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

• electric_muse 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • baggachipz 1y ago
    If only there were some sort of loud opposition to this act, predicting exactly the situation we're in today. Our elected representatives would have had to take a hard look at this and reject it due to its danger!
    • htoiertoi345345 1y ago
      [flagged]
    • criddell 1y ago
      Couldn't agree more. Blocking SOPA / PIPA a decade or so ago was a nice reminder that when enough people speak up, bad laws can be avoided.
      • righthand 1y ago
        At the same time the legislature snuck in turning the US into a police state into the 2012 Defense spending bill. So while SOPA and PIPA was defeated, people did not pay “enough” attention in the end. If we had that kind of reaction to making your internet worse as we did to making our rights worse we would be better off.
    • ivape 1y ago
      [flagged]
      • dotnet00 1y ago
        This has been a growing feeling for me too, seeing many users on various platforms go from mocking the murders of non-white people to claiming that their political opposition is hateful due to recent events. I used to think that being accepted in society was just a matter of integrating culturally (which I thought was fair), but the way people have been emboldened to say the most awful things has been changing my mind.
        • ivape 1y ago
          I mean, we have to be practical in our condemnation. I feel we had that somewhere around the 2010s, where we accepted that you can’t change a racist 80 year old. Fine, I think America accepted that. But how the living fuck did that prior generation PASS ON the racism (and it’s way more than that, misogyny, economic selfishness, or wholesale disconnect in their economics to the point they don’t even vote for their economic interest). HOW? How did they take 1 year olds in 1990-2010 and make them like the previous generation? People are not understanding what a huge sin this was. You CANNOT raise the children in an ideology that was nationally condemned and fought over for decades. It was an utter failure, no one was watching the kids. This shit is so deep rooted that I am at a loss. To put it clearly, this is how anticlimactic America has been the last 20 years: 1) Imagine watching American History X 2) And instead of Ed Norton coming to a rebirth moment of shedding his racism and turning a new leaf, he stays a racist, doubles down, and also raises racist children. There. Reality.
          • runsWphotons 1y ago
            Younger generations are probably more racist than their parents but not their grandparents. There are a lot of reasons this probably happened, and it wasn't something done to infants, but transpired over the last 10-15 years.
            • krapp 1y ago
              I think part of it is being raised on the internet right as the cultural backlash against progressivism, "cancel culture" and Obama started to accelerate across social media, and right-wing grifting became big business after Gamergate.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  • LightBug1 1y ago
    We all remember fighting this battle at the time ... Great to know our prediction of where this would end up was right. Tragic to know our prediction of where this would end up was right. I can only hope those at the time who denied this are caught up in said dragnet. A bit like immigrants voting for Trump, I digress.
  • rs186 1y ago
    A few years ago, I tried to open a bank account, and was turned away because my visa stamp expired (despite having valid immigration status). The clueless clerk and her advisor were going through The Patriot Act to find justification. Fortunately, other banks weren't staffed with idiots, and I was able to open an account elsewhere after providing my documents.
    • shaky-carrousel 1y ago
      I say you dodged a bullet, then. They are probably just as clueless handling everything else.
      • zerkten 1y ago
        Possibly, but this not unreasonable for regular employees. They are not paid enough to deal with the consequences of making a mistake in a low volume situation. If they go off-piste, even when that is a valid action, then they are likely going to be penalized by their employer's compliance department. That's because that piece of bureaucracy is still required at the next stage of bureaucracy. Now level 2's life is harder. It's best just to ignore and move on. There will always be some non-zero failure rate like this as long as bureaucracies exist.
  • delusional 1y ago
    > concentrating power in a few regulated intermediaries. That’s not healthy for innovation, or democracy. How are "regulated intermediaries" not democratic? If they're regulated by the democratically elected government, that seems entirely democratic to me.
    • dmix 1y ago
      He said "not healthy for democracy", that doesn't imply the process to create the law wasn't democratic. Democracy always has the risk of sabotaging itself by naive actors who don't respect fundamental freedoms because they fear the public.
      • delusional 1y ago
        > Democracy always has the risk of sabotaging itself by naive actors who don't respect fundamental freedoms because they fear the public. That sounds like a very radical statement. How are we to decide on these "fundamental freedoms" without putting them through the same democratic process we usually employ? Are we to ask the king for his opinions on how our democracy must be restricted? Are we to ask you? If the democratically elected officials "feat the public" what are they fearful of? Not getting elected? Are you implying the democratically elected officials shouldn't do what the public want? Additionally, do these "fundamental freedoms" include the right to transact with any counterpart at any point? I have not found that right in any established human rights framework.
  • tempodox 1y ago
    And it happens exactly as predicted. Surprise!
  • mightysashiman 1y ago
    Democrawhat?
  • varelse 1y ago
    [dead]
  • hedora 1y ago
    It’s worse than that. Roe v. Wade associated privacy with abortion in the US, so the Supreme Court eliminated the right to privacy as part of the decision to overturn Roe v Wade. Mere criminality wouldn’t put privacy in such an indefensible position. Look at who’s president.
  • jmyeet 1y ago
    This should surprise literally nobody. Let me briefly explain the US political landscape. Classic liberalism is a pollitical and moral philosophy that came about in the last 600+ years that (among other things) enshrined individualism and private property. This evolved hand in hand with enclosures (ie private property) and ultimately led to capitalism as an economic system. Colloquially, "liberal" is used to describe someobody who is socially progressive, typically a Democrat, but that really has nothing to do with the origins. Neoliberalism is what liberalism evolved into, primarily in the 20th century. The key principles are that capitalism (the "free market") is the solution to basically all problems and deregulation (to increase profits, basically). Everybody is a (neo)liberal. Democrats and Republicans both. Note that "leftists" are by definition not neoliberals and are anti-capitalist but people often mistakenly use terms like "liberal" and "leftist" interchangeably when they couldn't be more different. Imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. Fascism is capitalism in crisis. The Democratic Party as it exists in the US today, is controlled opposition. So we come to the Overton window. This is how it goes: 1. Republicans pass some legislation like the Patriot Act to take away rights, usually under the guise of "security". The Patriot Act of course was passed in the aftermath of 9/11; 2. Ultimately the Democrats get in office and... don't reverse it. It becomes the new normal. They do this by being institutionalists. But defending institutions is merely an excuse for inaction. 3. Come the next election the Patriot Act or the border wall or whatever will the new normal and some even more fascist legislation will be on the table. As an example, try and find the daylight between the immigration plan of the Kamala Harris 2024 campaign and the Trump 2020 immigration plan (that Democrats opposed at the time). Nobody cares about our individual rights. Things continue to get worse because both parties will always choose the US imperial project and the profits of corporations over your rights. We are six companies in a trenchcoat.
