> Interestingly, in the end I was able to withdraw all my funds from AAVE through direct contract calls as illustrated above. So basically the web UI is blocked but people can still use AAVE by sending transactions to the blockchains directly.
> Interestingly, in the end I was able to withdraw all my funds from AAVE through direct contract calls as illustrated above. So basically the web UI is blocked but people can still use AAVE by sending transactions to the blockchains directly.
The only thing that was censoring his transactions was the website, which is centralized by design.
Basically, the "sanction preventions" Aave is instituting are for show only, in hopes they fool the regulators. They'll annoy and disturb the casual crypto trader but will do nothing to stop the big criminals from money laundering. I hope the developers of these defi lending protocols get hit with the criminal charges next.
When the "artists" have been openly and shamelessly stating, since around 2009, that the entire purpose of their "art" is to aid in laundering money and other crimes? Yes, absolutely.
If they're smart, they wouldn't admit to it publicly. But do you not remember the early history of Bitcoin, and the Silk Road? Nothing's changed since then, except some people got arrested and some haven't yet.
I really don't think you want to continue the discussion in the direction of "what's wrong crime A and crime B", that'll get off the rails very quickly.
Less of this, please. Obviously, not everyone into crypto and defi says those exact words. But there are enough saying that type of thing, where I think it's wrong of anyone involved with this to feign ignorance. They know what they're getting into.
Transactions and storage of money. You could also argue that artists who sell their artworks for huge sums of money are associating themselves to money laundering.
Transactions and storage of money are already decentralized, through the traditional finance system that connects at least thousands of banks and payment processors and other financial institutions. So it can't be that.
>You could also argue that artists who sell their artworks for huge sums of money are associating themselves to money laundering.
Yes, that's why transactions for those huge sums are subject to AML laws.
>That's not the case for every country on the planet
It's not helping there either. Countries where the economy is strictly controlled by the government, like North Korea, are mainly using crypto and defi to centralize even more. Their government can use defi to steal from other countries with impunity, evading international laws while continuing to oppress their own citizens and disallowing them from using the internet.
>And how do those prevent rich person A from paying rich person B (by buying a painting owned by B for an inflated price) for some illegal service?
If it were done through a bank (or a law-abiding crypto exchange) they would be required to keep a log of the transaction and the legal identities of the participants, as well as a log of where the money came from and where it's going. The idea is, if buying the painting is just one of the steps to "clean" the money, they'll be able to trace it back to when the money was dirty.
People in Lebanon are not being allowed to withdraw their money from banks, something similar happened in Greece a few years ago. With crypto if you have your own keys that's not an issue.
I don't see how the North Korea thing is an issue. I'm not sure what hacks you're referring to but when it comes to smart contracts code is law and the people who use them know that, if you can't get back the tokens you sent to a smart contract it's only your fault for not understanding how the software works. I don't think North Korea should exist in the first place but I don't think the act of getting money from a smart contract is immoral.
As for using works of art to launder money, I meant something like rich person A offers child prostitutes (or any other illegal service or item) to rich person B, who pays A by buying one of their paintings for a higher price than what A paid for it.
Being able to make a transaction does not mean you are not subject to them, just that you found a workaround and probably earned yourself a spot on a list. They can still take your freedom
I have nothing positive to say about this article.
I giggled a little at reading it... A dude with way more money than brains is mad that "decenteralized finance" is decenteralized and can do whatever they want?
The guy then admits to losing a quarter of a million; you'd think that'd be enough of a penalty for him to realize that maybe he should take his remaining money out, but nope.
Gee. Who could've imangined that there's logical reasons for most financial regulations?
There are lots of people with a lot of money in the old banking system who are not tech savvy. They are routinely defrauded and affected by 3rd party fraud. Still, it doesn't warrant labeling them as "having more money than brains".
In the case of the article, this is someone who had some money in a centralized exchange (AAVE) which was hacked by a bad actor, and then the breadcrumbs were traced to the sanctioned TornadoCash accounts.
My dad just sent the money form his account on his bank after some scammer called him (saying that he was a bank officer) and convinced him that his bank account was hacked, and he needed to move his money to another account in a different bank. Needless to say, it was all a scam.
