I don't like it. Giving away or selling the components for free would have been better than just throwing it at the dump. I appreciate the PII concerns, but these days disks have built-in sanitation procedures, as part of an industry-wide program to reduce waste.
And if you throw away memory for PII concerns, that would be beyond crazy.
You will find many such Marie Antoinettes in certain social circles, m/v, but mostly m. Living in such a bubble tends to warp one's perspective, also as self-justification. Those people below become resources, accounted for like energy, materials and other consumables. People wouldn't notice it anymore, but it is still a telltale sign how much a company value humans if they delegate herding to a so called Human Resources department.
The default rebuttal is that Human Resources is just a standard term. <= the point
If the asset has risen in value over the years, the donor could (a) sell it for dollars, pay capital gains taxes, and then donate the rest or (b) donate the asset and let the FSF do the selling. (b) avoids the tax which means more money for the FSF. It's a common approach with non-profits.
Are you saying 501 non-profits don't pay capital gains? (b) certainly avoids tax on the donor's part, but on the non-profit? I am assuming the non-profit would have to convert to fiat to do something useful with the donation.
> Are you saying 501 non-profits don't pay capital gains?
Correct, as long as those gains are used as part of the 501-aligned mission. Same with donations, they don't pay a corp income tax. This is part of being a tax exempt organization.
I'll explain a bit what's going on here. The typical crypto ethos usually isn't aligned with governments or paying taxes at all.
Additionally, banks are heavily government regulated entities, they are almost part of the executive branch. Aiding in the collection of taxes, neutering economic incentives for illegal activities, and implementing public economic policy are common and unquestioned responsibilities placed on banks through laws.
Banks launder money for extreme illicit activities. Look at TD Bank or HSBC, they were find record breaking for laundering cartel money. Your naivety is not surprising since you refuse to dig deeper and discover the actual truth. Banks and govt doesn't care about you. Their purpose is to deceive, steal and manipulate their true motive from general population. They own your whole life.
Yes, it goes both ways but people always focus on monero's crime use which by the way indirectly hardens the protocol. Most people don't like to say it but it's the truth. The world's highest ranking agencies and billion dollar companies like chanalysis cannot break it, which means it actually works and the reason those actors wanna crack monero is because of some "illicit" usage.
It's an indirect audit being conducted all the time. The best chainanalysis could come up with was running malicious nodes to deanonymize users.
It does go both ways, but the ratio of legitimate to ilegitimate use is important, with banks and law enforcement it's like one in a million. With crypto, crime represents more than half of usage by mcap.
You are missing the entire point. The money itself is fake and artificially generated at will by these authorities. Monero and any major coin has actual value because you can't just create out of thin air. Fiat is on it's edge. Look at monero's price, it's growing at record breaking point. Why? People realize it's true value and anonymity/privacy aspects.
> Your own private bank which cannot interact with most financial institutions and merchants?
That's the whole point. Why would an privacy coin wanna interact with a corrupted banking sector? It's clearly not for you since you can't even see the actual point. You can use the banks, like everyone and let them profile (and sell your data), track and own your whole life.
What is? Not being able to use it for most things? Then how is it a private bank? How is it different from storing money in a safe in your home? Which, by the way, is more useful as you can use it for more things.
> It's clearly not for you since you can't even see the actual point.
That’s a cop-out, and a circular reasoning fallacy. Instead of making a point of why something is useful, you’re dismissing any questions or disagreements as “you don’t get it”. If someone invents a toilet which instead of flushing sends your dejects all over the bathroom, that’s not something people “don’t see the point of”, it’s a bad product. If Monero has a point that we’re missing and you want to defend it, explain what it is.
> You can use the banks, like everyone and let them profile (and sell your data), track and own your whole life.
Ah, yes, fear-mongering and assumptions with just a dash of false dichotomy, the next step in the non-argument. The only options aren’t “don’t use banks at all and be completely private” or “sign up for a bank and let them spy on you in your underwear”. There’s a spectrum. You can buy significantly more things with a bank account than with Monero. In many countries, Monero is the same as nothing. At best you could use it to trade for a regular currency (if you’re lucky), meaning you’re back at square one but with extra steps.
> How do you jump from banks to taxes? Taxes are for the government.
Many reasons to do that jump. I'll give two.
In some countries banks do collect automatically certain taxes that then go to the government. For example in the EU, in Belgium for example, if a stock I owned paid dividends and the bank is the custodian, the bank shall gladly take 30% off the dividends (+ add insane fees on top) and give that money to the government. As a sidenote it's wild that when you receive dividends in some countries you often end up with less than 50% of the actual dividends but I digress.