    • jmull 1y ago
      That's a very nice lecture, but I think it's almost entirely digressive. The "success" of the Patriot Act really has nothing to do with classic liberalism, neoliberalism, leftists, Democrats, Republicans, or Kamala Harris. These are the current background details in which an age-old dynamic plays out: A threat gives those in power a chance to grab more power and they take it. Once they have it they do not give it up easily. It just boils down to a truism: Those who seek power seek power. There's really nothing more to it than that.
  • israrkhan 1y ago
    Could not have said it better. You put it up beautifully. Thanks.
  • viccis 1y ago
    Agamben wrote some interesting analysis of this [1], expanding on the concept of the "state of exception", which was a older concept introduced by a much more odious man who employed it very effectively in the early 20th century. Agamben argued that modern governments now try to create permanent states of exception, of which I would argue the Patriot Act is a perfect example. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Agamben#State_of_Exception_(2005) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Agamben#State_of_Excep...
  • rikthevik 1y ago
    I still have the 2600 issues before and after 9/11. At the time it was pretty clear that the federal government was going make a large and permanent power grab.
  • ozgrakkurt 1y ago
    Really hope they ban it in the US so it can flourish in countries that actually need and respect it
    • psychlops 1y ago
      Thank you for writing this. You are absolutely correct and made me step back to realize that the dollar is a global reserve currency and the US will do everything it takes to keep it that way.
  • Razengan 1y ago
    > concentrating power Isn't that the actual point? of laws like this? Keeping those in power in power and further entrenching the moats around them.
  • varispeed 1y ago
    "I will only insert the tip and briefly, I promise" - then proceeds to f*ck the nation unconscious.
  • yalogin 1y ago
    No one willingly gives up power and if it’s the U.S. government there is a large ecosystem worth hundreds of billions around the patriot act, it’s never going to be sunset, and it not going to grow
  • atoav 1y ago
    As a quite political teenager (not even from the US, never been there to this day) I argued that this law is going to stay. I wish I would have been wrong. These types of laws are not a good thing to have in the hands of power-hungry narcissists that like to rule not represent.
• dented42 1y ago
  This is blatant misinformation. Firstly this has nothing to do with the patriot act, I’m pretty sure the patriot act expired years ago. But more importantly it doesn’t seem like the government is trying to ban anything, they’re just extending the anti-fraud / anti-money laundering measures enjoyed by the ‘traditional’ financial institutions to the world of cryptocurrency. Those measures don’t prevent people from doing ‘suspicious’ things, they just treat certain transaction types with more care because of the increased likelihood that they are evidence of a crime.
• btbuildem 1y ago
  Not a huge surprise, unfortunately.
  • esafak 1y ago
    I'm surprised because I thought the Trump administration was hot on crypto.
    • chii 1y ago
      They might be pro-crypto, but you're not in their group of special people allowed to anonymously own it. You have to use a wallet service owned by someone in that group, so that you're always under control.
    • moduspol 1y ago
      The vast majority of (especially less tech-savvy) crypto people are in it for the speculation. They have no interest in self-custody.
    • incone123 1y ago
      Sure, the approved and controlled kind. Wheels of government turn so slow this idea probably started several administrations ago.
    • giveita 1y ago
      Hot on being bribed by political donors to do their bidding. Crypto donors are going to be abroad and so unaffected.
• tw04 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • techterrier 1y ago
    it's another $5 wrench situation
    • rvnx 1y ago
      The solution is to store your money on a wallet where you do not have the private key. This way if you cannot access your funds nobody will be able to coerce you.
      • ceejayoz 1y ago
        Their solution to that is "rot in jail for a long time, then". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Beatty_Chadwick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Beatty_Chadwick
        • diggan 1y ago
          Demonstrating that if you wait long enough (14 years in that case), you can get away without loosing the funds, even from the state? > On July 10, 2009, Chadwick was ordered released from prison by Delaware County Judge Joseph Cronin, who determined his continued incarceration had lost its coercive effect and would not result in him surrendering the money.
          • ceejayoz 1y ago
            His finances are gonna be under close inspection for the rest of his life, and fourteen years is a lot to lose.
            • diggan 1y ago
              2.5 million was a lot in 1992, and who knows what that amount is today, if they've offloaded it to somewhere it earns interest. I know plenty of people who day-by-day sacrifice their time for way less than ~500 per day which that ends up being if we assume the money been still since they were arrested.
• elif 1y ago
  I'm confused how the connection was made between "here are our guidelines for suspicious activity" and "self custody is outlawed"
  • idiotsecant 1y ago
    Because just about all those practices are what reasonable users of the protocol would do, and making your transactions 'suspicious' is synonymous with all the big players refusing to deal with you. It's a way of prohibiting behaviour outside the force of law, which is even more insidious.
  • mothballed 1y ago
    It can be hard to figure out exactly what is outlawed with banking interactions. It seems a lot of the KYC/AML stuff is based on industry best practices and guidelines. There's no law you need a state ID with address to open a bank account, but when I tried to open up a bank account without an address I found it basically impossible. The bank will then cite that these practices are what they're held to as law, because the law itself is vague and relies on more nebulous customs. So what is called "guidelines" one day becomes legally binding later with no act of congress. Unfortunately there's a massive swath of mere guidelines and regulation that end up having legal binding. For instance, a Navy sailor was recently sent to jail for 20 years for having gun parts that were cut up the wrong way, the "wrong way" being the right way with previous mere guidance and the wrong way apparently being the fact that some time since then the guidance changed but not the law.
    • tantalor 1y ago
      De facto vs. de justo
      • ThePowerOfFuet 1y ago
        De jure.
    • potato3732842 1y ago
      That's the whole point. They can't overtly outlaw things because aggrieved parties would sue and win. So they soft outlaw them with expensive record keeping requirements and ambiguity because no business big enough to win but smaller than a giant mega-corp will intentionally risk going toe to toe with the government in court as doing so would likely be financially ruinous. And even if the government doesn't look like it's disposed to do that in your situation you're still sticking your neck out by deviating from the herd because then you can't screech "standard business practice" when some contrived chain of facts results in you fending off a civil suit for whatever reason. This isn't just a banking thing or a guns thing, you see examples in every industry once you know the pattern.
• koakuma-chan 1y ago
  As someone who hasn't read the article, is holding bitcoin in your own wallet going to become illegal? Also, which wallet do you guys recommend, I use Coinbase but it sucks.
  • Mistletoe 1y ago
    Use a hardware wallet like Trezor.
    • cypherpunks01 1y ago
      Yes, and for even higher security, use a bitcoin-only airgapped hardware wallet like Coinkite's Coldcard or Foundation's Passport Core.
