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Re: [Taler] [address@hidden: 'Oh, that's an idea...': U.S. parents respo


From: Jacob Bachmeyer
Subject: Re: [Taler] [address@hidden: 'Oh, that's an idea...': U.S. parents respond to China screen time ban]
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2021 19:32:28 -0500
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.8.1.22) Gecko/20090807 MultiZilla/1.8.3.4e SeaMonkey/1.1.17 Mnenhy/0.7.6.0

Richard Stallman wrote:
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

[...]

For instance, they would not be able to invent a Taler token that only
whites can obtain, if it is illegal for banks to discriminate based on
race.

This is substantially the concern that you were having trouble understanding. Consider special tokens that vouch for immutable characteristics, such as ethnic background, instead of "this person is an adult" or "this person can buy booze". While you are correct that making racial discrimination by banks illegal would prevent such uses, the abuse potential is not in banks deciding to do this on their own, but governments deciding to abuse the technology to impose this discrimination. In short, the abuse potential here lies with _government_ rather than business.

Using China as contrast again, how about special tokens not available to Uighurs? Once we implement one type of "identity attribute" in Taler, we have no control over governments imposing more such attributes on Taler exchanges in their jurisdictions. Not supporting this at all and standing on the grounds of human rights and the great abuse potential of this feature is, I believe, a more ethical solution. After all, if we could depend on other people to be ethical, Tivoisation would not exist and we would probably still be happily using GPLv2.


-- Jacob



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