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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

#291

Post by immibis »

palmfacehn wrote: post #272
user34283 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even if you accept those premises, reasonable people would expect limits on the power of the state to infringe upon property rights, even when backed by a popular majority. Furthermore, the principle of individual self-ownership is a key starting point for modern, liberal ideas of law. Of course you are free to reject those premises, but I would characterize that as authoritarian rather than obvious .

Both should be limited. Almost everything should be limited. Deciding the limits is called politics.

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

#292

Post by ddtaylor »

Nifty3929 wrote: post #110

A lot of people keep looking for technology solutions to political problems. The fact is that privacy, especially of financial transactions, is becoming illegal. Any technology that allows you to send or spend money anonymously will be attacked by our governments. They won't be allowed. You can argue about whether you can get away with it due to difficulty of enforcement, but all that does is turn us all into crimina…

> The fact is that privacy, especially of financial transactions, is becoming illegal. Any technology that allows you to send or spend money anonymously will be attacked by our governments. They won't be allowed.

It's probably a bit worse than that. It's not specific to transactions or spending.

Eventually any IP talking to another IP without the mandatory metadata to link it to a physical identity will be illegal.

Right now there is a hodge-podge of solutions that piggy-back on the phone networks, wires, etc. that used to give LEO enough actionable information to track some criminals. But most of that has been obsoleted by modern cryptography.

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

#293

Post by user34283 »

palmfacehn wrote: post #272
user34283 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even if you accept those premises, reasonable people would expect limits on the power of the state to infringe upon property rights, even when backed by a popular majority. Furthermore, the principle of individual self-ownership is a key starting point for modern, liberal ideas of law. Of course you are free to reject those premises, but I would characterize that as authoritarian rather than obvious .

Property rights exist within a legal framework defined by the people, through law.

What you're talking about here with self-ownership and the state "infringing" upon property rights when you're taxed and can't transact privately, it seems less than "reasonable".

It seems like you're trying to paint routine and widely accepted functions of democratic governments as if they were unreasonable, authoritarian overreach.

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

#294

Post by throawaywpg »

blindriver wrote: post #81
conception wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you imagine the world today if Bernie had won?

He was sabotaged by the DNC. Even Elizabeth Warren said that the nomination process was rigged by the DNC. Absolute corruption and the world would absolutely be a different place. But his support of ratcheting up the Ukraine war disappointed profoundly. That’s not the Bernie I would have voted for.

supporting Ukraine has always been in America's interests. How embarassing it must be for Trump to be publicly humiliated by Putin over a cease fire.

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

#295

Post by runako »

mothballed wrote: post #163
runako wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

By referendum I meant to be able to vote directly on a specific law. If you look at how weed was legalized, it required a referendum in many (most?) states because no representative wants to be the guy that has his face plastered everywhere when some kid dies after he smokes some legal weed and smashes into a pole, even if most his constituents wanted the policy. Representatives generally have to be risk averse to ge…

Absolutely.

The catch is that when voters vote at all levels, they express by their choices that e.g. marijuana legalization is not a high priority. So voters might well vote to legalize if given that standalone choice, but it's not obvious to me that it's a good idea to insulate representatives from their inaction.

> no representative wants to be the guy

So on this, a number of states arrived at some level of legalization exactly this way. Legalization laws were signed by governors as diverse politically as Kay Ivey in Alabama and Tim Walz in Minnesota.

There's no statutory reason that voters in e.g. South Carolina cannot choose representation as amenable to legalization as Beshear in Kentucky or Reeves in Mississippi. Referenda also are subject to faithful implementation by representatives, so attempting to side-step the choice of representatives is not necessarily going to be fruitful.

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

#296

Post by fsflover »

lokar wrote: post #261
fsflover wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you hear about the Internet?

Crime is pretty heavily regulated on the Internet, has been for years. If that regulation had been impossible, it would not have been allowed to grow, and would have been shut down / banned.

You should check out I2P.

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

#297

Post by jmyeet »

Bitcoin is a perfect microcosm for the tech sector in what happens when people who don't know how something works and refuse to understand it, try to replace it.

Every aspect of the modern financial system exists for a reason. It evolved over time to deal with problems. Things like reversible transactions are a feature not a bug.

Bitcoin is where all the gold bugs went who lamented the end of the gold standard. Most of these people didn't understand that at no point in history was the US dollar 100% backed by gold (or silver, originally). Never.

What backs the US dollar isn't gold or oil or anythihng else we dig up out of the ground. It's long schlong of the US military.

I've also said that crypt currency exists only because the government hasn't shut it down. All it would take is a policy change from the US government to say banks who have access to the US financial system cannot trade in Bitcoin and it would be over. Yes you could still have wallets (at least until the government starts going after Bitcoin farms, which again it could do) but what would you do with those coins?

Bitcoin is not, never has been and never will be an escape from the perils (some real, many imagined) of fiat currencies.

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

#298

Post by mrguyorama »

mothballed wrote: post #163
runako wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

By referendum I meant to be able to vote directly on a specific law. If you look at how weed was legalized, it required a referendum in many (most?) states because no representative wants to be the guy that has his face plastered everywhere when some kid dies after he smokes some legal weed and smashes into a pole, even if most his constituents wanted the policy. Representatives generally have to be risk averse to ge…

>If you look at how weed was legalized, it required a referendum

It only required a referendum in some states because most US states are controlled by Republican governors and legislatures who openly defy what their own constituents want without fear of being voted out, because republicans vote republican no matter what. Republican voters will say "I want to legalize weed", their elected representative spouts literal DARE propaganda about weed that republican voters KNOW is false since they literally smoke weed (illegally, how about that), but they STILL re-elect those politicians, because it's more important to not have a democrat in office than to actually get what you democratically voted for.

Here in Maine, we passed a referendum to legalize weed. It passed. Lepage spent the next 4 years of his Governor term refusing to implement it, entirely. Like he just criminally defied the will of the public. As soon as Mills took office, the state built up a framework for recreational weed and IMO it's pretty good compared to other states, which is probably why we have literal Chinese gangs growing illegal weed all over the state :/

You see the same thing in every Republican state that allows citizen referendums. The public passes a referendum, and the republican politicians of the state just utterly defy it, and they do not get voted out

Democrat politicians respect citizen referendums, even when they are stupid and against democrat policies, like in California where Uber is not an employer because that's how the people voted.

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

#299

Post by cantor_S_drug »

cratermoon wrote: post #223
komali2 wrote: post #160

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…

> was it always this stupid? Excellent question. There are two easily readable sources I know of covering historical events of the sort you're asking about. The first is Barbara W. Tuchman's The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam , where the entire premise is that stupid people did stupid things and then doubled down on stupidity as they went along. The second is Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of E…

> stupid people did stupid things and then doubled down on stupidity as they went along.

You might like this review of the movie Civil War. Very well thought out review.

Alex Garland's CIVIL WAR has a clear and simple meaning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWBzZJxhQtY

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

#300

Post by genewitch »

_9ptr wrote: post #211
black6 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might turn out to vote if there was a candidate whose sole platform plank was to repeal as many existing laws as possible.

any democratic candidate?

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/report-cards/2022

I'm not sure that democrats enact/write less laws. If they don't enact (or write) less laws, i cannot see how the aggregate number of laws reduces.

This, apparently, is a "hard" statistical (research) problem, even though i've seen reporting on this exact subject, along the lines of "number of lines in bills written by each party" or similar. but the top 2 are democrats. I think "enacted" is a different metric, but i'm still pretty certain that democrats lead on "enacted" legislation, at least in the last 25 years.

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