, like monetary policy, like engineering, is all tradeoffs all the way down, there is no objective right answer to hard problems like sanctions avoidance and ransomware protection!

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

@by_caballero @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus any strategy which enables something as terrible as ransomware is objectively wrong and i will call it as such.

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

@by_caballero @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus sanctions avoidance is also a criminal activity and frankly i am disinterested in helping people like Putin launder their money. that is not the kind of “social justice” i am interested in.

bumblefudge

@ariadne @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus that's giving technology a lot of credit-- ransomware didn't suddenly flourish cuz digital cash was invented, it flourished because the megacorps that sell people software with vulnerabilities and tell them to put all their data in it aren't liable when the hackers ransom them. without digital cash they'll just use physical cash or gold bricks or some other means of paying the ransom

bumblefudge

@ariadne @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus again, neither am i, we just disagree on how directly i'm helping putin by doing what i do (you still haven't asked). even if i were a core protocol dev on a cryptocurrency, from there to my directly contributing is a subjective jump. not one i fault you for making, just one i politely and subjectively disagree with, because i don't take clients that i consider helpful to putin . if you knew the number of clients i've lost over these issues...

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

@by_caballero @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus digital cash enabled the automation needed to make ransomware scale, and i will concede that the largest waves came from 0day vulnerabilities that were kept secret by the intelligence sector. but ransomware is directly evil and it exists on the backbone of digital cash.

i shed no tears when eGold and liberty reserve were shut down by the DHS.

bumblefudge

@ariadne @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus lol me neither. and i actually agree that crypto contributes to the scaling of a seriously sketchy underworld. but is it the root cause? where in this picture does the long history of mossad and US intelligence funding ransomware R&D and literally growing the 0day market to price out enemies fit in? the more we talk the less we disagree, it seems

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

@by_caballero @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus i went to a cyberweapon convention where everyone who attended had to have a security clearance last year. it was sure fascinating stuff.

i don’t disagree that the root cause is elsewhere, but cryptocurrency created a choke point which is significantly more difficult to defeat verses the old days where we would just shut down the illicit payment processors like eGold.

if i heard dissidents saying send us cryptocurrency, or abortion clinics saying send us cryptocurrency to pay for abortions, i would be willing to believe that there is a possible good for cryptocurrency, but i don’t see that.

instead i see spam and ransomware and ddos for hire. services which cannot exist in a traditional finance ecosystem.

bumblefudge

@ariadne @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus well, *I* have seen crypto used for funding abortions and smuggling people out of oppressive regimes and feeding people in gaza but I'm the first to admit that data is not the plural of anecdote and i'm disappointed with the ratio of censorship-resistant capital flows i'm happy about to flows i'm unhappy about. no one is paying journalists to cover the former... but plenty of journos get paid to downplay or scandalize the latter.

bumblefudge

@ariadne @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus cyberweapon convention sounds awesome, btw, i'd love to hear more about that as my pegasus/ransomware intell mostly comes from niche war-crimes investigative journalism. i need to AFK for the day very soon but next time i'm in a virtual room with you i'm gonna ask more about that!