Just like encryption, once privacy becomes associated with criminality, you end up weakening security for law-abiding users and concentrating power in a few regulated intermediaries. That’s not healthy for innovation, or democracy.
The wording is confusing. Two provisions expired, not the entire Patriot Act.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250306093943/https://www.nytim...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act#Section_expiration...
But then they say "The first act reauthorized all but two Title II provisions. Two sections were changed to sunset on December 31, 2009"
But the first act was passed in 2005, and so it's unclear whether it reauthorized provisions only until 2006 or a longer term.
Unfortunately, that doesn't mean a whole lot, as many of the provisions live on in the USA Freedom Act.
details on it:
Reauthorization of Other Patriot Act Provisions: The USA FREEDOM Act extended two other provisions from the Patriot Act that were set to expire: "Lone Wolf" Provision: Allows for surveillance on individual terrorists who may not be directly linked to a foreign power. "Roving Wiretap" Provision: Enables surveillance to follow a suspect even if they change their communication methods or devices.
Everyone should be super clued in whenever the government chooses to classify something as 'terrorism' because of these provisions.
There appeared to be a lot of "good things" associated with this Act but also... as things go. Not great things such as above.
Being confusing, I'm almost certain, was the entire point.
They got what they wanted from it beyond their wildest dreams.
We're truly living in Orwell's world.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Free_or_Die
> "Live Free or Die" is the official motto of the U.S. state of New Hampshire, adopted by the state in 1945. It is possibly the best-known of all state mottos, partly because it conveys an assertive independence historically found in American political philosophy and partly because of its contrast to the milder sentiments found in other state mottos.
> The Treasury Is Expanding The Patriot Act To Attack Bitcoin Self Custody
It's also the thing I don't understand about party loyalty.
When candidate George W. Bush was running for President, he was saying all kinds of things about how big government is bad and regulation destroys small businesses etc. Clearly not consistent with what he did once he was in office. When candidate Obama was running for President, he was saying how those things Bush actually did were bad and unconstitutional, and then once he's in office he signs a Patriot Act extension, fails to pardon Snowden, etc. When candidate Trump, well, you know.
Most of this is structural, not partisan. And a lot of it is Congress even though people mostly talk about the President. The partisanship itself is structural -- get your state to use STAR voting instead of first past the post and you get more than two choices, and then liars can be evicted even if their state/district goes >60% to the left or right.
> get your state to use STAR voting instead of first past the post and you get more than two choices, and then liars can be evicted even if their state/district goes >60% to the left or right.
The system is flawed from its roots. People need a voting system that allows them to specify their conscious, not vote on strategy only. The latter only leads to a race to the bottom. Unfortunately ranked voting systems do not allow for this, and we've seen those predictions come true in places like New York.
> It's also the thing I don't understand about party loyalty.
We've turned politics into religion. It's not just the right (though I'd argue it's more common), but so many people love to paint everything as black and white. Anyone who thinks the world isn't full of shades of gray is a fucking zealot and we've let that go on for too long.
I kind of dislike approval voting because it's marginally worse than score/STAR to begin with, and on top of that has an ugly failure mode where the ballot looks like a first past the post ballot and then some non-trivial percentage of people don't realize they can vote for more than one candidate and you're back to being stuck with a two-party system. Whereas score makes it clear something's different but still only takes ten seconds to explain ("rate each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10").
> What I don't understand is how a lot of people will state both parties are corrupt and then also be party loyal.
Tribalism. People convince themselves that both options are bad but one is worse and then fight their own brothers who picked the other one.
But the lesser of evils is still evil and the ability to change your vote to the other team is the only leverage you have against either of them, so what happens if you relinquish it?
Given a decision between the devil you know and the devil you don't, choose the one that you have not tried.
> it's marginally worse than score/STAR to begin with, and on top of that has an ugly failure mode
The way I like to explain score vs ranking to people is like measuring things with a normal ruler vs measuring things but your ruler only has inches on it. People seem to get it and the importance of specifying how much more you like one candidate over another or how little your indifference is between some.
But I think we both understand these systems sufficiently and probably shouldn't derail. I just want to make sure we don't fall into doing the same thing I'm complaining about over here[0]
> the lesser of evils
That is a far worse form of tribalism because they lie to themselves. They've convinced themselves they believe something that they don't actually believe in. What I'm worried about is how common this is. Even down to the mundane cliche, where I jokingly define as "something everyone can recite, but no one can put into practice." Road to hell I guess...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45225341
[1] Give me the choice between the lesser of many evils! I joke, but as much as I love cardinal voting I won't make the claim that it is a cure all. But given a choice between two evils or many evils (and no other information), I'll take many evils. My chances are better in being able to pick a lesser one.
Any vote that is not proactively for the major party that is the closest to your political beliefs is effectively a vote for the major party least aligned.
Both teams are corrupt, but in different ways.
On my team it’s rules being bent but not broken, a few bad apples, everyone was doing it, parents wanting to give their children the best start in life, the inevitable results of the need to raise campaign funds to continue their great work, and/or they’ve already rightly been suitably punished.
On the other team it’s a problem that runs through all of them, reflecting their poor character, the lack of basic decency resulting from their hollow look-out-for-number-1 political beliefs, and is undoubtedly representative of a much wider problem that’s being covered up.
> Both teams are corrupt, but in different ways.
This is a given.
> On my team
> On the other team
One does not need always compare. We can both evaluate a single political party by its merits, absent of everything else, while also being able to evaluate how they stand comparatively. In fact, you can't even do the latter without doing the former first!
All you've accomplished is perpetuating the two evils. You perpetuate the evil you vote for my allowing them to excuse their actions in justification of fighting the greater. You have no power to change what you've chosen as greater and you've abdicated the power to make your lesser even less evil, instead choosing to gave it power to become more evil!
Think carefully about what you say. It's not only Siths who speak in absolutes, but evil does thrive on over-simplification.
> your question of “how can anyone be committed to someone they describe as a lesser evil”,
> the GP
We're at a point where if that is parody then it is indistinguishable from reality. I hope you're right and that it is parody. But hell, just the other week I saw someone pull out the "bUt YoU dIdN't UsE a SoTa MoDeL" card in reference to a GPT-5 output and I mistakenly assumed this was a joke.