Hearing and reading it looks pretty obvious... I do think he is a victim.
Ignoring all the obvious jokes here about banking without regulations and throwing good money after bad, I'm interested in the technical aspect of such bans and had some trouble finding resources. The author says "blocked by DeFi protocols such as AAVE and Uniswap." What does this actually mean? I found Uniswap's FAQ on this ( https://help.uniswap.org/en/articles/6149816-address-screeni... ), but I'm not sure what it means to be a blocked address. Is it just that certain companies won't execute transactions directly with those addresses? Is the author somehow prevented from trading their ETH?
True, but I could envision a scenario in which someone working for the government might interpret his actions as bypassing measures put in place to enforce a sanction. Regardless of how valid or invalid it was for his account to be blocked in the first place.
Just wait until staking is merged, 67% of the pools are run by centralized companies wanting to do business in the US, and they start filtering at the transaction level, including or not in blocks based on these same dirty metrics.
Lots of people who became paper rich are going to go the other direction just as fast.
If they filter transactions, ETH will become worthless, causing the relevant stakers to lose all their money since by definition they are the ones with the most money.
Seems like the system will punish censorship as designed.
They will be the majority though, enough to choose the history of the ledger, it's more that they won't allow other validators to join the network, who could invalidate their choices. Thus, the penalties will not be applied.
How does ETH do to stop miners from rejecting or preferring transactions for blocks today? Pretty sure there have been some interesting stories about transaction front running and other tactics to abuse the system for personal gain (which is a fundamental issue in the unregulated blockchain ecosystem)
The penalties are outside of the network. The penalties are that nobody wants to use a cryptocurrency with transaction filtering, when there are so many without it. Thus, the real-world value of the network token decreases drastically.
There are also a bunch of people sitting on the sidelines, waiting for a regulated network.
Since all of these things are basically just printed money based on the faith of the people, and since ETH is number 2, I think it will survive centralization and regulatory capture, since most of the populace could care less about these things. It just happens to be that the ethos of crypto libertarianism isn't that important to valuing the network.
The rules of the ETH network allow for this regulatory capture to happen as well. Decentralized governance means you may not get your way when the majority think differently.
Interesting point. Instead of needing to be part of the good-old-boys club, on a decentralized network, anyone can try being corrupt. Hacking works similarly.
> If they filter transactions, ETH will become worthless
I'm not sure about that. Some hodlers of ETH might be fine with governments being able to censor transactions. In that case what will determine the price of ETH is also how much of it these people own.
It's the UI being blocked so far. My understanding is that they use APIs from companies like https://www.trmlabs.com/ to decide if a wallet is dirty but the algorithm right now is deeply flawed.
Typical implementation is money can go in, but can't come out til the sanction is lifted. Sorry bout it.
You won't find much on the technical implementation, because the sector as a rule keeps the implementation details generally under wraps. The intent is clear however. Lock as much of their financial resources in a sanctioned account as possible.
> Interestingly, in the end I was able to withdraw all my funds from AAVE through direct contract calls as illustrated above
Will this just result in the next wallet being tainted, and so on? I guess maybe you can try to cash out the crypto before whoever you're selling to catches on?
Part of the blame goes to etherscan for trying to be a gatekeeper. In 2016 it used to just be a transaction explorer, now it,s trying to determine what is legal or not.
I'm not saying Monero will crash and nobody will use it if it gets sanctioned, but just like ETH coming from Tornado Cash is considered tainted the same could apply to all Monero.
The big question is whether validators who process sanctioned contract transactions on chain are liable. I would say they are, since in theory they can choose which transactions to include. If I were a US based miner I'd be looking into it. (not that I agree but it seems the trend is more enforcement, not less, over time)
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] thread/s obviously
> Interestingly, in the end I was able to withdraw all my funds from AAVE through direct contract calls as illustrated above. So basically the web UI is blocked but people can still use AAVE by sending transactions to the blockchains directly.
> Interestingly, in the end I was able to withdraw all my funds from AAVE through direct contract calls as illustrated above. So basically the web UI is blocked but people can still use AAVE by sending transactions to the blockchains directly.
