261–270 of 611 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Essentially decentralisation sounds nice, but doesnt work in practice.
Did you hear about the Internet?
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…
There is, to be fair, a legitimate debate to be had about dismantling our anti-money laundering infrastructure.
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.
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…
>I feel like I can't possibly live in the stupidest era in world history. Your statistical intuition is sound, and while there are many historical sources describing very stupid events (VSE) dating as far back as recorded history, it is difficult to appreciate the outer bounds of the stupidity range because what has been written is a small fraction of the history that people have lived for at least 100,000 years. So…
I have a grad school professor that owes me $1M dollars on a bet that the Patriot Act would never end. I told him he was painfully naive and not suitable to each graduate school economics with such thinking.
I feel like growing up is realizing that the government is just a big gang. They do what they want and will enforce with menace what they want. They can change the rules, take your stuff and it ain't stealing because they said so. Sigh.
Find a way that is costs trump money or prevents him from making money, and this stuff will vanish instantly.
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…
That is an attack on self-custody. If you hold Bitcoin you now have an elevated risk of being picked up in some dragnet and suffering random consequences in unrelated parts of the financial system for reasons that you don't understand. If Bitcoin holders weren't alerted by articles like this, there is actually a pretty reasonable chance that they go in, experiment with Bitcoin and trip off a surveillance system as be…
This is based on the idea that there is some exception from previous rules and regulations. Before Bitcoin existed, lots of these rules were formulated. Now Bitcoin is on the scene and has evolved best practices for self-custody that ignore everything that went before. Bitcoin becoming more popular and integrated means that the rules from US financial system will start to be applied.
There is no surprise in this. If more effort was put into mitigating the concerns of the US financial system (or others) then things like this wouldn't happen. However, the truth is that the philosophies are incompatible so it's just a war of attrition that will unsurprisingly result in conformance to US financial regulation.
War on Terror AUMF is still in force and is why the President can just decide to bomb whatever country they want without asking for permission, now. All that shit after 9/11 was crazy and dangerous, and some of us said that at the time, and go figure, the fucking obviously true things we were saying have turned out to be... true. What a surprise.
The War on Terror AUMF relies on a Presidential determinatiom that the targets “planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or person”.
But the President has had implicit blanket permission to bomb whoever he wants with a time limit ever since the War Powers Act was passed.
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…