Sarcasm doesn't seem to translate well over the internet. Fewer clues and people conflate the ability to read with literacy. I love sarcasm, but it appears Descartes was right
> Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they’re in good company.I feel like I can't possibly live in the stupidest era in world history so it makes me try to see other historical eras in a similar light - how can I reinterpret the past such that it also experienced a bunch of clownish nonsense?
One thing that it doesn't really cover is the rest of German society and how those thugs managed to get power. Weimer Germany was run by the social democrats. These people were basically 'center left.' They ended up in control after the 1919 revolution that got rid of the Kaiser, and ruled via coalition government with other centrist and center-right parties as junior members.
In general people's complaints were 1) land reform because especially in Prussia most of the land was still owned by massive landowners (Junkers) and most peasants were tenant farmers and 2) better working conditions in industry for the working poor 3) some way to get out of the economic crisis that was bad even before the depression in Germany.
The social democrats failed to deliver any of this. And mostly they spend their entire time in power battling with the Communists. This included hiring freekorps, which were paramility groups that roamed the German countryside after the war and eventually turned into brownshirts, to work with the police to attack communists. There was already a ton of state sponsored terror in the 1920s directed almost entirely at the left.
Support for the social democrats and other center parties collapsed and in the 1932 election, the nazis and communists were the big winners almost entirely at the expense of the social democrats. The center parties decided that working with the communists was absolutely beyond the pale and thought that the nazis would be more easy to manipulate, so they decided to work with Hitler and made him chancellor. Once the nazis had their foot in the door, as it were, and given that they had contempt for democracy and the rule of law, they used every dirty trick they could after that to consolidate power.
Just to clarify for other folks, there are many episodes re: Nazis, but it also covers everything from Khmer Rouge to more modern coverage that's truly the more banal kind of evil, covering the worst and most destructive grifters. So while it's definitely kinda preoccupied with fascism, there's another through-line with dis/misinformation, etc etc.
I do agree with your basic criticism though, fair to say the general show format for dictators is 1st part bio which is frequently unremarkable, then the 2nd part is appalling crimes. How society was complicit/tolerant enough to allow the decline to happen is usually sidelined. On the other hand though, it's kind of always the same and pretty simple. To the extent it's not simply hidden or covered up, it works like this. After things are definitely very shitty, whatever misguided optimism folks can muster is usually all about "harming the out-group will help somehow!". (It doesn't.)
But the astute dictator (or their advisors) can rely on and exploit that kind of tribalism. Common sense, static value-systems, or any sensitivity to blatantly hypocritical statements/behaviour etc just are not things that the common person can really hang on to once they are angry/impoverished/aggrieved/hungry
Excellent question. There are two easily readable sources I know of covering historical events of the sort you're asking about. The first is Barbara W. Tuchman's The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, where the entire premise is that stupid people did stupid things and then doubled down on stupidity as they went along. The second is Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, in which Hannah Arendt details just how dull and unimaginative Eichmann was. She writes, "it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown", and suggests that Eichmann was not especially different from anyone he worked for, right up to the top.
History doesn't seem clownish because of the way it is recorded and taught. Even Arendt's writing is cool and formal compared to the histrionics we see on social media and many news outlets.
> Was there a Napeolonic era equivalent to a media figure known for making light of school shootings, getting killed in a school shooting, a second after again making light of school shootings?
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and subsequent events leading to the start of the First World War, were filled with errors and stupidity, so much that history mostly lumps them all under the term "July Crisis", and rarely goes into detail. If you're familiar with the Abilene paradox, you have a framework for how the Great War started as the result of collective actions by soldiers, diplomats, and national leaders.
You might like this review of the movie Civil War. Very well thought out review.
Alex Garland's CIVIL WAR has a clear and simple meaning
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.
The thing is, you don't know what happened in the past - you weren't there. What you have is a lot of stories and films that bring that to life for you.
Personally, I'm pretty sure nothing in the implementation has changed, but that the goals being sought have changed, as has the technology and therefore the implementation.
To be clear, the book is fiction, but struggle sessions and beating physicists to death is not.
For what it’s worth I like the show just not that part.
I'll preface with, I am a communist so I have no anti communist tendencies.
But, that is what struggle sessions were like, and their most frequent locations were in classrooms, and their most frequent targets were teachers and professors. And they'd often drag in random peasants to watch. I remember one quote that was like, feeling bad for these peasants who have no idea wtf is going on or why they're watching some professor get beat half to death.
The CPC's reasons for the struggle sessions were cynically open-eyed: they wanted people to participate so that people were involved and culpable with the state violence against "counter revolutionaries."
This is why the PRC's communist revolution was flawed from the start and doomed to slide into deep authoritarianism, which holds out as a historical fact now.
Btw for what it's worth the book really isn't all that anti communist, or anti CPC at least. Criticism of the cultural revolution is allowed in the PRC now, or the author never would have been allowed to publish.
You could argue that the entirety of Europe declaring war on itself over the death of one royal (and not even a reigning monarch; an heir-apparent) is such an example; tens of millions dead over something as transient as birthright rulership. Others that come to mind are much of the reign of Henry VIII (everyone knew he was dangerously paranoid, nobody with the potential to do so mounted an overthrow of his power, and his son was shaping up to be worse and England was narrowly spared his reign by the luck of his own bad health). Then there's the French overthrow of a monarchy to replace it with a bloody civil war that liquidated, among others, most of the people who overthrew the monarchy (and replaced it with an empire).
Power consolidation begets perverse effects.
I mean that was just an excuse, in hindsight it's completely obvious that Europe was gearing up for war for years prior to the event. Just like now it seems completely possible that we might end up in a war or even civil war in some countries over a (seemingly) minor event - it's just going to be a spark that sets off the powder keg.
Your statistical intuition is sound, and while there are many historical sources describing very stupid events (VSE) dating as far back as recorded history, it is difficult to appreciate the outer bounds of the stupidity range because what has been written is a small fraction of the history that people have lived for at least 100,000 years.
So while I feel we are living in the stupidest era in history (the SEIH), I must conclude that we don't.
Recurring racism is either crazy (as in, it doesn’t work but people keep doing it), or, it … works for some people. It makes them feel better, builds camaraderie and unity amongst a group. So in practical terms, I don’t know if we can call this stupid or crazy.