The only thing that was censoring his transactions was the website, which is centralized by design.
Becomes
> If they're smart, they wouldn't admit to it publicly.
Let me guess. Your favourite castle is motte and bailey?
Less of this, please. Obviously, not everyone into crypto and defi says those exact words. But there are enough saying that type of thing, where I think it's wrong of anyone involved with this to feign ignorance. They know what they're getting into.
>You could also argue that artists who sell their artworks for huge sums of money are associating themselves to money laundering.
Yes, that's why transactions for those huge sums are subject to AML laws.
That's not the case for every country on the planet
> Yes, that's why transactions for those huge sums are subject to AML laws.
And how do those prevent rich person A from paying rich person B (by buying a painting owned by B for an inflated price) for some illegal service?
It's not helping there either. Countries where the economy is strictly controlled by the government, like North Korea, are mainly using crypto and defi to centralize even more. Their government can use defi to steal from other countries with impunity, evading international laws while continuing to oppress their own citizens and disallowing them from using the internet.
>And how do those prevent rich person A from paying rich person B (by buying a painting owned by B for an inflated price) for some illegal service?
If it were done through a bank (or a law-abiding crypto exchange) they would be required to keep a log of the transaction and the legal identities of the participants, as well as a log of where the money came from and where it's going. The idea is, if buying the painting is just one of the steps to "clean" the money, they'll be able to trace it back to when the money was dirty.
I don't see how the North Korea thing is an issue. I'm not sure what hacks you're referring to but when it comes to smart contracts code is law and the people who use them know that, if you can't get back the tokens you sent to a smart contract it's only your fault for not understanding how the software works. I don't think North Korea should exist in the first place but I don't think the act of getting money from a smart contract is immoral.
As for using works of art to launder money, I meant something like rich person A offers child prostitutes (or any other illegal service or item) to rich person B, who pays A by buying one of their paintings for a higher price than what A paid for it.
It's pretty crazy how all the arguments for freedom of speech (and software) go out the window for many people whenever cryptocurrency comes up.
I giggled a little at reading it... A dude with way more money than brains is mad that "decenteralized finance" is decenteralized and can do whatever they want?
The guy then admits to losing a quarter of a million; you'd think that'd be enough of a penalty for him to realize that maybe he should take his remaining money out, but nope.
Gee. Who could've imangined that there's logical reasons for most financial regulations?
There are lots of people with a lot of money in the old banking system who are not tech savvy. They are routinely defrauded and affected by 3rd party fraud. Still, it doesn't warrant labeling them as "having more money than brains".
In the case of the article, this is someone who had some money in a centralized exchange (AAVE) which was hacked by a bad actor, and then the breadcrumbs were traced to the sanctioned TornadoCash accounts.
Victim shaming is wrong.
Hearing and reading it looks pretty obvious... I do think he is a victim.
Lots of people who became paper rich are going to go the other direction just as fast.
Seems like the system will punish censorship as designed.
This guy explains it in detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyP0uxxB6V8
How does ETH do to stop miners from rejecting or preferring transactions for blocks today? Pretty sure there have been some interesting stories about transaction front running and other tactics to abuse the system for personal gain (which is a fundamental issue in the unregulated blockchain ecosystem)
Since all of these things are basically just printed money based on the faith of the people, and since ETH is number 2, I think it will survive centralization and regulatory capture, since most of the populace could care less about these things. It just happens to be that the ethos of crypto libertarianism isn't that important to valuing the network.
This also happens in regulated markets, but you have to be very well connected to do it. https://wwnorton.com/books/flash-boys/
For anyone interested, see: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest
I'm not sure about that. Some hodlers of ETH might be fine with governments being able to censor transactions. In that case what will determine the price of ETH is also how much of it these people own.
You won't find much on the technical implementation, because the sector as a rule keeps the implementation details generally under wraps. The intent is clear however. Lock as much of their financial resources in a sanctioned account as possible.
Will this just result in the next wallet being tainted, and so on? I guess maybe you can try to cash out the crypto before whoever you're selling to catches on?
How do you know that you did not transact with a sanctioned entity? (and by proxy did do something wrong)
How?