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

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511–520 of 611 posts

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

#511

> [The Patriot Act] contains many sunset provisions beginning December 31, 2005, approximately four years after its passage. Before the sunset date, an extension was passed for four years which kept most of the law intact. In May 2011, President Barack Obama signed the PATRIOT Sunset Extensions Act of 2011, which extended three provisions. These provisions were modified and extended until 2019 by the USA Freedom Act,…

Also it dosent matter if it's expired anymore. It was kept on for 20+ Fing years. During that time it was used to permananly shred constitusional rights and human rights.

They got what they wanted from it beyond their wildest dreams.

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

#512
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? Next time ask him if he'd be OK living in a glass house, since, as he's not a bad guy, he has nothing to hide.

Maybe ask if he has ever exceeded the speed limit, or run a red light, or failed to signal a turn. All things that could be monitored by a smartphone and reported to the police automatically.

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

#513
post #507

sometimes you wonder if people have become so thoroughly captured by the status quo they can no longer even conceive of a monetary system existing that is not entirely dependent on custodians acting on someone's behalf it's not the developers of bitcoin's fault your entire reg compliance apparatus was constructed on requiring intermediaries

It's fundamentally unsurprising that the custodians of the existing system don't like a system built on the premise of circumventing it

In their defense, there might be some issues with circumventing such controls. Money laundring, fraud, market manipulation and sanction circumvention aren't always positive for society at large

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

#515
post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For nearly quarter of a century.

Longer than that. I feel like people have completely forgotten things like Iran-Contra, or the Gulf of Tonkin.

or that the CIA literally killed a sitting president

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

#516
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…

[deleted]

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

#517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, there really isn't. Money laundering has been a huge problem enabling all sorts of crimes and issues. There is no debate to be had on the benefits of prohibiting it, and you have to be very deep in the Silicon Valley rabbit hole to think even 5% of the population of any nation would support doing away with those rules.

Except that money laundering is allowable for some, but not all. Don't pretend the AML rules are enforced fairly and evenly.

Again: something being imperfect doesn't make it bad. Fix the imperfect enforcement, don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

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

#518
post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've described an asset not a currency and sure, your asset will keep going up forever like so many assets before it, famously.

That changes nothing. And you can use it as a currency. Declaring it an asset is irrelevant. You can call Bitcoin a cryptocurrency, an asset, a currency, a scam, it doesn't effect Bitcoin in any way. Bitcoin doesn't care. Its sole purpose is as an incorruptible, debasement and censorship resistant ledger native to the public internet. Of course this all redefines exactly what a currency or an asset IS. Is Gold a curr…

No one knows what will be in the future. As mentioned in the discussion, the possession of bitcoin can be simply outlawed.

As an extra note, total bitcoin supply is just the chain spec. It can be changed.

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

#520
post #440

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…

Except, you know, the dollar bills the government itself prints.

To some extent. Not dragnettable but certainly not perfectly anonymous.
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