The word we might be looking for is “rotten”. To watch the evil of the past and continue to harbor any adjacent attitudes absolutely does qualify as “one of the the most rotten eras”, especially because our era was educated on the past and given so much comfort and luxury.
——
I wanna expand why I am honing in on racism. I can only define the American Right as something that has battery pack that is powered by hate. I can’t find the source of the hate. There’s no foreign occupier in America, there’s no evil army here locking people up. The hatred is rooted somewhere, and the core emotion of hatred is the fertile ground for all the obstinance (why nothing good seems to take initiative in this country).
It doesn’t take a genius to say “hey, I think this multi century issue of white racism is still here guys”, like discovering that a alien monster was on the ship all along, lingering, a horror movie.
Edit:
Get the audiobook for this. You can hear just how crazy things have always been:
https://www.amazon.com/Abuse-of-Power-Stanley-I-Kutler-audio...
I listen to this on nice walks, and I’ve literally had to stop in the middle of walking to laugh at the absurdity of it all. It’s surreal and relevant to what’s going on today, as usual.
helps that the same rich people have lots of influence over what the rest sees, hears and thinks.
Not what you meant, but that evil army is called ICE.
ICE is gateway to something far more sinister in my opinion, and that will be persistent fascism enforced by a quasi military entity
The core elements are usually similar. Fetishism of militarism often by people who never see a day of combat, occult and antiscientific beliefs, grifts, purges and nepotism, brutish mocking cruelty. The Nazi Totenkopf was the shiba inu of its day.
History doesn't repeat but it does rhyme. I think the lesson here is people tend to understimate what they can't respect. Thinking "no one would be stupid enough to take this guy seriously" is often a mistake.
I mean not being condescending to them would go a long way.
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.
It's more that the privacy-first folk are the ones that bother expressing opinions in threads like this. I think these days, a large part of HN audience doesn't especially care about privacy, and a good chunk of us are the ones that created the current privacy hellscape we have.
> a large part of HN audience doesn't especially care about privacy, and a good chunk of us are the ones that created the current privacy hellscape we have.
Any thread about Signal has top comments bashing Signal over something much more minor like backups, lack of stickers, Moxie's side project with MobileCoin, and/or some conspiracy about secret backdoors. Yet, there is never an alternative offered which my grandma could use. No, she can't use Matrix. Maybe your grandma is tech literate, but mine grandma is 90. Even my parents aren't tech literate! Hell, I couldn't even get my group of PhD level CS friends to try out Matrix with me, but I could strong arm half of them into using Signal while the other half just wanted to use iMessage.
Any thread on ZKP coins like ZCash devolve into conversations about how Monero is better.
Any thread on Firefox has a top comment about how much Firefox sucks because the icons are a bit different or how the dev tools are better or some other excuse. They all devolve into people just talking about their favorite color of Chrome (e.g. Brave, Opera, Edge). IDGAF, just install Firefox and uBlock on your family's computer, they won't notice the difference between FF and Chrome.
Or any number of other such topics. They devolve into purity tests and tribalism. The lack of perfection in some tool only becomes some excuse to continue licking the boot. Can we not acknowledge that things have flaws but that these flaws are a worthwhile cost to not living under surveillance capitalism? I hear so many people complain about surveillance capitalism and then only throw up their hands in the air to say "but what can you do?" or "it's the way things are." We're the fucking people who made it that way and we're the fucking people who continue to make things that way! Not every HN user works at big tech, but I'm willing to bet nearly every HN user is their family's goto tech support person. You at least have that power to influence your friends and family about how to solve these problems.
We're the people that other people look to for tech advice. We can have nuanced conversations all day, and I think we fucking should, but most of them turn into dumb flame wars like "vim vs emacs" or "spaces vs tabs" and all this ends up with is the system perpetuating. Can we just for one god damn month not roll around in the mud? All the time I hear about how we love merit and meritocracy. Well let's fucking do it then. And we're engineers, if there's flaws in these OPEN SOURCE SYSTEMS, then let's fucking fix them instead of just complaining about the flaws of living under the boot. Or do we just like to complain and they've won because they convinced us we have no power?
You're right that privacy and freedom should never be sacrificed for convenience or aesthetics!
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.
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 that. I think crystallizing exactly why you believe the right answer is No is essential, otherwise you're just not going to convince people on that side -- in their mind, I think, you're demanding more rights than you historically had, and at the cost of protecting the rest of the population.
I also really believe that this raises the bar for everyone. If the government has to work harder to prove your guilt, the case is all that much stronger when the threshold is met.
I'm probably preaching to the choir but I increasingly see arguments to the contrary as boiling down to "make things so the executive branch of the government doesn't have to work as hard" which I don't find compelling as a societal value.
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.
Models could identify "suspicious" behavior and generate plausible theories to fit the desired witch hunt, based on what they read. Scary.
Your father is subject to a simple but pervasive error: Not every justification who is a good or a bad guy is ethical right in every aspect of life.
everybody is a bad guy in the eyes of their political opponents.
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
This is such a sham though.
You have some privacy-protecting technology everyone would benefit from. Ordinary people don't really understand it but would use and benefit from it if it was the default.
Laws are passed that make it illegal to use or otherwise highly inconvenient, e.g. you have to fill out an onerous amount of paperwork even if you're not doing anything wrong. Ordinary people are deterred from using it and ordinary systems don't adopt it. Criminals continue using it because they don't care about breaking the paperwork laws if they're already breaking the drug laws.
Then people say look at this evil technology that only criminals use! As if the reason others don't use it wasn't purposeful.
The issue is that it's treated as a "financial asset" to begin with, which de facto inhibits its use as a currency. You want to pay for a sandwich with cash? Hand them bills, get sandwich. You want to pay with cryptocurrency? File securities paperwork. Who is going to do that?
By comparison, things like foreign currencies that float against the dollar aren't reported when the transaction amount is below a threshold.
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.
We have to decide what kind of society we want. One with locks on doors or a world where that is illegal. Bad guys use locks and so do regular people. Taking away everyone's freedom and safety because it makes it easier to catch "bad guys" is not worth the tradeoffs in terms of safety / privacy or creating a society worth living in.
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.
