The actual list of "suspicious activities" in the article is about pooling, structuring, delaying transactions -- the stuff you do to hide activity, whether for good or bad.
It says nothing whatsoever about self-custody. The author makes the imaginary leap because they say they personally recommend doing all those things with self-custody. But they're totally separate things.
So as far as I can tell, the headline is just false clickbait.
They also claim:
> If enacted, any user who leverages these tools will be flagged as a suspicious... and could potentially be sent to prison.
I don't think that's the case? Having a transaction considered suspicious doesn't send you to prison. At best it seems like traditional banks might not permit a transaction, or it could be used as supporting evidence for separate actual illegal activities like money laundering? But going to prison requires being convicted of an actual crime. Not just activity that is "suspicious".
The draft text explicitly bans single-use addresses, which are used by any self-respecting wallet (Exodus, Ledger, Trezor) these days.
The actual problem with the article/headline is that the "Patriot Act" has expired. Although I'm sure there are plenty of similarly vague laws that could be used to justify this.
What text are you referring to? The article has a screenshot of a tweet with a screenshot of an excerpt that seems fair to paraphrase as "anyone behaved in this sort of activity is suspicious." I don't see anything about a ban and if you're only using single-use addresses that seems probably not suspicious in absence of all the other things which if you're doing all of them, seem objectively like they can only be described as money laundering.
If you've got nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about!
Nobody will ever run afoul of the system or fall through the cracks.
We only have the best and brightest bureaucrats who won't make mistakes.
Nobody will ever be attacked with this for politicized reasons.
This will never be used to debank or isolate or penalize or attack an innocent person.
And even if it did, the government would never use its immunity from prosecution to evade accountability!
Don't be paranoid, and don't worry! We're the good guys!
> If you've got nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about!
We curtail commercial speech relative to political speech to protect against fraud. Regulating financial activity is deeply precedented, especially in contexts where whether it's an individual person or group of people is ambiguated.
> The author makes the imaginary leap because they say they personally recommend doing all those things with self-custody.
It is because if you can't do those things, bitcoin has no use. Its only functions are to dodge laws and transfer money, and it's bad at transferring money.
That is an attack on self-custody. If you hold Bitcoin you now have an elevated risk of being picked up in some dragnet and suffering random consequences in unrelated parts of the financial system for reasons that you don't understand. If Bitcoin holders weren't alerted by articles like this, there is actually a pretty reasonable chance that they go in, experiment with Bitcoin and trip off a surveillance system as being "suspicious".
It is unlikely that we know what the penalties for suspicious transactions are in the US legal system. That seems like a matter that should have come before FISA Court at some point so we won't see public records of what the case law is. Even if it hasn't the actual workings of the financial control the US exercises aren't exactly secret but they also aren't exactly easy to follow.
> If you hold Bitcoin you now have an elevated risk of being picked up in some dragnet and suffering random consequences in unrelated parts of the financial system for reasons that you don't understand
This is exxageration. If you operate a cash business, you're under the same heightened supervision.
>> That is an attack on self-custody. If you hold Bitcoin you now have an elevated risk of being picked up in some dragnet and suffering random consequences in unrelated parts of the financial system for reasons that you don't understand.
This is based on the idea that there is some exception from previous rules and regulations. Before Bitcoin existed, lots of these rules were formulated. Now Bitcoin is on the scene and has evolved best practices for self-custody that ignore everything that went before. Bitcoin becoming more popular and integrated means that the rules from US financial system will start to be applied.
There is no surprise in this. If more effort was put into mitigating the concerns of the US financial system (or others) then things like this wouldn't happen. However, the truth is that the philosophies are incompatible so it's just a war of attrition that will unsurprisingly result in conformance to US financial regulation.
Bitcoin maximalists are learning that having a non-fungible and fully traceable ledger might be a problem. Even Satoshi called this out! As is, BTC is somewhat of a privacy nightmare. All of your transactions are on the public ledger for anyone with basic knowledge of statistics to correlate and see all of your transactions. Blockchain Analytics is big business!
All the things the Treasury is considering to be "suspicious activity" simply can't be tracked with something that's non-fungible and untracable like Monero. This suspicious activity - aka privacy - is just how all monero transactions are done.
That assumes Bitcoin maximalists ultimately see it as a means of transaction. The ones I come across in the wild are purely maximalists for speculative purposes and couldn’t care less about the “practical” use cases for it.
Replace "store of value" and "protection against inflation" with "investment" or "number go up" and see what it does to most of discourse around Bitcoin.
Not saying anything new here, but at the core there are only a few key reasons for using bitcoin: investment, hiding your finances, and the idealism of de-centralization.
The intrinsic value of decentralization is the ability to operate outside any fiat system of laws or government. So that one lines up a lot with the criminal side of hiding your finances. The investment aspect sure is enticing to lots of folks, but without a real core underlying value it's just bubbles and rug-pulls. So all this has the effect, wittingly or not, of lining up the incentives of all BTC users with money launderers.
Sure there are TONS of perfectly legal reasons not to want people to track your finances. Many of them are even moral. But obviously many are neither moral nor legal. (The edge case of moral but illegal sure gets people fired up, but it's a vanishing minority of actual use.) So when the regulators come looking for criminals, we unsurprisingly get lots of sound and fury about how there are lots of perfectly valid reasons why good people will want to act in ways that make them look like criminals. Uh huh. Yes, there sure are.
But with Monero, you see that it is effectively shut off from the Fiat ecosystem entirely. The proposal here clearly lays out how bad Bitcoin is for privacy. But it's not like the more private alternatives are actually allowed to be viable alternatives.
ironically, the inconvenience of exchanging Monero for fiat helps Monero be used as an actual currency. rather than exchanging Monero for cash and then buying things with cash, Monero is exchanged for the things itself.
Yeah. I understand the excitement over the past two decades about the possibility of cryptocurrencies, but it came with a lot of naivete. After the fight to create sovereign central banks, did anyone seriously think that they were just going to give it up? Sure, maybe they can't stop you technologically, but it's very easy to simply make it unlawful, and then the men (and robots) with guns call.
Very true. In my opinion, and strictly from an American-centric view, privacy should only extend to transactions within borders between citizens. As soon as it involves transactions from outside our borders, then it is a national security concern. We know, right now, that both Russia and China are fueling internal political tension via massive and sophisticated disinformation/influence campaigns, a certain part of which involves paying influencers, extremists, shady media outlets, maybe a Representative or three in America to push their agendas, foment discontent aiming to destabilize and control the United States. Monero is definitely being used in this information warfare. I am pro-privacy, pro- individual rights, but we have to resolve this central tension of these things and the very real hyper connected world we live in which very real nation-state enemies. I am at the point where I think restricting the internet to allied countries might actually be a good idea, as currently we are leaving citizens unprotected from every nation-state actor who wishes to manipulate us with targeted, data-analytic, bot- and ai-empowered campaign against us. It is out of control, and as long as a monetary instrument like crypto enables that attack surface, it will be hard for me to support crypto-maxamialism.
> a certain part of which involves paying influencers, extremists, shady media outlets, maybe a Representative or three in America to push their agendas, foment discontent aiming to destabilize and control the United States.
Doesn't this describe every political party and megacorp in the US too...?
One of the biggest platforms this happens through is Reddit, and they intentionally leave it wide open. You don’t even have to have an email address to register and start posting. Bots make these platforms a fortune, and they’re happy to sell out their country to foreign influence for a dime.
So yes, and I’ve been saying this since it started really getting bad in 2020, we need to completely cut enemies of the US off from our internet. There will obviously be attempts to proxy through western countries, so it needs to be strictly enforced, possibly with an identity requirement for participants.
For those against this, imagine a physical country where anyone can spawn thousands of faceless, nameless drones disguised as real people which are free to do whatever they want in society with zero risk of consequences. What would happen to that country? It would fall. As digital societies have now become larger than countries themselves, this is the very situation we’re dealing with. It’s not the utopia we hoped for, but it will be a dystopia unless action is taken.
Monero has already been delisted from relevant exchanges last year because "reasons".
The main website that matched people to trade fiat for monero (localmonero) got closed recently because "reasons".
It is pretty popular and outlawed since a while. Basically the only relevant crypto currency used for purchases on the street since several years now. You can look up the number of daily on-chain transactions and tends to be on top every day.
You likely would only notice this if you need to donate money for someone with the wrong opinions or live at a non-aligned country.
I'd argue the opposite - if Bitcoin had been created with secure private transactions (untraceability) it would be in the same popular position it is today, but the attacks on it (chain analysis etc) would be failing instead of inevitably marching forward.
Your argument seems to rely on an assumption that the insecurity of Bitcoin has been legible and apparent to the [greater] government for most of Bitcoin's life, and so the government allowed it to gain popularity knowing those insecurities would eventually make it succumb to government control. But in general government sees any lack of identification/data as a problem to be rectified, and the popular wisdom for quite some time has been that Bitcoin is "anonymous". so I'd say the government acted as quick as it would have regardless of the actual security properties. It feels like any holding off had more to do with financial lucrativeness rather than an understanding of its long term security flaws.
Now that we're here though, Bitcoin does seem like a very strong inoculation against financial privacy technology. Government is now well aware that software/cryptography can be used for money, and the first question asked is why isn't your new niche system grokkable to chain analysis?
It's not so black and white. Obviously social and political change is the goal. But in the meantime technology can help if you're living under repression.
Take VPNs and Tor helping people jump the Great Firewall of China for example. Obviously, yes, this is a political problem; the GFW shouldn't exist. But it would be foolish to dismiss the technology as a vital part of fighting back against the state.
Which, I believe, would make it even more prevalent. It would be the confession that they cannot control it, and while most people would be deterred by this, I can see a shadow economy growing because (or thanks ?) to this.
You are being downvoted, but you are correct. I am east european and I know how hard the fist of the State hits. Sometimes I think westerners see technology like some special moves that you can quickly combo so you can defeat the evil boss at the end. No, there are no special moves, just a boot stamping on a human face -- forever.
I have deep disagreements with my father on this subject. He worked as a federal agent for 30 years, mostly in digital forensics. He does not believe in the right to privacy in any of the same ways I do. Whereas I believe a right to privacy in your tools and communication is essential, he believes they infringe on the government's ability to catch criminals. Classic justification of "if you're not a bad guy, what do you have to hide?"
I just thought this was worth sharing, my dad was a tech guy (though not much of a programmer), the folks on HackerNews and related sites mostly have a privacy-first worldview. But not everyone shares this view, especially those who work in or around law enforcement. Civilians who believe in the right to privacy must stand their ground in the face of this.
> the folks on HackerNews and related sites mostly have a privacy-first worldview
It's more that the privacy-first folk are the ones that bother expressing opinions in threads like this. I think these days, a large part of HN audience doesn't especially care about privacy, and a good chunk of us are the ones that created the current privacy hellscape we have.
> a large part of HN audience doesn't especially care about privacy, and a good chunk of us are the ones that created the current privacy hellscape we have.
Case in point:
Any thread about Signal has top comments bashing Signal over something much more minor like backups, lack of stickers, Moxie's side project with MobileCoin, and/or some conspiracy about secret backdoors. Yet, there is never an alternative offered which my grandma could use. No, she can't use Matrix. Maybe your grandma is tech literate, but mine grandma is 90. Even my parents aren't tech literate! Hell, I couldn't even get my group of PhD level CS friends to try out Matrix with me, but I could strong arm half of them into using Signal while the other half just wanted to use iMessage.
Any thread on ZKP coins like ZCash devolve into conversations about how Monero is better.
Any thread on Firefox has a top comment about how much Firefox sucks because the icons are a bit different or how the dev tools are better or some other excuse. They all devolve into people just talking about their favorite color of Chrome (e.g. Brave, Opera, Edge). IDGAF, just install Firefox and uBlock on your family's computer, they won't notice the difference between FF and Chrome.
Or any number of other such topics. They devolve into purity tests and tribalism. The lack of perfection in some tool only becomes some excuse to continue licking the boot. Can we not acknowledge that things have flaws but that these flaws are a worthwhile cost to not living under surveillance capitalism? I hear so many people complain about surveillance capitalism and then only throw up their hands in the air to say "but what can you do?" or "it's the way things are." We're the fucking people who made it that way and we're the fucking people who continue to make things that way! Not every HN user works at big tech, but I'm willing to bet nearly every HN user is their family's goto tech support person. You at least have that power to influence your friends and family about how to solve these problems.
We're the people that other people look to for tech advice. We can have nuanced conversations all day, and I think we fucking should, but most of them turn into dumb flame wars like "vim vs emacs" or "spaces vs tabs" and all this ends up with is the system perpetuating. Can we just for one god damn month not roll around in the mud? All the time I hear about how we love merit and meritocracy. Well let's fucking do it then. And we're engineers, if there's flaws in these OPEN SOURCE SYSTEMS, then let's fucking fix them instead of just complaining about the flaws of living under the boot. Or do we just like to complain and they've won because they convinced us we have no power?
You should ask him if he's ever worked with someone who's pulled information on someone else for personal matters. Or if he'd be okay with personal information being pulled about himself. I'm usually surprised when people believe in the political process so much they can't fathom a government who will abuse their powers to undermine democracy.
Maybe ask if he has ever exceeded the speed limit, or run a red light, or failed to signal a turn. All things that could be monitored by a smartphone and reported to the police automatically.
Have him publish his full name, date of birth, social security number, mother's maiden name, bank checking and routing numbers, credit card numbers + expiration dates + cvv numbers, nude photos of his wife, nude photos of himself, all of the search history from all of his browsers online, all visible to the public.
Surely he doesn't see any point in keeping any of that information private, he's a good guy and not doing anything wrong, therefore he has nothing to hide and no use for privacy.
I think the crucial bit you're missing is that the fundamental disagreement boils down to whether a properly-signed-and-executed warrant ought to be sufficient for the government to get its hands on evidence or otherwise do what it needs to do to deliver justice.
To you, he seems to believe Yes, and to him, I think you seem to believe No. Historically, the answer has been Yes, and crypto has fundamentally changed that. I think crystallizing exactly why you believe the right answer is No is essential, otherwise you're just not going to convince people on that side -- in their mind, I think, you're demanding more rights than you historically had, and at the cost of protecting the rest of the population.
I'd go a little further to say that he believes the government has the authority to do what it needs to do to catch criminals/terrorists/bad guys. He's much more concerned over whether a method is technically legal than whether or not the government should do said method. Whether its a properly signed warrant is kind of immaterial when there are various ways to get around that requirement legally and with precedent.
No, historically the vast majority of communication was not recorded, and so a warrant could not be used to access the communication. The fact of the modern world is that for the first time in history almost everything we do is recorded, and so subject to those warrants.
No offense to your father but I've always felt like the "innocent until proven guilty" philosophy is expansive and fundamental privacy rights are part of that principle. That is, the underlying principle isn't "innocent until proven guilty" but something more akin to "your complete autonomy should be assumed by default, and the government should have to clear an extremely high threshold to constrain it".
I also really believe that this raises the bar for everyone. If the government has to work harder to prove your guilt, the case is all that much stronger when the threshold is met.
I'm probably preaching to the choir but I increasingly see arguments to the contrary as boiling down to "make things so the executive branch of the government doesn't have to work as hard" which I don't find compelling as a societal value.
This is the crux of my belief system on the topic too. Along with the associated “burden of proof” and how making it less burdensome should not be anyone citizens goal or responsibility.
The irony is that it’s precisely why GPs dad had a job, with full transparency there’s essentially no need for any type of forensics.
What does he think if "government's ability to catch criminals" becomes "government's ability to attack political opponents"? I suppose he has a privileged position, as part of the incorruptible rule-of-law democratic land of the free, but people in other countries may not be so well off.
Ifnnu the government actually caught criminals it old be easier to believe that giving them more tools to so might help. But in reality most crimes go unsolved and most prevention is done by human nature and people just not doing crimes
> No one ever answers the “what do you have to hide” question, which is a little sus.
Poe's Law strikes again, but for reference there are even several major categories:
Some things are nobody's business. If you have religious parents and you're gay, you may not want them to know that, even if your religious parents work for the government.
People have proprietary secrets. A drug company or tech company can't be spending a billion dollars on 95%-finished R&D only to have a random cop take a $10,000 bribe to hand it over to a foreign competitor.
It's important to protect the political opposition from the incumbents. The thing Nixon had to resign over? That.
Sometimes the bad guys work for the government. If your abusive ex is a cop, they shouldn't be able to trivially find you without a warrant.
The government shouldn't be able to go on a fishing expedition. If you do something that isn't illegal, or that you have a right to do, that shouldn't be an excuse to trawl through your life so you can be prosecuted for breaking a law that everybody breaks but only people who step on the toes of the powerful are prosecuted for.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -Cardinal Richelieu
"Saying you don't need privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't need freedom of speech because you have nothing to say." -Edward Snowden
Okay, so reply with your credit card numbers, links to all your cell phone photos, your DNA test results, your passwords, and your medical history. What do you have to hide?
You: "But you are randos on the internet, not the government!"
So I can get any of that from anyone if I just bribe the right government official? Or if I want that info for nefarious purposes I just have to get hired at the right agency? Or I can lobby to get a law passed that says everyone with the sequence "GATTACA" at a particular site on chromosome 7 is inherently evil and must be locked away for the public good? (Oh, what a surprise, it turns out that DNA sequence is incredibly common only for your particular race, huh.) Or if you're a celebrity, any cop can demand to search your phone without a warrant and get all of your private photos to sell to tabloids? You're genuinely ok with all of this? You find people who are concerned about these things suspicious?
Laws change. People in power do not always have your best interests at heart.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic but imo the lack of answers is because the phrasing begs the question. If you change "hide" to "protect" it suddenly becomes a bit more of a different proposition.
Boomers were raised in a high trust society, they think that the powers-that-be are fundamentally good. They don't see how easily it could be corrupted.
