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U.S. Senate Vote in Favor of Amendment That Threatens Crypto Industry

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Re: U.S. Senate Vote in Favor of Amendment That Threatens Crypto Industry

#121

Post by knorker »

cs702 wrote: post #24

WINNERS: Large corporations and financial institutions. They can afford the now-required overhead for all kinds of services, including transaction processing with fees and rewards, i.e., mining, and make a nice profit at high volumes. LOSERS: Smaller service providers. They cannot afford the now-required overhead because they don't have sufficient economies of scale.

WINNERS: Rule of law

LOSERS: Criminals who saw so much hope in trivially laundering their ill gotten gains now see that as slightly less likely.

Re: U.S. Senate Vote in Favor of Amendment That Threatens Crypto Industry

#122

Post by gizmo686 »

echopurity wrote: post #99

Many people start coding at a young age. Imagine your kid having to report their dapp to the IRS. It's not about the money. It's about the control. The situation is probably worse for adults. Why go through the hassle of developing dapps when it means dealing with the IRS and potentially jail, etc.? Personally I've abandoned working on completely harmless dapps because of threats from the state. It's stifling for ind…

Many people start wood working at a young age. If they want to build a house, they need to acuire permits, comply with zoning regulation, comply with building codes, get sign off from a certified engineer.

Not all coding is the same. If you want to work to code in a regulated industry, you need to play by the regulations. Finance is a regulated industry, not a sandbox.

Re: U.S. Senate Vote in Favor of Amendment That Threatens Crypto Industry

#124

Post by woodruffw »

EGreg wrote: post #113
woodruffw wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you are against anonymous cryptocurrency transactions, should you not also be against all end-to-end encryption? After all, it could conceal cryptocurrency transactions! This conflation of free expression and hiding your finances would get you laughed out of any courtroom in America. I strongly support E2EE encryption and do work that directly supports a number of E2EE efforts; the idea that this requires me to…

Please read what I am actually writing. I will try a different format. Perhaps you can respond POINT BY POINT to show that you have read it and have a substantive argument about it, rather than about your personal feelings about what a name du jour should mean: 1. End-to-end encrypted communication opens the barn door, you can conceal any anonymous cryptocurrency transactions in there, as well as darknets, smart cont…

I’m not going to do that, because I’m not going to spend any particular amount of time or effort defending a position that’s self evident among actual cryptographers.

Money laundering is not free speech, and supporting E2EE does not somehow magically mean that I have to support or be okay with burning coal so that people can crack hashes. If you want to argue about cryptography itself, I suggest finding someone who’s actually against privacy and encryption.

Re: U.S. Senate Vote in Favor of Amendment That Threatens Crypto Industry

#125

Post by lern_too_spel »

mschuster91 wrote: post #115
kryogen1c wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the answer is there should be no AML, KYC and/or reporting by cryptocurrency companies, we have no common ground on this argument. this hits the nail on the head, imo. its the central argument. i dont think its as unambiguous as you say, though. payment processors are _right now_ acting as extrajudicial legislators. many LEGAL business, like porn and weed, are restricted from operating on major payment networks.…

> payment processors are _right now_ acting as extrajudicial legislators. many LEGAL business, like porn and weed, are restricted from operating on major payment networks. The thing is, at least for weed companies, that they technically are not legal on federal level where banks are regulated. The Obama, Trxmp and Biden admins simply have chosen for now to ignore the issue on executive level since Congress is complet…

To elaborate, the customer's liability on unauthorized charges is capped by law on card transactions, so the merchant has to eat the cost of the alleged fraud or the cost of disputing the alleged fraud (plus the cost of the alleged fraud because their dispute will almost certainly fail).

Moving the cost of fraud to the buyer will change the buyer's behavior in a way that the seller wouldn't want, so this is just one more cryptocurrency solution in search of a problem.

Re: U.S. Senate Vote in Favor of Amendment That Threatens Crypto Industry

#126

Post by zonethundery »

danShumway wrote: post #44
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #31

I've been following this discussion in Washington and on Hacker News. I'm moderately anti-crypto--I don't buy the pitch but am open to being wrong and believe folks should be free to do what they want with it. I've also been struck by the proliferation of bank-like services without bank-like obligations. This stretches from fractional-reserve and maturity-transforming services like Tether to exchanges/dealers like Bi…

> Wyden's amendment is a result of reasonable concerns expressed by miners I'm honestly kind of surprised Wyden's amendment didn't get accepted. I guess I misunderstood the level of support it actually had; it seemed reasonable to me and I thought that most of the interest groups had gotten onboard with it. Maybe that's an area where I'm just in a bubble.

