Russian-American ballerina Ksenia Karelina has pleaded guilty to treason charges after she was arrested for donating money to a charity supporting Ukraine.
Russian prosecutors are seeking a 15-year sentence after the security services accused Ms Karelina of collecting money that was used to purchase tactical supplies for the Ukrainian army.
She was detained by authorities in Yekaterinburg, about 1,600km (1,000 miles) east of Moscow after a family visit in February.
The sentence comes one week after Russia and the West carried out the largest prisoner exchange since the Cold War, where 24 people jailed in seven different countries were exchanged.
Ms Karelina’s lawyer said the prosecutors’ request for a 15-year sentence in a penal colony was too severe as the defendant had cooperated with the investigation.
Mikhail Mushailov also said it was “impossible” for Ms Karelina to have been included in the recent prisoner exchange, because an exchange can only happen once the court verdict comes into force.
When people ask why we need digital money with high privacy guarantees, this is why.
Taler, credit cards, money transfers… all allow have the structure to allow this to happen.
I’d consider any of the current cryptocurrencies to be overall failures. They’re a way for tech-bros to piss away money on “investments” and for Chinese-owned mining firms to make a profit at the expense of the environment.
I agree that an anonymous digital currency is a fantastic idea, but how do you keep it from just turning into another Bitcoin?
Removed by mod
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/cryptocurrency/
We focus on the attributes of possible solutions, and use it for transactions.
The page you linked talks about privacy, but it makes no mention of abuse by investors or the environmental impact of miners.
Nobody will deny that cryptocurrency is good for privacy, but that doesn’t negate all of its damaging aspects.
Most crypto-currencies are horrible for privacy, as every transaction is public and is permanently linked to a specific wallet. So the only privacy preserving aspect is that it isn’t always easily possible to link a wallet to a person. One slip-up linking a payment to a person (like giving an address to ship for example, having your device confiscated, or you know… exchanging fiat money at a legal exchange) and all your past transactions can be linked to you easily.
Most, Except Monero which the privacy guide link talks about.
You want a stablecoin linked to USD that doesn’t have price manipulation
E.g. https://ethglobal.com/showcase/zkcoin-sb6dz
Modern blockchains use energy efficient proof of stake, not wasteful proof of work.
nano uses very little energy, I’ve heard some claims that it uses less per transaction than SEPA. combine it with the privacy of Monero and now the only problem is volatility.
True, but it beats 15 years in a russian jail.
FUD regarding Taler. This kind of thing is exactly what could not be traced with a Taler based payment.
https://taler.net/en/kyc.html
Remember the threat in this scenario is the authoritarian government with full banking authority to legally inspect all transactions, as well as token timings.
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding how Taler works. Yes KYC exists for it, but the exchange can only know that you exchanged money for Taler token, not what you spend them on. And on a cross-border payment like this the government doesn’t have “full banking authority” either.
https://taler.net/files/taler-book.pdf
2.2.1 Exchange Compromise modes
If the exchange is inside of Russia, which for a Russian user with a Russian bank account, seems likely, these compromise methods can be used by the central authority to deanonymize wallets created from the Russian Exchange.
The Taler defense against this is the Auditor system, but when the compromise is being done by the central authority its moot.
Not even to mention the 2.2.3 Perfect Crime Scenario revocation method.
The most likely scenario is people are going to mint coins EXACLTY when they want to spend them, so just looking at the exchange timing and the spend timing is enough to reveal most users… to the central authority.
Taler is designed from the ground up to crack down on illegal business activities, which is fine until the central authority deciding the illegal business activity is something we disagree with (like funding human rights related relief in a war zone)
I do agree that Taler is better for privacy then credit cards, but it wouldn’t help our ballerina, if your spending can put you in jail or get you killed, Taler is not appropriate for the threat model
Ok, can you please quote the exact part in those two sections that would allow to deanonymize the payer of a specific transaction?
I read both sections you mentioned, and 2.2.1 only seems to have one rare case where the merchant is a fake honeypot and the exchange is totally compromised, which clearly wouldn’t be the case in our scenario, where the merchant is in another country and the attacker doesn’t know either the merchant nor the customer in advance. And 2.2.3 talks about a hypothetical modification of GNU Taler,
which would be incompatible with the version the merchant in another country is using(and anyways tries to deanonymize the merchant and not the customer),and again afaik wouldn’t work retroactivelyEdit: would need to be done while transaction is in process, and aims to catch a merchant that forced someone to pay anonymously in a ransom case or so (meaning the payer is already known or at least suspected). And this would also be massively disruptive to all other customers of the same exchange.This is not possible retroactively, and any exchange doing that would be quickly detected and not accepted by the merchant which is not under control of the government because they are based in another country. Edit: Basically for this to work, the exchange, the auditor and the merchant would need to be under full control of the hostile government and the system actively compromised before the transaction takes place.
We disagree on the primitives of the architecture clearly. To my (self stylized) reasonable opinion the primitives are such that I cannot recommend Taler to anyone where their spending puts their Life or Liberty at risk, such as the good Ballerina in this sad story.