Millennials see reality through the lens of 'Squid game' and 'Hunger games.' Meanwhile boomers think we're Snowflakes. They don't understand that we're fighting a relentless psychological war in a hyper-competitive environment of scarcity.
> Whereas I believe a right to privacy in your tools and communication is essential, he believes they infringe on the government's ability to catch criminals.
Honestly, if I had spent 30 years of my life trying to catch criminals, I would probably believe the same. Just like dermatologists telling everyone to put on sunscreen at all times (because they see skin cancer cases on the daily), criminal prosecutors often live in a bubble, where crime happens all the time and everywhere, and you can never have enough sophisticated tools to catch the perpetrators. They completely forget that normal life away from crime exists, too.
Anyone in law enforcement for long enough, and I'd probably say something like 5-10 years on the beat, is enough to make many apathetic to rights and dignities. A sad reality unfortunately. Its the same vein of salespeople who get so caught-up in the hustle they that see everyone and every relationship as a potential transaction. And if I'm being introspective, my own flaw of seeing most systems/laws/social contracts as problems that can be solved with tinkering (they can't).
The typical HN person works as a software engineer, and the typical software company makes money, either directly or indirectly, via targeted ads. And these ads are served via a surveillance infrastructure that would not be out of place in a dystopian science fiction novel.
Even the companies that don't make money from ads have no qualms just letting Google or Facebook collect data about their website visitors.
Actually that's a problem for a lot of libertarian minded tech, it starts being thought of as enabling freedom from oppressive governments and ends up being adopted by criminals - Bitcoin, Tor, etc.
In the tech industry you also find a bend of very economically self interested version of privacy, which is that giving privacy to your users is a great way to claim you didn't know anything bad was happening. I'm pretty sure that, not high minded ideals, is why Meta invests so much in e2e encryption and privacy for WhatsApp, and publicizing it - when the next horrible thing is planned using Whatsapp, it lets them disclaim all responsibility for moderating what's happening on their platform
> Actually that's a problem for a lot of libertarian minded tech, it starts being thought of as enabling freedom from oppressive governments and ends up being adopted by criminals - Bitcoin, Tor, etc.
This is such a sham though.
You have some privacy-protecting technology everyone would benefit from. Ordinary people don't really understand it but would use and benefit from it if it was the default.
Laws are passed that make it illegal to use or otherwise highly inconvenient, e.g. you have to fill out an onerous amount of paperwork even if you're not doing anything wrong. Ordinary people are deterred from using it and ordinary systems don't adopt it. Criminals continue using it because they don't care about breaking the paperwork laws if they're already breaking the drug laws.
Then people say look at this evil technology that only criminals use! As if the reason others don't use it wasn't purposeful.
> starts being thought of as enabling freedom from oppressive governments and ends up being adopted by criminals - Bitcoin, Tor, etc
Yes. Both are real facets of this type of tech. For all the handwringing about "but what if fascism" that we have here in the US, I'm pretty sure 90% of the actual worries American cryptocurrency users have in their hearts is either about tax evasion, money laundering, or using crypto to buy/sell something illegal (Granted, there are some things illegal to buy/sell that there could be an ethical argument shouldn't be illegal -- probably certain drugs for instance). If someone has made bitcoin transactions to say, donate to EFF, Planned Parenthood or ACLU, I would take a bet of 5 Bitcoin that he isn't going to be imprisoned for that fact in this country. Yes, even though Trump is President.
But I think we who believe in privacy make ourselves look bad if we try to pretend that there isn't a ton of that stuff going on.
It's a reasonable opinion to say that privacy is good, but I think the thing to argue and "prove" is that it outweighs the fact that this technology also enables all this bad stuff. Which is a value judgment and thus you need to convince people, rather than just point to the word "Freedom" and assert.
A lot of people keep looking for technology solutions to political problems. The fact is that privacy, especially of financial transactions, is becoming illegal. Any technology that allows you to send or spend money anonymously will be attacked by our governments. They won't be allowed.
You can argue about whether you can get away with it due to difficulty of enforcement, but all that does is turn us all into criminals. They won't put ALL of in jail, but they can put ANY of us in jail - the ones they don't like.
> The fact is that privacy, especially of financial transactions, is becoming illegal. Any technology that allows you to send or spend money anonymously will be attacked by our governments. They won't be allowed.
It's probably a bit worse than that. It's not specific to transactions or spending.
Eventually any IP talking to another IP without the mandatory metadata to link it to a physical identity will be illegal.
Right now there is a hodge-podge of solutions that piggy-back on the phone networks, wires, etc. that used to give LEO enough actionable information to track some criminals. But most of that has been obsoleted by modern cryptography.
> But most of that has been obsoleted by modern cryptography.
Except that people are people, and people make mistakes, and it doesn't take a lot of mistakes to fail in your opsec, and then your whole plot unravels.
Don’t understand this pessimism. There are a large number of countries in the world. You can migrate out of a country if they start doing insane things like this.
I would consider leaving UK very seriously if I was building a life there now, as an example.
Some think we need financial freedom, but in reality it's the freedom to fund scams and malware, launder money, dodge taxes, and buy stuff that’s illegal.
That won't become legal just because you use "Monero" or whatever. Obviously we can't have privacy for financial transactions.
You forgot a few things on that list that people would like freedom for:
advocating for (or against) trans rights, protesting against the deportation of migrants, advocate against gun-control, and donating to (anti) palestinian causes
Are just a few things that people would like the freedom to do.
The point being, financial privacy is an important part of having a functioning democracy. But at the same time, financial control and limits are also an important part of a functioning democracy, for e.g. the 'freedoms' you mention.
In the end, neither perfect privacy, not perfect surveilance are what we need. The best solution will be somewhere in the middle, with nuance.
This is a very narrow way to see it. Technological advancements can and did massively affect politics and other parts of life.
Today you get away with it, they make it harder but it would still be better than the old one.
People manage to corrupt and hack things inevitably as long as it is static, changing systems can obviously be good just for this reason only. It also brings questions about why the current system is the way it is.
> [The Patriot Act] contains many sunset provisions beginning December 31, 2005, approximately four years after its passage. Before the sunset date, an extension was passed for four years which kept most of the law intact. In May 2011, President Barack Obama signed the PATRIOT Sunset Extensions Act of 2011, which extended three provisions. These provisions were modified and extended until 2019 by the USA Freedom Act, passed in 2015. In 2020, efforts to extend the provisions were not passed by the House of Representatives, and as such, the law has expired.
The Wikipedia article is quite confusing, and seems to imply that those two provisions expired because they were the only two provisions not sunsetted already. The table indicates that most of the law sunsetted on March of 2006:
"I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and all sorts of petty fuhrers of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible."
The patriot act is not really “a law” in the sense of being a concrete series of statements you can point to in today’s US Code. It’s more like a patch to a codebase. At the time it was passed it (like any statutory act of Congress) created and amended dozens of sections of the US code. Some of those provisions had expiration dates which have lapsed, but not all, and (apparently) not the sections this article discusses dealing with financial crimes.
I believe you have misread the comment. In 2015, it was expanded and extended until 2019. After that, it was allowed to expire and was not extended or expanded further.
Also it dosent matter if it's expired anymore. It was kept on for 20+ Fing years. During that time it was used to permananly shred constitusional rights and human rights.
They got what they wanted from it beyond their wildest dreams.
> Whenever leftists say that "Trump is a symptom of an illness that has been metastasizing for a long time" this is what we mean.
It's also the thing I don't understand about party loyalty.
When candidate George W. Bush was running for President, he was saying all kinds of things about how big government is bad and regulation destroys small businesses etc. Clearly not consistent with what he did once he was in office. When candidate Obama was running for President, he was saying how those things Bush actually did were bad and unconstitutional, and then once he's in office he signs a Patriot Act extension, fails to pardon Snowden, etc. When candidate Trump, well, you know.
Most of this is structural, not partisan. And a lot of it is Congress even though people mostly talk about the President. The partisanship itself is structural -- get your state to use STAR voting instead of first past the post and you get more than two choices, and then liars can be evicted even if their state/district goes >60% to the left or right.
My big ask is, was it always this stupid? Like, all these huge historical events and figures, did it all go down as stupidly and clownishly as the modern USA? Was there an early 20th century fascist Europe equivalent to a man named Big Balls being beat up by children and a fascist police action being triggered as a result? Was there a Napeolonic era equivalent to a media figure known for making light of school shootings, getting killed in a school shooting, a second after again making light of school shootings? Was George III as publicly and flagrantly fellated by the court as Trump is by the media still allowed into the White House?
I feel like I can't possibly live in the stupidest era in world history so it makes me try to see other historical eras in a similar light - how can I reinterpret the past such that it also experienced a bunch of clownish nonsense?
There's a conflict between Bitcoin as a public ledger, privacy, and money laundering.
With a bank you can have anti-money laundering and bank secrecy. Transaction are known by the bank, can be subject to subpoena or automatic reporting, but are non-public.
If you want privacy on Bitcoin you need to do things that look a lot like money laundering. Governments banning money laundering isn't a surprise. The value of Bitcoin, if transactions are fully public and attributable to pseudonyms, is questionable.
In some ways, the problem Bitcoin has is that it is inflexible. Governments want to change the rules in finance from time to time, traditional finance adapts.
No, there really isn't. Money laundering has been a huge problem enabling all sorts of crimes and issues. There is no debate to be had on the benefits of prohibiting it, and you have to be very deep in the Silicon Valley rabbit hole to think even 5% of the population of any nation would support doing away with those rules.
Most governments aren't decentralized in their structure, which causes the "problem". If you have private entities that coordinate with each other it works quite well, but the world is very used to big centralized governments that "solve" all their problems.
It can be hard to figure out exactly what is outlawed with banking interactions. It seems a lot of the KYC/AML stuff is based on industry best practices and guidelines. There's no law you need a state ID with address to open a bank account, but when I tried to open up a bank account without an address I found it basically impossible. The bank will then cite that these practices are what they're held to as law, because the law itself is vague and relies on more nebulous customs.
So what is called "guidelines" one day becomes legally binding later with no act of congress.
Unfortunately there's a massive swath of mere guidelines and regulation that end up having legal binding. For instance, a Navy sailor was recently sent to jail for 20 years for having gun parts that were cut up the wrong way, the "wrong way" being the right way with previous mere guidance and the wrong way apparently being the fact that some time since then the guidance changed but not the law.
That's the whole point. They can't overtly outlaw things because aggrieved parties would sue and win. So they soft outlaw them with expensive record keeping requirements and ambiguity because no business big enough to win but smaller than a giant mega-corp will intentionally risk going toe to toe with the government in court as doing so would likely be financially ruinous.
And even if the government doesn't look like it's disposed to do that in your situation you're still sticking your neck out by deviating from the herd because then you can't screech "standard business practice" when some contrived chain of facts results in you fending off a civil suit for whatever reason.
This isn't just a banking thing or a guns thing, you see examples in every industry once you know the pattern.
It explains how KYC and AML law function as a stochastic control on crime. How that is difficult to do through actual laws, and what the downsides of this system are.
> creating and using single-use wallets, addresses, or accounts, and sending [cryptocurrency] through such wallets, addresses, or accounts through a series of independent transactions
One could argue that's how normal Bitcoin wallets work. The addresses are deterministic based on your passphrase (or derived private key). The addresses don't need to get reused because there's no real value in doing so, and no real cost of just using a new address each time.
Though yes--even if that's the exact meaning and design, presumably one could still use the simpler wallets that DO just reuse the same address over and over. And obviously that'd reduce privacy quite a bit.
Yes. Single-use addresses protect me. If you store your entire balance under a single address then anybody you transact with can see your entire balance by lookup up the transaction. Single-use addresses protects you from people snooping around looking for worth while $5 wrench attacks.
What you quoted is regarding the use of a SERIES of single use wallets. What is the "normal Bitcoin" use case for funneling money through a chain of throwaway wallets?
Because just about all those practices are what reasonable users of the protocol would do, and making your transactions 'suspicious' is synonymous with all the big players refusing to deal with you. It's a way of prohibiting behaviour outside the force of law, which is even more insidious.
I feel like growing up is realizing that the government is just a big gang. They do what they want and will enforce with menace what they want. They can change the rules, take your stuff and it ain't stealing because they said so. Sigh.
I recognized it in the opposite direction, after observing that gangs inevitably end up being quasi-states within their turf. They demonstrate almost everything I associate with statehood except for issuing their own currency. From there, the reverse (that governments are just big gangs) also flows naturally.
To your point: gangs of various stripes pay blood money to the families of fallen members; they also fund or support community programs to curry good favor.
My takeaway though is that human societies abhor a power vacuum: no matter what my libertarian and ultraliberal friends imagine, there must be a strongman. At least with democracy, we have the opportunity to somewhat influence who that is.
You only get two options for each vote, and there is no reason that one or both of the options would need to be aware of or be in favor of an acceptable solution to the given problem. In fact, the chance of that happening is vanishingly small.
This would come as no surprise, since all the original promises of Bitcoin circa 15-ish years ago are long dead. The turning point occurred when all exchanges agreed to report transactions directly to the IRS. I say this as someone who had an interest prior to that but lost all interest when the Crypto community sold out its ideals and consented to certain regulations in the interest of mass marketing cryptocurrency for the purpose of speculative profit.
Doing KYC is somewhat against the whole idea of like "no government involvement" but it doesn't negate that the government controls the currency.
You lost all interest because Bitcoin became attractive to people who deal with companies who insist on KYC? How is that in any relation to the underlying code or mantra that Bitcoin is about?
Yes, I lost interest at the point where entirely all of the on/off ramps to Bitcoin submitted to universal data sharing with the central government in the interest of greater profitability. At that point, "being your own bank" is gone, and the process is equivalent to withdrawing cash from a normal bank, and the value proposition of Bitcoin is limited to its features as a deflationary speculative asset.
This is pure click bait that relies on a deliberate misreading of a 2023 notice [1] that tries to imply that "self custody" is being attacked in any form.
All that this is saying is that the government will try to track money movement to pursue criminal activity, including, unfortunately the criminal activity of moving money in a way that looks sketchy. This is something that we have decided we have to live with.
It's not "pure click bait" for anyone that has followed along with the crypto community since the early days. This is basically an official stake in the heart for anyone that even loosely held on to the original ideals behind crypto.
Crypto is increasingly no different than traditional banking in anyways that are beneficial, and remains different in ways that can only be harmful to the individual (market manipulation, wild speculation, lack of institutional regulation) etc.
I don't know how anyway remotely interested in decentralized crytpocurrencies can see this as "click bait".
It's a two year old note talking about mixers and money laundering and it's being misrepresented as a new government stance against self-custody. That's why it's click bait.
I think the case for why strong encryption is important is much clearer than why untraceable financial instruments are important and I don't think it's super compelling to argue that these things are actually the same, even if your opposition to government control is the same.
I think it's actually pretty clear that almost all people are not capable of secure and reliable self-custody and would be better off with an intermediary. We're not keeping our fiat currency in a safe under our bed after all.
I think it makes sense to start from the idea that you should be able to transfer funds to someone, like $100 to your mother, without needing the government or a megacorp to facilitate it. The same way I can gift my TV to my mom.
Whether that's cash or cryptocurrency doesn't seem to matter since your argument would also apply to cash.
Exactly! I want digital cash. We have the technology to do that, so why not? The tech crowd hyped up Bitcoin, but why never privacy coins? Any single flaw becomes killer, even if the flaw is unrelated to privacy or even petty. Hell, I'd even take a US ZKP-based stable coin that was pre-mined (but had strong privacy guarantees) and had even a small (like 0.1-0.5%) gas fee that ended up acting as some form of consumption tax. At least then there's some guarantee of tax revenue while maintaining the notion that Big Brother doesn't need to know I gave my friend some beer money.
Our world worked with cash before. Sure, it wasn't perfect, but are those imperfections worse than the mass invasion of our privacy? There's no perfect system, so the only question is how we weight certain issues, not that flaws exist. If we purity test then the only winners are the immoral people who are willing to lie and deceive so that their choice appears to pass said purity tests. They love us to spend our time infighting because that's less time working against them.
Cash and crypto do share similar properties that way... but with cash, you can't deposit say, $1,000,000 in cash into a bank, where you can use it for a lot more types of transactions, without forms being filed with the government, in order to both instill fear into the hearts of drug dealers and gangsters (etc) and to help catch them if they're dumb enough.
Now, drug dealers sometimes do just do as many transactions as possible with cash, outside the banking system, for that reason. But they're hindered by these anti-laundering regulations, which is considered a good thing by most.
To me then it sounds reasonable to impose similar limits and reporting obligations - treating crypto as much like cash as is practical - when it comes to exchanging crypto for dollars in any way. It doesn't prevent Bad People from conducting transactions in BTC directly, but they have always been able to do so with cash for some things.
The far left doesn't believe in the idea of property ownership in the traditional sense. So no, I think the premise that you can transfer property to anyone without the government tracking it is incorrect. Taxes could theoretically be imposed, registration might be required to comply with a social "program" they are implementing, etc.
it's already illegal. unless you keep tax records and receipts with all that money under your bed, probably cause and civil forfeiture can be broadly applied to it.
I think you are conflating 2 things:
- ability to privately give money to someone (mechanism is irrelevant, by hand or by way of a blockchain)
- self-custody risks for uninformed users
The first one is the privacy argument.
Would you be comfortable if you’re not allowed to give the cash in your pocket to someone without someone watching over? If the answer is no, you are pro privacy for financial transactions.
Cash has the privacy feature as a default. You can argue that 3rd parties that help you send cash don’t have to offer any privacy, but BTC isn’t that, and forcing it to be that way is an attack on privacy.
I don't have a predetermined opinion on whether it is good or bad for cash to be untraceable.
I think arguments for privacy are pretty poorly argued and often come down to "isn't the idea of someone watching you icky" which this thread is not disabusing me of.
almost all people are not capable of secure and reliable self-custody and would be better off with an intermediary
I agree, send me your bank account login info and I can keep it safe for you.
