for one, the base currency in question is uncensorable. e.g. I for one find it detestable that fruits and nuts sellers in Iran suffer immensely because of US sanctions. The idea that innocent citizens are being made to suffer for their governments policy (especially in more authoritarian countries) is gross. I see it akin to punishing a child for their parents behavior.
It was illegal to protect jews from being enslaved and murdered not too long ago. Evading the law is exactly why it's important and it is the ethically superior position to support tools that enable people to bypass unethical laws.
if you sanction Iran, limiting their fruit sellers, you have to have means to track the trades in order to enforce those sanctions - lightening network is effectively untraceable at the moment (and tools built on top of bitcoin can make tracing payments provably impossible) which means the sanctions can't be easily enforced - no country is going to spend resources proving their businesses aren't doing fruit trades with sanctioned countries, so if you can't trace the money, you're going to have an incredibly hard time enforcing sanctions - which I would suggest means Iranian fruit sellers aren't going to be nearly as limited in their trade. Iran certainly isn't going to limit them and the sanctioning country (US in this example) isn't going to have the resources to audit every single import to every other country.
I don't think it's as hard as you think to track ships. They're all tracked already
Government will adapt and just ban shipping vessels from visiting sanctioned countries, or create a vast make work agency to inspect cargo on ships that visited sanctioned countries.
and who is going to track those ships? The sanctioning country doesn't have the jurisdiction and likely doesn't have the resources to logistically stop it. The countries benefiting from the trade (both sanctioned and allied nations) have every incentive to allow the trade to happen if it can happen without detection - so who is going to stop it?
The physical fruits and nuts still have to be smuggled out of Iran and into a country supporting the sanctions for this to make sense. And the physical smuggling seems way more difficult than figuring out the payments.
They have to be smuggled INTO another country. One that has applied sanctions and doesn’t want Iran’s fruits and nuts. Violating import laws especially for agricultural products is a big deal.
no country _wants_ to reduce trade - they simply accept that sanctions are necessary. Reducing trade necessarily hurts both countries, and there aren't likely to be any functioning developed countries that want to act against their own interests. As such, it's not at all hard to imagine the receivers having a hard time enforcing sanctions. After all, with all the problems a country has - why would they dedicate time and resources to purposefully hurt their own?
If the countries wanted to accept the fruits and nuts, they wouldn’t need bitcoin for payments. They would do the usual trade processes. They have outlawed imports from Iran and bitcoin doesn’t change the fact that circumventing agricultural import laws is a massive crime.
incorrect, those imports paid in fiat are traceable - that's how we enforce sanctions today - we fine companies like banks for violating sanctions all the time - you know how they're caught? Financial audits, every time.
Companies use proxy countries to bypass sanctions all the time. You know how they're caught? Financial audits.
> change the fact that circumventing agricultural import laws is a massive crime
I'm not sure how people so easily forget that it was a massive crime to protect jews from being murdered. That same thing still happens today with various minority groups around the world.
If you pay attention to non-developed world problems, you become painfully aware that bypassing laws that are a "massive crime" is extremely important for solving some of the worst problems in humanity today.
Humans make mistakes. Systems that intend to serve humans have to accommodate that flaw in order to be viable. Fixing mistakes means rewriting history. That means censorship. And so censorship isn't a bad thing. It's actually a core requirement for any system designed for broad usage.
Flawed logic, censorship can be a mistake just like anything else. Adding the ability to fix mistakes with censorship also adds the ability to make mistakes with censorship. Censorship, however is centralized power and therefore trades fixing small scale mistakes with the centralized power to make big mistakes. This is why western society and individual liberties have been so dominant in modern history. Authoritarian societies have fallen one after another, further evidence that it is incorrect to treat centralization as something other than a bad tradeoff.
limiting peoples ability to trade isn't justice anymore than limiting their ability to speak. Sure you could conveniently stop many crimes if you could just monitor and censor everyone's ability to speak - but I think the consequences are quite obvious.
There isn't a crime in the world that can't be stopped in more appropriate ways than giving an authority presence the ability to stop me or anyone else from spending resources that they own. Nowhere on the list of top crimes against humanity have there been situations where it would've been better if centralized powers had more authority.
Authority is a fundamental and underlying requirement of essentially all aspects of civil society, including but not limited to justice. There is actually no way to define even the concept of crime without an appeal to a supervisory authority.
Authority, and specifically "centralized" authority, is a necessary component of any system that can effectively serve more than a nominal quantity of human beings.
> Authority, and specifically "centralized" authority, is a necessary component of any system that can effectively serve more than a nominal quantity of human beings.
It would seem bitcoin, a global, massively successful cryptocurrency with no centralized authority, serving as a sovereign nations national currency, serving markets all over the world to the order of trillions of dollars would be one of many direct contradictions to your claim.
Neither the fact that the failed state of Venezuela has made some moves towards Bitcoin, nor the amount of nonproductive/wash volume that crypto does per day or whatever, serve as counterpoints to my claim.
Currency had an actual definition, expressed in terms of other actual things. It's not just whatever you say it is, or whatever someone might use to perform an economic activity.
Additionally, Bitcoin is plainly not "massive successful". It is at best "marginally utilized".
