by Citizenfive | Dec. 03, 2014, cca 332678

An assertion was made that the $3.5M capital infusion into ChangeTip by Pantera et al could only be explained as an investment into nefarious mass surveillance.

This is invalid for the stated reasons and plenty more. And even if there were plans to sell data, Big Data doesn't cause oppression, big governments do. Big Data significantly benefits consumers, across the board. Being anti-BD while not anti-gun or anti-drugs etc. are not logically compatible views. (People's perceptions of causality are completely fubar, as Logic is no longer taught formally, and rarely picked up naturally.)

Bitcoin is a fix for the bezzle. It disintermediates, and defends against coerced re-intermediation. Much like Tor, it was never a fire-and-forget invisibility cloak.

Understand that in Bitcoin, Tx sanitation will always be a thing. This specific balance of pseudoanonymity was by design.

Anonymity is a right. Rights are asserted, and surrendered. They can neither be granted nor revoked by amendments or puny human “laws”. If you want anonymity, you must assert it. With Bitcoin, that means good wallet hygiene, and solid infosec. That means knowing some protocol-level stuff (aw, hard, I know).

The design and crypto enables Bitcoin to defend itself against “Hydra”, but real cryptoanarchists know that meatspace threats are only indirectly solved by cryptosystems. Bitcoin and blockchains top a short list the key tools in the toolbag, but they're just tools.

So, the original assertion, briefly and by numbers. For one thing, it turns out—if you look—ChangeTip is not advertised as free anyway.

But to indulge a more logical version of the same objection, where could $350M of transactions come from, to break even with funding?

Well, YouTube alone serves up 4 billion viewstreams a day. Right now, the average CPM is below $7.60 and falling. The average top-viewed video is about 4.5 minutes, depending on how you do it.

At that rate, for any given solid block of time on YouTube, you could do it ad-free for the bitcoin equivalent of 10.1 cents. Entirely up to you. And if 0.1% of YouTube views were subsidized by user-optout, that's over $400k a day flowing through ChangeTip.

Just 0.1%, of just the CPM adspace on YouTube, covers the $3.5M in 2.4 years, less burn rate.

Support unSystem and related projects. A ChangeTip is fine too. 「⇒」1KmsWHRPM2kxV99VN8Vgx1gMZqKJ8uDUD4