Believing a profit-motivated corporation or individual is trustworthy long term especially in an age of quick mergers and acquisitions is .. deeply naive to say the least.
> We're not keeping our fiat currency in a safe under our bed after all.
Only because Americans haven't had a proper large-scale bank crash for a while now. In countries where it does happen, people very much do keep their fiat currency "under the mattress" though. And it's good that they have that option.
>Loading up a single address with too many UTXOs degrades the entropy of a public-private key pair and makes it easier to brute force a user's private key.
Is there a realistic risk there? If I use an address a million times, how much weaker is it? And how feasible would it be for an attacker to brute for it?
Strictly speaking, loading an address with many UTXOs has no effect on security of the receiving address at all (beyond increasing its public profile).
The security concerns start happening after an address spends a UTXO. Before a P2WPKH (segwit) address is used, only the public key hash is known. In order to spend from it, the full public key needs to be revealed. That's why it's recommended to use single-use addresses, because a quantum computing attack or elliptic curve vulnerability could be used against an address where the attacker knows the public key, but would not work against an address where the pubkey has not yet been revealed.
So, the main security change happens after you spend from an address the first time. Subsequently, there are theoretical vulnerabilities that could occur after an address is spent from many times, but really only if the signer is malicious like dark skippy, or faulty and doesn't properly follow RFC 6979 deterministic signatures, leaking some signature entropy which could be used to crack the private key. The latter has happened with some bad custom wallet implementations, but these attacks are even further in the realm of theoretical, not super realistic, require faulty software/firmware to be implanted into signing devices.
so the risk to the wallet holder is the exact same risk that exists for every single HTTPS connection right now?
Post quantum algorithms have been available. You can do it today. Why not for bitcoin?
In reality, there are very few current real world implementations. This article makes it seem that RSA is under active exploitation. If it is, bitcoin is not the first target IMO
I have a grad school professor that owes me $1M dollars on a bet that the Patriot Act would never end. I told him he was painfully naive and not suitable to each graduate school economics with such thinking.
Unless you used different language for the bet, you lost it the moment it was made.
"Never" may be falsified by "at least once", but affirmed only by "never". So I'm afraid only you could have ever been on the hook for the $1M, and may still be!
If the United States ends, I win. It's looking pretty probable today, with this inescapable cascading of everything traditionally considered American Values, and the POTUS openly defying the US Constitution with zero repercussions beyond wimpy whispered protests. Then there is the media doing EVERYTHING in it's power to accelerate this destruction...
Bitcoin is more a rug pull then ever, it's just that the "right" people are in charge of when and how the rug is pulled so it's becoming legitimized in all the ways that benefit those people and de-legitimized in all ways that benefit the individual.
sometimes you wonder if people have become so thoroughly captured by the status quo they can no longer even conceive of a monetary system existing that is not entirely dependent on custodians acting on someone's behalf
it's not the developers of bitcoin's fault your entire reg compliance apparatus was constructed on requiring intermediaries
It's fundamentally unsurprising that the custodians of the existing system don't like a system built on the premise of circumventing it
In their defense, there might be some issues with circumventing such controls. Money laundring, fraud, market manipulation and sanction circumvention aren't always positive for society at large
M question was on what legal/Constitutional basis does the Treasury have for expanding the Patriot Act? Is it because the law provides powers to the Treasury department to define areas that the law should apply? Or is it a case where the administration (once again) is assuming it can do something, the Constitution be damned?
Self-Custody is problematic for any government as it allows any citizens to accumulate any kind of wealth they have and simply "transfer" it overseas without any oversight and in a ridiculously short amount of time. Some countries (rich/developed countries) allow free capital transfer but these transfers are regulated and also some jurisdictions are sanctioned. Transferring money abroad, from the perspective of the origin country, just moves the money inside the origin country system from one party to another. So it is well within the visibility and control of the state, especially for large amounts of money.
Today, you can brain-memorize $1bn in Bitcoin and move yourself from one country to another; and depending on the country; might be able to exercise different amounts of that purchasing power. Control moves from the origin country to the reception country.
Russia and China were always hostile because of this. The Chinese authorities regarded Bitcoin as some sort of capital flight scheme. Now both Europe and the USA are too. I think Bitcoin only chance for survival, in its current form, is if these two poles do use it as a mechanism to attack one another. Mining is already balanced between East and West.
Maybe in 2028 a presidential candidate can run with removing the Patriot Act as one of their campaign points. I suspect the world will be very different then. The America I knew, remembered, and loved started dying with the passage of the Patriot Act.
There needs to be something like the federal equivalent of a referendum. I think with that, it would be possible to get rid of the patriot act and legalize weed, both of which seem to have popular support but zero chance of majority of representatives backing because they don't want to be liable for the worst-case corner-cases in the aftermath.
An interesting what-if scenario; but, let's assume Sanders won and all else remained largely the same as it has:
Unless the Sanders Administration had a very favorable or majority Democrat Congress aligned with his progressive wing, many proposals would be outright blocked or heavily compromised. Knowing our limitation that everything else has stayed largely the same as history since, this wouldn't be the case. The hypothetical administration's attempts at sweeping reforms, such as healthcare and climate regulation, would very likely be significantly curtailed or overturned by courts or constrained by constitutional limits on separation. The GOP, even though they actively outspend Democrats when in power, obstruct via financial limits each and every Democratic-led effort while crowing about expansion of debt incursion; as such, spending on Bernie's proposed initiatives would raise concerns about deficits, inflation, and taxation. Even with tax increases, there would be pushback from wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbyists.
Basically, nothing would change in any significant way except, perhaps, the SCOTUS would not be outright overturning DECADES of 'settled law' in favor of an absurd view of the world as it was hundreds of years ago.
Many people will imagine things. However history constantly suggests that most of those are very different from the reality that results.
The good news is when your candidate loses you don't find out the evil they really do and you can say it is not your fault. The bad news is you don't find out what is bad about the things you think are good.
Just because a politician does the most virtue signaling towards the left doesn't mean that they'll produce the most progressive results. Bernie has a very poor track record of coalition building. He was getting into fights with Manchin even though he was needed as the 50th vote for the American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act.
He's never been a champion of financial freedom on an individual basis. He's consistently advocated for deeper and more intrusive regulations on cryptocurrencies.
Probably very similar unfortunately. The current state of US politics is that any policy further than center or maybe slightly left of center has a snowball's chance in hell of making it through Congress. The best case scenarios is probably what Biden accomplished: temporarily pausing the slide into far-right authoritarianism. Maybe he's able to pass some extremely watered down version of health care reform or tax reform but that seems unlikely. Certainly nothing like true progressive platform he ran on is possible in the US right now.
He was sabotaged by the DNC. Even Elizabeth Warren said that the nomination process was rigged by the DNC. Absolute corruption and the world would absolutely be a different place.
But his support of ratcheting up the Ukraine war disappointed profoundly. That’s not the Bernie I would have voted for.
> a presidential candidate can run with removing the Patriot Act as one of their campaign points
I've worked on privacy regulation. This would not get votes. The unfortunate fact is that the people most passionate about these issues are also tremendously lazy or extremely nihilistic. (Maybe it comes with the territory of not trusting institutions.)
Either way, privacy advocates can rarely muster even a dozen calls to electeds, let alone credibly threaten backing a primary opponent. The reason SOPA/PIPA worked is it animated a group of tech advocates beyond those with ideological opposition to surveillance.
No candidate can do that. The children were raised to be racist and ignorant. That basically means you are going to deal with poorly raised feral racist and entitled children. You aren’t going to rehabilitate that in your lifetime, the childhoods are fucked up. Maybe in 30-40 years these people will have a come to Jesus moment, but we don’t have a malleable national moral character to appeal to helpful sensibilities given how poorly the prior generation failed at raising proper children with good moral character.
Basically, a good portion of White America are gone cases. You won’t be able to explain to gone cases anything. That’s the reality of America.
There will almost certainly be an election in 2028. The degree to which it will be rigged through gerrymandering, voter intimidation, voter suppression and/or blatant cheating is a different question.
Despite the origin of HN being in the US, given that the current community has expanded to a large array of multinational English speakers, I'd rather country-specific posts like these were tagged such, in a international context: e.g. "The US treasury is expanding.."
even if mention of "the patriot act" is an obvious signal, there are many such contexts but an explicit tagging makes quick parsing easier. Same for mention of the government/authorities/police/military/administration/constitution/president etc.
This is inaccurate and in a hilarious way.
Treasury is not coming after Bitcoin. There's an update in an ongoing rulemaking process that got reported here[0] as banning mixing and privacy tools. It may have been blown out of proportion[1], but I am not a lawyer, and certainly banning these tools would be bad. The thing is, Bitcoin's not private—every transaction is public for everyone to download. It's Twitter for your bank account. And that comes with serious privacy, safety, and boring commercial counterparty risks that should be addressed. These kinds of tools exist to mitigate that problem. The irony is that Bitcoin has largely refused to address this obvious issue, so no, Treasury isn't coming for Bitcoin. Indeed, there been years of people arguing Bitcoin would be just fine with no privacy protections.
[0] https://www.therage.co/us-government-to-bring-patriot-act-to...
[1] https://x.com/valkenburgh/status/1966174324701778071"
On- and off- ramps suck. And there isn't much speculative value. So it misses the main 'use case' of crypto.
Its by far the best crypto-currency for making payments. But people care very little about making payments with crypto, and exchanging between Fiat and Monero is very difficult, so its not an easy payment system either.
Overton window. There is a lot of funding for youtube influencers to play with casino coins that are transparent and traceable. Those are basically looking for "money goes up" and don't really care about the crypto part.
Monero is only on the news for negative reasons when someone tries to bring it down or delists from yet another exchange. There isn't funding to make it popular, which I guess in the end it is really up to Monero users from pushing it up.
That's a long-winded explanation of the fact that most people don't care about Monero's privacy benefits, so the only way Monero will be more popular is if someone funds a marketing campaign for it.
War on Terror AUMF is still in force and is why the President can just decide to bomb whatever country they want without asking for permission, now.
All that shit after 9/11 was crazy and dangerous, and some of us said that at the time, and go figure, the fucking obviously true things we were saying have turned out to be... true. What a surprise.
> War on Terror AUMF is still in force and is why the President can just decide to bomb whatever country they want without asking for permission, now.
The War on Terror AUMF relies on a Presidential determinatiom that the targets “planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or person”.
But the President has had implicit blanket permission to bomb whoever he wants with a time limit ever since the War Powers Act was passed.
People who protested this horse shit were called unamerican for christs sake. Bush Jr said the literal words "you are either with us, or against us". The right went into utter hysterics about France not wanting to help our BS invasion.
The right loves to say that violent rhetoric is the left's fault, while they wished us harm for not wanting to invade a random country in the middle east that wasn't even related to the terrorist attack.
Meanwhile, all that horseshit with the TSA only ever enriched a couple people connected to the admin.
> Meanwhile, all that horseshit with the TSA only ever enriched a couple people connected to the admin.
I'm pretty sure Homeland Security was only created because it was easier to steer a pile of brand-new contracts for a brand-new organization to the "right" places, than it would have been if they'd simply expanded the roles of existing parts of the government that were already supposed to be doing what Homeland was supposedly created for.
> The right loves to say that violent rhetoric is the left's fault
Well you know, they are the ones constantly comparing Republicans to Hitler, the Nazis, calling them fascists, making direct claims that electing Trump would lead to the end of democracy, having "punch Nazis" be a rallying cry, and so on. Not really crazy to see how that might influence people to think that killing Trump or even a conservative podcaster is necessary to save the world.
If there would have been better policing of digital currency by its users against criminal actors, perhaps digital assets would be spared the attention and now regulation. Sadly, increasing adoption and privacy guarantees lure criminals same as legitimate users.
> Loading up a single address with too many UTXOs degrades the entropy of a public-private key pair and makes it easier to brute force a user's private key.
Well that's not true... The key doesn't change because you added more bitcoin
Nation states existed for centuries in which money was frequently held as cash and even large transactions were often done in cash. its still common (or was until very recently) in a lot of (mostly poor) countries
> With financial privacy and real freedom, you can hire a competing army.
Having the money to pay an army is a long way from hiring one. Recruitment and buying military equipment at any scale would be obvious.
If you were in charge of identifying and locating criminals based on on-chain transaction data, what are the list of guidelines you'd put together to use PUBLIC DATA to determine suspicious behavior?
If you're competent, at all, the list would look like this. Let's not immediately jump to "self custody is gonna be outlawed"
----
Point 2
Bitcoin was designed this way. This data is public. This is HOW THE DAMN THING WORKS.
This article is written by a "Seasoned Bitcoiner", which is a term that reveals just how cooked they are. They haven't come to terms with the fact that the Bitcoin price is predicated on being the first, but certainly not the best public blockchain for realizing the goals of a global decentralized currency, whether you agree that's even a possibility or not.
Some people adopt ignorance -- Others were born in it, molded by it.
What crime needs to be identified based on transactions? Tax evasion? I can't think of any others that don't leave behind a real world mark that would be the thing that initiates investigation.
Following the money is important to investigating all sorts of crimes, as most crimes are done for money.
Arresting someone selling guns on the street doesn't stop much - they're quickly replaceable, you need to identify and determine where the guns are coming from. Same with human trafficking, drug trafficking, selling fake goods, and nearly every crime.
Considering how they're clamping down on anonymity wherever they can, crypto wasnt going to escape their clutches for very long. How long before its seperated from it original aim and just turned into a gambling token.
Original aim was that people don't deposit Bitcoins into a bank, Coinbase etc, but use it to freely transact between themselves, outside of gov control.
> How long before its seperated from it original aim and just turned into a gambling token
Always has been.
I mean it was useful for online gaming related transactions, like 15 years ago.
Ever since it has become a more obvious scam with every passing year.
Today you can barely post about it on most major platforms without immediately spawning multiple spam comments trying to part you from your money.
Real value crypto adds to the economy: ~0.
Once this scam inevitable comes crashing down, it will probably take the stock market with it. And all for nothing but the enrichment of early crypto adopters.
> We shouldn't have to live in a world where standards cater to the lowest common denominator, in this case criminals, and make things worse off for the overwhelming majority of the population.
On a long enough timeline, having anything stored in local hardware is going to be suspicious. Not surprised to see government embrace of crypto lead to increased scrutiny.
LOL, the BTC people who thought "Digital Gold" was a good slogan are going to learn what happened to self custody of gold and the gold standard.
BTC is in a much worse situation than gold was in 1970. The government has the technology to follow transactions and require BTC transactions to be done on their chain with their BTC equivalent GBTCs. That is until the government decides to issue print more BTC equivalents
Bitcoin is a perfect microcosm for the tech sector in what happens when people who don't know how something works and refuse to understand it, try to replace it.
Every aspect of the modern financial system exists for a reason. It evolved over time to deal with problems. Things like reversible transactions are a feature not a bug.
Bitcoin is where all the gold bugs went who lamented the end of the gold standard. Most of these people didn't understand that at no point in history was the US dollar 100% backed by gold (or silver, originally). Never.
What backs the US dollar isn't gold or oil or anythihng else we dig up out of the ground. It's long schlong of the US military.
I've also said that crypt currency exists only because the government hasn't shut it down. All it would take is a policy change from the US government to say banks who have access to the US financial system cannot trade in Bitcoin and it would be over. Yes you could still have wallets (at least until the government starts going after Bitcoin farms, which again it could do) but what would you do with those coins?
Bitcoin is not, never has been and never will be an escape from the perils (some real, many imagined) of fiat currencies.
It is a fantastic escape from debasement of fiat, and always has been an escape from the perils of fiat currencies. It was created for this very purpose in 2009, and has absolutely achieved this goal.
A 2019 $ vs a 2025 $ are significantly different purchasing power. Yet a 2019 BTC vs a 2025 BTC shows remarkable capital appreciation.
You can pick any time scale you like, and except for very specific edge cases, it has in general been a great hedge against debasement of fiat, and will continue to be.
I have been able to preserve the purchasing power of my savings for over a decade now, and still keep buying every week.
Why would this be any different the next decade? (beyond the attenuation effect from more capital flowing into the space?).
This is not terribly surprising. Control of the monetary system is a key responsibility of the US federal government; it was always going to be the case that if Bitcoin became a meaningfully-sized part of the financial system the government would impose regulation.
Now we get to see how enforceable it is (and I suspect it's more enforceable than people wanted to assume... They can jail you indefinitely for refusing to divulge a password if the court finds it is not a violation of your Fifth Amendment rights to divulge it. https://xkcd.com/538/).
The government doesn't want to actually stop these things. They just want to make everything that people do normally illegal. Enforcement will only happen if you rock the boat.
As someone who hasn't read the article, is holding bitcoin in your own wallet going to become illegal? Also, which wallet do you guys recommend, I use Coinbase but it sucks.
It doesn't look like that explicitly will become illegal, but this part undermines a lot of the value of it:
> creating and using single-use wallets, addresses, or accounts, and sending [cryptocurrency] through such wallets, addresses, or accounts through a series of independent transactions
That's the default way Bitcoin wallets work, and it helps a ton to improve privacy. If we were limited to always reusing the same few addresses, it'll be very easy for not just law enforcement but ANYONE to see just how much Bitcoin you have.
If that's a small amount, it's not a risk. If it's a big amount, now you've got a target on your back. For me to accept Bitcoin payments, I need to publish my address, and from that address, you'll be able to see how much Bitcoin I have (and trace other transactions) over time.
Imagine everyone in town knowing that you've got six figures (or more) of money that can undoubtedly be extracted from you by invading your home, taking family members hostage, etc. At that point, you may think it's safer to keep it in an exchange, and you may be right.
If you are in Europe, it already kinda is. You need to declare/KYC that wallet. Europe also want these self-custodial wallets to become "accessible" somehow to the authorities.
Good luck with that. If you are on a 'real' OS like Linux or BSD and have *coins there, I doubt anyone would know. Especially if you have disk encryption and using a trusted VPN or tor or something like that. Remember to enable MAC spoofing too.