Yet. They want to execute people for being trans in Florida, by separately passing laws that child abusers get executed, and that being trans == child abuse. It's not hyperbolic to worry that donating to a trans rights organization could make you a governmental target. Scammers might steal some of my money, but they're not going to abduct me off the street into unmarked vans in front of my kids.
Poe's Law strikes again, but for reference there are even several major categories:
Some things are nobody's business. If you have religious parents and you're gay, you may not want them to know that, even if your religious parents work for the government.
People have proprietary secrets. A drug company or tech company can't be spending a billion dollars on 95%-finished R&D only to have a random cop take a $10,000 bribe to hand it over to a foreign competitor.
It's important to protect the political opposition from the incumbents. The thing Nixon had to resign over? That.
Sometimes the bad guys work for the government. If your abusive ex is a cop, they shouldn't be able to trivially find you without a warrant.
The government shouldn't be able to go on a fishing expedition. If you do something that isn't illegal, or that you have a right to do, that shouldn't be an excuse to trawl through your life so you can be prosecuted for breaking a law that everybody breaks but only people who step on the toes of the powerful are prosecuted for.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -Cardinal Richelieu
"Saying you don't need privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't need freedom of speech because you have nothing to say." -Edward Snowden
- Megacorporations cozying up to government in exchange for access to this information, for a competitive advantage, targeted advertising, etc. Lawmakers will bend over backward for corporations if they are promised "job creation" in their districts, or it could be lobbying or even straight-up bribery. We have a sitting supreme court member who openly takes bribes and he's suffered no consequences for it. It's not hard to imagine data the government collected in a giant dragnet being shared with generous campaign contributors.
- Laws changing to target an out-group. Remember how the government was keenly interested in people's period-tracking apps so they could imprison people who they suspected had an abortion? It doesn't matter whether your private data could incriminate you now, it's dangerous if it could incriminate you from any future government that is hostile to you.
You: "But you are randos on the internet, not the government!"
So I can get any of that from anyone if I just bribe the right government official? Or if I want that info for nefarious purposes I just have to get hired at the right agency? Or I can lobby to get a law passed that says everyone with the sequence "GATTACA" at a particular site on chromosome 7 is inherently evil and must be locked away for the public good? (Oh, what a surprise, it turns out that DNA sequence is incredibly common only for your particular race, huh.) Or if you're a celebrity, any cop can demand to search your phone without a warrant and get all of your private photos to sell to tabloids? You're genuinely ok with all of this? You find people who are concerned about these things suspicious?
Laws change. People in power do not always have your best interests at heart.
Even the companies that don't make money from ads have no qualms just letting Google or Facebook collect data about their website visitors.
Fortunately, other banks weren't staffed with idiots, and I was able to open an account elsewhere after providing my documents.
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.
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.
Whether that's cash or cryptocurrency doesn't seem to matter since your argument would also apply to cash.
That's not actually an argument for anyone who doesn't share your assumptions though and is largely just lazy thinking.
Cash also has physical limitations that make large cross-border transactions hard, which crypto does not.
To be fair, they argued against intermediation. Not regulation. Requiring a filing for every $100 cash transfer to one's mother would satisfy their requirement.
Regulation is a controlling mechanism that puts constraints on what people can and can't do. Some constraints will enable more things to happen because it reduces certain risks (e.g. property rights and laws against stealing enable investment and development of property).
But when there is too much regulation it has the opposite effect, and instead of enabling progress it stifles it. It acts as a calcification that slows change and makes society less adaptable.
So it's not that regulation is bad, it's that too much regulation can be bad.
Now in terms of regulating people's abilities to transact specifically: in a health democracy putting some regulations on transactions will probably have a positive effect because it can limit abuse and risk, and therefore increase freedom for honest people to make transactions. However when a civilization reaches the point in its life cycle when it is transitioning from a healthy plurality into authoritarianism, the risk of over-regulation of transactions skyrockets and the elimination of privacy when transacting is extremely likely to lead to tyranny.
When someone acts like regulating transactions is inherently bad, they're either repeating something they heard and didn't question, or they're assuming the people they are speaking to are educated in history and have a healthy fear of tyranny.
You're regulating an "untraceable" utterance of a string of data.
Pragmatically it's worse than trying to stop fentanyl, which is already impossible, and even trying to stop it has just made the gangs that much more powerful because they now control whole small nation-state tier light-infantry militias funded by black-market profits induced from trying to ban it.
I honestly don't see any way to effectively ban cryptocurrency that has net positive utility. "Yay we caught some criminals, all it cost us was a dystopia!"
I don't actually care about this topic at all, but people should do a better job of defending their positions.
You added that most people would be better off with intermediated financial transactions which is probably true for most day to day transactions, but the TFA proposal brings up the question of whether everyone should be forced to use an intermediary.
For example, just using single-use addresses would be considered suspicious, probably just because it complicates basic taint analysis. Yet that's a fundamental component of privacy, and to do otherwise is akin to how Venmo lets people see your own transaction history (a very odd feature btw).
Well, given that they're responding to this:
>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.
Why would you not expect people to argue in the style you presented them?
> that's cash
Our world worked with cash before. Sure, it wasn't perfect, but are those imperfections worse than the mass invasion of our privacy? There's no perfect system, so the only question is how we weight certain issues, not that flaws exist. If we purity test then the only winners are the immoral people who are willing to lie and deceive so that their choice appears to pass said purity tests. They love us to spend our time infighting because that's less time working against them.
Now, drug dealers sometimes do just do as many transactions as possible with cash, outside the banking system, for that reason. But they're hindered by these anti-laundering regulations, which is considered a good thing by most.
To me then it sounds reasonable to impose similar limits and reporting obligations - treating crypto as much like cash as is practical - when it comes to exchanging crypto for dollars in any way. It doesn't prevent Bad People from conducting transactions in BTC directly, but they have always been able to do so with cash for some things.
But it shouldn't be illegal or somehow indicative of criminality.
Same thing with self custody of crypto.
If so, that would be pretty bad right?
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.
The first one is the privacy argument.
Would you be comfortable if you’re not allowed to give the cash in your pocket to someone without someone watching over? If the answer is no, you are pro privacy for financial transactions.
