Thanks Zane. Appreciate the comprehensive response. I searched through the thread in Decentralization on the IC moving forward and did not see anything from Dfinity. It clearly is top of mind for them though and I am sure they have some thoughts on it given the whole badlands exploration.
Your proposal article really makes me think that whole Mario Nintendo debacle was a massive red herring. It was the wrong debate to have. So long as law enforcement can shut down nodes because they are in data centers and easily located, node providers simply HAVE to comply. All the talk about throwing up the middle finger to the law is stupid if it is a losing fight. Right now, you are correct in that Dfinity is not censorship resistant. Yes it is an open system that is WAY more performant than any other cryptocurrency and a superior alternative to AWS in some respects. But no, it is not censorship resistant because of the dependance on data centers.
Now, if we want to implement additional subnets to complement the IC that are in fact censorship-resistant and cannot be shut down by law enforcement then that is a debate worth having. But your long well thought out forum post did not get much of a response from Dfinity. Did you ever have any conversations following the thread? I would imagine that to carry out your plan would require significant effort and resources from Dfinity to make it a reality.
Closing the loop on this thread, if law enforcement really wants to shut down Spinner Cash it seems like it probably could under the current structure of the IC. Right?
Someone … “crypto is to hide and launder money”
Crypto bro… “Noooo, it is all on chain, totally transparent. Banks are not on chain, not transparent but we are”
Government… “we ban system with the sole purpose of hiding crypto”
Crypto bro… " I want my privacy" (oups… transparency gone my magic)
Does this community want to follow the laws or being outlaws? Any of you need spinner cash? I don’t. Censorship resistant? Ok, what will you do with child porn, money laundering, drug deals, copyright of hard working people and artist on IC… and so much more? Do you want IC to become Dark web3?
Twitter handle, “Cryptoisgood”, an ICP fan on Twitter and Tik Tok, have already asked twitter to lock an account that was stealing his content and his identity. What will he do when, if, IC get fully censorship proof?
It is a bad taste to me that spinner cash won the supernova first prize. Is this the best we can do? I am 100% for privacy and hate government spying on citizens with no reasons. But i hate more everything else I mentionned in this post. Which battle are you picking up?
wow…
spinner cash was a great demonstration of the capabilities of an upcoming feature on the IC.
and now just because the US government bans a similar app you want to come out and say their effort
was not worthy of the award…the fact that you don’t need this kind of tools for anonymity doesn’t mean that other people in this planet don’t have good use for it. These applications are just tools like a knife or syringe or many other things that criminals also use to commit crimes.
I have not said that it is not a high quality product. The quality of programming, the quality of IC community, the quality and skill of all programmers on IC is amazing. Just said I am personally dissapointed that a tool that help to hide money won the first prize. But I respect the decision.
I have done multiple KYC with banks in the past. Do you know how much money I have? What privacy are you talking about? Does the Internet Identity not private enough?
We can open a IC account and deposit tons of ICP, worth millions without any KYC. Not good enough?
Good enough for me anyway.
well…good for you that you live in a part of the planet were simple actions like what you mention aren’t use to track you with whatever intent or the government uses that info. to persecute you because they don’t like what you are doing. A simple transfer to a family in need can get you in trouble in some places.
@darien
One thing for sure. If some important amount of crypto goes through SpinnerCash after some important hacks, I predict the government will ban SpinnerCash just the same. So whatever we agree or not, the end result may be the same and the community must be prepared for such an event. This one is not hard to predict.
Swimming against the current of the river is much harder, most of time impossible to reach the destination. Up to Ic to swim with or against the current of the crypto river.
I don’t think people are arguing that is not going to happen. The concern is what the role of the internet computer governance is when it does happen. Should the nns be involved in censoring application that may be illegal in one jurisdiction but not in another? Is the internet censorship resistant enough to allow controversial applications to run on it? If the internet computer is truly a global compute platform, there should be no reason something like spinner can’t run on it without interference from the DAO because as far as I know it is not illegal to use privacy tools in many countries.
On the other hand, I agree with censorship of certain things like CP because that is illegal in every jurisdiction that I know of.
The community you really need to start talking about Badlands to harden the decentralization of the internet computer.
Super Mario was just the beginning, I used it as an example to make it clear it’s a real issue and not something hypotehical.
Unfortunately I haven’t heard anything from Dfinity, which makes me think they don’t have any plans to improve the situation in the foreeseable future outside of using boundary nodes as censor, which as they plan to implement completely wouldn’t solve the issue and even with changes might not be enough for authorities. Dfinity seem to rely too much on technicalities, they did this for the tax proposals and are betting on it for boundary nodes too. I’m skeptical the authorities will be fine with content not being served in some jurisdictions, imagine if the US knew a Wikileaks server is hosted in the US but only accessible from Switzerland, do you think they’ll accept such a situation or do whatever they can to track down the homeland server and get it shut down?.