If you have your wallet on a Cell Phone, you might as well post a sign outside of your house stating "I am a bitcoin user and trying to keep that use secret" :)
Coinbase is an exchange, but they also acquired a standalone wallet that's been rebranded a few times, but now it seems to be called Base (Formerly Coinbase Wallet).
This is blatant misinformation. Firstly this has nothing to do with the patriot act, I’m pretty sure the patriot act expired years ago.
But more importantly it doesn’t seem like the government is trying to ban anything, they’re just extending the anti-fraud / anti-money laundering measures enjoyed by the ‘traditional’ financial institutions to the world of cryptocurrency.
Those measures don’t prevent people from doing ‘suspicious’ things, they just treat certain transaction types with more care because of the increased likelihood that they are evidence of a crime.
A few years ago, I tried to open a bank account, and was turned away because my visa stamp expired (despite having valid immigration status). The clueless clerk and her advisor were going through The Patriot Act to find justification.
Fortunately, other banks weren't staffed with idiots, and I was able to open an account elsewhere after providing my documents.
It’s worse than that. Roe v. Wade associated privacy with abortion in the US, so the Supreme Court eliminated the right to privacy as part of the decision to overturn Roe v Wade.
Mere criminality wouldn’t put privacy in such an indefensible position. Look at who’s president.
Agamben wrote some interesting analysis of this [1], expanding on the concept of the "state of exception", which was a older concept introduced by a much more odious man who employed it very effectively in the early 20th century. Agamben argued that modern governments now try to create permanent states of exception, of which I would argue the Patriot Act is a perfect example.
Thank you for writing this. You are absolutely correct and made me step back to realize that the dollar is a global reserve currency and the US will do everything it takes to keep it that way.
> concentrating power in a few regulated intermediaries. That’s not healthy for innovation, or democracy.
How are "regulated intermediaries" not democratic? If they're regulated by the democratically elected government, that seems entirely democratic to me.
No one willingly gives up power and if it’s the U.S. government there is a large ecosystem worth hundreds of billions around the patriot act, it’s never going to be sunset, and it not going to grow
As a quite political teenager (not even from the US, never been there to this day) I argued that this law is going to stay. I wish I would have been wrong. These types of laws are not a good thing to have in the hands of power-hungry narcissists that like to rule not represent.
If only there were some sort of loud opposition to this act, predicting exactly the situation we're in today. Our elected representatives would have had to take a hard look at this and reject it due to its danger!
This should surprise literally nobody. Let me briefly explain the US political landscape.
Classic liberalism is a pollitical and moral philosophy that came about in the last 600+ years that (among other things) enshrined individualism and private property. This evolved hand in hand with enclosures (ie private property) and ultimately led to capitalism as an economic system.
Colloquially, "liberal" is used to describe someobody who is socially progressive, typically a Democrat, but that really has nothing to do with the origins.
Neoliberalism is what liberalism evolved into, primarily in the 20th century. The key principles are that capitalism (the "free market") is the solution to basically all problems and deregulation (to increase profits, basically).
Everybody is a (neo)liberal. Democrats and Republicans both. Note that "leftists" are by definition not neoliberals and are anti-capitalist but people often mistakenly use terms like "liberal" and "leftist" interchangeably when they couldn't be more different.
Imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. Fascism is capitalism in crisis. The Democratic Party as it exists in the US today, is controlled opposition.
So we come to the Overton window. This is how it goes:
1. Republicans pass some legislation like the Patriot Act to take away rights, usually under the guise of "security". The Patriot Act of course was passed in the aftermath of 9/11;
2. Ultimately the Democrats get in office and... don't reverse it. It becomes the new normal. They do this by being institutionalists. But defending institutions is merely an excuse for inaction.
3. Come the next election the Patriot Act or the border wall or whatever will the new normal and some even more fascist legislation will be on the table. As an example, try and find the daylight between the immigration plan of the Kamala Harris 2024 campaign and the Trump 2020 immigration plan (that Democrats opposed at the time).
Nobody cares about our individual rights. Things continue to get worse because both parties will always choose the US imperial project and the profits of corporations over your rights. We are six companies in a trenchcoat.
That's a very nice lecture, but I think it's almost entirely digressive.
The "success" of the Patriot Act really has nothing to do with classic liberalism, neoliberalism, leftists, Democrats, Republicans, or Kamala Harris. These are the current background details in which an age-old dynamic plays out: A threat gives those in power a chance to grab more power and they take it. Once they have it they do not give it up easily.
It just boils down to a truism: Those who seek power seek power. There's really nothing more to it than that.
This author is being disingenuous. All of those actions are indeed suspicious. I am not a fan of the Patriot Act, but these new guidelines actually seem pretty reasonable to me.
It will be interesting to see how the pro-Trump crypto bros react to this. Likely by now the whole group has had a chance to invest heavily in various altcoins or whatever will be the beneficiary of government largesse, so these proposed (and difficult to enforce) restrictions are likely intended just to pump those for quick profits.
I'd argue that Bitcoin has been effectively immune to attacks like this by governments for nearly a decade.
That the blockchain bros are surprised that Trump is not acting in their interest is itself surprising, even though it shouldn't. 3-level meta-surprising, so to say.
Does no one else find it weird seeing anything from this administration "anti-Bitcoin" at all? I wouldn't be surprised by this headline during a previous administration, but generally speaking, this administration has been very Bitcoin-friendly (and Bitcoin institutions friendly right back). To be clear, the simplest answer is "sure but that doesn't mean they have to agree on everything". But I would like to propose that if you ask the simple question of "who does this benefit?" it may suggest we are witnessing a different phenomenon here.
I think this might be the first indication that what we currently call "institutional Bitcoin supporters" are not "Bitcoin supporters" at all, or rather, what they call "Bitcoin" is not what you and I call "Bitcoin". Services like Coinbase and BTC ETFs don't really suffer from this development at all. In fact, I think it's quite obvious that obviously benefit from something like this (at least from the first-order effects). What's the alternative to self custody? Well... third-party custody. Especially since they are already bound up by KYC rules, right? Their is a cynical reading that there's nothing inconsistent with this development if you consider "institutional Bitcoin's" goals to primarily be replacing existing financial power structures with themselves. "Bitcoin" is just a means to an end. Their goals were only incidentally aligned with individual BTC holders since they were previously in similar circumstances as the "out group". Previous administrations were as suspicious of "Bitcoin companies" as any individual Bitcoin holder, perhaps even more so. But that's not the case anymore. Bitcoin companies have successfully been brought into the fold, so it's not even that they're necessarily "betraying" the values of Bitcoin true believers, you might argue that interpretation of shared values was entirely inferred to begin with.
Critically though, I think an important consequence of this is that Bitcoin purists and skeptics should realize that they arguably now have more in common than not, at least in the immediate term, and may be each other's best allies. In my experience, for most the existence of Bitcoin, its skeptics haven't really seen Bitcoin as a "threat." Instead, to admittedly generalize, their critiques have been mostly about Bitcoin being "broken" or "silly" or "misunderstanding the point of centralized systems", etc. These aren't really "oppositional" positions in the traditional "adversarial sense," more dismissive. In fact, the closest thing to an "active moral opposition" to Bitcoin that I've seen is an environmental one. IOW, Bitcoin true believers think about Bitcoin way more than Bitcoin skeptics do. Similarly, Bitcoin true believers really have nothing against skeptics other than... the fact that they occasionally talk shit about Bitcoin? IOW, Bitcoin skeptics are not "the natural enemy Bitcoin was designed to defeat".
But if you think about it, "institutional Bitcoin" sort of embodies something both these camps generally have hated since before Bitcoin. Whether you believe Bitcoin to be a viable answer or not, it is undeniable that the "idea" of Bitcoin is rooted in the distrust of these elitist financial institutions, that evade accountability, benefit from special treatment, and largely get to rig the larger system in their favor. Similarly, I don't think Bitcoin skeptics like these institutions or are "on their side". In fact, perhaps they'd argue that they predicted that Bitcoin wouldn't solve any of this and would just be another means of creating them. But IMO what they should both realize is that the most important threat right now is these institutional players. They are in fact, only "nominally" Bitcoin in a deep sense. From the perspective of true believers, their interests are actually in now way "essentially" aligned with any "original Bitcoin values," and from the perspective of skeptics, the threat they pose has very little to do with their use of "the Bitcoin blockchain".
They are arguably just another instantiation of the "late stage capitalist" playbook of displacing an existing government service in order to privatize its rewards. Coinbase could be argued to have more in common with Uber than Ledger wallets. Instead of consolidating and squeezing all the value from taxis though, the play is to do the same with currency itself. It is incidental that Uber happened to be so seemingly "government averse". In this context, it's actually helpful to cozy up to the government and provide the things government departments want that make no difference to fintech's bottom line (such as KYP). In fact, that might be their true value proposition. Bitcoin only enters the conversation because in order to replace a currency, you do... need a currency. Bitcoin was convenient. It was already there, it had a built-in (fervent) user base that was happy to do your proselytizing for you, and even saw you as a good "first step" for normies that couldn't figure out to manage their own wallet. The Bitcoin bubble was already there, why fight it when you can ride it?
Again, I think this is highly likely to be against the values of Bitcoin true believers and skeptics alike, and I also think that if the above is true, it represents an actual danger to us all. Recent events with credit card processors have already demonstrated that payment systems have proven to be incredibly efficient tools at stifling speech. In other words, this is arguably an "S-tier threat", on par with or perhaps worse than any sort of internet censorship or net neutrality. If so, we should treat it as such and work together.
On the other hand, doesn't all "wouldn't it be nice if it was like this?" look naive and wild before they were implemented/fought through?
Things like "Womens right to vote", "Civil rights" or even democracy was seen as completely backwards and naive at one point in history (and still is in some places), but today we kind of see it as something good to strive for, most of the times.
I'm not saying it's 100% the same for cryptocurrencies, but isn't there a chance it's something similar at least?
> nation is going to give up their self-determination because someone thinks countries having self-control
Nations do not have selves. That's taking the analogy too far. I do agree that they will definitely continue trying to exert control, though. It's kinda their thing.
Unless they personally can profit from the situation anyway. Then they’ll often do perfunctory PR prosecutions while taking kickbacks. See things like prosecutions around prostitution for one usually pretty clear example.
It's really not. 100% of the time the nation state is winning that battle, as evidence by literally all of human history. Crypto-bros make up a fraction of a fraction of the population and most people don't have sympathy for any of them when the primary use cases of crypto today are extortion and black markets in the western world.
Sure but now you need a $5 wrench to essentially force a guy to tell you where he buried the gold, rather than just walking to the bank and taking it. I don't see that as some kind of win for the guy with a wrench, especially when you realize the bank manager is way less likely to be a violent nutter sov-cit.
The solution is to store your money on a wallet where you do not have the private key. This way if you cannot access your funds nobody will be able to coerce you.
They supported both candidates, and Harris kept talking about crypto in the face of everybody screaming at her that it was losing her votes. She thought being able to afford Beyoncé concerts with crypto bro cash would offset that.
They might be pro-crypto, but you're not in their group of special people allowed to anonymously own it. You have to use a wallet service owned by someone in that group, so that you're always under control.
For very similar reasons why the US has the 5th amendment, why blanket surveillance is not considered a good thing by functioning democracies, and why most people want their porn-viewing habits to remain private.
There are plenty of bad things that need to be prevented, but a functioning democracy requires the ability to act outside the surveillance of both your peers, and the currently sitting government.
The headline is not supported by the article.
The actual list of "suspicious activities" in the article is about pooling, structuring, delaying transactions -- the stuff you do to hide activity, whether for good or bad.
It says nothing whatsoever about self-custody. The author makes the imaginary leap because they say they personally recommend doing all those things with self-custody. But they're totally separate things.
So as far as I can tell, the headline is just false clickbait.
They also claim:
> If enacted, any user who leverages these tools will be flagged as a suspicious... and could potentially be sent to prison.
I don't think that's the case? Having a transaction considered suspicious doesn't send you to prison. At best it seems like traditional banks might not permit a transaction, or it could be used as supporting evidence for separate actual illegal activities like money laundering? But going to prison requires being convicted of an actual crime. Not just activity that is "suspicious".
The draft text explicitly bans single-use addresses, which are used by any self-respecting wallet (Exodus, Ledger, Trezor) these days.
The actual problem with the article/headline is that the "Patriot Act" has expired. Although I'm sure there are plenty of similarly vague laws that could be used to justify this.
What text are you referring to? The article has a screenshot of a tweet with a screenshot of an excerpt that seems fair to paraphrase as "anyone behaved in this sort of activity is suspicious." I don't see anything about a ban and if you're only using single-use addresses that seems probably not suspicious in absence of all the other things which if you're doing all of them, seem objectively like they can only be described as money laundering.
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Isn't the Act still active, just some provisions have expired?
If you've got nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about! Nobody will ever run afoul of the system or fall through the cracks. We only have the best and brightest bureaucrats who won't make mistakes. Nobody will ever be attacked with this for politicized reasons. This will never be used to debank or isolate or penalize or attack an innocent person. And even if it did, the government would never use its immunity from prosecution to evade accountability!
Don't be paranoid, and don't worry! We're the good guys!
Fair points, but you understand it does everyone a disservice to conflate anonymity with custody.
> If you've got nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about!
We curtail commercial speech relative to political speech to protect against fraud. Regulating financial activity is deeply precedented, especially in contexts where whether it's an individual person or group of people is ambiguated.
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> The author makes the imaginary leap because they say they personally recommend doing all those things with self-custody.
It is because if you can't do those things, bitcoin has no use. Its only functions are to dodge laws and transfer money, and it's bad at transferring money.
That is an attack on self-custody. If you hold Bitcoin you now have an elevated risk of being picked up in some dragnet and suffering random consequences in unrelated parts of the financial system for reasons that you don't understand. If Bitcoin holders weren't alerted by articles like this, there is actually a pretty reasonable chance that they go in, experiment with Bitcoin and trip off a surveillance system as being "suspicious".
It is unlikely that we know what the penalties for suspicious transactions are in the US legal system. That seems like a matter that should have come before FISA Court at some point so we won't see public records of what the case law is. Even if it hasn't the actual workings of the financial control the US exercises aren't exactly secret but they also aren't exactly easy to follow.
> If you hold Bitcoin you now have an elevated risk of being picked up in some dragnet and suffering random consequences in unrelated parts of the financial system for reasons that you don't understand
This is exxageration. If you operate a cash business, you're under the same heightened supervision.
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>> That is an attack on self-custody. If you hold Bitcoin you now have an elevated risk of being picked up in some dragnet and suffering random consequences in unrelated parts of the financial system for reasons that you don't understand.
This is based on the idea that there is some exception from previous rules and regulations. Before Bitcoin existed, lots of these rules were formulated. Now Bitcoin is on the scene and has evolved best practices for self-custody that ignore everything that went before. Bitcoin becoming more popular and integrated means that the rules from US financial system will start to be applied.
There is no surprise in this. If more effort was put into mitigating the concerns of the US financial system (or others) then things like this wouldn't happen. However, the truth is that the philosophies are incompatible so it's just a war of attrition that will unsurprisingly result in conformance to US financial regulation.
Bitcoin maximalists are learning that having a non-fungible and fully traceable ledger might be a problem. Even Satoshi called this out! As is, BTC is somewhat of a privacy nightmare. All of your transactions are on the public ledger for anyone with basic knowledge of statistics to correlate and see all of your transactions. Blockchain Analytics is big business!
All the things the Treasury is considering to be "suspicious activity" simply can't be tracked with something that's non-fungible and untracable like Monero. This suspicious activity - aka privacy - is just how all monero transactions are done.
That assumes Bitcoin maximalists ultimately see it as a means of transaction. The ones I come across in the wild are purely maximalists for speculative purposes and couldn’t care less about the “practical” use cases for it.
This is an interesting thing to try out:
Replace "store of value" and "protection against inflation" with "investment" or "number go up" and see what it does to most of discourse around Bitcoin.
Being able to transact is the point of it all. If practical use is not possible that makes it useless and that makes it worthless.
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Not saying anything new here, but at the core there are only a few key reasons for using bitcoin: investment, hiding your finances, and the idealism of de-centralization.
The intrinsic value of decentralization is the ability to operate outside any fiat system of laws or government. So that one lines up a lot with the criminal side of hiding your finances. The investment aspect sure is enticing to lots of folks, but without a real core underlying value it's just bubbles and rug-pulls. So all this has the effect, wittingly or not, of lining up the incentives of all BTC users with money launderers.
Sure there are TONS of perfectly legal reasons not to want people to track your finances. Many of them are even moral. But obviously many are neither moral nor legal. (The edge case of moral but illegal sure gets people fired up, but it's a vanishing minority of actual use.) So when the regulators come looking for criminals, we unsurprisingly get lots of sound and fury about how there are lots of perfectly valid reasons why good people will want to act in ways that make them look like criminals. Uh huh. Yes, there sure are.
But with Monero, you see that it is effectively shut off from the Fiat ecosystem entirely. The proposal here clearly lays out how bad Bitcoin is for privacy. But it's not like the more private alternatives are actually allowed to be viable alternatives.
ironically, the inconvenience of exchanging Monero for fiat helps Monero be used as an actual currency. rather than exchanging Monero for cash and then buying things with cash, Monero is exchanged for the things itself.
Is this true? Kraken and Bitfinex both seem to support XMR <-> USD
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Yeah. I understand the excitement over the past two decades about the possibility of cryptocurrencies, but it came with a lot of naivete. After the fight to create sovereign central banks, did anyone seriously think that they were just going to give it up? Sure, maybe they can't stop you technologically, but it's very easy to simply make it unlawful, and then the men (and robots) with guns call.
