Sure. I’m guessing the equation in people’s minds probably went something like “Well we know donating to Navalny through a bank might be dangerous. What about this crypto thing? I hear that’s supposed to be anonymous and decentralized. Well shit looks like I have to sign up with this Binance company to get started. Good thing they’re not based in Russia. I guess I just have to donate and pray since there are no other good options.”
Remember we’re talking about incredibly brave freedom fighters here. People risking everything try to make a difference under a repressive dictator. Like CanadaMatt says, we should be demanding more of companies and rightly excoriating them for stuff like this. Binance should be shamed out of the crypto world if they actually turned over the data. Something like that would give me a lot more faith in the movement. Beetlejuice repeatedly calling Navalny a terrorist as a justification is sickening. I don’t care if it’s pure trolling.
Imagine DeSantis was president for 16 years and the USA is exactly as Russia is today. Where this type of dissent is literally illegal. Would you feel safe buying bitcoin on PayPal and sending that bitcoin to Eugene Debbs Jr’s political action fund THROUGH PayPal? Would you be confident the fascist thugs running the government would never find out? That’s essentially what’s going on.
You’re not “using crypto” to fund Eugene Debbs Jr’s noble fight for justice, you’re using PayPal. PayPal is licensed by the government and operates there under the condition that they follow the laws (however horrible those laws may be in terms of true objective justice). if your government decides Eugene Debbs Jr is a terrorist guess what you just did?
now, if you actually wanted to use crypto to support your guy and to fight the tyrants, you buy crypto from wherever and send it to a private wallet. then from there, no one can fully nail you down as spending that money. you can say you sent it to a guy selling a bag of oranges on the side of the road. and if mr oranges wants to fund terrorists, well that’s on him. that’s how crypto enables people to freely use capital against a tyrannical government. if you put your name on accounts that are doing shit your government doesn’t like, that government can trace it to you and punish you in any number of unjust ways. it’d be unjust, i agree! but getting caught like that is such a dumb move. it’d be like sending a bank transfer to your drug dealer instead of getting cash at an atm and handing it over
so i’m more, like, disappointed at the idea that people still don’t “get” what crypto is about. and i don’t mean you guys itt i mean like real world, russian residents sending navalny money through accounts they’ve KYC’d. they blew it. they had an opportunity and didn’t use it correctly, and now they’re just as exposed as if they donated to navalny by any other method aside from cash handoffs.
Hardcore crypto bros have despised companies like Binance and Coinbase for years precisely because of the scenarios that Suzzer describes.
Normie crypto nerds don’t really care because they’re not freedom fighters in it for the overthrowal of government. They mostly like nfts, metaverses, defi, memes and twitter/discord shitposting.
Edit: and I think most people here fall into the 2nd category which is why the reaction is mainly lol whatever.
I have a Binance account. In order to open it I needed to provide them with my name, a valid address and phone number, a picture of my passport, and a selfie of me holding that passport. They do this because the jurisdictions they serve require it under Know Your Customer regulations. I can’t imagine anybody who went through that process had any expectations of privacy on that platform from their own government.
Is this really a claim these days? lol at a created finite commodity with designed anonymity doing anything else than exactly what its been doing. “Just give us another ten years and we will finally solve all of that nasty p̶u̶r̶p̶o̶s̶e̶f̶u̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶d̶e̶s̶i̶g̶n̶e̶d crime-ridden behavior to give you the confidence to help instill trust that your NFT with snugglepuss colored hair is worth every penny.”
If you want to evade the government you use Monero on a hardware wallet. Sorry if totally evading government capital controls requires half an hour of due diligence. But also, I own a hardware wallet (a Trezor) and I briefly used Binance and I found the latter more annoying to set up and use. The interface sucks and as zikzak mentions, there was tedious KYC hoop-jumping.
@suzzer99 , I think there’s still a misunderstanding. There’s crypto, and there’s the exchanges. There’s a difference between them. If you’re going to trade a fiat currency for crypto, then you need an exchange or you need to buy from a friend and have them transfer crypto to your wallet.
I know you bring up your t-mobile buddy as an example of how crypto is bad, but -
I could give you my phone, my google fi password, my email password, and any other passwords and you still wouldn’t be able to get into my Metamask wallet, which holds some of my crypto and NFTs. You would need either:
a. My metamask password, which is unrecoverable by any means
2. my seed phrase
iii. My literal thumb
If you installed metamask and generated a wallet and bought cyrpto from somebody in the discord with fiat (either in person or with venmo or something), there’s absolutely nothing linking your wallet to you.
To add for any lurkers not sure what the hell is being discussed about any crypto security…Treat you seed phrase as if that held all of your security…checking account #, pin, voice verification in one. Don’t be fooled into entering it into some bullshit site for whatever reason ever. Banks are forced to protect you and pay you back from shit like that - you’re on your own with crypto.
do you think there’s really a metamask (or exodus or etc) box labelled “do NOT hand all my money over to someone” that is unchecked upon installation, and that one has to check it in order to not have their money handed over to someone?
tbf though, one reason your arguments go so sideways here is that your main antagonist, Beetlejuice, thinks crypto was invented in Q2 of 2021 and solely so he could buy cartoon jpegs
whereas somebody like Goofyballer is open about being new, Beetlejuice’s endgame is to be respected by people like you (or some bastardization of respect like a villain might have for a hero and vice versa) and you thinking he’s an OG CRYPTOBRO fits the bill as a consolation prize
so, we have this truly bizarre argument where even though you seem to know very little about crypto, one of your opponents know even less, yet you’re weirdly ascribing this knowledge to them that they’re in no hurry to correct
and it’s results in this fucking disaster
that said most everyone else is sincere and honest so you’re really doing a disservice to them and yourself
yeah lol i’m pretty sure this is true and just to make this fight more fair: they waited like two months to start buying their cartoon jpegs because that’s how long it took to first get over being overwhelmed by metamask and then to figure it out; and they never thought to ask me here even after i bought my topshot basketball baseball cards with ethereum and blew everyone’s mind!
so yeah, all those millions and billions and zillions that Beetlejuice likes trolling you about missing out on? they missed out on even more golden months because “metamask is totes hard”
