[CFRG] Bitcoin delenda est. Was: Escalation: time commitment to fix *production* security bugs for BLS RFC v4?

As a human being living on a planet threatened by environmental damage from
CO2 emissions, I am strongly opposed to any IETF work to support any form
of purported 'cryptocurrency' that relies on any form of 'proof of work' or
'proof of waste'.

The electricity requirements of cryptocurrencies have been larger than that
of entire countries. This is an experiment that it is time to stop.

I am entirely serious in this position.

Besides the environmental issues, there is the fact that the
crypto-currency community has consistently failed to establish any
effective means of preventing the endemic frauds in their systems.
Fraudulent exchanges regularly steal money from their customers.
Applications developed by individuals with minimal expertise are used for
transfers of vast quantities of fictional cash with no effective oversight
and this results in further frauds.

The cryptocurrency community has a long history of misrepresenting the
engagement of parties with established reputations as endorsing their
'product'. And this presents real risk to the IETF when the least
objectionable use of the product in question is to evade currency controls.
Cryptocurrency became popular as a means of paying for illegal drugs and
has since become the enabler for ransomware.

The cryptocurrency world has no shortage of people who will trash anyone
criticizing their activities as 'stupid', 'uninformed', 'need to do some
research'. Fine, let them sort their own messes out.

IETF should take no action that risks a headline 'IETF endorses
cryptocurrency'. If the ransomware, child abuse and Ponzi scheme industries
have a problem as a result of a bad technology decision, we should not lift
a finger to save them.

The only conversations I want to have on cryptocurrencies is with
government regulators looking for ways to regulate these criminal
facilitation enterprises out of existence as they previously did with
eGold, Gold Age and BTC's very long line of predecessors which like BTC
were entirely different but completely the same.

On Sat, Apr 24, 2021 at 10:57 AM Salz, Rich <rsalz=
40akamai.com@dmarc.ietf.org> wrote:

> >    There may be one way: holding implementers accountable.
>
> >    They relied on a draft. As such, they took a gamble. Now they lost
> that
>     gamble, and gambling ethics dictates that they pay up.
>
> Yes.  Strongly agree that this is the best approach.  This is a *DRAFT*
> It would be like implementing Rijndael and then complaining that it has
> bugs and isn't AES.
>
> Contact the people who developed and put things into production.
>
>
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