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The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody

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Re: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody

#101

Post by csomar »

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.

Re: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody

#102

Post by ceejayoz »

diggan wrote: post #100
ceejayoz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His finances are gonna be under close inspection for the rest of his life, and fourteen years is a lot to lose.

2.5 million was a lot in 1992, and who knows what that amount is today, if they've offloaded it to somewhere it earns interest. I know plenty of people who day-by-day sacrifice their time for way less than ~500 per day which that ends up being if we assume the money been still since they were arrested.

But none of that matters if it's fundamentally inaccessible. The instant he spends outside of his known means, they have evidence he's accessed the funds and can jail him for contempt again. Travel is probably barred.

Re: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody

#103

Post by mothballed »

Xelbair wrote: post #30
Mistletoe wrote: post #13

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.

Re: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody

#104

Post by rs186 »

electric_muse wrote: post #10

[flagged]

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.

Re: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody

#105

Post by goda90 »

aeon_ai wrote: post #44

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 outlawe…

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.

Re: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody

#106

Post by stavros »

htoiertoi345345 wrote: post #70
jihadjihad wrote: post #33

> [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,…

"USA Freedom Act" We're truly living in Orwell's world.

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.

Re: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody

#107

Post by ivape »

Mistletoe wrote: post #13

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.

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.

Re: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody

#108

Post by thrance »

lordofgibbons wrote: post #65

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 "suspi…

If Monero ever came close to Bitcoin's popularity, it would be outlawed. Plain as that. You can't get freedom through technology.

Re: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody

#109

Post by eof »

chain030 wrote: post #76
8organicbits wrote: post #26

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 Bit…

Essentially decentralisation sounds nice, but doesnt work in practice.

Bitcoin, tor, bittorrent are all perfect examples of decentralization simply not working in practice

Re: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody

#110

Post by Nifty3929 »

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.

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