Cash has the privacy feature as a default. You can argue that 3rd parties that help you send cash don’t have to offer any privacy, but BTC isn’t that, and forcing it to be that way is an attack on privacy.
I think arguments for privacy are pretty poorly argued and often come down to "isn't the idea of someone watching you icky" which this thread is not disabusing me of.
When you do not have privacy, you must then have trust. You are trusting, typically blindly, that your governments and other organizations will not use knowledge against you.
Before the Holocaust, Germany built a registry of known Jews by census. Obviously at the time, nobody knew what it could be used for, the latent evil within just plain information. It was done innocently, naively.
The same applies to all privacy violations. Yes, we could monitor, record, and analyze all text messages. Sure.
What are the consequences of that? What if you live somewhere where being gay is punishable by execution? What if you out yourself?
What if you're not even gay, but it seems as though you might be?
Or what if you live in an authoritarian state, and dissent is punished with death? Your government has cornered you. They can do whatever they like, and you cannot so much as vocalize complaints.
You may say, "oh well this isn't the case for me, so who cares?"
Yes, now, in this particular point in time, in your very specific place. What garantees do you have that things stay that way? None. You are blindly trusting that those who hold your information will not weaponize it.
You have given your enemies a gun, loaded it for them, held it up to your forehead, and said "please don't pull the trigger"
As a thought experiment, imagine how differently the underground railroad would look if everyone had smartphones that were tracked and communications surveilled.
Unless you are a committed anarchist though, you likely see a limit to the use of the precautionary principle as applied to state capacity in general.
Why is this argument sufficient to stop the state from monitoring financial transactions, but not sufficient to prevent the existence of a justice system?
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.
Now imagine that "someone" hates people like you, has the power to hurt you with impunity and is actively looking for any excuse to do so.
almost all people are not capable of secure and reliable self-custody and would be better off with an intermediary
Believing a profit-motivated corporation or individual is trustworthy long term especially in an age of quick mergers and acquisitions is .. deeply naive to say the least.
Mere criminality wouldn’t put privacy in such an indefensible position. Look at who’s president.
"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.
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.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Agamben#State_of_Excep...
At the time it was pretty clear that the federal government was going make a large and permanent power grab.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well you know, they are the ones constantly comparing Republicans to Hitler, the Nazis, calling them fascists, making direct claims that electing Trump would lead to the end of democracy, having "punch Nazis" be a rallying cry, and so on. Not really crazy to see how that might influence people to think that killing Trump or even a conservative podcaster is necessary to save the world.
Additionally, it’s disingenuous to say allegory statements to the behaviors of a person is inciting violence. Calling someone Hitler, describing them as “like Hitler” etc are not credible calls to violence. They aren’t even inherently violent in so far as they suggest nothing as to what to do with that information
[0]: https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-rise-of-poli...
The right's been laughing it up for decades when liberals get attacked, and calling for aid for their attackers (Kirk did this exact thing with Paul Pelosi, and was, I kid you not, in the middle of trying to blame trans people for the prevalence of mass shootings in the US when he got shot). Calling families of shooting victims crisis actors. Working people up over invented child abuse conspiracies to the point that folks get violent over it. The left aren't the ones doing most of the actually killing people over politics for the last couple decades, at least. There hasn't been significant rates of political violence from the left since like the '70s.
AI Apocalypse Now image of scene in which a large assault featuring napalm takes place, with Trump inserted, re: invading Chicago, and shit like "Chicago's going to learn why we're calling it the Department of War"? This isn't coming from fringe randos, this shit's from republicans holding positions of power and their immediate advisors. These are just examples, there's a constant stream of this stochastic terrorism and actual threats of violence from leaders on the right. It's a huge part of their messaging. Where's Obama talking about West Virginia like it's a foreign country that's wronged us and we're getting ready to Shock and Awe their asses? Doesn't happen.
The left isn't pulling these comparisons out of nowhere, you know? They're comparing them to fascists because they target minorities and promote political violence fucking constantly (plus commit it! Rather often!) while publicly describing and then following through on plans to centralize power to the executive. I know there's a set of somewhat politically-disconnected folks who are super dedicated to the "both sides are equally, but differently, bad, and this doesn't vary over time" thing as if it's a law of nature, but it's extremely not true, in fact.
Isn't that the actual point? of laws like this? Keeping those in power in power and further entrenching the moats around them.
It is a extremely convenient act for whoever is in power.
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.)
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.
The catch is that when voters vote at all levels, they express by their choices that e.g. marijuana legalization is not a high priority. So voters might well vote to legalize if given that standalone choice, but it's not obvious to me that it's a good idea to insulate representatives from their inaction.
> no representative wants to be the guy
So on this, a number of states arrived at some level of legalization exactly this way. Legalization laws were signed by governors as diverse politically as Kay Ivey in Alabama and Tim Walz in Minnesota.
There's no statutory reason that voters in e.g. South Carolina cannot choose representation as amenable to legalization as Beshear in Kentucky or Reeves in Mississippi. Referenda also are subject to faithful implementation by representatives, so attempting to side-step the choice of representatives is not necessarily going to be fruitful.
It only required a referendum in some states because most US states are controlled by Republican governors and legislatures who openly defy what their own constituents want without fear of being voted out, because republicans vote republican no matter what. Republican voters will say "I want to legalize weed", their elected representative spouts literal DARE propaganda about weed that republican voters KNOW is false since they literally smoke weed (illegally, how about that), but they STILL re-elect those politicians, because it's more important to not have a democrat in office than to actually get what you democratically voted for.
Here in Maine, we passed a referendum to legalize weed. It passed. Lepage spent the next 4 years of his Governor term refusing to implement it, entirely. Like he just criminally defied the will of the public. As soon as Mills took office, the state built up a framework for recreational weed and IMO it's pretty good compared to other states, which is probably why we have literal Chinese gangs growing illegal weed all over the state :/
You see the same thing in every Republican state that allows citizen referendums. The public passes a referendum, and the republican politicians of the state just utterly defy it, and they do not get voted out
Democrat politicians respect citizen referendums, even when they are stupid and against democrat policies, like in California where Uber is not an employer because that's how the people voted.
LOL what, apparently you forgot about Proposition 187, which California voters voted "yes" on, got tied up in the courts, and then when a Democrat governor came into power he let the appeals die.
