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

No need to even use police corruption. A brief look at the current US government, and how it suddenly came to be in the freeest and most democratic of countries, ought to suffice to show why not any government should ever get a free pass.

Voters generally seem willing to embrace authoritarian solutions when it is applied to the things they dislike. The political classes have multiple incentives to appeal to those voters. Outside of a few outliers, neither group generally concerns themselves with the underlying principles of civil liberties until their favored causes are attacked. Hypocrisy abounds. Reasoning from first principles is dismissed as ideological extremism.

From here it is easy to see how the incentives of a democratic-regulatory-state work against property rights, free speech, privacy rights and other civil liberties.

> This seems like an argument against the state in every form, you could say the same thing about the government collecting taxes, having a police department, courts etc.

Yes and no.

Yes in that: all of those tools can be abused.

We need to take steps to ensure they are not, and we need to actively deprive the government of tools they can use for evil. The US has fought wars over this, which we why we created the constitution as we did.

No in that: information is both everlasting and fundamental. Privacy does not address bits or paper, those are proxies. Privacy addresses the human mind. This is the key people miss when they try to make an analogy.

The police and justice system only address actions by their nature. They are fundamentally restricted.

Private violations go to a deeper, lower, level. They attack the precursor to actions - thoughts and identity. Who you are, and what you believe.

What does this mean in practice?

Suppose I am a terrorist. If I want to avoid the justice system, it's simple. I will not commit acts of terror. I am untouchable, no amount of police activity can compromise my life or liberty.

Suppose we, instead, don't look at actions, and attack privacy. Suppose you deduce I am a terrorist. Maybe from the color of my house, from the jokes in my messages, from my patterns of movement, from the length of my hair, from the activities at my job.

Now, I can no longer avoid the attack, because it is intrinsic to my character. Like a stain, or a marker.

In theory this sounds like a good thing: we caught terrorists before they could commit terror.

But notice something: we cannot know someone's identity or beliefs. Mind reading is currently impossible. We are trying to implement thought crimes, without the ability to know thoughts.

This is compounded with the fact that surveillance is forever. Every data point collected on you, we should assume, will outlive you.

It does not matter if you're not actually a terrorist and you're just a brown person, and then you spend the next 10 years donating to children's hospitals. The damage is done.

This is all, of course, the happy path: we're trying to get terrorists. I'm assuming the government is not evil.

But, that's a bad assumption, isn't it? Time passes whether you want it to or not. What is good tomorrow is not what is good today.

This doesn't mean privacy should be absolute. But it does mean that a complete lack of privacy is disasterous.

Up until right about now, that has simply not been possible. We are limited by the physical world and technology.

What we have right now is a fatal combination of unprecedented surveillance tools and a complete disdain for privacy.

Make no mistake: such a combination will result in casualties never before seen to mankind. This allows a type of warfare and destruction that operates at a more fundamental level than primitive guns and tanks. Even nuclear weaponry is nothing in the face of the absolute dissolution of privacy.

If you don't agree with me, I don't need to kill you or your family. I don't need to invade your country. I know what everyone is thinking, so I will change their thoughts, and now you do not disagree with me. Think supercharged propaganda and complete silence of dissent.

Freedom with crypto means I can pay bills without unjust barriers, and no individual and especially no "financial institution" (ultimately the governments) decides if my transaction goes through or can confiscate the money without confiscating me.

With Paypal, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, and all the payment gateways and controlled entities in between, you will be banned for a "trade secret" reason which they have no legal obligation to reveal. Example 1: https://kiwifarms.st/threads/payment-processor-censorship-vi... (You may discredit the source and ignore factual information and numerous examples at your own discretion)

When you lost the ability to pay for things, you can be starved, of food and more importantly your principles and dignity.

Like many other issues that I consider political, what is important to me and what I believe to be actually righteous in the end is more important than the issues of e.g. personal responsibility from being scammed, or criminal and money laundering transactions. Remember where the term "money laundering" came from.

>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.

It doesn't matter. The things oranges are good for are known, even if they're not applicable to you personally. Those applications are objective. It is objectively true that oranges are edible, even if you subjectively don't like them. It is objectively true that an orange can weight paper down, even if you can't carry even a single orange more right now.

Of course, sometimes there's an asymmetry of information where someone might price something incorrectly (e.g. someone doesn't know that oranges can now be used as fusion fuel, so he sells it for less). But the fact that we can say that the price is "incorrect" means there is a correct price.

>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.

I don't see you giving any examples of what Bitcoin is good for.