  • truffet 1y ago
    [dead]
    • moduspol 1y ago
      Coinbase is an exchange, but they also acquired a standalone wallet that's been rebranded a few times, but now it seems to be called Base (Formerly Coinbase Wallet).
    • koakuma-chan 1y ago
      No it's not in my control but I use it because it is convenient to buy and sell.
  • moduspol 1y ago
    It doesn't look like that explicitly will become illegal, but this part undermines a lot of the value of it: > creating and using single-use wallets, addresses, or accounts, and sending [cryptocurrency] through such wallets, addresses, or accounts through a series of independent transactions That's the default way Bitcoin wallets work, and it helps a ton to improve privacy. If we were limited to always reusing the same few addresses, it'll be very easy for not just law enforcement but ANYONE to see just how much Bitcoin you have. If that's a small amount, it's not a risk. If it's a big amount, now you've got a target on your back. For me to accept Bitcoin payments, I need to publish my address, and from that address, you'll be able to see how much Bitcoin I have (and trace other transactions) over time. Imagine everyone in town knowing that you've got six figures (or more) of money that can undoubtedly be extracted from you by invading your home, taking family members hostage, etc. At that point, you may think it's safer to keep it in an exchange, and you may be right.
• Mistletoe 1y ago
  Maybe in 2028 a presidential candidate can run with removing the Patriot Act as one of their campaign points. I suspect the world will be very different then. The America I knew, remembered, and loved started dying with the passage of the Patriot Act.
  • Xelbair 1y ago
    Given how patriot act survived many terms of both republicans and democrats i highly doubt it. It is a extremely convenient act for whoever is in power.
    • mothballed 1y ago
      There needs to be something like the federal equivalent of a referendum. I think with that, it would be possible to get rid of the patriot act and legalize weed, both of which seem to have popular support but zero chance of majority of representatives backing because they don't want to be liable for the worst-case corner-cases in the aftermath.
      • runako 1y ago
        We are constantly voting in primaries and general elections. We vote in federal elections every two years, state elections generally at least as frequently, though often not in federal election year. We vote for mayor and city council and insurance commissioner and Secretary of State and county commission. We don't need a referendum, we just need to choose representation that wants the same things we want. (Alternate formation: Americans do not want these things as much as some of us think they do.)
        • mothballed 1y ago
          By referendum I meant to be able to vote directly on a specific law. If you look at how weed was legalized, it required a referendum in many (most?) states because no representative wants to be the guy that has his face plastered everywhere when some kid dies after he smokes some legal weed and smashes into a pole, even if most his constituents wanted the policy. Representatives generally have to be risk averse to get to the point they can even represent people on issues. This means they are extremely reluctant to vote for anything that might come back to bite them somehow, even if it is popular. >Alternate formation: Americans do not want these things as much as some of us think they do There is extremely overwhelming evidence that a supermajority of americans have wanted medical marijuana to be federally legal for many years. And overwhelming evidence the representatives have not been successfully bringing that forward.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• 8organicbits 1y ago
  There's a conflict between Bitcoin as a public ledger, privacy, and money laundering. With a bank you can have anti-money laundering and bank secrecy. Transaction are known by the bank, can be subject to subpoena or automatic reporting, but are non-public. If you want privacy on Bitcoin you need to do things that look a lot like money laundering. Governments banning money laundering isn't a surprise. The value of Bitcoin, if transactions are fully public and attributable to pseudonyms, is questionable. In some ways, the problem Bitcoin has is that it is inflexible. Governments want to change the rules in finance from time to time, traditional finance adapts.
  • chain030 1y ago
    Essentially decentralisation sounds nice, but doesnt work in practice.
    • eof 1y ago
      Bitcoin, tor, bittorrent are all perfect examples of decentralization simply not working in practice
      • atomic128 1y ago
        I can't tell if you are being sarcastic. Obviously Bitcoin doesn't "work" for any purpose. But in contrast, Tor obviously works. Here are constantly updating HTTP response dumps from the Tor hidden service ecosystem: https://rnsaffn.com/zg4/ https://rnsaffn.com/zg4/ (NSFW) There is a lot happening inside the Tor network.
      • ddtaylor 1y ago
        It's been terrible that BitTorrent doesn't work anymore. I can only download 10TB of all the movies and TV shows our family has ever wanted spanning 60 years. It has to run off this massive server in the closest as big as our cat! Sucks our grandma can't access it from across the country via Tailscale and a bit of DNS abuse.
    • ddtaylor 1y ago
• Thorrez 1y ago
  >Loading up a single address with too many UTXOs degrades the entropy of a public-private key pair and makes it easier to brute force a user's private key. Is there a realistic risk there? If I use an address a million times, how much weaker is it? And how feasible would it be for an attacker to brute for it?
  • cypherpunks01 1y ago
    Strictly speaking, loading an address with many UTXOs has no effect on security of the receiving address at all (beyond increasing its public profile). The security concerns start happening after an address spends a UTXO. Before a P2WPKH (segwit) address is used, only the public key hash is known. In order to spend from it, the full public key needs to be revealed. That's why it's recommended to use single-use addresses, because a quantum computing attack or elliptic curve vulnerability could be used against an address where the attacker knows the public key, but would not work against an address where the pubkey has not yet been revealed. So, the main security change happens after you spend from an address the first time. Subsequently, there are theoretical vulnerabilities that could occur after an address is spent from many times, but really only if the signer is malicious like dark skippy, or faulty and doesn't properly follow RFC 6979 deterministic signatures, leaking some signature entropy which could be used to crack the private key. The latter has happened with some bad custom wallet implementations, but these attacks are even further in the realm of theoretical, not super realistic, require faulty software/firmware to be implanted into signing devices.
    • BillTthree 1y ago
      so the risk to the wallet holder is the exact same risk that exists for every single HTTPS connection right now? Post quantum algorithms have been available. You can do it today. Why not for bitcoin? In reality, there are very few current real world implementations. This article makes it seem that RSA is under active exploitation. If it is, bitcoin is not the first target IMO
      • cypherpunks01 1y ago
• jihadjihad 1y ago
  > [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, passed in 2015. In 2020, efforts to extend the provisions were not passed by the House of Representatives, and as such, the law has expired. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act
  • htoiertoi345345 1y ago
    "USA Freedom Act" We're truly living in Orwell's world.
    • stavros 1y ago
      Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ensuring Effective Discipline Over Monitoring Act. It's just an acronym bro, don't get all worked up about it, now let's go down, the Two Minutes' Hate is about to start.
      • shaky-carrousel 1y ago
        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.
        • stavros 1y ago
          Apparently I forgot to close my sarcasm tag.
          • lvass 1y ago
            Stuff is so Orwellian that it really looks like a joke for those who do not know what USA Freedom Act means.
