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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

#491

Post by komali2 »

tormeh wrote: post #480
krapp wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honestly I'm realizing they're right, I've seen multiple comments here promoting the great replacement conspiracy. Personally I don't mind calling such people stupid, but, they are on HN.

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

#492

Post by Nevermark »

jofla_net wrote: post #443
conductr wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the crux of my belief system on the topic too. Along with the associated “burden of proof” and how making it less burdensome should not be anyone citizens goal or responsibility. The irony is that it’s precisely why GPs dad had a job, with full transparency there’s essentially no need for any type of forensics.

Sadly, Percisely. Digital Forensics (the evidence of nothing by the way, a great book), is approaching little more than gluing together datasets from various completely fungible entities. I too could be a master investigator if I could simply compel various busnisses to gift me the tables needed!

Pretty soon they will be able to run all our information through a language model.

Models could identify "suspicious" behavior and generate plausible theories to fit the desired witch hunt, based on what they read. Scary.

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

#493

Post by yosito »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #266
Mouvelie wrote: post #181

I feel like growing up is realizing that the government is just a big gang. They do what they want and will enforce with menace what they want. They can change the rules, take your stuff and it ain't stealing because they said so. Sigh.

On the other hand you get to vote who is in the gang. So choose wisely.

You used to get to vote. It doesn't work like that anymore.

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

#494

Post by heavyset_go »

tormeh wrote: post #240
komali2 wrote: post #160

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…

Apparently (can't be bothered to fact check this) the nazis liked having parades in the dark because it was easier to propagate the idea of the nazi ubermensch when you couldn't see that the dedicated members of the nazi party were generally on the uglier side of average. As you'd expect of dissatisfied radicals, really. Probably same reason there's a stereotype of right-wing people on social media having a profile p…

> Anyway, as stupid as this is, Americans are generally literate, with access to unadulterated messages from the other side of the world. Imagine how stupid things were when 95% were illiterate and all information passed through a giant game of telephone before it arrived to you.

I agree, but the other side of this is that we're open to manipulation coming from anyone around the world, and sometimes that game of telephone can act as an effective bullshit filter.

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

#495

Post by conductr »

Nevermark wrote: post #492
jofla_net wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, Percisely. Digital Forensics (the evidence of nothing by the way, a great book), is approaching little more than gluing together datasets from various completely fungible entities. I too could be a master investigator if I could simply compel various busnisses to gift me the tables needed!

Pretty soon they will be able to run all our information through a language model. Models could identify "suspicious" behavior and generate plausible theories to fit the desired witch hunt, based on what they read. Scary.

The eventuality is of course a dystopian thought police situation, where simply thinking or even Googling something suggesting you were even contemplating something illegal will be grounds to charge you with the crime.

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

#496

Post by solid_fuel »

stavros wrote: post #236
shaky-carrousel wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're incredibly lucky the 'just an acronym' ended that way then. Had they named it the 'Joining and Reinforcing the Nation by Satisfying Liberties and Guaranteeing Efficient Control Over Surveillance' we would have ended with the JRN SLGECOS Act.

Apparently I forgot to close my sarcasm tag.

I chuckled, at least.

Seeing the rise in the amount of bots on YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, basically all the major and a lot of minor social networks over the last ~decade has really been something, too. Tons and tons of people with account names that all follow similar regex's saying the same things around the same time.

I suppose it feels closer to Brave New World than 1984 but it's eerie, and those are just the accounts that stand out. I imagine the "premium propaganda" option from the companies and agencies providing the bot services are even harder to discern.

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

#497

Post by heavyset_go »

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…

> If someone has made bitcoin transactions to say, donate to EFF, Planned Parenthood or ACLU, I would take a bet of 5 Bitcoin that he isn't going to be imprisoned for that fact in this country. Yes, even though Trump is President.

This is archaic thinking, today all it takes is the president tweeting about your donations for your family to have to go into hiding forever.

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

#498

Post by ozgrakkurt »

Nifty3929 wrote: post #110

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…

This is a very narrow way to see it. Technological advancements can and did massively affect politics and other parts of life.

Today you get away with it, they make it harder but it would still be better than the old one.

People manage to corrupt and hack things inevitably as long as it is static, changing systems can obviously be good just for this reason only. It also brings questions about why the current system is the way it is.

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

#499

Post by dataflow »

ikmckenz wrote: post #452
dataflow wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure what you're saying "no" to. Nothing you wrote contradicts what I wrote. Anything that was recorded was fair game. The whole point here is that you're arguing reality has changed and thus so should the legal rights people are granted, whereas this person's father is simply saying that our current legal rights imply a different conclusion. These two sides are not contradictory; they're just talking past each other.

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

#500

Post by ozgrakkurt »

ddtaylor wrote: post #292
Nifty3929 wrote: post #110

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…

Don’t understand this pessimism. There are a large number of countries in the world. You can migrate out of a country if they start doing insane things like this.

I would consider leaving UK very seriously if I was building a life there now, as an example.

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