Very true. In my opinion, and strictly from an American-centric view, privacy should only extend to transactions within borders between citizens. As soon as it involves transactions from outside our borders, then it is a national security concern. We know, right now, that both Russia and China are fueling internal political tension via massive and sophisticated disinformation/influence campaigns, a certain part of which involves paying influencers, extremists, shady media outlets, maybe a Representative or three in America to push their agendas, foment discontent aiming to destabilize and control the United States. Monero is definitely being used in this information warfare. I am pro-privacy, pro- individual rights, but we have to resolve this central tension of these things and the very real hyper connected world we live in which very real nation-state enemies. I am at the point where I think restricting the internet to allied countries might actually be a good idea, as currently we are leaving citizens unprotected from every nation-state actor who wishes to manipulate us with targeted, data-analytic, bot- and ai-empowered campaign against us. It is out of control, and as long as a monetary instrument like crypto enables that attack surface, it will be hard for me to support crypto-maxamialism.
> a certain part of which involves paying influencers, extremists, shady media outlets, maybe a Representative or three in America to push their agendas, foment discontent aiming to destabilize and control the United States.
Doesn't this describe every political party and megacorp in the US too...?
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One of the biggest platforms this happens through is Reddit, and they intentionally leave it wide open. You don’t even have to have an email address to register and start posting. Bots make these platforms a fortune, and they’re happy to sell out their country to foreign influence for a dime.
So yes, and I’ve been saying this since it started really getting bad in 2020, we need to completely cut enemies of the US off from our internet. There will obviously be attempts to proxy through western countries, so it needs to be strictly enforced, possibly with an identity requirement for participants.
For those against this, imagine a physical country where anyone can spawn thousands of faceless, nameless drones disguised as real people which are free to do whatever they want in society with zero risk of consequences. What would happen to that country? It would fall. As digital societies have now become larger than countries themselves, this is the very situation we’re dealing with. It’s not the utopia we hoped for, but it will be a dystopia unless action is taken.
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If Monero ever came close to Bitcoin's popularity, it would be outlawed. Plain as that. You can't get freedom through technology.
Monero has already been delisted from relevant exchanges last year because "reasons".
The main website that matched people to trade fiat for monero (localmonero) got closed recently because "reasons".
It is pretty popular and outlawed since a while. Basically the only relevant crypto currency used for purchases on the street since several years now. You can look up the number of daily on-chain transactions and tends to be on top every day.
You likely would only notice this if you need to donate money for someone with the wrong opinions or live at a non-aligned country.
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Freedom here means transacting without:
--
anti-money laundering safeguards
sanctions enforcement
consumer protection
tax enforcement
fraud prevention systems
--
It is very true that technology won't get you this freedom from sensible legal requirements we impose on financial transactions.
That's obviously a good thing, but I guess people who are in crypto would disagree.
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> You can't get freedom through technology
I'd argue the opposite - if Bitcoin had been created with secure private transactions (untraceability) it would be in the same popular position it is today, but the attacks on it (chain analysis etc) would be failing instead of inevitably marching forward.
Your argument seems to rely on an assumption that the insecurity of Bitcoin has been legible and apparent to the [greater] government for most of Bitcoin's life, and so the government allowed it to gain popularity knowing those insecurities would eventually make it succumb to government control. But in general government sees any lack of identification/data as a problem to be rectified, and the popular wisdom for quite some time has been that Bitcoin is "anonymous". so I'd say the government acted as quick as it would have regardless of the actual security properties. It feels like any holding off had more to do with financial lucrativeness rather than an understanding of its long term security flaws.
Now that we're here though, Bitcoin does seem like a very strong inoculation against financial privacy technology. Government is now well aware that software/cryptography can be used for money, and the first question asked is why isn't your new niche system grokkable to chain analysis?
It's not so black and white. Obviously social and political change is the goal. But in the meantime technology can help if you're living under repression.
Take VPNs and Tor helping people jump the Great Firewall of China for example. Obviously, yes, this is a political problem; the GFW shouldn't exist. But it would be foolish to dismiss the technology as a vital part of fighting back against the state.
Which, I believe, would make it even more prevalent. It would be the confession that they cannot control it, and while most people would be deterred by this, I can see a shadow economy growing because (or thanks ?) to this.
You are being downvoted, but you are correct. I am east european and I know how hard the fist of the State hits. Sometimes I think westerners see technology like some special moves that you can quickly combo so you can defeat the evil boss at the end. No, there are no special moves, just a boot stamping on a human face -- forever.
Monero is outlawed in the EU. It's not illegal to possess, but no business is allowed to touch it.
Which proves that it does what it says. (Much like when the police suspect someone of being a drug dealer for using GrapheneOS)
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I have deep disagreements with my father on this subject. He worked as a federal agent for 30 years, mostly in digital forensics. He does not believe in the right to privacy in any of the same ways I do. Whereas I believe a right to privacy in your tools and communication is essential, he believes they infringe on the government's ability to catch criminals. Classic justification of "if you're not a bad guy, what do you have to hide?"
I just thought this was worth sharing, my dad was a tech guy (though not much of a programmer), the folks on HackerNews and related sites mostly have a privacy-first worldview. But not everyone shares this view, especially those who work in or around law enforcement. Civilians who believe in the right to privacy must stand their ground in the face of this.
> the folks on HackerNews and related sites mostly have a privacy-first worldview
It's more that the privacy-first folk are the ones that bother expressing opinions in threads like this. I think these days, a large part of HN audience doesn't especially care about privacy, and a good chunk of us are the ones that created the current privacy hellscape we have.
Case in point:
Any thread about Signal has top comments bashing Signal over something much more minor like backups, lack of stickers, Moxie's side project with MobileCoin, and/or some conspiracy about secret backdoors. Yet, there is never an alternative offered which my grandma could use. No, she can't use Matrix. Maybe your grandma is tech literate, but mine grandma is 90. Even my parents aren't tech literate! Hell, I couldn't even get my group of PhD level CS friends to try out Matrix with me, but I could strong arm half of them into using Signal while the other half just wanted to use iMessage.
Any thread on ZKP coins like ZCash devolve into conversations about how Monero is better.
Any thread on Firefox has a top comment about how much Firefox sucks because the icons are a bit different or how the dev tools are better or some other excuse. They all devolve into people just talking about their favorite color of Chrome (e.g. Brave, Opera, Edge). IDGAF, just install Firefox and uBlock on your family's computer, they won't notice the difference between FF and Chrome.
Or any number of other such topics. They devolve into purity tests and tribalism. The lack of perfection in some tool only becomes some excuse to continue licking the boot. Can we not acknowledge that things have flaws but that these flaws are a worthwhile cost to not living under surveillance capitalism? I hear so many people complain about surveillance capitalism and then only throw up their hands in the air to say "but what can you do?" or "it's the way things are." We're the fucking people who made it that way and we're the fucking people who continue to make things that way! Not every HN user works at big tech, but I'm willing to bet nearly every HN user is their family's goto tech support person. You at least have that power to influence your friends and family about how to solve these problems.
We're the people that other people look to for tech advice. We can have nuanced conversations all day, and I think we fucking should, but most of them turn into dumb flame wars like "vim vs emacs" or "spaces vs tabs" and all this ends up with is the system perpetuating. Can we just for one god damn month not roll around in the mud? All the time I hear about how we love merit and meritocracy. Well let's fucking do it then. And we're engineers, if there's flaws in these OPEN SOURCE SYSTEMS, then let's fucking fix them instead of just complaining about the flaws of living under the boot. Or do we just like to complain and they've won because they convinced us we have no power?
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You should ask him if he's ever worked with someone who's pulled information on someone else for personal matters. Or if he'd be okay with personal information being pulled about himself. I'm usually surprised when people believe in the political process so much they can't fathom a government who will abuse their powers to undermine democracy.
> If you're not a bad guy, what do you have to hide?
Next time ask him if he'd be OK living in a glass house, since, as he's not a bad guy, he has nothing to hide.
Maybe ask if he has ever exceeded the speed limit, or run a red light, or failed to signal a turn. All things that could be monitored by a smartphone and reported to the police automatically.
Have him publish his full name, date of birth, social security number, mother's maiden name, bank checking and routing numbers, credit card numbers + expiration dates + cvv numbers, nude photos of his wife, nude photos of himself, all of the search history from all of his browsers online, all visible to the public.
Surely he doesn't see any point in keeping any of that information private, he's a good guy and not doing anything wrong, therefore he has nothing to hide and no use for privacy.
Notably, many of those dudes are fanatical about their OWN digital security, however.
Just like many cops (and thieves) invest pretty heavily in physical security.
And why the first thing a cop does if another cop starts hassling them (and won’t back down) is get a lawyer. Because they know.
It’s often less about what you did or didn’t do, and sometimes more about what someone wants/needs to nail you on.
I think the crucial bit you're missing is that the fundamental disagreement boils down to whether a properly-signed-and-executed warrant ought to be sufficient for the government to get its hands on evidence or otherwise do what it needs to do to deliver justice.
To you, he seems to believe Yes, and to him, I think you seem to believe No. Historically, the answer has been Yes, and crypto has fundamentally changed that. I think crystallizing exactly why you believe the right answer is No is essential, otherwise you're just not going to convince people on that side -- in their mind, I think, you're demanding more rights than you historically had, and at the cost of protecting the rest of the population.
I'd go a little further to say that he believes the government has the authority to do what it needs to do to catch criminals/terrorists/bad guys. He's much more concerned over whether a method is technically legal than whether or not the government should do said method. Whether its a properly signed warrant is kind of immaterial when there are various ways to get around that requirement legally and with precedent.
No, historically the vast majority of communication was not recorded, and so a warrant could not be used to access the communication. The fact of the modern world is that for the first time in history almost everything we do is recorded, and so subject to those warrants.
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>"if you're not a bad guy, what do you have to hide?"
everybody is a bad guy in the eyes of their political opponents.
No offense to your father but I've always felt like the "innocent until proven guilty" philosophy is expansive and fundamental privacy rights are part of that principle. That is, the underlying principle isn't "innocent until proven guilty" but something more akin to "your complete autonomy should be assumed by default, and the government should have to clear an extremely high threshold to constrain it".
I also really believe that this raises the bar for everyone. If the government has to work harder to prove your guilt, the case is all that much stronger when the threshold is met.
I'm probably preaching to the choir but I increasingly see arguments to the contrary as boiling down to "make things so the executive branch of the government doesn't have to work as hard" which I don't find compelling as a societal value.
This is the crux of my belief system on the topic too. Along with the associated “burden of proof” and how making it less burdensome should not be anyone citizens goal or responsibility.
The irony is that it’s precisely why GPs dad had a job, with full transparency there’s essentially no need for any type of forensics.
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What does he think if "government's ability to catch criminals" becomes "government's ability to attack political opponents"? I suppose he has a privileged position, as part of the incorruptible rule-of-law democratic land of the free, but people in other countries may not be so well off.
Ifnnu the government actually caught criminals it old be easier to believe that giving them more tools to so might help. But in reality most crimes go unsolved and most prevention is done by human nature and people just not doing crimes
"if you're not a bad guy, what do you have to hide?"
Your father is subject to a simple but pervasive error: Not every justification who is a good or a bad guy is ethical right in every aspect of life.
No one ever answers the “what do you have to hide” question, which is a little sus.
> No one ever answers the “what do you have to hide” question, which is a little sus.
Poe's Law strikes again, but for reference there are even several major categories:
Some things are nobody's business. If you have religious parents and you're gay, you may not want them to know that, even if your religious parents work for the government.
People have proprietary secrets. A drug company or tech company can't be spending a billion dollars on 95%-finished R&D only to have a random cop take a $10,000 bribe to hand it over to a foreign competitor.
It's important to protect the political opposition from the incumbents. The thing Nixon had to resign over? That.
Sometimes the bad guys work for the government. If your abusive ex is a cop, they shouldn't be able to trivially find you without a warrant.
The government shouldn't be able to go on a fishing expedition. If you do something that isn't illegal, or that you have a right to do, that shouldn't be an excuse to trawl through your life so you can be prosecuted for breaking a law that everybody breaks but only people who step on the toes of the powerful are prosecuted for.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -Cardinal Richelieu
"Saying you don't need privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't need freedom of speech because you have nothing to say." -Edward Snowden
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Okay, so reply with your credit card numbers, links to all your cell phone photos, your DNA test results, your passwords, and your medical history. What do you have to hide?
You: "But you are randos on the internet, not the government!"
So I can get any of that from anyone if I just bribe the right government official? Or if I want that info for nefarious purposes I just have to get hired at the right agency? Or I can lobby to get a law passed that says everyone with the sequence "GATTACA" at a particular site on chromosome 7 is inherently evil and must be locked away for the public good? (Oh, what a surprise, it turns out that DNA sequence is incredibly common only for your particular race, huh.) Or if you're a celebrity, any cop can demand to search your phone without a warrant and get all of your private photos to sell to tabloids? You're genuinely ok with all of this? You find people who are concerned about these things suspicious?
Laws change. People in power do not always have your best interests at heart.
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Not sure if you're being sarcastic but imo the lack of answers is because the phrasing begs the question. If you change "hide" to "protect" it suddenly becomes a bit more of a different proposition.
If I told you, I wouldn't be hiding it then, would I? You can hardly blame me for for Russell's paradox, it's been around far longer than I have been
Boomers were raised in a high trust society, they think that the powers-that-be are fundamentally good. They don't see how easily it could be corrupted.
Millennials see reality through the lens of 'Squid game' and 'Hunger games.' Meanwhile boomers think we're Snowflakes. They don't understand that we're fighting a relentless psychological war in a hyper-competitive environment of scarcity.
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> Whereas I believe a right to privacy in your tools and communication is essential, he believes they infringe on the government's ability to catch criminals.
Honestly, if I had spent 30 years of my life trying to catch criminals, I would probably believe the same. Just like dermatologists telling everyone to put on sunscreen at all times (because they see skin cancer cases on the daily), criminal prosecutors often live in a bubble, where crime happens all the time and everywhere, and you can never have enough sophisticated tools to catch the perpetrators. They completely forget that normal life away from crime exists, too.
Anyone in law enforcement for long enough, and I'd probably say something like 5-10 years on the beat, is enough to make many apathetic to rights and dignities. A sad reality unfortunately. Its the same vein of salespeople who get so caught-up in the hustle they that see everyone and every relationship as a potential transaction. And if I'm being introspective, my own flaw of seeing most systems/laws/social contracts as problems that can be solved with tinkering (they can't).
your father wasn't a tech guy. he was a cop.
I'd disagree, they're not mutually exclusive.
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The typical HN person works as a software engineer, and the typical software company makes money, either directly or indirectly, via targeted ads. And these ads are served via a surveillance infrastructure that would not be out of place in a dystopian science fiction novel.
Even the companies that don't make money from ads have no qualms just letting Google or Facebook collect data about their website visitors.
Actually that's a problem for a lot of libertarian minded tech, it starts being thought of as enabling freedom from oppressive governments and ends up being adopted by criminals - Bitcoin, Tor, etc.
In the tech industry you also find a bend of very economically self interested version of privacy, which is that giving privacy to your users is a great way to claim you didn't know anything bad was happening. I'm pretty sure that, not high minded ideals, is why Meta invests so much in e2e encryption and privacy for WhatsApp, and publicizing it - when the next horrible thing is planned using Whatsapp, it lets them disclaim all responsibility for moderating what's happening on their platform
> Actually that's a problem for a lot of libertarian minded tech, it starts being thought of as enabling freedom from oppressive governments and ends up being adopted by criminals - Bitcoin, Tor, etc.
This is such a sham though.
You have some privacy-protecting technology everyone would benefit from. Ordinary people don't really understand it but would use and benefit from it if it was the default.
Laws are passed that make it illegal to use or otherwise highly inconvenient, e.g. you have to fill out an onerous amount of paperwork even if you're not doing anything wrong. Ordinary people are deterred from using it and ordinary systems don't adopt it. Criminals continue using it because they don't care about breaking the paperwork laws if they're already breaking the drug laws.
Then people say look at this evil technology that only criminals use! As if the reason others don't use it wasn't purposeful.
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> starts being thought of as enabling freedom from oppressive governments and ends up being adopted by criminals - Bitcoin, Tor, etc
Yes. Both are real facets of this type of tech. For all the handwringing about "but what if fascism" that we have here in the US, I'm pretty sure 90% of the actual worries American cryptocurrency users have in their hearts is either about tax evasion, money laundering, or using crypto to buy/sell something illegal (Granted, there are some things illegal to buy/sell that there could be an ethical argument shouldn't be illegal -- probably certain drugs for instance). If someone has made bitcoin transactions to say, donate to EFF, Planned Parenthood or ACLU, I would take a bet of 5 Bitcoin that he isn't going to be imprisoned for that fact in this country. Yes, even though Trump is President.
But I think we who believe in privacy make ourselves look bad if we try to pretend that there isn't a ton of that stuff going on.
It's a reasonable opinion to say that privacy is good, but I think the thing to argue and "prove" is that it outweighs the fact that this technology also enables all this bad stuff. Which is a value judgment and thus you need to convince people, rather than just point to the word "Freedom" and assert.
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A lot of people keep looking for technology solutions to political problems. The fact is that privacy, especially of financial transactions, is becoming illegal. Any technology that allows you to send or spend money anonymously will be attacked by our governments. They won't be allowed.
You can argue about whether you can get away with it due to difficulty of enforcement, but all that does is turn us all into criminals. They won't put ALL of in jail, but they can put ANY of us in jail - the ones they don't like.
> The fact is that privacy, especially of financial transactions, is becoming illegal. Any technology that allows you to send or spend money anonymously will be attacked by our governments. They won't be allowed.
It's probably a bit worse than that. It's not specific to transactions or spending.
Eventually any IP talking to another IP without the mandatory metadata to link it to a physical identity will be illegal.
Right now there is a hodge-podge of solutions that piggy-back on the phone networks, wires, etc. that used to give LEO enough actionable information to track some criminals. But most of that has been obsoleted by modern cryptography.
> But most of that has been obsoleted by modern cryptography.
Except that people are people, and people make mistakes, and it doesn't take a lot of mistakes to fail in your opsec, and then your whole plot unravels.