It "felt like" some common ground between the wyden and portman (and its successor) amendments would be found. It was complicated by Senate procedural votes that made amendments much harder, and an overlying concern about CBO scoring of the budget impact of the bill. It can still be amended by unanimous consent (all 100 senators)but wyden or portman will have to blink and all the bill-haters will have to acquiesce.

Re: U.S. Senate Vote in Favor of Amendment That Threatens Crypto Industry

#127

Post by EGreg »

tremon wrote: post #105
EGreg wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it goes deeper than that, including a point that woodruffw totally misses (perhaps he read only the first paragraph of what I wrote?) If you are against anonymous cryptocurrency transactions, should you not also be against all end-to-end encryption? After all, it could conceal cryptocurrency transactions! Or any of an endlessly growing amount of potentially dangerous information or assets, transferred peer to pee…

If you are against anonymous cryptocurrency transactions, should you not also be against all end-to-end encryption? Only if you hold the belief that money is a form of free speech. Otherwise, money is just valuable property that you have to account for on your yearly/monthly tax statement to the government.

No, I believe that once you allow end to end encrypted free speech, you allow many dangerous things. Including cryptocurrency transactions, silk road sales for all kinds of bad things, sex trafficking and child pornography… you also allow terrorists to plan their activities, etc.

Yes I think that is just as dangerous, if not more, than monetary transactions.

Therefore, if your position is that people should not be allowed to have self-hosted wallets (“unhosted” wallets) and app stores should have to ban them from the stores, then you should consider whether the same position should be applied to E2E software across the board, and for the same reasons of opening a dangerous pandora’s box.

See the sister comment and my reply to it

Re: U.S. Senate Vote in Favor of Amendment That Threatens Crypto Industry

#128

Post by zonethundery »

nprz wrote: post #106
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #31

I've been following this discussion in Washington and on Hacker News. I'm moderately anti-crypto--I don't buy the pitch but am open to being wrong and believe folks should be free to do what they want with it. I've also been struck by the proliferation of bank-like services without bank-like obligations. This stretches from fractional-reserve and maturity-transforming services like Tether to exchanges/dealers like Bi…

The bill expands the definition of broker to include anyone who facilities the transfer of crypto: miners, wallet providers, smart contract devs. These people are now made responsible for collecting transaction records for the IRS. That's just not how cryptocurrency works. Miners, smart contract devs, don't know who is transacting with who. It's effectively a ban on cryptocurrency.

You're not wrong, that is a maximalist interpretation of the language. Portman has tried to clarify, but there is always a gap between legislative intent and what the rulemaking process (i.e. Treasury) ends up doing with the statute. It's terrible language but not the end of the world (yet).

Re: U.S. Senate Vote in Favor of Amendment That Threatens Crypto Industry

#129

Post by woodruffw »

Quarrel wrote: post #118
woodruffw wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AML has been completely ineffective; there's absolutely zero evidence to show it's reduced drug usage or terrorism, drug gangs now are richer than ever before. AML is not itself an anti-drug-trafficking or anti-terrorism law. It’s a law designed to make money laundering more difficult by requiring banks to keep and submit more information on large transactions. Normal American citizens also launder and embezzle mon…

AML / CTF is enacted in the US through US laws (of course). But, they're a Basel Committee initiative, where legislation is broadly mirrored around countries that have 95% of world GDP: https://www.bis.org/list/bcbs/tid_199/index.htm Central banks have come together to either help manage the order of world banking, or to allow evil Rothschild overlords to run the world, depending on which bit of the internet you're l…

The legislation, sure. But not the infrastructure or data: Turkey can legislate whatever it wants, but they’re never going to see my bank records (except for under some truly extraordinary and unlikely circumstances).

Re: U.S. Senate Vote in Favor of Amendment That Threatens Crypto Industry

#130

Post by [deleted] »

EGreg wrote: post #113
woodruffw wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you are against anonymous cryptocurrency transactions, should you not also be against all end-to-end encryption? After all, it could conceal cryptocurrency transactions! This conflation of free expression and hiding your finances would get you laughed out of any courtroom in America. I strongly support E2EE encryption and do work that directly supports a number of E2EE efforts; the idea that this requires me to…

Please read what I am actually writing. I will try a different format. Perhaps you can respond POINT BY POINT to show that you have read it and have a substantive argument about it, rather than about your personal feelings about what a name du jour should mean: 1. End-to-end encrypted communication opens the barn door, you can conceal any anonymous cryptocurrency transactions in there, as well as darknets, smart cont…

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