Proposition 8: voters voted to ban gay marriage, courts said "nah we're not going to do that." Judges aren't technically politicians but that line is a little blurry at times.
Unless the Sanders Administration had a very favorable or majority Democrat Congress aligned with his progressive wing, many proposals would be outright blocked or heavily compromised. Knowing our limitation that everything else has stayed largely the same as history since, this wouldn't be the case. The hypothetical administration's attempts at sweeping reforms, such as healthcare and climate regulation, would very likely be significantly curtailed or overturned by courts or constrained by constitutional limits on separation. The GOP, even though they actively outspend Democrats when in power, obstruct via financial limits each and every Democratic-led effort while crowing about expansion of debt incursion; as such, spending on Bernie's proposed initiatives would raise concerns about deficits, inflation, and taxation. Even with tax increases, there would be pushback from wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbyists.
Basically, nothing would change in any significant way except, perhaps, the SCOTUS would not be outright overturning DECADES of 'settled law' in favor of an absurd view of the world as it was hundreds of years ago.
This is a feature, and why Trump's second term is so different to his first, or Bidens, or Obamas, or Bush, or Nixon. You'd probably have to go back to FDR for such sweeping changes to the US state.
Trumps first term was overturning norms in behavior, but not overturning the way the entire governing system works, all four estates.
The good news is when your candidate loses you don't find out the evil they really do and you can say it is not your fault. The bad news is you don't find out what is bad about the things you think are good.
Now, that might not have worked but anything might have had a pretty large impact on global/US deaths.
But his support of ratcheting up the Ukraine war disappointed profoundly. That’s not the Bernie I would have voted for.
Sometimes you gotta rip that bandaid off.
this is the end of celebrity culture at the hands of social media.
monarchies are the central core of celebrity cultism, look at France today; surrounded by the Monarchies and up in flames.
I've worked on privacy regulation. This would not get votes. The unfortunate fact is that the people most passionate about these issues are also tremendously lazy or extremely nihilistic. (Maybe it comes with the territory of not trusting institutions.)
Either way, privacy advocates can rarely muster even a dozen calls to electeds, let alone credibly threaten backing a primary opponent. The reason SOPA/PIPA worked is it animated a group of tech advocates beyond those with ideological opposition to surveillance.
behaviour says more than words
Exactly. It's a social norm among that class of society
When a Koch, or a Scwab, or the CEO of some mega-corp buys a property on Martha's Vineyard, or the Hamptons, or Vail or overlooking Tahoe or whatever, with intent to actually spend even the scantest amount of time there themselves they engage in absurd unnecessary renovations. That's just how they do things. There is an occasional exception for those in that group who have "found meaning" in some other avenue for lighting money on fire.
Edit: You can thank me later for implicitly telling you where the best construction dumpsters are.
Trump is not going to live much longer than 2028 anyway.
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/photos-trumps-drooping-face-9-11-p...
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/trump-sparks-health-fe...
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/glob...
> Biden got taken down by the the "crippling senile dementia" meme because it's only a problem when it's Democrats
Democrats felt both Biden and Trump were far too old and senile to be in charge. And they were right.
The problem is that Republicans only felt it was Biden.
Remember when having a "consensual" blowjob from an intern was almost enough to get a president fired? Remember when presidents resigned when the public found out they were involved in organising a break-in?
That world has long gone, social media saw to that.
This is his second, ostensibly last, term, meaning he will have an uphill battle at best to convince the public that he should get another term for some bullshit reason. His last term ended with him obviously trying to prevent the next guy from taking over. He obviously wants to be in power. It's disingenuous to say there is no basis. Whether it's likely is another matter but this is intellectually dishonest.
I'm not sure that democrats enact/write less laws. If they don't enact (or write) less laws, i cannot see how the aggregate number of laws reduces.
This, apparently, is a "hard" statistical (research) problem, even though i've seen reporting on this exact subject, along the lines of "number of lines in bills written by each party" or similar. but the top 2 are democrats. I think "enacted" is a different metric, but i'm still pretty certain that democrats lead on "enacted" legislation, at least in the last 25 years.
Basically, a good portion of White America are gone cases. You won’t be able to explain to gone cases anything. That’s the reality of America.
The bad guys will say you only need privacy if you’re guilty and the plebs will lap it up
2) America started dying way before when we thought things like being anti woke was more important than policy.
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.
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.
Based on what I've seen in the world looking across all the countries I am familiar with, including the US, I have to say I think the opposite is true.
However it's also not a very interesting question imo. You will never "reset" a generation from any aspect of culture, and now that we're in the global information age it's triply impossible. We don't need to fool around with naturalist fallacy - it's enough to say that racism is bad and we should get rid of it.
Absolutely there are nests of racist snakes, the KKK still continues after all and we have out and out nazis like Nick Fuentes getting page time in the NYTimes, so something is rotten in that country. Even still, compared to my travels throughout Europe, the USA has something unique about its diversity. It does seem like there's something different about the American identity superseding race and religion.
Compare to a country where your statement might be true, insomuch as it's a massive population of practically lost-cause racists: Israel. I've had several conversations with Israelis and my main takeaway is that the government has spent the last couple generations doing its utmost to convince everyone in the country that the planet is a zero-sum ongoing tribal war. The racism there is ingrained not just into the culture but into the law.
Having met people like that, I tempered my aggressively leftist America takes. America has issues but I've encountered way more flagrant and disgusting forms of racism in a year of travels through Europe than I did in decades of travel in the USA. I feel like I didn't know what racism really is until I left the USA.
How are "regulated intermediaries" not democratic? If they're regulated by the democratically elected government, that seems entirely democratic to me.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
Ah, our favorite - a Journalism
Don't be paranoid, and don't worry! We're the good guys!
We curtail commercial speech relative to political speech to protect against fraud. Regulating financial activity is deeply precedented, especially in contexts where whether it's an individual person or group of people is ambiguated.
It is unlikely that we know what the penalties for suspicious transactions are in the US legal system. That seems like a matter that should have come before FISA Court at some point so we won't see public records of what the case law is. Even if it hasn't the actual workings of the financial control the US exercises aren't exactly secret but they also aren't exactly easy to follow.
This is exxageration. If you operate a cash business, you're under the same heightened supervision.
