Live data from Hacker News

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

tftc.io

151–160 of 611 posts

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

#151

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…

Yeah. I understand the excitement over the past two decades about the possibility of cryptocurrencies, but it came with a lot of naivete. After the fight to create sovereign central banks, did anyone seriously think that they were just going to give it up? Sure, maybe they can't stop you technologically, but it's very easy to simply make it unlawful, and then the men (and robots) with guns call.

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

#152
If there would have been better policing of digital currency by its users against criminal actors, perhaps digital assets would be spared the attention and now regulation. Sadly, increasing adoption and privacy guarantees lure criminals same as legitimate users.

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

#154
post #7
post #3

[flagged]

Unless they personally can profit from the situation anyway. Then they’ll often do perfunctory PR prosecutions while taking kickbacks. See things like prosecutions around prostitution for one usually pretty clear example.

I believe you, but do you have any evidence of how the prostitution kick backs work? Interesting articles?

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

#155
post #105
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.

Money laundering is the obvious one—and the primary reason crypto’s value is as high as it is.

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

#156
post #113

> [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?

I believe you have misread the comment. In 2015, it was expanded and extended until 2019. After that, it was allowed to expire and was not extended or expanded further.

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

#157

> [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,…

> In 2020, efforts to extend the provisions were not passed by the House of Representatives, and as such, the law has expired.

The wording is confusing. Two provisions expired, not the entire Patriot Act.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250306093943/https://www.nytim...

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

#158
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We are constantly voting in primaries and general elections. We vote in federal elections every two years, state elections generally at least as frequently, though often not in federal election year. We vote for mayor and city council and insurance commissioner and Secretary of State and county commission.

We don't need a referendum, we just need to choose representation that wants the same things we want. (Alternate formation: Americans do not want these things as much as some of us think they do.)

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

#159
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eco…

Younger generations are probably more racist than their parents but not their grandparents. There are a lot of reasons this probably happened, and it wasn't something done to infants, but transpired over the last 10-15 years.

I think part of it is being raised on the internet right as the cultural backlash against progressivism, "cancel culture" and Obama started to accelerate across social media, and right-wing grifting became big business after Gamergate.

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

#160
post #83

> [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,…

Whenever leftists say that "Trump is a symptom of an illness that has been metastasizing for a long time" this is what we mean.

My big ask is, was it always this stupid? Like, all these huge historical events and figures, did it all go down as stupidly and clownishly as the modern USA? Was there an early 20th century fascist Europe equivalent to a man named Big Balls being beat up by children and a fascist police action being triggered as a result? Was there a Napeolonic era equivalent to a media figure known for making light of school shootings, getting killed in a school shooting, a second after again making light of school shootings? Was George III as publicly and flagrantly fellated by the court as Trump is by the media still allowed into the White House?

I feel like I can't possibly live in the stupidest era in world history so it makes me try to see other historical eras in a similar light - how can I reinterpret the past such that it also experienced a bunch of clownish nonsense?

Post reply on HN