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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

#131

Post by pessimizer »

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 author makes the imaginary leap because they say they personally recommend doing all those things with self-custody.

It is because if you can't do those things, bitcoin has no use. Its only functions are to dodge laws and transfer money, and it's bad at transferring money.

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

#132

Post by ddtaylor »

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.

Most governments aren't decentralized in their structure, which causes the "problem". If you have private entities that coordinate with each other it works quite well, but the world is very used to big centralized governments that "solve" all their problems.

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

#133

Post by dbdr »

angryGhost wrote: post #47

> Loading up a single address with too many UTXOs degrades the entropy of a public-private key pair and makes it easier to brute force a user's private key. Well that's not true... The key doesn't change because you added more bitcoin

The quote does not say that the key changes. It says that each transaction makes it (a bit) easier to perform a brute force attack.

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

#134

Post by mothballed »

tw04 wrote: post #129
mothballed wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would also be delusional to think crypto-bros will give up their self-determination to the nation-state.

It's really not. 100% of the time the nation state is winning that battle, as evidence by literally all of human history. Crypto-bros make up a fraction of a fraction of the population and most people don't have sympathy for any of them when the primary use cases of crypto today are extortion and black markets in the western world.

I don't think there's any shortage of history of people fighting the impossible, mostly getting crucified, and occasionally winning, and occasionally just existing as someone that would take the state more money than it's worth to go after.

You're expecting crypt-bros to act rationally based on utility of outcome. If they're acting ideologically there's no guarantee that will be the case.

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

#135

Post by 1gn15 »

thrance wrote: post #108
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.

It's not so black and white. Obviously social and political change is the goal. But in the meantime technology can help if you're living under repression.

Take VPNs and Tor helping people jump the Great Firewall of China for example. Obviously, yes, this is a political problem; the GFW shouldn't exist. But it would be foolish to dismiss the technology as a vital part of fighting back against the state.

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

#136

Post by user34283 »

thrance wrote: post #108
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.

Freedom here means transacting without:

--

anti-money laundering safeguards

sanctions enforcement

consumer protection

tax enforcement

fraud prevention systems

--

It is very true that technology won't get you this freedom from sensible legal requirements we impose on financial transactions.

That's obviously a good thing, but I guess people who are in crypto would disagree.

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

#138

Post by diggan »

ceejayoz wrote: post #102
diggan wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, of course, but since he didn't wanna give it up, and was willing to take 14 years of prison, I feel pretty confident he has some way of being able to use it, otherwise why not give it up?

Of course, this is also assuming he was lying when he said all the money been spent and he had no money when he was arrested.

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

#140

Post by AlecSchueler »

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.

It's called the patriot act, anyone fighting it is instantly framed as anti-American.
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