This is based on the idea that there is some exception from previous rules and regulations. Before Bitcoin existed, lots of these rules were formulated. Now Bitcoin is on the scene and has evolved best practices for self-custody that ignore everything that went before. Bitcoin becoming more popular and integrated means that the rules from US financial system will start to be applied.
There is no surprise in this. If more effort was put into mitigating the concerns of the US financial system (or others) then things like this wouldn't happen. However, the truth is that the philosophies are incompatible so it's just a war of attrition that will unsurprisingly result in conformance to US financial regulation.
It is because if you can't do those things, bitcoin has no use. Its only functions are to dodge laws and transfer money, and it's bad at transferring money.
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.
This is subjective. Value is subjective. This is taught in many introductory economics classes.
> an orange has some minimum price, because if nothing else it's composed of matter and so can weight things down
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.
> If bitcoin is useless to transact, then its intrinsic worth is zero, so its price is 100% speculative
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.
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.
The intrinsic value of decentralization is the ability to operate outside any fiat system of laws or government. So that one lines up a lot with the criminal side of hiding your finances. The investment aspect sure is enticing to lots of folks, but without a real core underlying value it's just bubbles and rug-pulls. So all this has the effect, wittingly or not, of lining up the incentives of all BTC users with money launderers.
Sure there are TONS of perfectly legal reasons not to want people to track your finances. Many of them are even moral. But obviously many are neither moral nor legal. (The edge case of moral but illegal sure gets people fired up, but it's a vanishing minority of actual use.) So when the regulators come looking for criminals, we unsurprisingly get lots of sound and fury about how there are lots of perfectly valid reasons why good people will want to act in ways that make them look like criminals. Uh huh. Yes, there sure are.
Doesn't this describe every political party and megacorp in the US too...?
So yes, and I’ve been saying this since it started really getting bad in 2020, we need to completely cut enemies of the US off from our internet. There will obviously be attempts to proxy through western countries, so it needs to be strictly enforced, possibly with an identity requirement for participants.
For those against this, imagine a physical country where anyone can spawn thousands of faceless, nameless drones disguised as real people which are free to do whatever they want in society with zero risk of consequences. What would happen to that country? It would fall. As digital societies have now become larger than countries themselves, this is the very situation we’re dealing with. It’s not the utopia we hoped for, but it will be a dystopia unless action is taken.
The current, put as many bots as you want on, approach is pure war.
The main website that matched people to trade fiat for monero (localmonero) got closed recently because "reasons".
It is pretty popular and outlawed since a while. Basically the only relevant crypto currency used for purchases on the street since several years now. You can look up the number of daily on-chain transactions and tends to be on top every day.
You likely would only notice this if you need to donate money for someone with the wrong opinions or live at a non-aligned country.
--
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.
So no, it isn't obviously a "good thing", unless you reject these nuances in favor of an all powerful state.
Yes, the state has control of finance and transactions. It always does.
Democracies are build on principles like Popular sovereignty, political equality, or the rule of law.
Private transactions or tax-free property isn't a democratic feature. Yes, it's that obvious.
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.
Something being routine and done democratically is no defence at all of it being liberal or in line with the principle of property rights. Or even of it being legal in a lot of instances, democratic governments lose legal challenges quite regularly.
And in this case, attacks on private transactions are absolutely unreasonable authoritarian overreach. The government doesn't need to surveil people when they have no reason to suspect those people of wrongdoing.
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.
The war on cash is a good example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
https://ij.org/federal-court-rules-in-favor-of-convenience-s...
Should civil forfeiture be heavily reformed, and is it being obviously abused? Yes. Is the ability to use cryptocurrency to bypass sanctions, fund oppressive regimes, drive criminal empires, and power a new generation of scams a much worse problem? Absolutely.
Proponents of a system explicitly designed to enable financial fraud shocked when governments apply fraud rules to them, news at 11.
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.
I'd argue the opposite - if Bitcoin had been created with secure private transactions (untraceability) it would be in the same popular position it is today, but the attacks on it (chain analysis etc) would be failing instead of inevitably marching forward.
Your argument seems to rely on an assumption that the insecurity of Bitcoin has been legible and apparent to the [greater] government for most of Bitcoin's life, and so the government allowed it to gain popularity knowing those insecurities would eventually make it succumb to government control. But in general government sees any lack of identification/data as a problem to be rectified, and the popular wisdom for quite some time has been that Bitcoin is "anonymous". so I'd say the government acted as quick as it would have regardless of the actual security properties. It feels like any holding off had more to do with financial lucrativeness rather than an understanding of its long term security flaws.
Now that we're here though, Bitcoin does seem like a very strong inoculation against financial privacy technology. Government is now well aware that software/cryptography can be used for money, and the first question asked is why isn't your new niche system grokkable to chain analysis?
Which proves that it does what it says. (Much like when the police suspect someone of being a drug dealer for using GrapheneOS)
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.
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.
Right now there is a hodge-podge of solutions that piggy-back on the phone networks, wires, etc. that used to give LEO enough actionable information to track some criminals. But most of that has been obsoleted by modern cryptography.
I would consider leaving UK very seriously if I was building a life there now, as an example.
Unfortunately in 2025 it is a race to the bottom. While some countries (such as the UK) are sinking faster than others, there isn't a single country I can think of that is moving in the right direction when it comes to privacy, free speech and civil liberties.
Except that people are people, and people make mistakes, and it doesn't take a lot of mistakes to fail in your opsec, and then your whole plot unravels.
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.
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.
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.
No, I don't think it is. Perhaps privacy for speech and voting are.
I live in Canada. Anonymous heinous speech? No thank you. Go away.
In most civilized countries you have privacy in the voting booth (because without it, buying votes becomes trivial), but no privacy in financing campaigns.
Some of those countries even have rules about when campaigns can and cannot run, because there are benefits to living in a society that's not actively bombarded by polarizing political screeching 24/7. It does some to cut down the influence of dollars in politics.
I guess it makes people in the advertising business, and people looking to buy political influence very unhappy.
>No, I don't think it is. Perhaps privacy for speech and voting are.
Cash works for financial privacy, and functioning democracies.
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.
There is, to be fair, a legitimate debate to be had about dismantling our anti-money laundering infrastructure.