• crazygringo 1y ago
  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 things. So as far as I can tell, the headline is just false clickbait. They also claim: > If enacted, any user who leverages these tools will be flagged as a suspicious... and could potentially be sent to prison. I don't think that's the case? Having a transaction considered suspicious doesn't send you to prison. At best it seems like traditional banks might not permit a transaction, or it could be used as supporting evidence for separate actual illegal activities like money laundering? But going to prison requires being convicted of an actual crime. Not just activity that is "suspicious".
  • decimalenough 1y ago
    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.
    • lukeschlather 1y ago
      What text are you referring to? The article has a screenshot of a tweet with a screenshot of an excerpt that seems fair to paraphrase as "anyone behaved in this sort of activity is suspicious." I don't see anything about a ban and if you're only using single-use addresses that seems probably not suspicious in absence of all the other things which if you're doing all of them, seem objectively like they can only be described as money laundering.
      • Karrot_Kream 1y ago
        I think single-use address use should not be marked as suspicious on its own but I agree in combination with other things in that screenshot I think it should. That's the "reasonable" line I have. This seems like the right balance for AML laws. The rest of the discussion in this thread is awful. The article title is clickbait. The comments are mostly generic tangents about "crypto bad" or "muh surveillance". Guess it's par for the course when discussing cryptocurrency on this site.
• aeon_ai 1y ago
  I'm going to take a different tack on this one. --- Point 1 Crime is real. Can we agree on that? If you were in charge of identifying and locating criminals based on on-chain transaction data, what are the list of guidelines you'd put together to use PUBLIC DATA to determine suspicious behavior? If you're competent, at all, the list would look like this. Let's not immediately jump to "self custody is gonna be outlawed" ---- Point 2 Bitcoin was designed this way. This data is public. This is HOW THE DAMN THING WORKS. This article is written by a "Seasoned Bitcoiner", which is a term that reveals just how cooked they are. They haven't come to terms with the fact that the Bitcoin price is predicated on being the first, but certainly not the best public blockchain for realizing the goals of a global decentralized currency, whether you agree that's even a possibility or not. Some people adopt ignorance -- Others were born in it, molded by it.
  • goda90 1y ago
    What crime needs to be identified based on transactions? Tax evasion? I can't think of any others that don't leave behind a real world mark that would be the thing that initiates investigation.
    • otterley 1y ago
      Money laundering is the obvious one—and the primary reason crypto’s value is as high as it is.
    • Arainach 1y ago
      Following the money is important to investigating all sorts of crimes, as most crimes are done for money. Arresting someone selling guns on the street doesn't stop much - they're quickly replaceable, you need to identify and determine where the guns are coming from. Same with human trafficking, drug trafficking, selling fake goods, and nearly every crime.
• angryGhost 1y ago
  > Loading up a single address with too many UTXOs degrades the entropy of a public-private key pair and makes it easier to brute force a user's private key. Well that's not true... The key doesn't change because you added more bitcoin
  • dbdr 1y ago
    The quote does not say that the key changes. It says that each transaction makes it (a bit) easier to perform a brute force attack.
• curtisszmania 1y ago
  [dead]
• ProjectArcturis 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • cosmicgadget 1y ago
    Ahem those are #2 and #3 behind "talking to disinterested people about it".
• nl 1y ago
  This article is nonsense. The guidance doesn't mention anything similar to self custody and the Patriot Act itself has expired: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act It's the worst kind of clickbait, and is actual, real fake news.
  • ExpertAdvisor01 1y ago
    Only section 215 related to FISA surveillance expired. Your comment is nonsense.
• lordofgibbons 1y ago
  Bitcoin 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 "suspicious activity" simply can't be tracked with something that's non-fungible and untracable like Monero. This suspicious activity - aka privacy - is just how all monero transactions are done.
  • thrance 1y ago
    If Monero ever came close to Bitcoin's popularity, it would be outlawed. Plain as that. You can't get freedom through technology.
    • 1gn15 1y ago
      It's not so black and white. Obviously social and political change is the goal. But in the meantime technology can help if you're living under repression. Take VPNs and Tor helping people jump the Great Firewall of China for example. Obviously, yes, this is a political problem; the GFW shouldn't exist. But it would be foolish to dismiss the technology as a vital part of fighting back against the state.
    • user34283 1y ago
      Freedom here means transacting without: -- anti-money laundering safeguards sanctions enforcement consumer protection tax enforcement fraud prevention systems -- It is very true that technology won't get you this freedom from sensible legal requirements we impose on financial transactions. That's obviously a good thing, but I guess people who are in crypto would disagree.
      • palmfacehn 1y ago
        [flagged]
• mikemarsh 1y ago
  "The Patriot Act. Read it."
• sneak 1y ago
  Financial privacy and national security are fundamentally at odds. With financial privacy and real freedom, you can hire a competing army. The state will never allow large scale financial privacy because it poses an existential threat to the state.
  • graemep 1y ago
    It is a nuisance to the state. I do not see how it is an existential threat. Nation states existed for centuries in which money was frequently held as cash and even large transactions were often done in cash. its still common (or was until very recently) in a lot of (mostly poor) countries > With financial privacy and real freedom, you can hire a competing army. Having the money to pay an army is a long way from hiring one. Recruitment and buying military equipment at any scale would be obvious.
    • sneak 1y ago
      What, like building a factory in Texas that manufactures ICBMs? :D
• jollyllama 1y ago
  This would come as no surprise, since all the original promises of Bitcoin circa 15-ish years ago are long dead. The turning point occurred when all exchanges agreed to report transactions directly to the IRS. I say this as someone who had an interest prior to that but lost all interest when the Crypto community sold out its ideals and consented to certain regulations in the interest of mass marketing cryptocurrency for the purpose of speculative profit.
  • throwawaybtc 1y ago
    Wait until you find out about the TRUST program and all the exchanges reporting PII to another.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  • andirk 1y ago
    Doing KYC is somewhat against the whole idea of like "no government involvement" but it doesn't negate that the government controls the currency. You lost all interest because Bitcoin became attractive to people who deal with companies who insist on KYC? How is that in any relation to the underlying code or mantra that Bitcoin is about?
    • jollyllama 1y ago
      Yes, I lost interest at the point where entirely all of the on/off ramps to Bitcoin submitted to universal data sharing with the central government in the interest of greater profitability. At that point, "being your own bank" is gone, and the process is equivalent to withdrawing cash from a normal bank, and the value proposition of Bitcoin is limited to its features as a deflationary speculative asset.
