Indeed. There's a huge difference between one or several actions and habitual behavior. You can find a method to get away with anything once. Operating on a daily basis where the government only has to catch you once is far less practical.

This is true for lots of virtuous acts or acts of survival under authoritative regimes, such as hiding Jews from the Nazis or selling your surplus harvest under Stalin. It’s only if you are privileged (or, arguably, ignorant) to not consider on balance the counterfactual costs of undermining technologies which could de-risk such acts for those being oppressed. (Which may include a future-you.)

Alternately, people who accurately understand the technology and the environment in which it is used might be speaking up against a system which is designed to endanger those people.

Using people subject to these risks in service of MLM recruitment pitches is not a moral good.

Thank you for stating your assumption all your opponents are acting out of either malevolence or bad faith. This transparency is often useful for people trying to make sense of which side of an argument has merit.

Kind of like when you accuse anyone pointing out the holes in your argument of being ignorant or apparently unconcerned by atrocities? At this point, anyone promoting blockchains for things which they are known to be unsuitable does need to establish that they are acting in good faith and do not have financial conflicts of interest.

> Kind of like when you accuse anyone pointing out the holes in your argument of being ignorant or apparently unconcerned by atrocities?

Yes! This is exactly the kind of behavior you did in your previous post. I'm glad you acknowledge it.

Of course, I did not do what you state here, since I wasn't actually responding to anyone nor were there any "holes in my argument" since I didn't even make an argument being refuted. (I entered this thread here far down the chain of the discussion, if you actually read it.) But it's cool to see that if I had done something like accusing people of such things without any substantive retorts, you'd agree your behavior was the same kind of dodge.

So where I see “It’s only if you are privileged (or, arguably, ignorant) to not consider…” in your comment, that was written by someone else?

No, I wrote that, but it wasn't responding to anyone. I was making a general point that failing to consider counterfactuals regarding such technology is an error. You seem to think I was responding to someone who "pointed out holes" in an argument I made. You're imagining this entirely. It's a cool hallucination though, I wonder why you're having it. As best I can tell its utility rests entirely on it giving you an opening to accuse me of hypocrisy for pointing out your presumption of bad faith and malevolence in others. Look at how far you've managed to take us afield using it! Neato.

From the HN guidelines: Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Whether it's morally worth it is a separate point. I was just stating that it wouldn't be especially difficult for the government of China to find, disable, and arrest the operators of large-scale long-range wifi networks.