You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: [Dear Steemit] An Open Letter to Steemit Inc.
You raise some viable points here. although really nothing new that hasn't been said before. The one that nonetheless gets my attention is that KYC part..i don't see that happening, for the obvious reason that the blockchain itself, the little i know, its allure is in large part owed to the privacy/anonymity aspect of it. Put KYC, and the disadvantages far outweigh those resulting from not having it.
Thanks, I do realise there's nothing particularly new in there, but I feel like I need to make my stance clear.
I disagree, but respect your perspective. To me, anonymity on a valueless platform isn't worth it. KYC and regulation is inevitable in my eyes for cryptocurrency to really take off. There are already blockchains orientated towards privacy, and anonymity isn't mentioned anywhere in the Steem whitepapers that I've seen. Steem isn't considered a privacy oriented coin or platform, so it doesn't seem like a valid enough reason to me. Users can still be anonymous to each other if that's the concern, however if it's anonymity from authorities, Steemit isn't the place for that. I haven't heard a viable alternative solution to this growing problem yet.
I appreciate your input though and thanks for reading.
Ideally all you say is true, i only fear those Steem INC guys don't seem to listen. But yes, you made your stance clear. Personally i have previously opined on some of these issues, and overall, i am of the opinion that a lot many technical tweaks need to be effected to deradicalize user behavior.
Thanks for your response.
Yeah, that's a good point, a lot of what I say is quite idealized. The lack of proper response from Steemit on these issues is probably my greatest concern.
An interesting point someone raised with me last week was that if these big whale accounts who act terribly and hide behind anonymity had that anonymity striped from them, well their behavior would be very different. It's part of the reason I use my full name on social media accounts, to remind me that just because there's a couple of screens and wires between us, we're still just people. It's all too tempting to call someone a c*nt when there doesn't seem to be real repercussions.
I'm against KYC as my anonymity protects my freedom of speech and having my real name attached to my account would greatly decrease the amount of topics I could write about. I would have to start censoring myself.
Thanks for giving me your reason, first to kinda quantify it! What makes you say that though? What kind of topics would you be unable to talk about? I can understand someone from a country like China needing to take such things into consideration, but we live in countries where freedom of speech exists.
I really appreciate your perspective.
My government can and sometimes does limit its citizens' freedom of expression. Its written right in Canada's Charter with the terminology so broad that all that needs to be done is have a law passed through the Supreme Court to limit rights.
Also, just because it may be ok to speak on a certain topic now, doesn't mean that it will also be ok to talk about it in the future. Anything posted especially on blockchain technology will last a long time. My concern is that we may get in trouble for something that was written previously years before.
My PM and his ministers has already labelled Canadians questioning the course of the current government as Islamophobic, deplorable and unCanadian. What happens when it goes beyond name-calling?
That takes away religion, politics, news, NWO, immigration, philosophy and opinion as topics.
There is also the issue of freedom of association. There is an old saying that mentions that "birds of a feather, flock together which means that people tend to form groups and spend plentiful time with people who resemble them and are much alike them, or have similar tastes, traits and moral qualities. While this is not necessarily true, I can imagine one being judged by who are their steemit friends.
Next there is the concern of the possible retribution of one's employer. The division between one's work and private life is getting ever-increasingly blurred. It's getting to the point that a company's codes of conduct controls one's life outside of the office.
That fear takes away even more topics to discuss. Finance and crypto-currency come too mind.
My thoughts are that we have the right to be anonymous when online. Anonymity is necessary in a free society. In the US, anonymity of penmanship of political articles is one of the cornerstones that formed the structure of their country (see The Federalist Papers). The purpose was to avoid personalities and personal attacks upon the authors. A person disagreeing with an anonymous statement could not attack it by saying that the author was corrupt, rather the person had to respond to the arguments made in the publication. This idea still holds true today. Every freedom has a price that must be paid, internet trolls, while annoying and tedious, are a very reasonable price to pay for the freedom of expressing an idea without fear of reprisal or detraction from substance.
I believe that there is a way to remove/silence the trolls without removing anonymity which is a reason that I joined steemit. Removing the flagging feature from users until they receive a certain rep level may help.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on the subject. I appreciate the opportunity to share my perspective. Thanks.