Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

tftc.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 611 posts

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

#111

Post by dotnet00 »

ivape wrote: post #96
baggachipz wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

[flagged]

This has been a growing feeling for me too, seeing many users on various platforms go from mocking the murders of non-white people to claiming that their political opposition is hateful due to recent events. I used to think that being accepted in society was just a matter of integrating culturally (which I thought was fair), but the way people have been emboldened to say the most awful things has been changing my mind.

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

#112

Post by graemep »

sneak wrote: post #78

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.

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

#113

Post by rs186 »

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,…

If the law has expired, how do they "expand" the law? I am confused. Did they refer to the wrong one?

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

#114

Post by decimalenough »

crazygringo wrote: post #42

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 thi…

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.

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

#115

Post by Aunche »

conception wrote: post #22
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.

Can you imagine the world today if Bernie had won?

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.

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

#116

Post by ianmiers »

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"

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

#117

Post by ivape »

dotnet00 wrote: post #111
ivape wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This has been a growing feeling for me too, seeing many users on various platforms go from mocking the murders of non-white people to claiming that their political opposition is hateful due to recent events. I used to think that being accepted in society was just a matter of integrating culturally (which I thought was fair), but the way people have been emboldened to say the most awful things has been changing my min…

I mean, we have to be practical in our condemnation. I feel we had that somewhere around the 2010s, where we accepted that you can’t change a racist 80 year old. Fine, I think America accepted that.

But how the living fuck did that prior generation PASS ON the racism (and it’s way more than that, misogyny, economic selfishness, or wholesale disconnect in their economics to the point they don’t even vote for their economic interest).

HOW? How did they take 1 year olds in 1990-2010 and make them like the previous generation? People are not understanding what a huge sin this was. You CANNOT raise the children in an ideology that was nationally condemned and fought over for decades. It was an utter failure, no one was watching the kids.

This shit is so deep rooted that I am at a loss. To put it clearly, this is how anticlimactic America has been the last 20 years:

1) Imagine watching American History X

2) And instead of Ed Norton coming to a rebirth moment of shedding his racism and turning a new leaf, he stays a racist, doubles down, and also raises racist children.

There. Reality.

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

#118

Post by anjel »

csomar wrote: post #101

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 o…

Sounds like capital flight is anticipated to become a thing. Why might that be?

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

#119

Post by resters »

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.

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

#120

Post by delusional »

electric_muse wrote: post #10

[flagged]

> 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.

Post reply on HN