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Don’t understand this pessimism. There are a large number of countries in the world. You can migrate out of a country if they start doing insane things like this.
I would consider leaving UK very seriously if I was building a life there now, as an example.
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Spot on.
Some think we need financial freedom, but in reality it's the freedom to fund scams and malware, launder money, dodge taxes, and buy stuff that’s illegal.
That won't become legal just because you use "Monero" or whatever. Obviously we can't have privacy for financial transactions.
You forgot a few things on that list that people would like freedom for:
advocating for (or against) trans rights, protesting against the deportation of migrants, advocate against gun-control, and donating to (anti) palestinian causes
Are just a few things that people would like the freedom to do.
The point being, financial privacy is an important part of having a functioning democracy. But at the same time, financial control and limits are also an important part of a functioning democracy, for e.g. the 'freedoms' you mention. In the end, neither perfect privacy, not perfect surveilance are what we need. The best solution will be somewhere in the middle, with nuance.
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This is a very narrow way to see it. Technological advancements can and did massively affect politics and other parts of life.
Today you get away with it, they make it harder but it would still be better than the old one.
People manage to corrupt and hack things inevitably as long as it is static, changing systems can obviously be good just for this reason only. It also brings questions about why the current system is the way it is.
Except, you know, the dollar bills the government itself prints.
Yes! But also this is why governments (including in the US) are trying to discourage the use of cash, and make it less convenient.
To some extent. Not dragnettable but certainly not perfectly anonymous.
> [The Patriot Act] contains many sunset provisions beginning December 31, 2005, approximately four years after its passage. Before the sunset date, an extension was passed for four years which kept most of the law intact. In May 2011, President Barack Obama signed the PATRIOT Sunset Extensions Act of 2011, which extended three provisions. These provisions were modified and extended until 2019 by the USA Freedom Act, passed in 2015. In 2020, efforts to extend the provisions were not passed by the House of Representatives, and as such, the law has expired.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act
> In 2020, efforts to extend the provisions were not passed by the House of Representatives, and as such, the law has expired.
The wording is confusing. Two provisions expired, not the entire Patriot Act.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250306093943/https://www.nytim...
The Wikipedia article is quite confusing, and seems to imply that those two provisions expired because they were the only two provisions not sunsetted already. The table indicates that most of the law sunsetted on March of 2006:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act#Section_expiration...
But then they say "The first act reauthorized all but two Title II provisions. Two sections were changed to sunset on December 31, 2009"
But the first act was passed in 2005, and so it's unclear whether it reauthorized provisions only until 2006 or a longer term.
I looked into this a little more, and these were the final two provisions of the Patriot Act, so the did law expire.
Unfortunately, that doesn't mean a whole lot, as many of the provisions live on in the USA Freedom Act.
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The wording is confusing.
Being confusing, I'm almost certain, was the entire point.
"USA Freedom Act"
We're truly living in Orwell's world.
For nearly quarter of a century.
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"I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and all sorts of petty fuhrers of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible."
Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ensuring Effective Discipline Over Monitoring Act.
It's just an acronym bro, don't get all worked up about it, now let's go down, the Two Minutes' Hate is about to start.
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If the law has expired, how do they "expand" the law? I am confused. Did they refer to the wrong one?
The patriot act is not really “a law” in the sense of being a concrete series of statements you can point to in today’s US Code. It’s more like a patch to a codebase. At the time it was passed it (like any statutory act of Congress) created and amended dozens of sections of the US code. Some of those provisions had expiration dates which have lapsed, but not all, and (apparently) not the sections this article discusses dealing with financial crimes.
I believe you have misread the comment. In 2015, it was expanded and extended until 2019. After that, it was allowed to expire and was not extended or expanded further.
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Also it dosent matter if it's expired anymore. It was kept on for 20+ Fing years. During that time it was used to permananly shred constitusional rights and human rights.
They got what they wanted from it beyond their wildest dreams.
Whenever leftists say that "Trump is a symptom of an illness that has been metastasizing for a long time" this is what we mean.
> Whenever leftists say that "Trump is a symptom of an illness that has been metastasizing for a long time" this is what we mean.
It's also the thing I don't understand about party loyalty.
When candidate George W. Bush was running for President, he was saying all kinds of things about how big government is bad and regulation destroys small businesses etc. Clearly not consistent with what he did once he was in office. When candidate Obama was running for President, he was saying how those things Bush actually did were bad and unconstitutional, and then once he's in office he signs a Patriot Act extension, fails to pardon Snowden, etc. When candidate Trump, well, you know.
Most of this is structural, not partisan. And a lot of it is Congress even though people mostly talk about the President. The partisanship itself is structural -- get your state to use STAR voting instead of first past the post and you get more than two choices, and then liars can be evicted even if their state/district goes >60% to the left or right.
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My big ask is, was it always this stupid? Like, all these huge historical events and figures, did it all go down as stupidly and clownishly as the modern USA? Was there an early 20th century fascist Europe equivalent to a man named Big Balls being beat up by children and a fascist police action being triggered as a result? Was there a Napeolonic era equivalent to a media figure known for making light of school shootings, getting killed in a school shooting, a second after again making light of school shootings? Was George III as publicly and flagrantly fellated by the court as Trump is by the media still allowed into the White House?
I feel like I can't possibly live in the stupidest era in world history so it makes me try to see other historical eras in a similar light - how can I reinterpret the past such that it also experienced a bunch of clownish nonsense?
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username checks out?
There's a conflict between Bitcoin as a public ledger, privacy, and money laundering.
With a bank you can have anti-money laundering and bank secrecy. Transaction are known by the bank, can be subject to subpoena or automatic reporting, but are non-public.
If you want privacy on Bitcoin you need to do things that look a lot like money laundering. Governments banning money laundering isn't a surprise. The value of Bitcoin, if transactions are fully public and attributable to pseudonyms, is questionable.
In some ways, the problem Bitcoin has is that it is inflexible. Governments want to change the rules in finance from time to time, traditional finance adapts.
> There's a conflict between Bitcoin as a public ledger, privacy, and money laundering
There is, to be fair, a legitimate debate to be had about dismantling our anti-money laundering infrastructure.
No, there really isn't. Money laundering has been a huge problem enabling all sorts of crimes and issues. There is no debate to be had on the benefits of prohibiting it, and you have to be very deep in the Silicon Valley rabbit hole to think even 5% of the population of any nation would support doing away with those rules.
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Essentially decentralisation sounds nice, but doesnt work in practice.
Most governments aren't decentralized in their structure, which causes the "problem". If you have private entities that coordinate with each other it works quite well, but the world is very used to big centralized governments that "solve" all their problems.
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Did you hear about the Internet?
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Bitcoin, tor, bittorrent are all perfect examples of decentralization simply not working in practice
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I'm confused how the connection was made between "here are our guidelines for suspicious activity" and "self custody is outlawed"
It can be hard to figure out exactly what is outlawed with banking interactions. It seems a lot of the KYC/AML stuff is based on industry best practices and guidelines. There's no law you need a state ID with address to open a bank account, but when I tried to open up a bank account without an address I found it basically impossible. The bank will then cite that these practices are what they're held to as law, because the law itself is vague and relies on more nebulous customs.
So what is called "guidelines" one day becomes legally binding later with no act of congress.
Unfortunately there's a massive swath of mere guidelines and regulation that end up having legal binding. For instance, a Navy sailor was recently sent to jail for 20 years for having gun parts that were cut up the wrong way, the "wrong way" being the right way with previous mere guidance and the wrong way apparently being the fact that some time since then the guidance changed but not the law.
That's the whole point. They can't overtly outlaw things because aggrieved parties would sue and win. So they soft outlaw them with expensive record keeping requirements and ambiguity because no business big enough to win but smaller than a giant mega-corp will intentionally risk going toe to toe with the government in court as doing so would likely be financially ruinous.
And even if the government doesn't look like it's disposed to do that in your situation you're still sticking your neck out by deviating from the herd because then you can't screech "standard business practice" when some contrived chain of facts results in you fending off a civil suit for whatever reason.
This isn't just a banking thing or a guns thing, you see examples in every industry once you know the pattern.
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See this very nice blog-post: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/kyc-and-aml-beyond-th...
It explains how KYC and AML law function as a stochastic control on crime. How that is difficult to do through actual laws, and what the downsides of this system are.
De facto vs. de justo
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> creating and using single-use wallets, addresses, or accounts, and sending [cryptocurrency] through such wallets, addresses, or accounts through a series of independent transactions
One could argue that's how normal Bitcoin wallets work. The addresses are deterministic based on your passphrase (or derived private key). The addresses don't need to get reused because there's no real value in doing so, and no real cost of just using a new address each time.
Though yes--even if that's the exact meaning and design, presumably one could still use the simpler wallets that DO just reuse the same address over and over. And obviously that'd reduce privacy quite a bit.
Yes. Single-use addresses protect me. If you store your entire balance under a single address then anybody you transact with can see your entire balance by lookup up the transaction. Single-use addresses protects you from people snooping around looking for worth while $5 wrench attacks.
What you quoted is regarding the use of a SERIES of single use wallets. What is the "normal Bitcoin" use case for funneling money through a chain of throwaway wallets?
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Because just about all those practices are what reasonable users of the protocol would do, and making your transactions 'suspicious' is synonymous with all the big players refusing to deal with you. It's a way of prohibiting behaviour outside the force of law, which is even more insidious.
I feel like growing up is realizing that the government is just a big gang. They do what they want and will enforce with menace what they want. They can change the rules, take your stuff and it ain't stealing because they said so. Sigh.
I recognized it in the opposite direction, after observing that gangs inevitably end up being quasi-states within their turf. They demonstrate almost everything I associate with statehood except for issuing their own currency. From there, the reverse (that governments are just big gangs) also flows naturally.
To your point: gangs of various stripes pay blood money to the families of fallen members; they also fund or support community programs to curry good favor.
My takeaway though is that human societies abhor a power vacuum: no matter what my libertarian and ultraliberal friends imagine, there must be a strongman. At least with democracy, we have the opportunity to somewhat influence who that is.
On the other hand you get to vote who is in the gang. So choose wisely.
You only get two options for each vote, and there is no reason that one or both of the options would need to be aware of or be in favor of an acceptable solution to the given problem. In fact, the chance of that happening is vanishingly small.
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You used to get to vote. It doesn't work like that anymore.
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Most of the people on the planet don't get to vote.
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This would come as no surprise, since all the original promises of Bitcoin circa 15-ish years ago are long dead. The turning point occurred when all exchanges agreed to report transactions directly to the IRS. I say this as someone who had an interest prior to that but lost all interest when the Crypto community sold out its ideals and consented to certain regulations in the interest of mass marketing cryptocurrency for the purpose of speculative profit.
Doing KYC is somewhat against the whole idea of like "no government involvement" but it doesn't negate that the government controls the currency.
You lost all interest because Bitcoin became attractive to people who deal with companies who insist on KYC? How is that in any relation to the underlying code or mantra that Bitcoin is about?
Yes, I lost interest at the point where entirely all of the on/off ramps to Bitcoin submitted to universal data sharing with the central government in the interest of greater profitability. At that point, "being your own bank" is gone, and the process is equivalent to withdrawing cash from a normal bank, and the value proposition of Bitcoin is limited to its features as a deflationary speculative asset.
Wait until you find out about the TRUST program and all the exchanges reporting PII to another.
This is pure click bait that relies on a deliberate misreading of a 2023 notice [1] that tries to imply that "self custody" is being attacked in any form.
All that this is saying is that the government will try to track money movement to pursue criminal activity, including, unfortunately the criminal activity of moving money in a way that looks sketchy. This is something that we have decided we have to live with.
[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/10/23/2023-23...
It's not "pure click bait" for anyone that has followed along with the crypto community since the early days. This is basically an official stake in the heart for anyone that even loosely held on to the original ideals behind crypto.
Crypto is increasingly no different than traditional banking in anyways that are beneficial, and remains different in ways that can only be harmful to the individual (market manipulation, wild speculation, lack of institutional regulation) etc.
I don't know how anyway remotely interested in decentralized crytpocurrencies can see this as "click bait".
It's a two year old note talking about mixers and money laundering and it's being misrepresented as a new government stance against self-custody. That's why it's click bait.
I think the case for why strong encryption is important is much clearer than why untraceable financial instruments are important and I don't think it's super compelling to argue that these things are actually the same, even if your opposition to government control is the same.
I think it's actually pretty clear that almost all people are not capable of secure and reliable self-custody and would be better off with an intermediary. We're not keeping our fiat currency in a safe under our bed after all.
I think it makes sense to start from the idea that you should be able to transfer funds to someone, like $100 to your mother, without needing the government or a megacorp to facilitate it. The same way I can gift my TV to my mom.
Whether that's cash or cryptocurrency doesn't seem to matter since your argument would also apply to cash.
If you start from an assumption that there should be no regulation, then your conclusion will be that there should be no regulation.
That's not actually an argument for anyone who doesn't share your assumptions though and is largely just lazy thinking.
Cash also has physical limitations that make large cross-border transactions hard, which crypto does not.
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Exactly! I want digital cash. We have the technology to do that, so why not? The tech crowd hyped up Bitcoin, but why never privacy coins? Any single flaw becomes killer, even if the flaw is unrelated to privacy or even petty. Hell, I'd even take a US ZKP-based stable coin that was pre-mined (but had strong privacy guarantees) and had even a small (like 0.1-0.5%) gas fee that ended up acting as some form of consumption tax. At least then there's some guarantee of tax revenue while maintaining the notion that Big Brother doesn't need to know I gave my friend some beer money.
Our world worked with cash before. Sure, it wasn't perfect, but are those imperfections worse than the mass invasion of our privacy? There's no perfect system, so the only question is how we weight certain issues, not that flaws exist. If we purity test then the only winners are the immoral people who are willing to lie and deceive so that their choice appears to pass said purity tests. They love us to spend our time infighting because that's less time working against them.
Cash and crypto do share similar properties that way... but with cash, you can't deposit say, $1,000,000 in cash into a bank, where you can use it for a lot more types of transactions, without forms being filed with the government, in order to both instill fear into the hearts of drug dealers and gangsters (etc) and to help catch them if they're dumb enough.
Now, drug dealers sometimes do just do as many transactions as possible with cash, outside the banking system, for that reason. But they're hindered by these anti-laundering regulations, which is considered a good thing by most.
To me then it sounds reasonable to impose similar limits and reporting obligations - treating crypto as much like cash as is practical - when it comes to exchanging crypto for dollars in any way. It doesn't prevent Bad People from conducting transactions in BTC directly, but they have always been able to do so with cash for some things.
The far left doesn't believe in the idea of property ownership in the traditional sense. So no, I think the premise that you can transfer property to anyone without the government tracking it is incorrect. Taxes could theoretically be imposed, registration might be required to comply with a social "program" they are implementing, etc.
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Yes, it might be true that most people aren't willing to keep their money under their beds for security reasons.
But it shouldn't be illegal or somehow indicative of criminality.
Same thing with self custody of crypto.
It's not illegal. They're talking about flagging it as "suspicious". Lots of legal things are flagged as suspicious by law enforcement.
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it's already illegal. unless you keep tax records and receipts with all that money under your bed, probably cause and civil forfeiture can be broadly applied to it.
I think you are conflating 2 things: - ability to privately give money to someone (mechanism is irrelevant, by hand or by way of a blockchain) - self-custody risks for uninformed users
The first one is the privacy argument.
Would you be comfortable if you’re not allowed to give the cash in your pocket to someone without someone watching over? If the answer is no, you are pro privacy for financial transactions.
Cash has the privacy feature as a default. You can argue that 3rd parties that help you send cash don’t have to offer any privacy, but BTC isn’t that, and forcing it to be that way is an attack on privacy.
I don't have a predetermined opinion on whether it is good or bad for cash to be untraceable.
I think arguments for privacy are pretty poorly argued and often come down to "isn't the idea of someone watching you icky" which this thread is not disabusing me of.
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I agree, send me your bank account login info and I can keep it safe for you.
Believing a profit-motivated corporation or individual is trustworthy long term especially in an age of quick mergers and acquisitions is .. deeply naive to say the least.
> We're not keeping our fiat currency in a safe under our bed after all.
Only because Americans haven't had a proper large-scale bank crash for a while now. In countries where it does happen, people very much do keep their fiat currency "under the mattress" though. And it's good that they have that option.
>Loading up a single address with too many UTXOs degrades the entropy of a public-private key pair and makes it easier to brute force a user's private key.
Is there a realistic risk there? If I use an address a million times, how much weaker is it? And how feasible would it be for an attacker to brute for it?
Strictly speaking, loading an address with many UTXOs has no effect on security of the receiving address at all (beyond increasing its public profile).
The security concerns start happening after an address spends a UTXO. Before a P2WPKH (segwit) address is used, only the public key hash is known. In order to spend from it, the full public key needs to be revealed. That's why it's recommended to use single-use addresses, because a quantum computing attack or elliptic curve vulnerability could be used against an address where the attacker knows the public key, but would not work against an address where the pubkey has not yet been revealed.
So, the main security change happens after you spend from an address the first time. Subsequently, there are theoretical vulnerabilities that could occur after an address is spent from many times, but really only if the signer is malicious like dark skippy, or faulty and doesn't properly follow RFC 6979 deterministic signatures, leaking some signature entropy which could be used to crack the private key. The latter has happened with some bad custom wallet implementations, but these attacks are even further in the realm of theoretical, not super realistic, require faulty software/firmware to be implanted into signing devices.
so the risk to the wallet holder is the exact same risk that exists for every single HTTPS connection right now?
Post quantum algorithms have been available. You can do it today. Why not for bitcoin?
In reality, there are very few current real world implementations. This article makes it seem that RSA is under active exploitation. If it is, bitcoin is not the first target IMO
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I have a grad school professor that owes me $1M dollars on a bet that the Patriot Act would never end. I told him he was painfully naive and not suitable to each graduate school economics with such thinking.