• FergusArgyll 1y ago
  The tweet says "could be labled suspicious" the article says could be made illegal. I've never heard of this website but if your only source is a tweet and you misrepresent it, I don't believe it. I'll take bets: By EOY 2026 it will be legal in the US to use single use addresses
• csomar 1y ago
  Self-Custody is problematic for any government as it allows any citizens to accumulate any kind of wealth they have and simply "transfer" it overseas without any oversight and in a ridiculously short amount of time. Some countries (rich/developed countries) allow free capital transfer but these transfers are regulated and also some jurisdictions are sanctioned. Transferring money abroad, from the perspective of the origin country, just moves the money inside the origin country system from one party to another. So it is well within the visibility and control of the state, especially for large amounts of money. Today, you can brain-memorize $1bn in Bitcoin and move yourself from one country to another; and depending on the country; might be able to exercise different amounts of that purchasing power. Control moves from the origin country to the reception country. Russia and China were always hostile because of this. The Chinese authorities regarded Bitcoin as some sort of capital flight scheme. Now both Europe and the USA are too. I think Bitcoin only chance for survival, in its current form, is if these two poles do use it as a mechanism to attack one another. Mining is already balanced between East and West.
  • anjel 1y ago
    Sounds like capital flight is anticipated to become a thing. Why might that be?
• Nifty3929 1y ago
  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 criminals. They won't put ALL of in jail, but they can put ANY of us in jail - the ones they don't like.
  • user34283 1y ago
    Spot on. Some think we need financial freedom, but in reality it's the freedom to fund scams and malware, launder money, dodge taxes, and buy stuff that’s illegal. That won't become legal just because you use "Monero" or whatever. Obviously we can't have privacy for financial transactions.
    • rocqua 1y ago
      You forgot a few things on that list that people would like freedom for: advocating for (or against) trans rights, protesting against the deportation of migrants, advocate against gun-control, and donating to (anti) palestinian causes Are just a few things that people would like the freedom to do. The point being, financial privacy is an important part of having a functioning democracy. But at the same time, financial control and limits are also an important part of a functioning democracy, for e.g. the 'freedoms' you mention. In the end, neither perfect privacy, not perfect surveilance are what we need. The best solution will be somewhere in the middle, with nuance.
      • user34283 1y ago
        > financial privacy is an important part of having a functioning democracy No, I don't think it is. Perhaps privacy for speech and voting are.
        • ozozozd 1y ago
          How is privacy for voting different than privacy for funding the candidate?
• ianmiers 1y ago
  This is inaccurate and in a hilarious way. Treasury is not coming after Bitcoin. There's an update in an ongoing rulemaking process that got reported here[0] as banning mixing and privacy tools. It may have been blown out of proportion[1], but I am not a lawyer, and certainly banning these tools would be bad. The thing is, Bitcoin's not private—every transaction is public for everyone to download. It's Twitter for your bank account. And that comes with serious privacy, safety, and boring commercial counterparty risks that should be addressed. These kinds of tools exist to mitigate that problem. The irony is that Bitcoin has largely refused to address this obvious issue, so no, Treasury isn't coming for Bitcoin. Indeed, there been years of people arguing Bitcoin would be just fine with no privacy protections. [0] https://www.therage.co/us-government-to-bring-patriot-act-to-digital-assets/ https://www.therage.co/us-government-to-bring-patriot-act-to... [1] https://x.com/valkenburgh/status/1966174324701778071 https://x.com/valkenburgh/status/1966174324701778071"
• resters 1y ago
  It will be interesting to see how the pro-Trump crypto bros react to this. Likely by now the whole group has had a chance to invest heavily in various altcoins or whatever will be the beneficiary of government largesse, so these proposed (and difficult to enforce) restrictions are likely intended just to pump those for quick profits. I'd argue that Bitcoin has been effectively immune to attacks like this by governments for nearly a decade.
• theturtle 1y ago
  Find a way that is costs trump money or prevents him from making money, and this stuff will vanish instantly.
  • lokar 1y ago
    Small potatoes. Once he controls the Federal reserve they can print money and give it to him (in the guise of a sovereign wealth fund).
• bilsbie 1y ago
  I always wonder why monero isn’t more popular?
  • nunobrito 1y ago
    Overton window. There is a lot of funding for youtube influencers to play with casino coins that are transparent and traceable. Those are basically looking for "money goes up" and don't really care about the crypto part. Monero is only on the news for negative reasons when someone tries to bring it down or delists from yet another exchange. There isn't funding to make it popular, which I guess in the end it is really up to Monero users from pushing it up.
    • warkdarrior 1y ago
      That's a long-winded explanation of the fact that most people don't care about Monero's privacy benefits, so the only way Monero will be more popular is if someone funds a marketing campaign for it.
  • rocqua 1y ago
    On- and off- ramps suck. And there isn't much speculative value. So it misses the main 'use case' of crypto. Its by far the best crypto-currency for making payments. But people care very little about making payments with crypto, and exchanging between Fiat and Monero is very difficult, so its not an easy payment system either.
• johnwheeler 1y ago
  Well, hopefully this will help prevent Bitcoin's biggest use case, which is criminal finance and money laundering. Why wouldn’t we want that?
  • rocqua 1y ago
    For very similar reasons why the US has the 5th amendment, why blanket surveillance is not considered a good thing by functioning democracies, and why most people want their porn-viewing habits to remain private. There are plenty of bad things that need to be prevented, but a functioning democracy requires the ability to act outside the surveillance of both your peers, and the currently sitting government.
    • johnwheeler 1y ago
      I just know it’s true, just like you know bitcoin will be the reserve currency of he world.
  • vvpan 1y ago
    What sources do you have that support that claim?
• OutOfHere 1y ago
  The article has no references, but even so, it's no wonder that Monero has gone up in the past day.
  • sMarsIntruder 1y ago
    https://coinpaper.com/10812/qubic-vs-monero-pr-stunt-or-proof-of-concept https://coinpaper.com/10812/qubic-vs-monero-pr-stunt-or-proo...
