Yeah, that would be less worrisome, hope this really is the case here.
EngineerGaming
joined 1 year ago
I thought that was because everyone just bought $3 off-brand ones on Amazon.
I did buy a pair of wireless headphones, but the earbuds are staying wired. The headphones have a large, easy-to-replace battery that lasts a couple of weeks easily - while earbuds don't. Some people might be inconvenienced by having to charge another device. Plus, Bluetooth doesn't have the same audio quality - not as important for me, but might be for some people.
That's just my association with the word "ban" - blocking, because that's what I usually experienced.
It is the free, easy way to get an SSL cert (plus automated renewals). Without it, maybe HTTPS wouldn't have been so omnipresent.
Here quite a few of the popular social media are banned. They're still popular but now every schoolkid, housewife and grandpa knows what a VPN is. Every time I hear such news, I am afraid of crackdowns on censorship evasion in those places too...
Samourai was a Bitcoin wallet attempting to improve the currency's privacy. Its devs were arrested this year.
Localmonero was a platform where people could post listings for buying or selling Monero without KYC. There was also an identical sister site Agoradesk for Bitcoin. They abruptly shut down this year, probably afraid of similar prosecution (it happened pretty soon after the Samourai case).
Chainalysis is a company that US government works with, attempting to track and deanonymize crypto transactions. Recently a presentation of theirs leaked, disclosing some of their methods (which were very interesting for the Monero community in particular).
I used to use Vanced but switched to Newpipe, as it is noticeably lighter (also at least for me, downloads did not properly work while they were fine on Newpipe).
Not all people are rich enough to have iPhones. And if you really want privacy, you wouldn't go for one anyway, instead choosing Graphene/Divest/Lineage. Not to mention iMessage is fully closed-source so you cannot even trust it to do what it does. I have issues wirh Signal, but at least I would take it over iMessage any day.
I highly doubt that "ending crypto crackdown" would mean guaranteeing safety for projects like Samourai or Localmonero. Or ending the relationship with Chainalysis.
To be fair, the idea of "alternative to banking" is still very much alive. BTC and LTC are very much used as currencies, even though BTC has fees too high for small transactions. Monero was developed specifically with utility rather than investment in mind - now reading about how exactly anonymity is enforced there (especially after the Chainalysis leaks), it's pretty interesting. I kinda hope we invent something better than blockchain-based currencies that is equivalent in uncensorability, but right now it's the closest we got.
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No. If I had money to spend on media, "affordable legal streaming services" would NOT stop me from pirating. Broad availability of DRMless media purchases would.