I believe, they might give it the Tornado cash treatment and on top of it require US nodes operators to stop running its canisters, such sanctions might extend to other countries too due to OFAC/FATF, some might consider such a possibility too unlikely, but I’m not too sure considering one of TC’s devs was arrested in the Netherlands.
It is true that the canister owner took the game down willingly. However, the situation did expose some core issues with the way ICP is handling censorship. For one, the NNS seems to have the ability to remove canisters. The last discussion centered around whether or not the NNS should use that ability based on a DMCA notice served to a boundary node operator. The discussion will be much more serious if boundary node operators (which I believe is still only Dfinity at the moment) are facing OFAC sanctions this time around.
I personally haven’t seen any updates regarding this, but it seems to me like boundary node decentralization should be a high priority right now.
Ultimately should a nighmare fuel powered dystopian technocratic authoritian regime ensare the plant using cbdcs and social credit as their vehicles of enslavement, some peoples only option may very well be these kinds of dapps
Thankfully we all invest for different reasons and that’s the beauty of democracy. I don’t think ICP should go against US sanctions mostly because I don’t want my investment in the NNS to go to 0. Frankly if ICP truly becomes unstoppable that’s what would happen. The US government would jail everyone at Dfinity and the token would go to 0. I know people are going to say USA doesn’t have jurisdiction in Europe, lots of people work in Dfinity San Francisco and lots of people in Zurich have family in the USA. Even if they don’t jail them, the threat is enough to destroy the project. I know if my job labeled me a terrorist, I would quit.
With that said if a proposal shows up saying US sanctions are asking us to take down spinner cash I will vote yes.
I’m in crypto to invest in my financial future not fight oppressive governments.
NNS’s control of IC is in conflict with the power of governments, but the solution is very simple, that is to make NNS the most powerful government in the world
That’s funny because you cannot have one without the other if you think deeply about it.
Your ability to improve your ‘financial future’ is directly related to what the blockchain tech is enabling : decentralization, privacy, ownership etc.
Otherwise you would still be under the boots of the banking system and your financial future would still be crappy.
I’ve written this on discord, but I’ll leave it here as well, for posterity.
The way I see it, we have three different cases here:
The network, through the NNS, gets to decide what smart contracts run on the platform. Anyone can propose to remove a certain canister, and if they get enough votes the canister gets removed. Democracy and PoS in action. In theory, the stakeholders should be incentivized to want the “good of the network”, and vote accordingly.
The boundary nodes can (and will) block access to certain URLs (and thus to certain smart contracts / canisters) based on what requests they receive from their respective jurisdictions. There is currently an effort from Dfinity to open the process of hosting a boundary node, and in theory help with this issue. (the worst case here being that certain content won’t be accessible from certain jurisdictions). As an additional technical challenge, it’s unclear if the end-user will be able to select what boundary node to use.
A certain government decides to place a certain service on a certain list. That service becomes so toxic that no-one wants to be associated with that service.
I believe it’s fair to talk about 1 & 2, while it would be unfair to blame the network / Dfinity for 3. This is so outside any of our scope (stakeholders, devs, the foundation) that it would be a futile expense of energy. There’s nothing we can do against governments that also have the power to enforce their rules. The network is irrelevant in this scenario (case in point, the first service was hosted on ETH, a mass distributed network).
A major takeaway from the Tornado Cash issue which is particularly relevant to the IC is that while more than one government has come down with a heavy hand on TC and even individual developers of TC, absolutely no moves have been made against the host network Ethereum.
It is imperative that the SNS and NNS be designed in such a way that no contagion from individual apps infects the entire network. Because there are bound to be individual apps that breach jurisdicitional rules and are shut down by various nations. Of course, there should be an ongoing attempt to make the IC genuinely censorship-resistant, but as I see it that seems at least two years away, while the wave of legally questionable services will be on offer on the network much sooner.
While the network is not censorship resistant in any meaningful way, it cannot be stressed enough how important it is for Dfinity and the IC to maintain sufficient distance from individual dapps. The consequences of contagion could be fatal. A few people made a similar point during the Mario debate, I hope the Dfinity foundation takes the issue seriously.
There’s a situation that no one seems to be discussing in this thread
A canister has not been taken down by the NNS
Http access has been restricted by a BN complying to a takedown request
In this scenario, the canister still has a http_request method available. Anyone can run their own frontend for the canister, playing DNS whack-a-mole with whichever government, even after the BN takedown is issued.
Ease of access may be limited, and governments can still create consequences for using a service, but the content and functionality of a canister can only be shut down by the NNS.
That’s great. As the IC grows and the number of name neurons increase I’m sure it will be difficult to convince more than 50% of voting power to remove a canister unless we’re talking about egregious things like CP. We need to go much better than this. The protocol need to be hard coded that it requires 65% or more vote cast from a proposal to remove a canister. It should be as hard as changing the United States Constitution.
