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

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231–240 of 611 posts

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

#231

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.

> a presidential candidate can run with removing the Patriot Act as one of their campaign points

I've worked on privacy regulation. This would not get votes. The unfortunate fact is that the people most passionate about these issues are also tremendously lazy or extremely nihilistic. (Maybe it comes with the territory of not trusting institutions.)

Either way, privacy advocates can rarely muster even a dozen calls to electeds, let alone credibly threaten backing a primary opponent. The reason SOPA/PIPA worked is it animated a group of tech advocates beyond those with ideological opposition to surveillance.

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

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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Talk about rejecting nuance, but now the state is "all powerful" because you can't transact privately.

Yes, the state has control of finance and transactions. It always does.

Democracies are build on principles like Popular sovereignty, political equality, or the rule of law.

Private transactions or tax-free property isn't a democratic feature. Yes, it's that obvious.

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

#233

Considering how they're clamping down on anonymity wherever they can, crypto wasnt going to escape their clutches for very long. How long before its seperated from it original aim and just turned into a gambling token.

Sounds like the cryptobros are about to have their turn with the Trump leopard eating their face...

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

#234

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?

I'm guessing similar to the Obama administration. E.g. he couldn't get proper healthcare reform passed.

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

#235
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 shooti…

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Problem could be economical. The rich want to get richer and more powerful, the poor and rest of the 99% have issues. Solving a lot of these issues would mean less wealth and power for the rich. So they need to create scapegoats. And racist stereotypes are probably the easiest way to do that. Close second are the people who think differently than [your_group].

helps that the same rich people have lots of influence over what the rest sees, hears and thinks.

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

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We're incredibly lucky the 'just an acronym' ended that way then. Had they named it the 'Joining and Reinforcing the Nation by Satisfying Liberties and Guaranteeing Efficient Control Over Surveillance' we would have ended with the JRN SLGECOS Act.

Apparently I forgot to close my sarcasm tag.

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

#237

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.

What text are you referring to? The article has a screenshot of a tweet with a screenshot of an excerpt that seems fair to paraphrase as "anyone behaved in this sort of activity is suspicious." I don't see anything about a ban and if you're only using single-use addresses that seems probably not suspicious in absence of all the other things which if you're doing all of them, seem objectively like they can only be described as money laundering.

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

#238
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Every president remodels and redecorates the White House, often to a much greater degree. The consternation over it is an intentional distraction.

It's done as an intentional distraction. The guy is a top class troll after all.

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

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you start from an assumption that there should be no regulation, then your conclusion will be that there should be no regulation. That's not actually an argument for anyone who doesn't share your assumptions though and is largely just lazy thinking. Cash also has physical limitations that make large cross-border transactions hard, which crypto does not.

If you start with the assumption there should be regulation, even then IDK how you get there. You're regulating an "untraceable" utterance of a string of data. Pragmatically it's worse than trying to stop fentanyl, which is already impossible, and even trying to stop it has just made the gangs that much more powerful because they now control whole small nation-state tier light-infantry militias funded by black-market…

Nobody here is actually even arguing about the proposal here, just repeating platitudes and analogies.

I don't actually care about this topic at all, but people should do a better job of defending their positions.

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

#240
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 shooti…

Apparently (can't be bothered to fact check this) the nazis liked having parades in the dark because it was easier to propagate the idea of the nazi ubermensch when you couldn't see that the dedicated members of the nazi party were generally on the uglier side of average. As you'd expect of dissatisfied radicals, really. Probably same reason there's a stereotype of right-wing people on social media having a profile picture of themselves in a car with sunglasses on.

Anyway, as stupid as this is, Americans are generally literate, with access to unadulterated messages from the other side of the world. Imagine how stupid things were when 95% were illiterate and all information passed through a giant game of telephone before it arrived to you.

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