Is there any evidence of Bitcoin being used by terrorist groups? Wouldn't that be a terrible idea for the terrorists?
It has been used for ransoming such as HBO's case.
US Senate Bill S.1241 to Criminalize Concealed Ownership of Bitcoin
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Re: US Senate Bill S.1241 to Criminalize Concealed Ownership of Bitcoin
#12Is there any evidence of Bitcoin being used by terrorist groups? Wouldn't that be a terrible idea for the terrorists?
I have no idea. But it's a great way to get relatively anonymous donations. At least, if you educate your donors to mix first. Also, properly mixed Bitcoin is great for anonymously leasing VPN services and servers, and for buying fake Facebook etc accounts, which are all useful for advocacy. And maybe black-market arms dealers accept Bitcoin now.
Re: US Senate Bill S.1241 to Criminalize Concealed Ownership of Bitcoin
#13Where's the problem? Can someone explain? It's not like this bans owning Bitcoin.
What's the problem with being required to send a plaintext copy of every encrypted email to various government agencies around the world? It's not like that would ban using encrypted email.
Re: US Senate Bill S.1241 to Criminalize Concealed Ownership of Bitcoin
#14How do you define "digital currency"? Under US legal tender laws BTC isn't money. You can incur capital gains when you exchange BTC for something over the basis you acquired it for, but you essentially gave smoothing of value away for something ephemeral.
Re: US Senate Bill S.1241 to Criminalize Concealed Ownership of Bitcoin
#15Good old Dianne Feinstein, always protecting me from the scary terrorists.
And freedom. Remember, freedom is scary.
To the downvoters: Seriously it is. For example: Can you imagine what would happen if we allowed people to have bars? People are expected to DRIVE to a BAR and DRINK! Can you imagine what people would do then, if we legalized the existence of bars? People would drive home drunk!
Banning bars is obviously the right thing to do!
Re: US Senate Bill S.1241 to Criminalize Concealed Ownership of Bitcoin
#16Is there any evidence of Bitcoin being used by terrorist groups? Wouldn't that be a terrible idea for the terrorists?
Yes, it is a terrible idea for terrorists.
And currently, bitcoin is too hard to use for terrorists or most criminals. You have to be relatively sophisticated. Yah, you may have gotten your grandma a wallet, but that's not the same as mastering the level of opsec to fund a clandestine organization using cryptocurrencies...
And further, since every transaction is recorded forever in the blockchain if any future address is compromised, the entire network can be compromised instantaneously....
Bitcoin is really worse for terrorist financing than good old USD.
And we "lost" trillions of USD on Pallets in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Re: US Senate Bill S.1241 to Criminalize Concealed Ownership of Bitcoin
#17Where's the problem? Can someone explain? It's not like this bans owning Bitcoin.
Your grandpa dies and you inherit his estate. There's a bunch of boxes and you go thru a lot of them until you get to one of his war stuff. It is too much and you put it aside.
Years later, you are prosecuted under this law because it turns out he had a hardware wallet in that box.
That's the problem, and it doesn't matter if you think it's not something that is likely.
Truth of the matter is, you committed no crime. This law would be the crime.
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I've been slow banned. Apparently HN has detected my opinions are not sufficiently marxist. I know how this goes. I was once shadow banned here for relating how I had met Grace Hopper. Another time for merely linking to a PDF of a scientific paper in response to someone elses scientific claim. (over 10 years that's about how many times I've tried to give this site another chance... this was the third one, and I'm done now. Thinking is not tolerated here, clearly.)
It was nice being on HN for awhile... but of course, the anti-intellectual snowflakes who run this site cannot abide actual critical thinking.
A shame, this could be a good site if discussions were allowed, instead it is a filter bubble of only one ideological viewpoint.
The bay area is quickly losing creditability-- as you advocate for "net neutrality" (which contains government censorship powers) on the argument that without it we will get government censorship, yet twitter and facebook and google are full scale censoring any viewpoint other than hard core militant marxist SJW... not to mention, HN does this as well. You guys reject thinking and the concept of diversity while justifying your sexism, racism and general bigotry with the #diversity hash tag.
The thing is, you know you're hypocrites, but instead of learning or thinking you just make your wall 10 feet higher.
By the way 850 points of karma proves I'm a good contributor here.... but one moderator disagrees with me and they take arbitrary action, without cause, without warning and without justification.
Don't ever pretend like you believe in the rule of law, you're criminals under your own rules!
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So to respond to the guy below:
These "laws" (which are unconstitutional, by the way) make a mockery of the rule of law. They erode our rights until we are purely at the mercy of the whim of tyrants. You assume the rule of law is there to protect you and you would have recourse, but you're wrong. There are many examples similar to your buried gold one-- people having their life savings simply stolen by the government under asset forfeiture, or going to jail for "money laundering" etc when they did nothing actually criminal.
Re: US Senate Bill S.1241 to Criminalize Concealed Ownership of Bitcoin
#18How do you define "digital currency"? Under US legal tender laws BTC isn't money. You can incur capital gains when you exchange BTC for something over the basis you acquired it for, but you essentially gave smoothing of value away for something ephemeral.
I'm waiting for the law to get so vague, they accidentally cover in-app/in-game currencies with legislation that requires it to be regulated.
Re: US Senate Bill S.1241 to Criminalize Concealed Ownership of Bitcoin
#19Good old Dianne Feinstein, always protecting me from the scary terrorists.
Not only did she pretend to be incredulous about NSA spying, she put forward the bill to excuse most of it after completely redirecting the conversation to "metadata." Now Ajit Pai made it a partisan issue she's having screaming about being pro net neutrality but a few years back she co-sponsored the PIPA bill!
Worst of all she's considered to be basically impossible to replace. It would be very nice to see CA stop giving her money and put a significant challenger forward but it's probably not good ROI to attempt.
Re: US Senate Bill S.1241 to Criminalize Concealed Ownership of Bitcoin
#20Where's the problem? Can someone explain? It's not like this bans owning Bitcoin.
What's the problem with being required to send a plaintext copy of every encrypted email to various government agencies around the world? It's not like that would ban using encrypted email.
What the problem with being required to report your income from various government agencies around the world? It's not like that would ban governments from existing, surely some people will continue to voluntarily pay some taxes on the honor system.