The internet does not scale in layers. This sounds more like Bitcoin is not scalable, so we're introducing abstractions to work around its limitations.
Scaling is not a goal of the OSI model, and TCP/IP predates (and does not adhere to) the OSI model anyway. For insight into how and why this came about, I recommend Padlipsky's "The Elements of Networking Style."
Those layers are different levels of abstraction that actually sit on top of one another, but encompass the lower layers.
e.g. HTTP, SMTP, POP3, etc., all sit on top of TCP — that is to say: all of those protocols actually use TCP, they are TCP, they are all made from TCP packets/communications.
TCP sits on top of IP, that is to say: all TCP packets are in fact IP packets.
They are layers of abstraction, and each layer of abstraction is not just 'related' to the lower layer(s), or 'referencing' the lower layer(s) once in a while, each of those upper layers is in fact an instance of the lower layer.
At the bottom, it's all IP. The higher layers aren't substitutes for IP that get turned into IP when necessary, they are all IP.
If your comparison was valid, then protocols such as e.g. HTTP wouldn't actually be valid TCP packets and valid IP packets, instead HTTP would be completely separate to the lower levels it is built upon, and at some point it would be converted back and forth to the other protocols. Which is not what happens.
If your comparison was valid, then all L2 cryptotoken transactions would actually simultaneously /be/ blockchain transactions — and not just written back to it periodically.
Edit:
Here's an analogy: it's like IP protocol is letters, those letters can be grouped into words, which is the next layer up, e.g. TCP, UDP, etc., and those words can be grouped into sentences, which are like the higher level protocols, such as HTTP, SMTP, POP3, etc.
Granted, the OSI model also includes lower levels, and I'm only discussing three higher layers, but the principle is the same. The higher levels /encompass/ the lower ones, they are actually built /with/ or /from/ the lower-level components. This isn't how Lighting works. It's a separate distinct network to the main blockchain, and it then writes back to blockchain.
To be quite frank, based upon the fact you think the layers of OSI and TCP/IP are to help it scale, you clearly appear to have little (or no) understanding as to how that actually works — so your direct comparison to LN scaling here isn't just weak, it's meaningless and just plain factually wrong. And this is particularly obvious to folk who /do/ actually understand both.
— Good day to you, your bad logic and your poor argument.
"A really vicious critique of the misguided ISO networking standards attempt, written when the 'OSI model' was trendy & lots of people were babbling about the sacred seven layers."
"The Book": The Elements of Networking Style: And Other Essays & Animadversions of the Art of Intercomputer Networking, by M. A. Padlipsky (1985)
The World's Only Know Constructively Snotty Computer Science Book: historically, its polemics for TCP/IP and against the international standardsmongers' "OSI" helped the Internet happen; currently, its principles of technoaesthetic criticism are still eminently applicable to the States of most (probably all) technical Arts-all this and Cover Cartoons, too but it's not for those who can't deal with real sentences.
Standards: Threat or Menace, p. 193
A final preliminary: Because ISORM is more widely touted than TCP/IP, and hence the clearer present danger, it seems only fair that it should be the target of the nastier of the questions. This is in the spirit of our title, for in my humble but dogmatic opinion even a good proposed Standard is a prima facie threat to further advance in the state of the art, but a sufficiently flawed standard is a menace even to maintaining the art in its present state, so if the ISORM school is wrong and isn't exposed the consequences could be extremely unfortunate. At least, the threat / menace paradigm applies, I submit in all seriousness, to protocol standards; that is, I wouldn't think of being gratuitously snotty to the developers of physical standards -- I like to be able to use the same cap to reclose sodapop bottles and beer bottles (though I suspect somebody as it were screwed up when it came to those damn "twist off" caps) -- but I find it difficult to be civil to advocates of "final," "ultimate" standards when they're dealing with logical constructs rather than physical ones. After all, as I understand it, a fundamental property of the stored program computer is its ability to be reprogrammed. Yes, I understand that to do so costs money and yes, I've heard of ROM, and no I'm not saying that I insist on some idealistic notion of optimality, but definitely I don't think it makes much sense to keep trudging to an outhouse if I can get indoor plumbing . . . even if the moon in the door is exactly like the one in my neighbor's.
Appendix 3, The Self-Framed Slogans Suitable for Mounting
On the occasion of The Book's reissuance, Peter Salus wrote a review in Cisco's Internet Protocol Journal which included the following observations:
Padlipsky brought together several strands that managed to result in the perfect chord for me over 15 years ago. I reread this slim volume (made up of a Foreword, 11 chapters (each a separate arrow from Padlipsky's quiver) and three appendixes (made up of half a dozen darts of various lengths and a sheaf of cartoons and slogans) several months ago, and have concluded that it is as acerbic and as important now as it was 15 years ago. [Emphasis added] The instruments Padlipsky employs are a sharp wit (and a deep admiration for François Marie Arouet), a sincere detestation for the ISO Reference Model, a deep knowledge of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET)/Internet, and wide reading in classic science fiction.
In a lighter vein, The Book has been called "... beyond doubt the funniest technical book ever written."
TCP has stronger consistency guarantees, and worse performance, than the underlying IP network. Doing it the other way around is usually considered an anti-pattern [1].