Unless you used different language for the bet, you lost it the moment it was made.
"Never" may be falsified by "at least once", but affirmed only by "never". So I'm afraid only you could have ever been on the hook for the $1M, and may still be!
Your prof made a good bet.
The wording was that the Patriot Act would not be temporary, and it will not be receded, and in fact would be strengthened.
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Was there concrete term limits to 'never'. Otherwise I fear you were the naive one.
Snarky comment meant in good humor.
He can pick up his million dollars at the end of eternity
If the United States ends, I win. It's looking pretty probable today, with this inescapable cascading of everything traditionally considered American Values, and the POTUS openly defying the US Constitution with zero repercussions beyond wimpy whispered protests. Then there is the media doing EVERYTHING in it's power to accelerate this destruction...
He's the smart one, you haven't won yet and he knows it.
Professor response after ignoring rambling student. Ok. Walks away.
Inevitable. Remember Roosevelt's gold confiscation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
It was forbidden to have more than 5 ounces of gold.
Good for Bitcoin, then ? Is it becoming a form of Gold, for real ?
Bitcoin is more a rug pull then ever, it's just that the "right" people are in charge of when and how the rug is pulled so it's becoming legitimized in all the ways that benefit those people and de-legitimized in all ways that benefit the individual.
Anything which threatens to rock the financial boat too much will be banned.
sometimes you wonder if people have become so thoroughly captured by the status quo they can no longer even conceive of a monetary system existing that is not entirely dependent on custodians acting on someone's behalf
it's not the developers of bitcoin's fault your entire reg compliance apparatus was constructed on requiring intermediaries
It's fundamentally unsurprising that the custodians of the existing system don't like a system built on the premise of circumventing it
In their defense, there might be some issues with circumventing such controls. Money laundring, fraud, market manipulation and sanction circumvention aren't always positive for society at large
i understand their motivation, but none of the existing controls have done much to prevent those bad things from occurring either
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M question was on what legal/Constitutional basis does the Treasury have for expanding the Patriot Act? Is it because the law provides powers to the Treasury department to define areas that the law should apply? Or is it a case where the administration (once again) is assuming it can do something, the Constitution be damned?
Self-Custody is problematic for any government as it allows any citizens to accumulate any kind of wealth they have and simply "transfer" it overseas without any oversight and in a ridiculously short amount of time. Some countries (rich/developed countries) allow free capital transfer but these transfers are regulated and also some jurisdictions are sanctioned. Transferring money abroad, from the perspective of the origin country, just moves the money inside the origin country system from one party to another. So it is well within the visibility and control of the state, especially for large amounts of money.
Today, you can brain-memorize $1bn in Bitcoin and move yourself from one country to another; and depending on the country; might be able to exercise different amounts of that purchasing power. Control moves from the origin country to the reception country.
Russia and China were always hostile because of this. The Chinese authorities regarded Bitcoin as some sort of capital flight scheme. Now both Europe and the USA are too. I think Bitcoin only chance for survival, in its current form, is if these two poles do use it as a mechanism to attack one another. Mining is already balanced between East and West.
Sounds like capital flight is anticipated to become a thing. Why might that be?
Maybe in 2028 a presidential candidate can run with removing the Patriot Act as one of their campaign points. I suspect the world will be very different then. The America I knew, remembered, and loved started dying with the passage of the Patriot Act.
Given how patriot act survived many terms of both republicans and democrats i highly doubt it.
It is a extremely convenient act for whoever is in power.
There needs to be something like the federal equivalent of a referendum. I think with that, it would be possible to get rid of the patriot act and legalize weed, both of which seem to have popular support but zero chance of majority of representatives backing because they don't want to be liable for the worst-case corner-cases in the aftermath.
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Can you imagine the world today if Bernie had won?
An interesting what-if scenario; but, let's assume Sanders won and all else remained largely the same as it has:
Unless the Sanders Administration had a very favorable or majority Democrat Congress aligned with his progressive wing, many proposals would be outright blocked or heavily compromised. Knowing our limitation that everything else has stayed largely the same as history since, this wouldn't be the case. The hypothetical administration's attempts at sweeping reforms, such as healthcare and climate regulation, would very likely be significantly curtailed or overturned by courts or constrained by constitutional limits on separation. The GOP, even though they actively outspend Democrats when in power, obstruct via financial limits each and every Democratic-led effort while crowing about expansion of debt incursion; as such, spending on Bernie's proposed initiatives would raise concerns about deficits, inflation, and taxation. Even with tax increases, there would be pushback from wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbyists.
Basically, nothing would change in any significant way except, perhaps, the SCOTUS would not be outright overturning DECADES of 'settled law' in favor of an absurd view of the world as it was hundreds of years ago.
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Many people will imagine things. However history constantly suggests that most of those are very different from the reality that results.
The good news is when your candidate loses you don't find out the evil they really do and you can say it is not your fault. The bad news is you don't find out what is bad about the things you think are good.
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Just because a politician does the most virtue signaling towards the left doesn't mean that they'll produce the most progressive results. Bernie has a very poor track record of coalition building. He was getting into fights with Manchin even though he was needed as the 50th vote for the American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act.
He's never been a champion of financial freedom on an individual basis. He's consistently advocated for deeper and more intrusive regulations on cryptocurrencies.
Yes, it would have been 4 years of zero progress because he would have been stonewalled by both parties.
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I'm guessing similar to the Obama administration. E.g. he couldn't get proper healthcare reform passed.
Probably very similar unfortunately. The current state of US politics is that any policy further than center or maybe slightly left of center has a snowball's chance in hell of making it through Congress. The best case scenarios is probably what Biden accomplished: temporarily pausing the slide into far-right authoritarianism. Maybe he's able to pass some extremely watered down version of health care reform or tax reform but that seems unlikely. Certainly nothing like true progressive platform he ran on is possible in the US right now.
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He was sabotaged by the DNC. Even Elizabeth Warren said that the nomination process was rigged by the DNC. Absolute corruption and the world would absolutely be a different place.
But his support of ratcheting up the Ukraine war disappointed profoundly. That’s not the Bernie I would have voted for.
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Ron Paul already did that. Not very popular.
There are many reasons Ron Paul was not very popular.
popular means whatever Hollywood decided to like
this is the end of celebrity culture at the hands of social media.
monarchies are the central core of celebrity cultism, look at France today; surrounded by the Monarchies and up in flames.
It's called the patriot act, anyone fighting it is instantly framed as anti-American.
> a presidential candidate can run with removing the Patriot Act as one of their campaign points
I've worked on privacy regulation. This would not get votes. The unfortunate fact is that the people most passionate about these issues are also tremendously lazy or extremely nihilistic. (Maybe it comes with the territory of not trusting institutions.)
Either way, privacy advocates can rarely muster even a dozen calls to electeds, let alone credibly threaten backing a primary opponent. The reason SOPA/PIPA worked is it animated a group of tech advocates beyond those with ideological opposition to surveillance.
No candidate can do that. The children were raised to be racist and ignorant. That basically means you are going to deal with poorly raised feral racist and entitled children. You aren’t going to rehabilitate that in your lifetime, the childhoods are fucked up. Maybe in 30-40 years these people will have a come to Jesus moment, but we don’t have a malleable national moral character to appeal to helpful sensibilities given how poorly the prior generation failed at raising proper children with good moral character.
Basically, a good portion of White America are gone cases. You won’t be able to explain to gone cases anything. That’s the reality of America.
I might turn out to vote if there was a candidate whose sole platform plank was to repeal as many existing laws as possible.
any democratic candidate?
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the average man does not want to be free. he simply wants to be safe. ~H.L. Mencken
The bad guys will say you only need privacy if you’re guilty and the plebs will lap it up
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There will almost certainly be an election in 2028. The degree to which it will be rigged through gerrymandering, voter intimidation, voter suppression and/or blatant cheating is a different question.
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Why not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_1933_German_parliamen...
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Despite the origin of HN being in the US, given that the current community has expanded to a large array of multinational English speakers, I'd rather country-specific posts like these were tagged such, in a international context: e.g. "The US treasury is expanding.."
even if mention of "the patriot act" is an obvious signal, there are many such contexts but an explicit tagging makes quick parsing easier. Same for mention of the government/authorities/police/military/administration/constitution/president etc.
I'm convinced the the capital-c Crypto industry hates crypto. Don't use it as a currency! Give us interest free loans (stablecoins) and gamble!
This is inaccurate and in a hilarious way. Treasury is not coming after Bitcoin. There's an update in an ongoing rulemaking process that got reported here[0] as banning mixing and privacy tools. It may have been blown out of proportion[1], but I am not a lawyer, and certainly banning these tools would be bad. The thing is, Bitcoin's not private—every transaction is public for everyone to download. It's Twitter for your bank account. And that comes with serious privacy, safety, and boring commercial counterparty risks that should be addressed. These kinds of tools exist to mitigate that problem. The irony is that Bitcoin has largely refused to address this obvious issue, so no, Treasury isn't coming for Bitcoin. Indeed, there been years of people arguing Bitcoin would be just fine with no privacy protections. [0] https://www.therage.co/us-government-to-bring-patriot-act-to... [1] https://x.com/valkenburgh/status/1966174324701778071"
I always wonder why monero isn’t more popular?
On- and off- ramps suck. And there isn't much speculative value. So it misses the main 'use case' of crypto.
Its by far the best crypto-currency for making payments. But people care very little about making payments with crypto, and exchanging between Fiat and Monero is very difficult, so its not an easy payment system either.
Overton window. There is a lot of funding for youtube influencers to play with casino coins that are transparent and traceable. Those are basically looking for "money goes up" and don't really care about the crypto part.
Monero is only on the news for negative reasons when someone tries to bring it down or delists from yet another exchange. There isn't funding to make it popular, which I guess in the end it is really up to Monero users from pushing it up.
That's a long-winded explanation of the fact that most people don't care about Monero's privacy benefits, so the only way Monero will be more popular is if someone funds a marketing campaign for it.
Single use wallets? Wallet is not a concept. Address is the concept. Addresses should be used once for security.
The screenshot-of-a-screenshot seems to be talking about mixers (e.g. TornadoCash). But ultimately, what did you expect?
Find a way that is costs trump money or prevents him from making money, and this stuff will vanish instantly.
Small potatoes. Once he controls the Federal reserve they can print money and give it to him (in the guise of a sovereign wealth fund).
War on Terror AUMF is still in force and is why the President can just decide to bomb whatever country they want without asking for permission, now.
All that shit after 9/11 was crazy and dangerous, and some of us said that at the time, and go figure, the fucking obviously true things we were saying have turned out to be... true. What a surprise.
> War on Terror AUMF is still in force and is why the President can just decide to bomb whatever country they want without asking for permission, now.
The War on Terror AUMF relies on a Presidential determinatiom that the targets “planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or person”.
But the President has had implicit blanket permission to bomb whoever he wants with a time limit ever since the War Powers Act was passed.
People who protested this horse shit were called unamerican for christs sake. Bush Jr said the literal words "you are either with us, or against us". The right went into utter hysterics about France not wanting to help our BS invasion.
The right loves to say that violent rhetoric is the left's fault, while they wished us harm for not wanting to invade a random country in the middle east that wasn't even related to the terrorist attack.
Meanwhile, all that horseshit with the TSA only ever enriched a couple people connected to the admin.
> Meanwhile, all that horseshit with the TSA only ever enriched a couple people connected to the admin.
I'm pretty sure Homeland Security was only created because it was easier to steer a pile of brand-new contracts for a brand-new organization to the "right" places, than it would have been if they'd simply expanded the roles of existing parts of the government that were already supposed to be doing what Homeland was supposedly created for.
> The right loves to say that violent rhetoric is the left's fault
Well you know, they are the ones constantly comparing Republicans to Hitler, the Nazis, calling them fascists, making direct claims that electing Trump would lead to the end of democracy, having "punch Nazis" be a rallying cry, and so on. Not really crazy to see how that might influence people to think that killing Trump or even a conservative podcaster is necessary to save the world.
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If there would have been better policing of digital currency by its users against criminal actors, perhaps digital assets would be spared the attention and now regulation. Sadly, increasing adoption and privacy guarantees lure criminals same as legitimate users.
The US is being run by a convicted felon and is in the process of converting to a totalitarian state.
Any upcoming changes to privacy regulations are going to be to further that goal, not to crack down on crime.
> Loading up a single address with too many UTXOs degrades the entropy of a public-private key pair and makes it easier to brute force a user's private key.
Well that's not true... The key doesn't change because you added more bitcoin
The quote does not say that the key changes. It says that each transaction makes it (a bit) easier to perform a brute force attack.
Financial privacy and national security are fundamentally at odds. With financial privacy and real freedom, you can hire a competing army.
The state will never allow large scale financial privacy because it poses an existential threat to the state.
It is a nuisance to the state.
I do not see how it is an existential threat.
Nation states existed for centuries in which money was frequently held as cash and even large transactions were often done in cash. its still common (or was until very recently) in a lot of (mostly poor) countries
> With financial privacy and real freedom, you can hire a competing army.
Having the money to pay an army is a long way from hiring one. Recruitment and buying military equipment at any scale would be obvious.
What, like building a factory in Texas that manufactures ICBMs? :D
I'm going to take a different tack on this one.
--- Point 1
Crime is real. Can we agree on that?
If you were in charge of identifying and locating criminals based on on-chain transaction data, what are the list of guidelines you'd put together to use PUBLIC DATA to determine suspicious behavior?
If you're competent, at all, the list would look like this. Let's not immediately jump to "self custody is gonna be outlawed"
----
Point 2
Bitcoin was designed this way. This data is public. This is HOW THE DAMN THING WORKS.
This article is written by a "Seasoned Bitcoiner", which is a term that reveals just how cooked they are. They haven't come to terms with the fact that the Bitcoin price is predicated on being the first, but certainly not the best public blockchain for realizing the goals of a global decentralized currency, whether you agree that's even a possibility or not.
Some people adopt ignorance -- Others were born in it, molded by it.
What crime needs to be identified based on transactions? Tax evasion? I can't think of any others that don't leave behind a real world mark that would be the thing that initiates investigation.
Following the money is important to investigating all sorts of crimes, as most crimes are done for money.
Arresting someone selling guns on the street doesn't stop much - they're quickly replaceable, you need to identify and determine where the guns are coming from. Same with human trafficking, drug trafficking, selling fake goods, and nearly every crime.
Money laundering is the obvious one—and the primary reason crypto’s value is as high as it is.
Considering how they're clamping down on anonymity wherever they can, crypto wasnt going to escape their clutches for very long. How long before its seperated from it original aim and just turned into a gambling token.
Original aim was that people don't deposit Bitcoins into a bank, Coinbase etc, but use it to freely transact between themselves, outside of gov control.
> How long before its seperated from it original aim and just turned into a gambling token
Always has been.
I mean it was useful for online gaming related transactions, like 15 years ago.
Ever since it has become a more obvious scam with every passing year.
Today you can barely post about it on most major platforms without immediately spawning multiple spam comments trying to part you from your money.
Real value crypto adds to the economy: ~0.
Once this scam inevitable comes crashing down, it will probably take the stock market with it. And all for nothing but the enrichment of early crypto adopters.
negative 10 years
Sounds like the cryptobros are about to have their turn with the Trump leopard eating their face...
They didn't care when he personally rugpulled them for billions, why would this disrupt their sycophancy?
> We shouldn't have to live in a world where standards cater to the lowest common denominator, in this case criminals, and make things worse off for the overwhelming majority of the population.
> "pooling or aggregating [cryptocurrency] from multiple persons, wallets, addresses, or accounts
Satoshi's whitepaper expanded BTC as time-stamp server for preventing DDOS on fax lines.
Loading up a single address with too many UTXOs degrades the entropy of a public-private key pair
does bitcoin or UTXO's somehow for some reason generate multiple PUBLIC keys for the same private key?
On a long enough timeline, having anything stored in local hardware is going to be suspicious. Not surprised to see government embrace of crypto lead to increased scrutiny.
like cash?
The statement goes beyond currency. In a connected world with infinite storage, why do you need that usb stick? What are you hiding on there?
Statist government is fundamentally incompatible with financial privacy. Such governments consider it inherently criminal.
LOL, the BTC people who thought "Digital Gold" was a good slogan are going to learn what happened to self custody of gold and the gold standard.
BTC is in a much worse situation than gold was in 1970. The government has the technology to follow transactions and require BTC transactions to be done on their chain with their BTC equivalent GBTCs. That is until the government decides to issue print more BTC equivalents
Can anyone ballpark a dollar figure for data center time to decrypt the ledger? No rubber hoses allowed.
To decrypt the public ledger to show the already publicly visible transactions?
$0
Am I misunderstanding you?
The article has no references, but even so, it's no wonder that Monero has gone up in the past day.
https://coinpaper.com/10812/qubic-vs-monero-pr-stunt-or-proo...
Bitcoin is a perfect microcosm for the tech sector in what happens when people who don't know how something works and refuse to understand it, try to replace it.
Every aspect of the modern financial system exists for a reason. It evolved over time to deal with problems. Things like reversible transactions are a feature not a bug.
Bitcoin is where all the gold bugs went who lamented the end of the gold standard. Most of these people didn't understand that at no point in history was the US dollar 100% backed by gold (or silver, originally). Never.
What backs the US dollar isn't gold or oil or anythihng else we dig up out of the ground. It's long schlong of the US military.
I've also said that crypt currency exists only because the government hasn't shut it down. All it would take is a policy change from the US government to say banks who have access to the US financial system cannot trade in Bitcoin and it would be over. Yes you could still have wallets (at least until the government starts going after Bitcoin farms, which again it could do) but what would you do with those coins?
Bitcoin is not, never has been and never will be an escape from the perils (some real, many imagined) of fiat currencies.
Rethink your ideas, you are very wrong here.
