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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

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Monero ever came close to Bitcoin's popularity, it would be outlawed. Plain as that. You can't get freedom through technology.

Monero has already been delisted from relevant exchanges last year because "reasons". The main website that matched people to trade fiat for monero (localmonero) got closed recently because "reasons". It is pretty popular and outlawed since a while. Basically the only relevant crypto currency used for purchases on the street since several years now. You can look up the number of daily on-chain transactions and tends…

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

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

What an excellent video essay, thanks for sharing. On the second watch, after removing the expectation of an alternative history, Civil War hit me really hard that a future civil war would be absurd and horrific.

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

#344
post #315

I have deep disagreements with my father on this subject. He worked as a federal agent for 30 years, mostly in digital forensics. He does not believe in the right to privacy in any of the same ways I do. Whereas I believe a right to privacy in your tools and communication is essential, he believes they infringe on the government's ability to catch criminals. Classic justification of "if you're not a bad guy, what do…

The typical HN person works as a software engineer, and the typical software company makes money, either directly or indirectly, via targeted ads. And these ads are served via a surveillance infrastructure that would not be out of place in a dystopian science fiction novel.

Even the companies that don't make money from ads have no qualms just letting Google or Facebook collect data about their website visitors.

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

#345

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. R…

> But most of that has been obsoleted by modern cryptography.

Except that people are people, and people make mistakes, and it doesn't take a lot of mistakes to fail in your opsec, and then your whole plot unravels.

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

#346

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> financial privacy is an important part of having a functioning democracy No, I don't think it is. Perhaps privacy for speech and voting are.

How is privacy for voting different than privacy for funding the candidate?

One man one vote is a little different from one dollar one word, or one dollar one vote.

In most civilized countries you have privacy in the voting booth (because without it, buying votes becomes trivial), but no privacy in financing campaigns.

Some of those countries even have rules about when campaigns can and cannot run, because there are benefits to living in a society that's not actively bombarded by polarizing political screeching 24/7. It does some to cut down the influence of dollars in politics.

I guess it makes people in the advertising business, and people looking to buy political influence very unhappy.

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

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just !

Want to bet 10k? You’re literally making claims without any basis. He left last time, he will leave again, if he even makes it to the end of his term

> without any basis

This is his second, ostensibly last, term, meaning he will have an uphill battle at best to convince the public that he should get another term for some bullshit reason. His last term ended with him obviously trying to prevent the next guy from taking over. He obviously wants to be in power. It's disingenuous to say there is no basis. Whether it's likely is another matter but this is intellectually dishonest.

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

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a conflict between Bitcoin as a public ledger, privacy, and money laundering There is, to be fair, a legitimate debate to be had about dismantling our anti-money laundering infrastructure.

No, there really isn't. Money laundering has been a huge problem enabling all sorts of crimes and issues. There is no debate to be had on the benefits of prohibiting it, and you have to be very deep in the Silicon Valley rabbit hole to think even 5% of the population of any nation would support doing away with those rules.

> there really isn't. Money laundering has been a huge problem enabling all sorts of crimes and issues

To be clear, I think there should be limits. I also think a lot of AML is theatrical.

Where it’s not is where large volumes can be moved. Less emphasis on cash. More on offshore accounts, tumblers and high-volume wallets.

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

#349

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…

To know the answers to all of these questions, you should really check out the Behind the Bastards podcast because that is the whole premise. Covering the lead-up to horrible situations and the inevitable slide in fascism. It's insanely detailed about covering many, many stupid fascist bastards and a few smart ones.

That's a good podcast that gets across that most of the Nazis really were just dense thugs.

One thing that it doesn't really cover is the rest of German society and how those thugs managed to get power. Weimer Germany was run by the social democrats. These people were basically 'center left.' They ended up in control after the 1919 revolution that got rid of the Kaiser, and ruled via coalition government with other centrist and center-right parties as junior members.

In general people's complaints were 1) land reform because especially in Prussia most of the land was still owned by massive landowners (Junkers) and most peasants were tenant farmers and 2) better working conditions in industry for the working poor 3) some way to get out of the economic crisis that was bad even before the depression in Germany.

The social democrats failed to deliver any of this. And mostly they spend their entire time in power battling with the Communists. This included hiring freekorps, which were paramility groups that roamed the German countryside after the war and eventually turned into brownshirts, to work with the police to attack communists. There was already a ton of state sponsored terror in the 1920s directed almost entirely at the left.

Support for the social democrats and other center parties collapsed and in the 1932 election, the nazis and communists were the big winners almost entirely at the expense of the social democrats. The center parties decided that working with the communists was absolutely beyond the pale and thought that the nazis would be more easy to manipulate, so they decided to work with Hitler and made him chancellor. Once the nazis had their foot in the door, as it were, and given that they had contempt for democracy and the rule of law, they used every dirty trick they could after that to consolidate power.

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

#350

I think the case for why strong encryption is important is much clearer than why untraceable financial instruments are important and I don't think it's super compelling to argue that these things are actually the same, even if your opposition to government control is the same. I think it's actually pretty clear that almost all people are not capable of secure and reliable self-custody and would be better off with an…

  almost all people are not capable of secure and reliable self-custody and would be better off with an intermediary
I agree, send me your bank account login info and I can keep it safe for you.

Believing a profit-motivated corporation or individual is trustworthy long term especially in an age of quick mergers and acquisitions is .. deeply naive to say the least.

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