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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

#461

Post by nobody9999 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #372
deadbabe wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one ever answers the “what do you have to hide” question, which is a little sus.

> No one ever answers the “what do you have to hide” question, which is a little sus. Poe's Law strikes again, but for reference there are even several major categories: Some things are nobody's business. If you have religious parents and you're gay, you may not want them to know that, even if your religious parents work for the government. People have proprietary secrets. A drug company or tech company can't be spen…

That's all as may be, and I agree those are relevant points, but the overarching principle, IMNSHO, is that "my business is my business and not anyone else's." Full stop.

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

#462

Post by godelski »

gus_massa wrote: post #430
lazyasciiart wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jesus. They were literally answering your question of “how can anyone be committed to someone they describe as a lesser evil”, very clearly not even using a specific side as the lesser evil, and you’re mad that anyone is able to elucidate or understand the reasoning used? You didn’t want to know how people do that, you just wanted to mention that they are terrible people and it’s a bad choice?

The problem is that the GP forgot the /s

  >  the GP
michaelt?

We're at a point where if that is parody then it is indistinguishable from reality. I hope you're right and that it is parody. But hell, just the other week I saw someone pull out the "bUt YoU dIdN't UsE a SoTa MoDeL" card in reference to a GPT-5 output and I mistakenly assumed this was a joke.

Sarcasm doesn't seem to translate well over the internet. Fewer clues and people conflate the ability to read with literacy. I love sarcasm, but it appears Descartes was right

  > Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they’re in good company.

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

#463

Post by clarkmoody »

Eridrus wrote: post #221
hombre_fatal wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it makes sense to start from the idea that you should be able to transfer funds to someone, like $100 to your mother, without needing the government or a megacorp to facilitate it. The same way I can gift my TV to my mom. Whether that's cash or cryptocurrency doesn't seem to matter since your argument would also apply to cash.

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.

Start from the assumption of liberty and the freedom of association. Unfortunately, most people don't believe in human liberty and prefer varying degrees of slavery.

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

#466

Post by yepitwas »

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]

You sure did choose to respond to something, but it wasn’t my post.

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

#467

Post by oofbey »

tchock23 wrote: post #124
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…

That assumes Bitcoin maximalists ultimately see it as a means of transaction. The ones I come across in the wild are purely maximalists for speculative purposes and couldn’t care less about the “practical” use cases for it.

Not saying anything new here, but at the core there are only a few key reasons for using bitcoin: investment, hiding your finances, and the idealism of de-centralization.

The intrinsic value of decentralization is the ability to operate outside any fiat system of laws or government. So that one lines up a lot with the criminal side of hiding your finances. The investment aspect sure is enticing to lots of folks, but without a real core underlying value it's just bubbles and rug-pulls. So all this has the effect, wittingly or not, of lining up the incentives of all BTC users with money launderers.

Sure there are TONS of perfectly legal reasons not to want people to track your finances. Many of them are even moral. But obviously many are neither moral nor legal. (The edge case of moral but illegal sure gets people fired up, but it's a vanishing minority of actual use.) So when the regulators come looking for criminals, we unsurprisingly get lots of sound and fury about how there are lots of perfectly valid reasons why good people will want to act in ways that make them look like criminals. Uh huh. Yes, there sure are.

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

#468

Post by roenxi »

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.

When they bought that in it was an attack on using cash. People have been pointing out that cash is under attack for a while.

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

#469

Post by SubiculumCode »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #455
SubiculumCode wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I used to be against the real ID moves of early social media platforms, and now I wonder. How would information spread if social media users on X, for example, were clearly identified as 1 to 1 associated with a named person? Sore they might spread something, but unless that guy in Russia has an American ID, then he's not posting.

The current, put as many bots as you want on, approach is pure war.

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

#470

Post by gus_massa »

godelski wrote: post #462
gus_massa wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the GP forgot the /s

> the GP michaelt? We're at a point where if that is parody then it is indistinguishable from reality. I hope you're right and that it is parody. But hell, just the other week I saw someone pull out the "bUt YoU dIdN't UsE a SoTa MoDeL" card in reference to a GPT-5 output and I mistakenly assumed this was a joke. Sarcasm doesn't seem to translate well over the internet. Fewer clues and people conflate the ability to…

I hope it was sarcasm, because I didn't want to offend anyone. Perhaps I'm reading too much in the details, but highlighting my team and the other team made me think that. (Anyway, I agree that it's better to avoid sarcasm online.)
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