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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

#451

Post by CamperBob2 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #260
roenxi wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 This is exxageration. If you operate a cash business, you're under the same heightened supervision.

And that's not OK either.

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

#452

Post by ikmckenz »

dataflow wrote: post #444
TheGRS wrote: 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…

I think the crucial bit you're missing is that the fundamental disagreement boils down to whether a properly-signed-and-executed warrant ought to be sufficient for the government to get its hands on evidence or otherwise do what it needs to do to deliver justice. To you, he seems to believe Yes, and to him, I think you seem to believe No. Historically, the answer has been Yes, and crypto has fundamentally changed tha…

No, historically the vast majority of communication was not recorded, and so a warrant could not be used to access the communication. The fact of the modern world is that for the first time in history almost everything we do is recorded, and so subject to those warrants.

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

#453

Post by Barbing »

joe_the_user wrote: post #355
lukeschlather wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 des…

The article has some references but not to a "draft text". The article makes no claims that a bill or other regulation-with-text is in the works. The image that serves as the topic of the article is apparently a tweet of the author of the article.

>the article...apparently [features] a tweet from the author of the article

Ah, our favorite - a Journalism

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

#454

Post by Talanes »

Eridrus wrote: post #239
mothballed wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Well, given that they're responding to this:

>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 intermediary. We're not keeping our fiat currency in a safe under our bed after all.

Why would you not expect people to argue in the style you presented them?

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

#455

Post by IAmGraydon »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #252
lordofgibbons wrote: post #65

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…

Very true. In my opinion, and strictly from an American-centric view, privacy should only extend to transactions within borders between citizens. As soon as it involves transactions from outside our borders, then it is a national security concern. We know, right now, that both Russia and China are fueling internal political tension via massive and sophisticated disinformation/influence campaigns, a certain part of wh…

One of the biggest platforms this happens through is Reddit, and they intentionally leave it wide open. You don’t even have to have an email address to register and start posting. Bots make these platforms a fortune, and they’re happy to sell out their country to foreign influence for a dime.

So yes, and I’ve been saying this since it started really getting bad in 2020, we need to completely cut enemies of the US off from our internet. There will obviously be attempts to proxy through western countries, so it needs to be strictly enforced, possibly with an identity requirement for participants.

For those against this, imagine a physical country where anyone can spawn thousands of faceless, nameless drones disguised as real people which are free to do whatever they want in society with zero risk of consequences. What would happen to that country? It would fall. As digital societies have now become larger than countries themselves, this is the very situation we’re dealing with. It’s not the utopia we hoped for, but it will be a dystopia unless action is taken.

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

#456

Post by virtue3 »

calibas wrote: post #377
calibas wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

I looked into this a little more, and these were the final two provisions of the Patriot Act, so the did law expire. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean a whole lot, as many of the provisions live on in the USA Freedom Act.

Was not aware of the USA Freedom Act

details on it:

Reauthorization of Other Patriot Act Provisions: The USA FREEDOM Act extended two other provisions from the Patriot Act that were set to expire: "Lone Wolf" Provision: Allows for surveillance on individual terrorists who may not be directly linked to a foreign power. "Roving Wiretap" Provision: Enables surveillance to follow a suspect even if they change their communication methods or devices.

Everyone should be super clued in whenever the government chooses to classify something as 'terrorism' because of these provisions.

There appeared to be a lot of "good things" associated with this Act but also... as things go. Not great things such as above.

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

#458

Post by Talanes »

xienze wrote: post #433
yepitwas wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump's the guy who suggested when he ran against Hillary that the "second amendment people" would be the only ones who could "do anything about it" if she won. Like, holy fucking shit , and then Republicans elected him president after he said that! TWICE! The right's been laughing it up for decades when liberals get attacked, and calling for aid for their attackers (Kirk did this exact thing with Paul Pelosi, and wa…

[flagged]

It’s impossible — impossible! — for anyone to attend a mass gathering with the pure intention of causing trouble.

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

#460

Post by ethanwillis »

Arainach wrote: post #330
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #262

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.

Except that money laundering is allowable for some, but not all.

Don't pretend the AML rules are enforced fairly and evenly.

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