To be clear, I think there should be limits. I also think a lot of AML is theatrical.
Where it’s not is where large volumes can be moved. Less emphasis on cash. More on offshore accounts, tumblers and high-volume wallets.
Don't pretend the AML rules are enforced fairly and evenly.
its like html being using for full blown applications.... its the wrong application of the tech. If you dont want people to see where you send stuff why would you pick a technology designed to do that?
Also, you can have reputability AND decentralization, that's actually a fundamental component of how any Blockchain system works. When you mine a block you sign it to ensure nobody else can resubmit your work and take credit.
Your point being?
People prefer centralised stuff since it takes care a lot of stuff for them. They dont actually care all that much about technology that yield decentralised outcomes. I know that may be difficult for many here to comperehend.
This does not quite follow. Care to explain more? What I observe in practice is that people move from one centralized service to the next centralized service (e.g., X->BlueSky) but rarely from centralized to decentralized.
So whats your point fella?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719
> Meta
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30186326
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44210689
> Apple
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11034071
And
Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA (ostechnix.com)
1021 points by marcodiego 58 days ago | 620 comments
it's not the developers of bitcoin's fault your entire reg compliance apparatus was constructed on requiring intermediaries
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.
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.
See Knife Rights V Garland. []
No one had been convicted in the past 10 years for violating the switchblade act, so the state ruled the law couldn't be challenged ("no standing"), even though it was actively being used to ruin people's businesses and raid their homes (the government would just give everything back a few years after doing so and not go through with charges).
[] https://kniferights.org/legislative-update/court-opines-feds...
It explains how KYC and AML law function as a stochastic control on crime. How that is difficult to do through actual laws, and what the downsides of this system are.
One could argue that's how normal Bitcoin wallets work. The addresses are deterministic based on your passphrase (or derived private key). The addresses don't need to get reused because there's no real value in doing so, and no real cost of just using a new address each time.
Though yes--even if that's the exact meaning and design, presumably one could still use the simpler wallets that DO just reuse the same address over and over. And obviously that'd reduce privacy quite a bit.
Then your wallet software is smart enough to treat all the addresses derived as a single wallet. When you go to make a payment, it makes it from the various addresses owned by the wallet. When you want to accept money, you can generate the next address in the series and give a fresh address to someone new.
The net result is that it's not clear from someone looking at the blockchain which addresses actually belong to YOUR wallet and which transactions are you sending money to someone else or yourself.
AFAIK this is how basically all Bitcoin wallets have worked for years. Electrum and Base (formerly bread wallet) as well as Ledger's wallet are the main ones I've used.
EDIT: Just to address this:
> What is the "normal Bitcoin" use case for funneling money through a chain of throwaway wallets?
It makes it so that someone publicly looking at the blockchain can't provably tell how much Bitcoin you have.
We still have to give addresses to people to receive money, so if we were only allowed to have a few, it wouldn't be hard to trace which people own which wallets. And then now you've got a big physical security risk because the world can see how much money you are able to give if they invade your home, kidnap a family member, etc. It'd be like having to put a sign out in front of your house that says, "$600,000 in cash is in here." And they could see the cash.
Yes, it does result in larger transaction sizes, and transaction sizes are used to calculate fees. In practice, my understanding is that the relative increase in size is not a big deal, but again, this is how pretty much all of them work.
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/2023/10/23/2023-23...
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".
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?
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.
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
Quantum resistant algorithms are under heavy discussion in bitcoin dev mailing list, and have been for awhile. I think the signature sizes for leading algorithms are still too large to be practical within existing block size limits, but of course lots of things would probably have to change in a quantum emergency. Bitcoin devs tend to be extremely conservative with making new changes (in part because it attracts a lot of contrarians) so it's going to take a long time for people to agree on the right architecture for a quantum resistant scheme in bitcoin, but it will happen, BIPs are in the works like BIP-360 which outlines some potential structure for it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
It was forbidden to have more than 5 ounces of gold.
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
does bitcoin or UTXO's somehow for some reason generate multiple PUBLIC keys for the same private key?
Any upcoming changes to privacy regulations are going to be to further that goal, not to crack down on crime.
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.
Well that's not true... The key doesn't change because you added more bitcoin
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.
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.
> 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.
If you have your wallet on a Cell Phone, you might as well post a sign outside of your house stating "I am a bitcoin user and trying to keep that use secret" :)
Also, always remember native coinjoin.
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.
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
The state will never allow large scale financial privacy because it poses an existential threat 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.
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.
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?).
Of course this all redefines exactly what a currency or an asset IS. Is Gold a currency? Is it an asset? is it both? Its semantics. Both gold and bitcoin can be exchanged for goods and services.
Most assets will not keep going up forever in Bitcoin terms. Maybe no asset will, on long enough time scales. Most assets are plummeting in price considerably in Bitcoin terms. Today it takes 6-figure units of dollars to buy one unit of Bitcoin. On to 7 and 8, and more. Eventually, you will not be able to exchange ANY amount of fiat for Bitcoin.
You are free to ignore Bitcoin for then next 10 years, like most folks on HN have done for the past 10.
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
It's the worst kind of clickbait, and is actual, real fake news.
Your comment is nonsense.
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/).
I'd argue that Bitcoin has been effectively immune to attacks like this by governments for nearly a decade.
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.
Things like "Womens right to vote", "Civil rights" or even democracy was seen as completely backwards and naive at one point in history (and still is in some places), but today we kind of see it as something good to strive for, most of the times.
I'm not saying it's 100% the same for cryptocurrencies, but isn't there a chance it's something similar at least?
Nations do not have selves. That's taking the analogy too far. I do agree that they will definitely continue trying to exert control, though. It's kinda their thing.
Usually it’s as simple as the cops looking the other way in exchange for ‘freebies’.
You're expecting crypt-bros to act rationally based on utility of outcome. If they're acting ideologically there's no guarantee that will be the case.
They supported an authoritarian because they thought they could buy him off with shitcoin corruption billions. Turns out he’s still an authoritarian after he’s taken the money and done the rug pull.
> 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.
Of course, this is also assuming he was lying when he said all the money been spent and he had no money when he was arrested.
People go to shocking lengths to spite their exes sometimes.
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.
--- 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.
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.