It is a fantastic escape from debasement of fiat, and always has been an escape from the perils of fiat currencies. It was created for this very purpose in 2009, and has absolutely achieved this goal. A 2019 $ vs a 2025 $ are significantly different purchasing power. Yet a 2019 BTC vs a 2025 BTC shows remarkable capital appreciation. You can pick any time scale you like, and except for very specific edge cases, it has in general been a great hedge against debasement of fiat, and will continue to be.
I have been able to preserve the purchasing power of my savings for over a decade now, and still keep buying every week.
Why would this be any different the next decade? (beyond the attenuation effect from more capital flowing into the space?).
You've described an asset not a currency and sure, your asset will keep going up forever like so many assets before it, famously.
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Wrong. As per the Coinage Act of 1792, the US dollar was to be equal to exactly 371.25 grains of fine silver.
At no point did the US have enough silver or gold to cover their obligations for all currency in circulation.
That’s my point.
You can make it worth whatever you want but if you’re not guaranteed to be able to redeem it, you’re calling that currency on something else.
That something else is the US military, ultimately.
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The Bitcoin lobby are definitely getting their money's worth.
Sounds like Anti-Money Laundering - pretty standard stuff.
Assuming this is true, how would this be enforced and tracked?
This is not terribly surprising. Control of the monetary system is a key responsibility of the US federal government; it was always going to be the case that if Bitcoin became a meaningfully-sized part of the financial system the government would impose regulation.
Now we get to see how enforceable it is (and I suspect it's more enforceable than people wanted to assume... They can jail you indefinitely for refusing to divulge a password if the court finds it is not a violation of your Fifth Amendment rights to divulge it. https://xkcd.com/538/).
Monero fixes that.
The government doesn't want to actually stop these things. They just want to make everything that people do normally illegal. Enforcement will only happen if you rock the boat.
Maybe it solves one problem, but it has many other: https://coinpaper.com/10812/qubic-vs-monero-pr-stunt-or-proo...
Also, always remember native coinjoin.
That was fake news, please update your knowledge on the topic: https://riat.at/qubic-attack-on-xmr-monero-no-51-attack-prov...
Also, what is that problem you mention with coinjoin? Please provide details.
As someone who hasn't read the article, is holding bitcoin in your own wallet going to become illegal? Also, which wallet do you guys recommend, I use Coinbase but it sucks.
It doesn't look like that explicitly will become illegal, but this part undermines a lot of the value of it:
> creating and using single-use wallets, addresses, or accounts, and sending [cryptocurrency] through such wallets, addresses, or accounts through a series of independent transactions
That's the default way Bitcoin wallets work, and it helps a ton to improve privacy. If we were limited to always reusing the same few addresses, it'll be very easy for not just law enforcement but ANYONE to see just how much Bitcoin you have.
If that's a small amount, it's not a risk. If it's a big amount, now you've got a target on your back. For me to accept Bitcoin payments, I need to publish my address, and from that address, you'll be able to see how much Bitcoin I have (and trace other transactions) over time.
Imagine everyone in town knowing that you've got six figures (or more) of money that can undoubtedly be extracted from you by invading your home, taking family members hostage, etc. At that point, you may think it's safer to keep it in an exchange, and you may be right.
If you are in Europe, it already kinda is. You need to declare/KYC that wallet. Europe also want these self-custodial wallets to become "accessible" somehow to the authorities.
Use a hardware wallet like Trezor.
Yes, and for even higher security, use a bitcoin-only airgapped hardware wallet like Coinkite's Coldcard or Foundation's Passport Core.
Good luck with that. If you are on a 'real' OS like Linux or BSD and have *coins there, I doubt anyone would know. Especially if you have disk encryption and using a trusted VPN or tor or something like that. Remember to enable MAC spoofing too.
If you have your wallet on a Cell Phone, you might as well post a sign outside of your house stating "I am a bitcoin user and trying to keep that use secret" :)
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Coinbase is an exchange, but they also acquired a standalone wallet that's been rebranded a few times, but now it seems to be called Base (Formerly Coinbase Wallet).
No it's not in my control but I use it because it is convenient to buy and sell.
This is blatant misinformation. Firstly this has nothing to do with the patriot act, I’m pretty sure the patriot act expired years ago.
But more importantly it doesn’t seem like the government is trying to ban anything, they’re just extending the anti-fraud / anti-money laundering measures enjoyed by the ‘traditional’ financial institutions to the world of cryptocurrency.
Those measures don’t prevent people from doing ‘suspicious’ things, they just treat certain transaction types with more care because of the increased likelihood that they are evidence of a crime.
You CANT. It's impossible, the people that operate their own computers running the network will NOT allow a government operated coin.
To the slaughter house ...
Lobbyists, Assemble!
This article is nonsense.
The guidance doesn't mention anything similar to self custody and the Patriot Act itself has expired: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act
It's the worst kind of clickbait, and is actual, real fake news.
Only section 215 related to FISA surveillance expired.
Your comment is nonsense.
Hah. Trump is the most corrupt president in US history. Honestly, who didn't think he would corrupt Bitcoin while he was at it?
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A few years ago, I tried to open a bank account, and was turned away because my visa stamp expired (despite having valid immigration status). The clueless clerk and her advisor were going through The Patriot Act to find justification.
Fortunately, other banks weren't staffed with idiots, and I was able to open an account elsewhere after providing my documents.
I say you dodged a bullet, then. They are probably just as clueless handling everything else.
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It’s worse than that. Roe v. Wade associated privacy with abortion in the US, so the Supreme Court eliminated the right to privacy as part of the decision to overturn Roe v Wade.
Mere criminality wouldn’t put privacy in such an indefensible position. Look at who’s president.
Agamben wrote some interesting analysis of this [1], expanding on the concept of the "state of exception", which was a older concept introduced by a much more odious man who employed it very effectively in the early 20th century. Agamben argued that modern governments now try to create permanent states of exception, of which I would argue the Patriot Act is a perfect example.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Agamben#State_of_Excep...
Really hope they ban it in the US so it can flourish in countries that actually need and respect it
Thank you for writing this. You are absolutely correct and made me step back to realize that the dollar is a global reserve currency and the US will do everything it takes to keep it that way.
I still have the 2600 issues before and after 9/11.
At the time it was pretty clear that the federal government was going make a large and permanent power grab.
> concentrating power in a few regulated intermediaries. That’s not healthy for innovation, or democracy.
How are "regulated intermediaries" not democratic? If they're regulated by the democratically elected government, that seems entirely democratic to me.
He said "not healthy for democracy", that doesn't imply the process to create the law wasn't democratic.
Democracy always has the risk of sabotaging itself by naive actors who don't respect fundamental freedoms because they fear the public.
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No one willingly gives up power and if it’s the U.S. government there is a large ecosystem worth hundreds of billions around the patriot act, it’s never going to be sunset, and it not going to grow
> concentrating power
Isn't that the actual point? of laws like this? Keeping those in power in power and further entrenching the moats around them.
"I will only insert the tip and briefly, I promise" - then proceeds to f*ck the nation unconscious.
We all remember fighting this battle at the time ...
Great to know our prediction of where this would end up was right.
Tragic to know our prediction of where this would end up was right.
I can only hope those at the time who denied this are caught up in said dragnet. A bit like immigrants voting for Trump, I digress.
As a quite political teenager (not even from the US, never been there to this day) I argued that this law is going to stay. I wish I would have been wrong. These types of laws are not a good thing to have in the hands of power-hungry narcissists that like to rule not represent.
If only there were some sort of loud opposition to this act, predicting exactly the situation we're in today. Our elected representatives would have had to take a hard look at this and reject it due to its danger!
Couldn't agree more. Blocking SOPA / PIPA a decade or so ago was a nice reminder that when enough people speak up, bad laws can be avoided.
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And it happens exactly as predicted. Surprise!
Could not have said it better. You put it up beautifully. Thanks.
Democrawhat?
This should surprise literally nobody. Let me briefly explain the US political landscape.
Classic liberalism is a pollitical and moral philosophy that came about in the last 600+ years that (among other things) enshrined individualism and private property. This evolved hand in hand with enclosures (ie private property) and ultimately led to capitalism as an economic system.
Colloquially, "liberal" is used to describe someobody who is socially progressive, typically a Democrat, but that really has nothing to do with the origins.
Neoliberalism is what liberalism evolved into, primarily in the 20th century. The key principles are that capitalism (the "free market") is the solution to basically all problems and deregulation (to increase profits, basically).
Everybody is a (neo)liberal. Democrats and Republicans both. Note that "leftists" are by definition not neoliberals and are anti-capitalist but people often mistakenly use terms like "liberal" and "leftist" interchangeably when they couldn't be more different.
Imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. Fascism is capitalism in crisis. The Democratic Party as it exists in the US today, is controlled opposition.
So we come to the Overton window. This is how it goes:
1. Republicans pass some legislation like the Patriot Act to take away rights, usually under the guise of "security". The Patriot Act of course was passed in the aftermath of 9/11;
2. Ultimately the Democrats get in office and... don't reverse it. It becomes the new normal. They do this by being institutionalists. But defending institutions is merely an excuse for inaction.
3. Come the next election the Patriot Act or the border wall or whatever will the new normal and some even more fascist legislation will be on the table. As an example, try and find the daylight between the immigration plan of the Kamala Harris 2024 campaign and the Trump 2020 immigration plan (that Democrats opposed at the time).
Nobody cares about our individual rights. Things continue to get worse because both parties will always choose the US imperial project and the profits of corporations over your rights. We are six companies in a trenchcoat.
That's a very nice lecture, but I think it's almost entirely digressive.
The "success" of the Patriot Act really has nothing to do with classic liberalism, neoliberalism, leftists, Democrats, Republicans, or Kamala Harris. These are the current background details in which an age-old dynamic plays out: A threat gives those in power a chance to grab more power and they take it. Once they have it they do not give it up easily.
It just boils down to a truism: Those who seek power seek power. There's really nothing more to it than that.
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"Crypto for me, not for thee..."
This author is being disingenuous. All of those actions are indeed suspicious. I am not a fan of the Patriot Act, but these new guidelines actually seem pretty reasonable to me.
"The Patriot Act. Read it."
It will be interesting to see how the pro-Trump crypto bros react to this. Likely by now the whole group has had a chance to invest heavily in various altcoins or whatever will be the beneficiary of government largesse, so these proposed (and difficult to enforce) restrictions are likely intended just to pump those for quick profits.
I'd argue that Bitcoin has been effectively immune to attacks like this by governments for nearly a decade.
That the blockchain bros are surprised that Trump is not acting in their interest is itself surprising, even though it shouldn't. 3-level meta-surprising, so to say.
Does no one else find it weird seeing anything from this administration "anti-Bitcoin" at all? I wouldn't be surprised by this headline during a previous administration, but generally speaking, this administration has been very Bitcoin-friendly (and Bitcoin institutions friendly right back). To be clear, the simplest answer is "sure but that doesn't mean they have to agree on everything". But I would like to propose that if you ask the simple question of "who does this benefit?" it may suggest we are witnessing a different phenomenon here.
I think this might be the first indication that what we currently call "institutional Bitcoin supporters" are not "Bitcoin supporters" at all, or rather, what they call "Bitcoin" is not what you and I call "Bitcoin". Services like Coinbase and BTC ETFs don't really suffer from this development at all. In fact, I think it's quite obvious that obviously benefit from something like this (at least from the first-order effects). What's the alternative to self custody? Well... third-party custody. Especially since they are already bound up by KYC rules, right? Their is a cynical reading that there's nothing inconsistent with this development if you consider "institutional Bitcoin's" goals to primarily be replacing existing financial power structures with themselves. "Bitcoin" is just a means to an end. Their goals were only incidentally aligned with individual BTC holders since they were previously in similar circumstances as the "out group". Previous administrations were as suspicious of "Bitcoin companies" as any individual Bitcoin holder, perhaps even more so. But that's not the case anymore. Bitcoin companies have successfully been brought into the fold, so it's not even that they're necessarily "betraying" the values of Bitcoin true believers, you might argue that interpretation of shared values was entirely inferred to begin with.
Critically though, I think an important consequence of this is that Bitcoin purists and skeptics should realize that they arguably now have more in common than not, at least in the immediate term, and may be each other's best allies. In my experience, for most the existence of Bitcoin, its skeptics haven't really seen Bitcoin as a "threat." Instead, to admittedly generalize, their critiques have been mostly about Bitcoin being "broken" or "silly" or "misunderstanding the point of centralized systems", etc. These aren't really "oppositional" positions in the traditional "adversarial sense," more dismissive. In fact, the closest thing to an "active moral opposition" to Bitcoin that I've seen is an environmental one. IOW, Bitcoin true believers think about Bitcoin way more than Bitcoin skeptics do. Similarly, Bitcoin true believers really have nothing against skeptics other than... the fact that they occasionally talk shit about Bitcoin? IOW, Bitcoin skeptics are not "the natural enemy Bitcoin was designed to defeat".
But if you think about it, "institutional Bitcoin" sort of embodies something both these camps generally have hated since before Bitcoin. Whether you believe Bitcoin to be a viable answer or not, it is undeniable that the "idea" of Bitcoin is rooted in the distrust of these elitist financial institutions, that evade accountability, benefit from special treatment, and largely get to rig the larger system in their favor. Similarly, I don't think Bitcoin skeptics like these institutions or are "on their side". In fact, perhaps they'd argue that they predicted that Bitcoin wouldn't solve any of this and would just be another means of creating them. But IMO what they should both realize is that the most important threat right now is these institutional players. They are in fact, only "nominally" Bitcoin in a deep sense. From the perspective of true believers, their interests are actually in now way "essentially" aligned with any "original Bitcoin values," and from the perspective of skeptics, the threat they pose has very little to do with their use of "the Bitcoin blockchain".
They are arguably just another instantiation of the "late stage capitalist" playbook of displacing an existing government service in order to privatize its rewards. Coinbase could be argued to have more in common with Uber than Ledger wallets. Instead of consolidating and squeezing all the value from taxis though, the play is to do the same with currency itself. It is incidental that Uber happened to be so seemingly "government averse". In this context, it's actually helpful to cozy up to the government and provide the things government departments want that make no difference to fintech's bottom line (such as KYP). In fact, that might be their true value proposition. Bitcoin only enters the conversation because in order to replace a currency, you do... need a currency. Bitcoin was convenient. It was already there, it had a built-in (fervent) user base that was happy to do your proselytizing for you, and even saw you as a good "first step" for normies that couldn't figure out to manage their own wallet. The Bitcoin bubble was already there, why fight it when you can ride it?
Again, I think this is highly likely to be against the values of Bitcoin true believers and skeptics alike, and I also think that if the above is true, it represents an actual danger to us all. Recent events with credit card processors have already demonstrated that payment systems have proven to be incredibly efficient tools at stifling speech. In other words, this is arguably an "S-tier threat", on par with or perhaps worse than any sort of internet censorship or net neutrality. If so, we should treat it as such and work together.
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Ahem those are #2 and #3 behind "talking to disinterested people about it".
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Yep, the belief that governments would just give up control of money always seemed incredibly naive to me too.
On the other hand, doesn't all "wouldn't it be nice if it was like this?" look naive and wild before they were implemented/fought through?
Things like "Womens right to vote", "Civil rights" or even democracy was seen as completely backwards and naive at one point in history (and still is in some places), but today we kind of see it as something good to strive for, most of the times.
I'm not saying it's 100% the same for cryptocurrencies, but isn't there a chance it's something similar at least?
> nation is going to give up their self-determination because someone thinks countries having self-control
Nations do not have selves. That's taking the analogy too far. I do agree that they will definitely continue trying to exert control, though. It's kinda their thing.
Unless they personally can profit from the situation anyway. Then they’ll often do perfunctory PR prosecutions while taking kickbacks. See things like prosecutions around prostitution for one usually pretty clear example.
I believe you, but do you have any evidence of how the prostitution kick backs work? Interesting articles?
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It would also be delusional to think crypto-bros will give up their self-determination to the nation-state.
It's really not. 100% of the time the nation state is winning that battle, as evidence by literally all of human history. Crypto-bros make up a fraction of a fraction of the population and most people don't have sympathy for any of them when the primary use cases of crypto today are extortion and black markets in the western world.
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it's another $5 wrench situation
Sure but now you need a $5 wrench to essentially force a guy to tell you where he buried the gold, rather than just walking to the bank and taking it. I don't see that as some kind of win for the guy with a wrench, especially when you realize the bank manager is way less likely to be a violent nutter sov-cit.
The solution is to store your money on a wallet where you do not have the private key. This way if you cannot access your funds nobody will be able to coerce you.
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They supported both candidates, and Harris kept talking about crypto in the face of everybody screaming at her that it was losing her votes. She thought being able to afford Beyoncé concerts with crypto bro cash would offset that.
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Not a huge surprise, unfortunately.
I'm surprised because I thought the Trump administration was hot on crypto.
They might be pro-crypto, but you're not in their group of special people allowed to anonymously own it. You have to use a wallet service owned by someone in that group, so that you're always under control.
The vast majority of (especially less tech-savvy) crypto people are in it for the speculation. They have no interest in self-custody.
Sure, the approved and controlled kind. Wheels of government turn so slow this idea probably started several administrations ago.
Hot on being bribed by political donors to do their bidding. Crypto donors are going to be abroad and so unaffected.
Well, hopefully this will help prevent Bitcoin's biggest use case, which is criminal finance and money laundering. Why wouldn’t we want that?
For very similar reasons why the US has the 5th amendment, why blanket surveillance is not considered a good thing by functioning democracies, and why most people want their porn-viewing habits to remain private.
There are plenty of bad things that need to be prevented, but a functioning democracy requires the ability to act outside the surveillance of both your peers, and the currently sitting government.
I just know it’s true, just like you know bitcoin will be the reserve currency of he world.
What sources do you have that support that claim?
The tweet says "could be labled suspicious" the article says could be made illegal.
I've never heard of this website but if your only source is a tweet and you misrepresent it, I don't believe it.
I'll take bets: By EOY 2026 it will be legal in the US to use single use addresses