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EFF to FinCEN: Stop Pushing for More Financial Surveillance

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Re: EFF to FinCEN: Stop Pushing for More Financial Surveillance

#91

Post by Xixi »

Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #86
dannyw wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of your taxes don’t go to things like roads or education. They go towards bombing brown people in the Middle East, and a smaller portion goes to programs like Medicare.

https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud...

That's the federal budget. Aren't things like road or education typically part of the state/city budgets?

I'm not American, but I used to live in NYC, and thus paid my taxes there. I was always under the impression that: federal budget is for the armies/FBI/CIA/NSA/FDA and other three letters agencies. On the other hand state taxes, city taxes, and sales taxes are for roads, schools, hospitals, firefighters, police and the MTA.

I'm surprised the federal budget even has a line item for Education, or Housing & Community!

Re: EFF to FinCEN: Stop Pushing for More Financial Surveillance

#92

Post by boogies »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #63
ve55 wrote: post #2

The way I usually phrase this situation is something like "The goals of a strong government are in direct opposition to the goals of most modern cryptocurrencies", and this is yet another subset of those goals where we can see the forces fighting against each other. I find it hard to convince myself cryptocurrency can win out in the long-term, as the more rules they find ways to skirt around via technology and decent…

The Soviet economy had a substantial black market, especially if you include the Blat system of favor-trading [1]. New York today is seeing growth of ostensibly illegal, unlicensed street vendors, in reaction to lockdown restrictions [2]. Government is not efficient, and cannot effectively enforce rules, so cryptocurrency will undoubtedly survive. [1] https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/rees-577-fall2016/2016/... [2…

> Government is not efficient, and cannot effectively enforce rules, so cryptocurrency will undoubtedly survive.

So true, they can’t even keep prohibited drugs from being smuggled onto their government spacecraft by hand-picked government (cosmo|astro)nauts.

https://reason.com/2021/01/01/space-the-final-smuggling-fron... (what great article, must discuss https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25646360 ;))

Re: EFF to FinCEN: Stop Pushing for More Financial Surveillance

#93

Post by Karunamon »

dannyw wrote: post #80
volta87 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't tax evasion per-se, but rather logic inconsistencies. For example, I've met quite a bit of people that don't want to pay any taxes. Yet they all want for them and their goods to be able to use roads for free, roads that are built and maintained with taxes. That's actually ok: two incompatible goals just means you have to make a trade-off; welcome to engineering. The problem is that none of them unde…

Most of your taxes don’t go to things like roads or education. They go towards bombing brown people in the Middle East, and a smaller portion goes to programs like Medicare.

That's strictly false. ~65% of the US budget is mandatory spending, and ~86% of that goes to things like social security, unemployment, Medicare, and so forth. Military spending is priority #3 by share of the budget, not priority #1.

Even if this wasn't a falsehood, characterizing all military spending as "bombing brown people in the middle east" is ignorant, incendiary political flamebait.

Re: EFF to FinCEN: Stop Pushing for More Financial Surveillance

#94

Post by Karunamon »

intotheabyss wrote: post #81
refurb wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I don’t get. Great, you can transfer Bitcoin to anyone for cheap, anywhere in the world. But that Bitcoin is useless to you or whoever you give it to unless it’s converted to currency. That’s where the gov’t puts it’s grip. Move as much Bitcoin wherever you want. Who cares. Want to convert to dollars or Euros or Yen? That’s where the gov’t steps in and say fine - prove who you are for this transaction. W…

Just wrap your Bitcoin into renBTC on Ethereum, and exchange it for DAI stablecoin. Then, deposit it into a zero knowledge mixer contract called tornado.cash and withdraw to a fresh address. Now you've broken the link. An entirely decentralized process of converting BTC into a stablecoin without an intermediary while maintaining some privacy.

How many bites of the pie did you lose during those 4 transactions? Besides, you still need to convert DAI to fiat to use it IRL in most ways, DAI is just another form of space money despite being pegged to the dollar.

I could also see criminalization of mixing tools being a thing.

Re: EFF to FinCEN: Stop Pushing for More Financial Surveillance

#95

Post by t0astbread »

refurb wrote: post #72
thefounder wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is converting that crypto into cash.

This is what I don’t get. Great, you can transfer Bitcoin to anyone for cheap, anywhere in the world. But that Bitcoin is useless to you or whoever you give it to unless it’s converted to currency. That’s where the gov’t puts it’s grip. Move as much Bitcoin wherever you want. Who cares. Want to convert to dollars or Euros or Yen? That’s where the gov’t steps in and say fine - prove who you are for this transaction. W…

That's what obfuscating coins like Monero or ZCash (with private transactions) are for - in theory. In practice no exchange directly offers conversions between those and "classic" currencies so you have to somewhat awkwardly convert via a more commonly used cryptocurrency. Oh and if anyone ever finds a deadly bug in the protocol transactions might be de-anonymized in the future.

