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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

#481

Post by xp84 »

beambot wrote: post #338
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…

> a certain part of which involves paying influencers, extremists, shady media outlets, maybe a Representative or three in America to push their agendas, foment discontent aiming to destabilize and control the United States. Doesn't this describe every political party and megacorp in the US too...?

If you don’t like those guys, you really won’t like the guys who will be in charge when the nation actually does descend into chaos.

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

#482

Post by kjkjadksj »

fluoridation wrote: post #424
teiferer wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has never been the main use outside an unrealistic dream world. Its main purposes are speculation and ponzi-like scams.

There are two components to price: what the thing is worth, and what you might be willing to convince someone else to buy it from you in the future for. The latter is the speculative component. The former must be related to some intrinsic property of the thing. For example, an orange has some minimum price, because if nothing else it's composed of matter and so can weight things down. If bitcoin is useless to transac…

Much like baseball cards and beanie babies.

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

#483

Post by lazyasciiart »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #448
lazyasciiart wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Criminals use privacy protection that is not illegal too.

Indeed, criminals use things like HTTPS and ad blockers and lock the doors to their cars and homes. But so does everybody else?

Yes. I am disagreeing with your assumption that all "libertarian minded tech" must be illegal and only used by criminals. VPNs, Signal, ...

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

#484

Post by trhway »

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…

>"if you're not a bad guy, what do you have to hide?"

everybody is a bad guy in the eyes of their political opponents.

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

#485

Post by immibis »

Arainach wrote: post #328
palmfacehn wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Political solutions are often messy and complex. Pragmatic fixes are rarely obvious and overreaches are common. Reforms are ongoing. Conversely, absolutists have no use for nuance. The war on cash is a good example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United... https://ij.org/federal-court-rules-in-favor-of-convenience-s...

Something being imperfect doesn't mean that getting rid of it is an improvement. Should civil forfeiture be heavily reformed, and is it being obviously abused? Yes. Is the ability to use cryptocurrency to bypass sanctions, fund oppressive regimes, drive criminal empires, and power a new generation of scams a much worse problem? Absolutely. Proponents of a system explicitly designed to enable financial fraud shocked w…

The ability of money to deice criminal empires is a problem. Abolish money.

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

#486

Post by derangedHorse »

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…

You should ask him if he's ever worked with someone who's pulled information on someone else for personal matters. Or if he'd be okay with personal information being pulled about himself. I'm usually surprised when people believe in the political process so much they can't fathom a government who will abuse their powers to undermine democracy.

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

#487

Post by roenxi »

user34283 wrote: post #293
palmfacehn wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Authoritarian overreach is itself a routine and widely accepted aspect of democratic governments. Authoritarians get 1 vote/person, same as everyone else. They're allowed to advocate for policies and score the occasional outrageous political win, just like everyone else. There are a lot of them out there and they are a significant political force.

Something being routine and done democratically is no defence at all of it being liberal or in line with the principle of property rights. Or even of it being legal in a lot of instances, democratic governments lose legal challenges quite regularly.

And in this case, attacks on private transactions are absolutely unreasonable authoritarian overreach. The government doesn't need to surveil people when they have no reason to suspect those people of wrongdoing.

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

#488

Post by derangedHorse »

fluoridation wrote: post #424
teiferer wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has never been the main use outside an unrealistic dream world. Its main purposes are speculation and ponzi-like scams.

There are two components to price: what the thing is worth, and what you might be willing to convince someone else to buy it from you in the future for. The latter is the speculative component. The former must be related to some intrinsic property of the thing. For example, an orange has some minimum price, because if nothing else it's composed of matter and so can weight things down. If bitcoin is useless to transac…

> what the thing is worth

This is subjective. Value is subjective. This is taught in many introductory economics classes.

> an orange has some minimum price, because if nothing else it's composed of matter and so can weight things down

You talk as if "minimum price" is objective. The "minimum price" you're referring to here is the most useless, but valued, property of the object for you. For other people, having weight can be a burden.

> If bitcoin is useless to transact, then its intrinsic worth is zero, so its price is 100% speculative

Again you speak as if as if everyone assumes the same value system as you, but differ only in a penchant for gambling in the form of price speculation.

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

#489

Post by koolala »

decimalenough wrote: post #114
crazygringo wrote: post #42

The headline is not supported by the article. The actual list of "suspicious activities" in the article is about pooling, structuring, delaying transactions -- the stuff you do to hide activity, whether for good or bad. It says nothing whatsoever about self-custody. The author makes the imaginary leap because they say they personally recommend doing all those things with self-custody. But they're totally separate thi…

The draft text explicitly bans single-use addresses, which are used by any self-respecting wallet (Exodus, Ledger, Trezor) these days. The actual problem with the article/headline is that the "Patriot Act" has expired. Although I'm sure there are plenty of similarly vague laws that could be used to justify this.

Isn't the Act still active, just some provisions have expired?

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

#490

Post by komali2 »

tehjoker wrote: post #406
nonameiguess wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This rings poignant now that I finally got around to reading The Three-Body Problem . It starts off depicting struggle sessions during the cultural revolution in China in the 60s, in which they're beating a physicist to death for teaching relativity because Einstein gave imperialists the bomb. It's so stupid, that if it was fiction, I wouldn't find it realistic that people would be this stupid. To be clear, the book…

Do you have a citation for an actual physicist being beaten to death because of their views on physics or was the book exaggerating for the sake of the plot and promoted widely in the west because it promoted anticommunism? For what it’s worth I like the show just not that part.

What didn't you like about that part, just the depiction of violence while everyone watched and did nothing?

I'll preface with, I am a communist so I have no anti communist tendencies.

But, that is what struggle sessions were like, and their most frequent locations were in classrooms, and their most frequent targets were teachers and professors. And they'd often drag in random peasants to watch. I remember one quote that was like, feeling bad for these peasants who have no idea wtf is going on or why they're watching some professor get beat half to death.

The CPC's reasons for the struggle sessions were cynically open-eyed: they wanted people to participate so that people were involved and culpable with the state violence against "counter revolutionaries."

This is why the PRC's communist revolution was flawed from the start and doomed to slide into deep authoritarianism, which holds out as a historical fact now.

Btw for what it's worth the book really isn't all that anti communist, or anti CPC at least. Criticism of the cultural revolution is allowed in the PRC now, or the author never would have been allowed to publish.

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