• tolmasky 1y ago
  Does no one else find it weird seeing anything from this administration "anti-Bitcoin" at all? I wouldn't be surprised by this headline during a previous administration, but generally speaking, this administration has been very Bitcoin-friendly (and Bitcoin institutions friendly right back). To be clear, the simplest answer is "sure but that doesn't mean they have to agree on everything". But I would like to propose that if you ask the simple question of "who does this benefit?" it may suggest we are witnessing a different phenomenon here. I think this might be the first indication that what we currently call "institutional Bitcoin supporters" are not "Bitcoin supporters" at all, or rather, what they call "Bitcoin" is not what you and I call "Bitcoin". Services like Coinbase and BTC ETFs don't really suffer from this development at all. In fact, I think it's quite obvious that obviously benefit from something like this (at least from the first-order effects). What's the alternative to self custody? Well... third-party custody. Especially since they are already bound up by KYC rules, right? Their is a cynical reading that there's nothing inconsistent with this development if you consider "institutional Bitcoin's" goals to primarily be replacing existing financial power structures with themselves. "Bitcoin" is just a means to an end. Their goals were only incidentally aligned with individual BTC holders since they were previously in similar circumstances as the "out group". Previous administrations were as suspicious of "Bitcoin companies" as any individual Bitcoin holder, perhaps even more so. But that's not the case anymore. Bitcoin companies have successfully been brought into the fold, so it's not even that they're necessarily "betraying" the values of Bitcoin true believers, you might argue that interpretation of shared values was entirely inferred to begin with. Critically though, I think an important consequence of this is that Bitcoin purists and skeptics should realize that they arguably now have more in common than not, at least in the immediate term, and may be each other's best allies. In my experience, for most the existence of Bitcoin, its skeptics haven't really seen Bitcoin as a "threat." Instead, to admittedly generalize, their critiques have been mostly about Bitcoin being "broken" or "silly" or "misunderstanding the point of centralized systems", etc. These aren't really "oppositional" positions in the traditional "adversarial sense," more dismissive. In fact, the closest thing to an "active moral opposition" to Bitcoin that I've seen is an environmental one. IOW, Bitcoin true believers think about Bitcoin way more than Bitcoin skeptics do. Similarly, Bitcoin true believers really have nothing against skeptics other than... the fact that they occasionally talk shit about Bitcoin? IOW, Bitcoin skeptics are not "the natural enemy Bitcoin was designed to defeat". But if you think about it, "institutional Bitcoin" sort of embodies something both these camps generally have hated since before Bitcoin. Whether you believe Bitcoin to be a viable answer or not, it is undeniable that the "idea" of Bitcoin is rooted in the distrust of these elitist financial institutions, that evade accountability, benefit from special treatment, and largely get to rig the larger system in their favor. Similarly, I don't think Bitcoin skeptics like these institutions or are "on their side". In fact, perhaps they'd argue that they predicted that Bitcoin wouldn't solve any of this and would just be another means of creating them. But IMO what they should both realize is that the most important threat right now is these institutional players. They are in fact, only "nominally" Bitcoin in a deep sense. From the perspective of true believers, their interests are actually in now way "essentially" aligned with any "original Bitcoin values," and from the perspective of skeptics, the threat they pose has very little to do with their use of "the Bitcoin blockchain". They are arguably just another instantiation of the "late stage capitalist" playbook of displacing an existing government service in order to privatize its rewards. Coinbase could be argued to have more in common with Uber than Ledger wallets. Instead of consolidating and squeezing all the value from taxis though, the play is to do the same with currency itself. It is incidental that Uber happened to be so seemingly "government averse". In this context, it's actually helpful to cozy up to the government and provide the things government departments want that make no difference to fintech's bottom line (such as KYP). In fact, that might be their true value proposition. Bitcoin only enters the conversation because in order to replace a currency, you do... need a currency. Bitcoin was convenient. It was already there, it had a built-in (fervent) user base that was happy to do your proselytizing for you, and even saw you as a good "first step" for normies that couldn't figure out to manage their own wallet. The Bitcoin bubble was already there, why fight it when you can ride it? Again, I think this is highly likely to be against the values of Bitcoin true believers and skeptics alike, and I also think that if the above is true, it represents an actual danger to us all. Recent events with credit card processors have already demonstrated that payment systems have proven to be incredibly efficient tools at stifling speech. In other words, this is arguably an "S-tier threat", on par with or perhaps worse than any sort of internet censorship or net neutrality. If so, we should treat it as such and work together.
• overfeed 1y ago
  The Bitcoin lobby are definitely getting their money's worth.
• HPsquared 1y ago
  Inevitable. Remember Roosevelt's gold confiscation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 It was forbidden to have more than 5 ounces of gold.
  • Mouvelie 1y ago
    Good for Bitcoin, then ? Is it becoming a form of Gold, for real ?
    • HPsquared 1y ago
      Anything which threatens to rock the financial boat too much will be banned.
    • crystal_revenge 1y ago
      Bitcoin is more a rug pull then ever, it's just that the "right" people are in charge of when and how the rug is pulled so it's becoming legitimized in all the ways that benefit those people and de-legitimized in all ways that benefit the individual.
• MASNeo 1y ago
  If there would have been better policing of digital currency by its users against criminal actors, perhaps digital assets would be spared the attention and now regulation. Sadly, increasing adoption and privacy guarantees lure criminals same as legitimate users.
  • hedora 1y ago
    The US is being run by a convicted felon and is in the process of converting to a totalitarian state. Any upcoming changes to privacy regulations are going to be to further that goal, not to crack down on crime.
• Hendrikto 1y ago
  > We shouldn't have to live in a world where standards cater to the lowest common denominator, in this case criminals, and make things worse off for the overwhelming majority of the population.
• PiraticSomate 1y ago
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• drumhead 1y ago
  Considering how they're clamping down on anonymity wherever they can, crypto wasnt going to escape their clutches for very long. How long before its seperated from it original aim and just turned into a gambling token.
  • user34283 1y ago
    > How long before its seperated from it original aim and just turned into a gambling token Always has been. I mean it was useful for online gaming related transactions, like 15 years ago. Ever since it has become a more obvious scam with every passing year. Today you can barely post about it on most major platforms without immediately spawning multiple spam comments trying to part you from your money. Real value crypto adds to the economy: ~0. Once this scam inevitable comes crashing down, it will probably take the stock market with it. And all for nothing but the enrichment of early crypto adopters.
  • matwood 1y ago
    Sounds like the cryptobros are about to have their turn with the Trump leopard eating their face...
    • mrguyorama 1y ago
      They didn't care when he personally rugpulled them for billions, why would this disrupt their sycophancy?
  • lokar 1y ago
    negative 10 years
  • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 1y ago
    Original aim was that people don't deposit Bitcoins into a bank, Coinbase etc, but use it to freely transact between themselves, outside of gov control.
• bsenftner 1y ago
  I have a grad school professor that owes me $1M dollars on a bet that the Patriot Act would never end. I told him he was painfully naive and not suitable to each graduate school economics with such thinking.
  • tmn 1y ago
    Was there concrete term limits to 'never'. Otherwise I fear you were the naive one. Snarky comment meant in good humor.
    • _9ptr 1y ago
      He can pick up his million dollars at the end of eternity
  • acaloiar 1y ago
    Unless you used different language for the bet, you lost it the moment it was made. "Never" may be falsified by "at least once", but affirmed only by "never". So I'm afraid only you could have ever been on the hook for the $1M, and may still be! Your prof made a good bet.
    • bsenftner 1y ago
      The wording was that the Patriot Act would not be temporary, and it will not be receded, and in fact would be strengthened.
