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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

#471

Post by IAmGraydon »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #469
IAmGraydon wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. The basis of the problem is an unlinking of actions and real world consequences. People wil do whatever they want when consequences no longer exist.

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

#472

Post by yalogin »

electric_muse wrote: post #10

[flagged]

No one willingly gives up power and if it’s the U.S. government there is a large ecosystem worth hundreds of billions around the patriot act, it’s never going to be sunset, and it not going to grow

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

#473

Post by cypherpunks01 »

BillTthree wrote: post #403
cypherpunks01 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strictly speaking, loading an address with many UTXOs has no effect on security of the receiving address at all (beyond increasing its public profile). The security concerns start happening after an address spends a UTXO. Before a P2WPKH (segwit) address is used, only the public key hash is known. In order to spend from it, the full public key needs to be revealed. That's why it's recommended to use single-use addres…

so the risk to the wallet holder is the exact same risk that exists for every single HTTPS connection right now? Post quantum algorithms have been available. You can do it today. Why not for bitcoin? In reality, there are very few current real world implementations. This article makes it seem that RSA is under active exploitation. If it is, bitcoin is not the first target IMO

Yes, TLS encryption has similar potential risks, quantum and other elliptic curve vulnerabilities.

Quantum resistant algorithms are under heavy discussion in bitcoin dev mailing list, and have been for awhile. I think the signature sizes for leading algorithms are still too large to be practical within existing block size limits, but of course lots of things would probably have to change in a quantum emergency. Bitcoin devs tend to be extremely conservative with making new changes (in part because it attracts a lot of contrarians) so it's going to take a long time for people to agree on the right architecture for a quantum resistant scheme in bitcoin, but it will happen, BIPs are in the works like BIP-360 which outlines some potential structure for it.

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

#474

Post by godelski »

gus_massa wrote: post #470
godelski wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

I hope you're right. I used to default to assuming sarcasm but that changed. I hope I'm wrong though, because you are right, there are enough elements where I did take a second to consider if it was

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

#475

Post by ipaddr »

xp84 wrote: post #364
yujzgzc wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually that's a problem for a lot of libertarian minded tech, it starts being thought of as enabling freedom from oppressive governments and ends up being adopted by criminals - Bitcoin, Tor, etc. In the tech industry you also find a bend of very economically self interested version of privacy, which is that giving privacy to your users is a great way to claim you didn't know anything bad was happening. I'm pretty…

> starts being thought of as enabling freedom from oppressive governments and ends up being adopted by criminals - Bitcoin, Tor, etc Yes. Both are real facets of this type of tech. For all the handwringing about "but what if fascism" that we have here in the US, I'm pretty sure 90% of the actual worries American cryptocurrency users have in their hearts is either about tax evasion, money laundering, or using crypto t…

Donating in public associates you with that charity. If that charity happens to be politically different from people in power it can use it against you.

We have to decide what kind of society we want. One with locks on doors or a world where that is illegal. Bad guys use locks and so do regular people. Taking away everyone's freedom and safety because it makes it easier to catch "bad guys" is not worth the tradeoffs in terms of safety / privacy or creating a society worth living in.

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

#476

Post by const_cast »

Eridrus wrote: post #326
ozozozd wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are conflating 2 things: - ability to privately give money to someone (mechanism is irrelevant, by hand or by way of a blockchain) - self-custody risks for uninformed users The first one is the privacy argument. Would you be comfortable if you’re not allowed to give the cash in your pocket to someone without someone watching over? If the answer is no, you are pro privacy for financial transactions. Cash h…

I don't have a predetermined opinion on whether it is good or bad for cash to be untraceable. I think arguments for privacy are pretty poorly argued and often come down to "isn't the idea of someone watching you icky" which this thread is not disabusing me of.

The main argument for privacy is that a lack of privacy is the primary vehicle of crimes against humanity.

When you do not have privacy, you must then have trust. You are trusting, typically blindly, that your governments and other organizations will not use knowledge against you.

Before the Holocaust, Germany built a registry of known Jews by census. Obviously at the time, nobody knew what it could be used for, the latent evil within just plain information. It was done innocently, naively.

The same applies to all privacy violations. Yes, we could monitor, record, and analyze all text messages. Sure.

What are the consequences of that? What if you live somewhere where being gay is punishable by execution? What if you out yourself?

What if you're not even gay, but it seems as though you might be?

Or what if you live in an authoritarian state, and dissent is punished with death? Your government has cornered you. They can do whatever they like, and you cannot so much as vocalize complaints.

You may say, "oh well this isn't the case for me, so who cares?"

Yes, now, in this particular point in time, in your very specific place. What garantees do you have that things stay that way? None. You are blindly trusting that those who hold your information will not weaponize it.

You have given your enemies a gun, loaded it for them, held it up to your forehead, and said "please don't pull the trigger"

As a thought experiment, imagine how differently the underground railroad would look if everyone had smartphones that were tracked and communications surveilled.

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

#478

Post by throwawaybtc »

jollyllama wrote: post #80

This would come as no surprise, since all the original promises of Bitcoin circa 15-ish years ago are long dead. The turning point occurred when all exchanges agreed to report transactions directly to the IRS. I say this as someone who had an interest prior to that but lost all interest when the Crypto community sold out its ideals and consented to certain regulations in the interest of mass marketing cryptocurrency…

Wait until you find out about the TRUST program and all the exchanges reporting PII to another.

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

#479

Post by incompatible »

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…

What does he think if "government's ability to catch criminals" becomes "government's ability to attack political opponents"? I suppose he has a privileged position, as part of the incorruptible rule-of-law democratic land of the free, but people in other countries may not be so well off.

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

#480

Post by tormeh »

krapp wrote: post #434
tormeh wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're generally not on HN. And since they're not here, we might as well speak about the problem using plain language.

There are plenty of Trump voters on HN, though.

Do you mean republicans? That’s different. I have some sympathy for the whole small government thing. I even kinda vote that way myself. But there’s a certain kind of person who will instantly vote for a “man of the people” who “tells it like it is” and promises that he’ll fix everything and says the foreigners took your jobs. And we have a term for those people.
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