Not a huge surprise, unfortunately.
I'm surprised because I thought the Trump administration was hot on crypto.
Hot on being bribed by political donors to do their bidding. Crypto donors are going to be abroad and so unaffected.
The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody
521–530 of 611 posts
Re: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody
#522sometimes 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
i understand their motivation, but none of the existing controls have done much to prevent those bad things from occurring either
Re: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody
#523> "pooling or aggregating [cryptocurrency] from multiple persons, wallets, addresses, or accounts
Satoshi's whitepaper expanded BTC as time-stamp server for preventing DDOS on fax lines.
Re: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody
#524Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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...?
Political parties and mega corps don’t strive to undermine the fabric of democracy itself though.
"Do you know how naive you sound, Michael? Political parties and mega corps don’t strive to undermine the fabric of democracy itself."
"Oh? who's being naïve, Kay?"
Re: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody
#525Sounds like Anti-Money Laundering - pretty standard stuff.
Re: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody
#526Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
Absolute financial privacy is not a liberal principle.
It's a fantasy cooked up by crypto enthusiasts and anti-government ideologues. You cannot enforce sanctions, prevent money laundering, protect consumers, or collect taxes if transactions are private.
It's just not going to work.
Re: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody
#527Statist government is fundamentally incompatible with financial privacy. Such governments consider it inherently criminal.
Re: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ea…
the problem is that technology has changed so much that it's legitimately hard to apply 18th-century laws to 21st-century life:
- does the plain view doctrine allow TSA to look under your clothes with mmWave sensors? or to peek through your walls with IR cameras? to use laser microphones to listen in on a conversation? to use EM emissions from your computer to conduct a side-channel attack?
- does the third-party doctrine allow police to read your emails (unlike actual letters) without a warrant? or your papers on Google Docs? to access streaming cloud backups from your home security cameras? to buy your location data from data brokers?
- does your fifth amendment right against self-incrimination protect you from confessing your passwords? from taking a polygraph? from measuring your P300 signal as you look at a lineup? from using fMRI to reconstruct images from your visual cortex?
- does the right to bear arms include AR-15s? machine guns? loitering munitions? tactical nukes? ICBMs?
there's a scale from textual pedantry to handwavy analogies. courts are increasingly going on vibes and hacking together post-hoc justifications because the source material is too abstract and too dated to allow any straightforward reading.
Re: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody
#529Bitcoin maximalists are learning that having a non-fungible and fully traceable ledger might be a problem. Even Satoshi called this out! As is, BTC is somewhat of a privacy nightmare. All of your transactions are on the public ledger for anyone with basic knowledge of statistics to correlate and see all of your transactions. Blockchain Analytics is big business! All the things the Treasury is considering to be "suspi…
But with Monero, you see that it is effectively shut off from the Fiat ecosystem entirely. The proposal here clearly lays out how bad Bitcoin is for privacy. But it's not like the more private alternatives are actually allowed to be viable alternatives.
ironically, the inconvenience of exchanging Monero for fiat helps Monero be used as an actual currency. rather than exchanging Monero for cash and then buying things with cash, Monero is exchanged for the things itself.
Re: The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody
#530I 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…
No one ever answers the “what do you have to hide” question, which is a little sus.
If I told you, I wouldn't be hiding it then, would I? You can hardly blame me for for Russell's paradox, it's been around far longer than I have been