Still in Belgium: there's now an additional 10% tax on added value (since 2025), in addition to all the other taxes btw, that's always to be paid (say you sell shares of GOOG that went up... Even if you held for years: 10% are due in addition to all the other taxes on added values): and politicians are now wondering if those 10% shouldn't be seized immediately, with the banks collecting the 10% when you sell any equity (stocks/funds) and handing them over to the government. (so by the same mechanism that dividends are already immediately "taxed" by the bank).
"Banks to taxes" is a very real thing. Worldwide, but not in the US, there's the "Common Reporting Standard" (CRS): banks are basically little snitches that transmit all your accounts balances to the local IRSes. Which komrades shall hail has great progress but I digress again.
In addition to that banks have to comply with KYC/AML rules and are expected to do a certain amount of SAR (Suspicious Activity Report) to the government. Government which typically ain't much interested in crime: it's more interested in collecting money (like in the Al Capone case) on non-paid taxes (and the fines that go with it too). Ah, that's a third reason to do that jump: banks shall tell the government there's a suspicious activity from that person, governement then comes asking "where's that money coming from and where are the taxes you had to pay on that amount?".
I don't own any Monero but the link between "banks" and "taxes" is very real: I'm not saying it's good or bad. What I'm saying is that there's a very clear link between banks and taxes.
Now, and I'm still digressing, there are cases where the government/IRS ain't allowed to come see your accounts: some companies and individuals, in certain jurisdiction, have very strong protection against that (like actual jail time for bank employees that'd leak customers bank balances to journalists or the IRS). But, worldwide, it's not the norm.
And as I understand Monero, if someone has a balance in Monero on a self-custodian wallet, there's no bank that's going to report the balance to the IRS. Although now in the EU, for example, if you hold Monero on a centralized exchange (like Coinbase, the HN unicorn), then Coinbase shall send to your local IRS your balance of Monero each year to the government (it's a requirement of the MiCA EU legislation).
> Your own private bank which cannot interact with most financial institutions and merchants?
But you can gift $900 000 to the FSF which, itself, shall, I take it, have a way to transform these Monero into a currency that can interact with financial instutions and merchants right?
AIUI there are merchant accepting cryptocurrencies? Maybe not Monero but, still AIUI, you can use a decentralized exchange to convert Monero to another cryptocurrency the merchant accepts?
…except they are a rather small hardware startup, there is a dozen other rather small hardware startups they did not buy, and there will be more such startups funded just on the news that NVIDIA bought one at a big premium.
I understand your line of reasoning, but the net effect is that any competition will be eliminated. Those startups that are not posing a real threat don't count anyways.
Hardware startups are not easy. If the effect is that the most likely way to make money is to be bought by the behemoth, then this distorts the market even more and suffocates innovation.
If you want to say "Enforcing regulation equals censorship", that is fine by me. For many, there could be a difference between them, as they reserve censorship to unjust regulation.
That would be a matter of linguistics, and I can't say which of both definitions is true.
Ok but the parent commentator invoked a contract. If there is no consent there is no contract. Simply stating that one is bound by laws isn't a justification, it's just an observation.
Is that on theoretical or practical grounds? I would love to learn how you would approach the challenge (no snark). I feel lots of developers miss the needed background, pour in a lot of work and then be stuck with it. How can we avoid that?
Is there some settled science, some principles and patterns in distributed security? Like, you want A, now you can only have option 1 or 2. But if you want B too, this only leaves you with option 2, provided you satisfy D too. But the combo D+B rules out any E.
No, there's no science to it at all; it's just a collective action problem. You saw it in Matrix's effort to get all their clients encrypted by default (they were hamstrung by an installed base of popular clients that didn't work that way), and again in the response to Nebuchadnezzar.
That sounds like a social problem again. What foundational materials would you recommend to read though for anyone trying to build something secure and non-centralized? It is a pity that everyone spends a lot of effort in this area, only to learn they did it wrong and having to deal with unfortunate design decisions. That is, if they are honest about it.
You can build secure and noncentralized! What you can't do is build secure and federated, where everyone lives in a shared, broadly reachable namespace comprised of independently operated instances.
I simply wouldn't build a secure group message system to begin with. It's a treacherously hard problem and the very few people who have done it well accomplished that with major UX compromises that put them at long-term disadvantage against schlock like Telegram, and survived mostly due to force-of-nature word of mouth.
If you're going to try, and you want to be rigorous about it, I'd say you need to start by reading the whole history of cryptanalyses of secure messaging systems, even systems you don't care about. Read the papers carefully and work out the attacks for yourself. It's a little like math in that you're only going to figure it out by actually working the examples yourself.
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