      • xp84 1y ago
        Still though, bad bet. The other guy can easily keep arguing that it's still just a few more years from being repealed, until one of you dies of old age. Unless your bet was that "it will be strengthened before it is repealed" and then his position was that "it would be repealed without ever being strengthened." Still possible for neither to happen indefinitely though, leaving the bet pending.
  • xandrius 1y ago
• skeezyboy 1y ago
  [flagged]
• nunobrito 1y ago
  Monero fixes that.
  • sMarsIntruder 1y ago
    Maybe it solves one problem, but it has many other: https://coinpaper.com/10812/qubic-vs-monero-pr-stunt-or-proof-of-concept https://coinpaper.com/10812/qubic-vs-monero-pr-stunt-or-proo... Also, always remember native coinjoin.
    • nunobrito 1y ago
      That was fake news, please update your knowledge on the topic: https://riat.at/qubic-attack-on-xmr-monero-no-51-attack-proven/ https://riat.at/qubic-attack-on-xmr-monero-no-51-attack-prov... Also, what is that problem you mention with coinjoin? Please provide details.
  • superkuh 1y ago
    The government doesn't want to actually stop these things. They just want to make everything that people do normally illegal. Enforcement will only happen if you rock the boat.
• Mouvelie 1y ago
  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.
  • nisegami 1y ago
    I recognized it in the opposite direction, after observing that gangs inevitably end up being quasi-states within their turf. They demonstrate almost everything I associate with statehood except for issuing their own currency. From there, the reverse (that governments are just big gangs) also flows naturally.
    • argomo 1y ago
      To your point: gangs of various stripes pay blood money to the families of fallen members; they also fund or support community programs to curry good favor. My takeaway though is that human societies abhor a power vacuum: no matter what my libertarian and ultraliberal friends imagine, there must be a strongman. At least with democracy, we have the opportunity to somewhat influence who that is.
  • amanaplanacanal 1y ago
    On the other hand you get to vote who is in the gang. So choose wisely.
    • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 1y ago
      Most of the people on the planet don't get to vote.
      • amanaplanacanal 1y ago
        Unfortunately. It looks like even 25 years ago over 50% lived in democracies, but the rise of autocracy recently is certainly depressing.
    • 1y ago
• anthem2025 1y ago
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• Eridrus 1y ago
  I think the case for why strong encryption is important is much clearer than why untraceable financial instruments are important and I don't think it's super compelling to argue that these things are actually the same, even if your opposition to government control is the same. I think it's actually pretty clear that almost all people are not capable of secure and reliable self-custody and would be better off with an intermediary. We're not keeping our fiat currency in a safe under our bed after all.
  • CityOfThrowaway 1y ago
    Yes, it might be true that most people aren't willing to keep their money under their beds for security reasons. But it shouldn't be illegal or somehow indicative of criminality. Same thing with self custody of crypto.
    • kspacewalk2 1y ago
      It's not illegal. They're talking about flagging it as "suspicious". Lots of legal things are flagged as suspicious by law enforcement.
      • ozozozd 1y ago
        Would that make it a probable cause for searches and seizures? If so, that would be pretty bad right?
        • xp84 1y ago
          Yeah, with the appalling civil forfeiture concept that I hope everyone is aware of, I also feel uncomfortable with this word "suspicious." In brief summary: If the police search your car (let's just assume probable cause exists) in a routine traffic stop and find say, $50,000 in cash in a bag, they can charge the cash with a crime and arrest it, and unlike a person, it's guilty until definitively proven innocent. I don't think that's fair. And it's a big reason that holding more than a little cash is financially risky. On the other hand, up till now I'd argue it's more risky (just specifically in terms of potential for loss of the money) to have your BTC in Coinbase or say, FTX where mine was, than in self-custody. These notions may reverse if your crypto private keys can be seized automatically as "suspicious," and the civil forfeiture thing has proven that the police will do that.
• yieldcrv 1y ago
  Lobbyists, Assemble!
• shadowgovt 1y ago
  This is not terribly surprising. Control of the monetary system is a key responsibility of the US federal government; it was always going to be the case that if Bitcoin became a meaningfully-sized part of the financial system the government would impose regulation. Now we get to see how enforceable it is (and I suspect it's more enforceable than people wanted to assume... They can jail you indefinitely for refusing to divulge a password if the court finds it is not a violation of your Fifth Amendment rights to divulge it. https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/).
• SubiculumCode 1y ago
  M question was on what legal/Constitutional basis does the Treasury have for expanding the Patriot Act? Is it because the law provides powers to the Treasury department to define areas that the law should apply? Or is it a case where the administration (once again) is assuming it can do something, the Constitution be damned?
• deleted 1y ago
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• yepitwas 1y ago
  War on Terror AUMF is still in force and is why the President can just decide to bomb whatever country they want without asking for permission, now. All that shit after 9/11 was crazy and dangerous, and some of us said that at the time, and go figure, the fucking obviously true things we were saying have turned out to be... true. What a surprise.
  • dragonwriter 1y ago
    > War on Terror AUMF is still in force and is why the President can just decide to bomb whatever country they want without asking for permission, now. The War on Terror AUMF relies on a Presidential determinatiom that the targets “planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or person”. But the President has had implicit blanket permission to bomb whoever he wants with a time limit ever since the War Powers Act was passed.
  • mrguyorama 1y ago
    People who protested this horse shit were called unamerican for christs sake. Bush Jr said the literal words "you are either with us, or against us". The right went into utter hysterics about France not wanting to help our BS invasion. The right loves to say that violent rhetoric is the left's fault, while they wished us harm for not wanting to invade a random country in the middle east that wasn't even related to the terrorist attack. Meanwhile, all that horseshit with the TSA only ever enriched a couple people connected to the admin.
    • yepitwas 1y ago
      > Meanwhile, all that horseshit with the TSA only ever enriched a couple people connected to the admin. I'm pretty sure Homeland Security was only created because it was easier to steer a pile of brand-new contracts for a brand-new organization to the "right" places, than it would have been if they'd simply expanded the roles of existing parts of the government that were already supposed to be doing what Homeland was supposedly created for.
    • xienze 1y ago
• loeg 1y ago
  The screenshot-of-a-screenshot seems to be talking about mixers (e.g. TornadoCash). But ultimately, what did you expect?
• jmyeet 1y ago
  Bitcoin is a perfect microcosm for the tech sector in what happens when people who don't know how something works and refuse to understand it, try to replace it. Every aspect of the modern financial system exists for a reason. It evolved over time to deal with problems. Things like reversible transactions are a feature not a bug. Bitcoin is where all the gold bugs went who lamented the end of the gold standard. Most of these people didn't understand that at no point in history was the US dollar 100% backed by gold (or silver, originally). Never. What backs the US dollar isn't gold or oil or anythihng else we dig up out of the ground. It's long schlong of the US military. I've also said that crypt currency exists only because the government hasn't shut it down. All it would take is a policy change from the US government to say banks who have access to the US financial system cannot trade in Bitcoin and it would be over. Yes you could still have wallets (at least until the government starts going after Bitcoin farms, which again it could do) but what would you do with those coins? Bitcoin is not, never has been and never will be an escape from the perils (some real, many imagined) of fiat currencies.