On the other hand if you pay digitally with "classic" currencies today, your privacy is severely diminished as well. Fintech companies often rely on third parties for some aspects of their services and financial data has special legal standing making it harder to control like you could do with other personal data (under the GDPR, for example).

Re: EFF to FinCEN: Stop Pushing for More Financial Surveillance

#96

Post by panarky »

koheripbal wrote: post #89
codethief wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can spend a decade developing a provably-anonymous cryptocurrency (which we have indeed now done) Looks like I've been out of the loop. Which cryptocurrency are you referring to?

Monero (XMR) is the most notable example, but there are other coins that implement the same technology of truly anonymous and untraceable transactions. FinCEN will not change their course. From their perspective, they would rather try to kill or stifle all cryptos than allow illegal activity to be done within that market without an ability to seize assets or trace funds. Right now they have total control over traditi…

Monero priced in Bitcoin is down 60% in the last year and it's down 90% since its peak in 2018.

If Monero's purpose is to be anonymous and untraceable, and Bitcoin's purpose is to be a store of value, then it appears the market prefers the store-of-value use case.

There's a popular idea that crypto currencies are only good for illegal activity. But the evidence so far from a nearly trillion-dollar market says that avoiding law enforcement is not what's driving the crypto phenomenon.

There's another popular idea that central bank money printing is devaluing national currencies when priced in crypto. I'm sure that's part of it, but inflating the money supply by 30% doesn't really justify a 10x increase in crypto valuations.

It's a small sample size, but the handful of wealthy families I'm acquainted with who are investing 0.1% to 2% of their net worth into Bitcoin (and a little into Ethereum) are more afraid of a collapse of the western political order than central bank money printing.

Institutions and high-net-worth individuals aren't looking for privacy for illicit transactions so they're not putting their wealth into Monero.

They've witnessed or researched what the collapse of the USSR did to the ruble and asset prices in the former Soviet Union, and they're buying some insurance against a similar unraveling in the US and Europe.

Re: EFF to FinCEN: Stop Pushing for More Financial Surveillance

#97

Post by alkonaut »

icelancer wrote: post #65
erk__ wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you pull up a list of countries by tax rates and some quality of life index they seem to be pretty corrolated so I would not say it is an outlier, where as the outliers are those with low tax and high QOL for example UAE, Oman and Qtar, but all those have a pretty significant income in another way compared to most countries.

>> If you pull up a list of countries by tax rates and some quality of life index they seem to be pretty corrolated Try correlating restrictive immigration policies and quality of life index. Should we tax people a lot and make it very hard for immigrants to become citizens? Scandinavian countries do precisely both.

> make it very hard for immigrants to become citizens? Scandinavian countries do precisely both.

As a Swede, all I can say is..."excuse me, Wat"?

Re: EFF to FinCEN: Stop Pushing for More Financial Surveillance

#98

Post by tehlike »

panarky wrote: post #96
koheripbal wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monero (XMR) is the most notable example, but there are other coins that implement the same technology of truly anonymous and untraceable transactions. FinCEN will not change their course. From their perspective, they would rather try to kill or stifle all cryptos than allow illegal activity to be done within that market without an ability to seize assets or trace funds. Right now they have total control over traditi…

Monero priced in Bitcoin is down 60% in the last year and it's down 90% since its peak in 2018. If Monero's purpose is to be anonymous and untraceable, and Bitcoin's purpose is to be a store of value, then it appears the market prefers the store-of-value use case. There's a popular idea that crypto currencies are only good for illegal activity. But the evidence so far from a nearly trillion-dollar market says that av…

I don't know if having your btc holdings publicly visible is a good thing for a corrupt government

Re: EFF to FinCEN: Stop Pushing for More Financial Surveillance

#100

Post by thefounder »

intotheabyss wrote: post #81
refurb wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I don’t get. Great, you can transfer Bitcoin to anyone for cheap, anywhere in the world. But that Bitcoin is useless to you or whoever you give it to unless it’s converted to currency. That’s where the gov’t puts it’s grip. Move as much Bitcoin wherever you want. Who cares. Want to convert to dollars or Euros or Yen? That’s where the gov’t steps in and say fine - prove who you are for this transaction. W…

Just wrap your Bitcoin into renBTC on Ethereum, and exchange it for DAI stablecoin. Then, deposit it into a zero knowledge mixer contract called tornado.cash and withdraw to a fresh address. Now you've broken the link. An entirely decentralized process of converting BTC into a stablecoin without an intermediary while maintaining some privacy.

In the end you still need to convert/exchange that last rinse crypto into cash. The exchanger may want to know where you've got that crypto from and the person(s) that sent you the crypted have been subjected to KYC. Just like with real money.
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