  • efeqasfcadvxcv 1y ago
    Rethink your ideas, you are very wrong here. It is a fantastic escape from debasement of fiat, and always has been an escape from the perils of fiat currencies. It was created for this very purpose in 2009, and has absolutely achieved this goal. A 2019 $ vs a 2025 $ are significantly different purchasing power. Yet a 2019 BTC vs a 2025 BTC shows remarkable capital appreciation. You can pick any time scale you like, and except for very specific edge cases, it has in general been a great hedge against debasement of fiat, and will continue to be. I have been able to preserve the purchasing power of my savings for over a decade now, and still keep buying every week. Why would this be any different the next decade? (beyond the attenuation effect from more capital flowing into the space?).
    • jmyeet 1y ago
      You've described an asset not a currency and sure, your asset will keep going up forever like so many assets before it, famously.
• andrewla 1y ago
  This is pure click bait that relies on a deliberate misreading of a 2023 notice [1] that tries to imply that "self custody" is being attacked in any form. All that this is saying is that the government will try to track money movement to pursue criminal activity, including, unfortunately the criminal activity of moving money in a way that looks sketchy. This is something that we have decided we have to live with. [1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/10/23/2023-23449/proposal-of-special-measure-regarding-convertible-virtual-currency-mixing-as-a-class-of-transactions https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/10/23/2023-23...
  • crystal_revenge 1y ago
    It's not "pure click bait" for anyone that has followed along with the crypto community since the early days. This is basically an official stake in the heart for anyone that even loosely held on to the original ideals behind crypto. Crypto is increasingly no different than traditional banking in anyways that are beneficial, and remains different in ways that can only be harmful to the individual (market manipulation, wild speculation, lack of institutional regulation) etc. I don't know how anyway remotely interested in decentralized crytpocurrencies can see this as "click bait".
    • andrewla 1y ago
      It's a two year old note talking about mixers and money laundering and it's being misrepresented as a new government stance against self-custody. That's why it's click bait.
• chaostheory 1y ago
  Assuming this is true, how would this be enforced and tracked?
• TheGRS 1y ago
  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 have to hide?" I just thought this was worth sharing, my dad was a tech guy (though not much of a programmer), the folks on HackerNews and related sites mostly have a privacy-first worldview. But not everyone shares this view, especially those who work in or around law enforcement. Civilians who believe in the right to privacy must stand their ground in the face of this.
  • yujzgzc 1y ago
    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 sure that, not high minded ideals, is why Meta invests so much in e2e encryption and privacy for WhatsApp, and publicizing it - when the next horrible thing is planned using Whatsapp, it lets them disclaim all responsibility for moderating what's happening on their platform
    • xp84 1y ago
      > 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 to buy/sell something illegal (Granted, there are some things illegal to buy/sell that there could be an ethical argument shouldn't be illegal -- probably certain drugs for instance). 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. But I think we who believe in privacy make ourselves look bad if we try to pretend that there isn't a ton of that stuff going on. It's a reasonable opinion to say that privacy is good, but I think the thing to argue and "prove" is that it outweighs the fact that this technology also enables all this bad stuff. Which is a value judgment and thus you need to convince people, rather than just point to the word "Freedom" and assert.
• hooverd 1y ago
  I'm convinced the the capital-c Crypto industry hates crypto. Don't use it as a currency! Give us interest free loans (stablecoins) and gamble!
• stealthlogic 1y ago
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• daveguy 1y ago
  Hah. Trump is the most corrupt president in US history. Honestly, who didn't think he would corrupt Bitcoin while he was at it?
• Finbarr 1y ago
  On a long enough timeline, having anything stored in local hardware is going to be suspicious. Not surprised to see government embrace of crypto lead to increased scrutiny.
  • BillTthree 1y ago
    like cash?
    • Finbarr 1y ago
      The statement goes beyond currency. In a connected world with infinite storage, why do you need that usb stick? What are you hiding on there?
• BillTthree 1y ago
  Loading up a single address with too many UTXOs degrades the entropy of a public-private key pair does bitcoin or UTXO's somehow for some reason generate multiple PUBLIC keys for the same private key?
• brianhama 1y ago
  This author is being disingenuous. All of those actions are indeed suspicious. I am not a fan of the Patriot Act, but these new guidelines actually seem pretty reasonable to me.
• teiferer 1y ago
  That the blockchain bros are surprised that Trump is not acting in their interest is itself surprising, even though it shouldn't. 3-level meta-surprising, so to say.
• gitfan86 1y ago
  LOL, the BTC people who thought "Digital Gold" was a good slogan are going to learn what happened to self custody of gold and the gold standard. BTC is in a much worse situation than gold was in 1970. The government has the technology to follow transactions and require BTC transactions to be done on their chain with their BTC equivalent GBTCs. That is until the government decides to issue print more BTC equivalents
• nxobject 1y ago
  "Crypto for me, not for thee..."
• max_ 1y ago
  To the slaughter house ...
• cwmoore 1y ago
  Can anyone ballpark a dollar figure for data center time to decrypt the ledger? No rubber hoses allowed.
  • procaryote 1y ago
    To decrypt the public ledger to show the already publicly visible transactions? $0 Am I misunderstanding you?
• throwmeaway222 1y ago
  You CANT. It's impossible, the people that operate their own computers running the network will NOT allow a government operated coin.
• w_TF 1y ago
  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
  • procaryote 1y ago
    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
    • w_TF 1y ago
      i understand their motivation, but none of the existing controls have done much to prevent those bad things from occurring either
      • procaryote 1y ago
        That's a pretty big claim
• giveita 1y ago
  Single use wallets? Wallet is not a concept. Address is the concept. Addresses should be used once for security.
• hamonrye34 1y ago
  > "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.
• jbs789 1y ago
  Sounds like Anti-Money Laundering - pretty standard stuff.
• RagnarD 1y ago
  Statist government is fundamentally incompatible with financial privacy. Such governments consider it inherently criminal.
• Chris2048 1y ago
  Despite the origin of HN being in the US, given that the current community has expanded to a large array of multinational English speakers, I'd rather country-specific posts like these were tagged such, in a international context: e.g. "The US treasury is expanding.." even if mention of "the patriot act" is an obvious signal, there are many such contexts but an explicit tagging makes quick parsing easier. Same for mention of the government/authorities/police/military/administration/constitution/president etc.