The Patriot Act itself was supposed to be temporary and “narrow.” Two decades later it’s the foundation for a financial dragnet that assumes privacy is the problem rather than a basic right.
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.
jihadjihad · 3h ago
> [The Patriot Act] contains many sunset provisions beginning December 31, 2005, approximately four years after its passage. Before the sunset date, an extension was passed for four years which kept most of the law intact. In May 2011, President Barack Obama signed the PATRIOT Sunset Extensions Act of 2011, which extended three provisions. These provisions were modified and extended until 2019 by the USA Freedom Act, passed in 2015. In 2020, efforts to extend the provisions were not passed by the House of Representatives, and as such, the law has expired.
The Wikipedia article is quite confusing, and seems to imply that those two provisions expired because they were the only two provisions not sunsetted already. The table indicates that most of the law sunsetted on March of 2006:
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.
bilbo0s · 1h ago
The wording is confusing.
Being confusing, I'm almost certain, was the entire point.
htoiertoi345345 · 3h ago
"USA Freedom Act"
We're truly living in Orwell's world.
ta1243 · 1h ago
For nearly quarter of a century.
stavros · 3h ago
Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ensuring Effective Discipline Over Monitoring Act.
It's just an acronym bro, don't get all worked up about it, now let's go down, the Two Minutes' Hate is about to start.
shaky-carrousel · 2h ago
We're incredibly lucky the 'just an acronym' ended that way then. Had they named it the 'Joining and Reinforcing the Nation by Satisfying Liberties and Guaranteeing Efficient Control Over Surveillance' we would have ended with the JRN SLGECOS Act.
GLdRH · 1h ago
You can forget about liberties until you come up with a better acronym
> "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.
sigma02 · 7m ago
I suppose one must die, since living free is not an option.
Note to self: stay out of New Hampshire.
stavros · 1h ago
Apparently I forgot to close my sarcasm tag.
lvass · 30m ago
Stuff is so Orwellian that it really looks like a joke for those who do not know what USA Freedom Act means.
rs186 · 3h ago
If the law has expired, how do they "expand" the law? I am confused. Did they refer to the wrong one?
semiquaver · 1h ago
The patriot act is not really “a law” in the sense of being a concrete series of statements you can point to in today’s US Code. It’s more like a patch to a codebase. At the time it was passed it (like any statutory act of Congress) created and amended dozens of sections of the US code. Some of those provisions had expiration dates which have lapsed, but not all, and (apparently) not the sections this article discusses dealing with financial crimes.
jdiff · 2h ago
I believe you have misread the comment. In 2015, it was expanded and extended until 2019. After that, it was allowed to expire and was not extended or expanded further.
rs186 · 2h ago
My comment refers to the original news article:
> The Treasury Is Expanding The Patriot Act To Attack Bitcoin Self Custody
jordanb · 3h ago
Whenever leftists say that "Trump is a symptom of an illness that has been metastasizing for a long time" this is what we mean.
komali2 · 2h ago
My big ask is, was it always this stupid? Like, all these huge historical events and figures, did it all go down as stupidly and clownishly as the modern USA? Was there an early 20th century fascist Europe equivalent to a man named Big Balls being beat up by children and a fascist police action being triggered as a result? 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? Was George III as publicly and flagrantly fellated by the court as Trump is by the media still allowed into the White House?
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?
photonthug · 1h ago
To know the answers to all of these questions, you should really check out the Behind the Bastards podcast because that is the whole premise. Covering the lead-up to horrible situations and the inevitable slide in fascism. It's insanely detailed about covering many, many stupid fascist bastards and a few smart ones.
photonthug · 1h ago
To know the answers to all of these questions, you should really check out the Bbehind the Bastards podcast because that is the whole premise. Covering the lead-up to horrible situations and the inevitable slide in fascism. It's insanely detailed about covering many, many stupid fascist bastards and a few smart ones.
cratermoon · 1h ago
> was it always this stupid?
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.
cantor_S_drug · 56m ago
> stupid people did stupid things and then doubled down on stupidity as they went along.
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
That contrasts well with how most of the media present events as somehow well thought out and considered.
Many stories somehow manage to make even the most unhinged, word salad rants into thoughtful position statements,
followed up with a bland bit of "other side" objection.
tormeh · 1h ago
Apparently (can't be bothered to fact check this) the nazis liked having parades in the dark because it was easier to propagate the idea of the nazi ubermensch when you couldn't see that the dedicated members of the nazi party were generally on the uglier side of average. As you'd expect of dissatisfied radicals, really. Probably same reason there's a stereotype of right-wing people on social media having a profile picture of themselves in a car with sunglasses on.
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.
banku_brougham · 1h ago
>I feel like I can't possibly live in the stupidest era in world history.
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.
rkomorn · 1h ago
I think the speed at which the impact of stupidity can spread in current times is unrivaled throughout history, though.
viridian · 50m ago
I think what's more important, is that you have a device that will broadcast you a personalized feed of whatever the most engaging stupidity in the world is, at that very moment, 24/7. The magnitude of this passive exposure is far greater than even the rate of spread.
tormeh · 1h ago
I generally agree, but if we assume that the amount of history scales proportional to the number of humans, then it's not so clear cut, as there's never been more humans alive than now. In other words, there's just more history to be dumb in, nowadays, than before.
ivape · 1h ago
You would have to define what stupid is. We have some definition of crazy, which is, doing something that doesn’t work over and over.
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:
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.
4ggr0 · 1h ago
Problem could be economical. The rich want to get richer and more powerful, the poor and rest of the 99% have issues. Solving a lot of these issues would mean less wealth and power for the rich. So they need to create scapegoats. And racist stereotypes are probably the easiest way to do that. Close second are the people who think differently than [your_group].
helps that the same rich people have lots of influence over what the rest sees, hears and thinks.
gnutrino · 1h ago
They say money is the root of all evil, and I think that is the core issue. It's unchecked greed and blind nationalism. Political and racial polarization is profitable. Selling guns and ammo is profitable. Being a corrupt politician who helps their rich friends make more money is profitable.
tempodox · 1h ago
> there’s no evil army here locking people up.
Not what you meant, but that evil army is called ICE.
shadowgovt · 1h ago
Details vary but from time-to-time, yes, things do go this wildly off the rails.
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.
gambiting · 34m ago
>>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
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.
krapp · 1h ago
The more I study 20th century fascism - and by "study" I mean "listen to podcasts like Behind the Bastards" - the more I learn that, yes, they were just as goofy and cringe in their time as their modern equivalents. Hitler was seen as a bit of a comic buffoon with his over-the-top rhetoric, he had an Austrian accent which made him come off as a country bumpkin, and many people were unimpressed by him. Trump in 2016 was a joke, a C-list celebrity game show host only known for being rich and sleazy and playing himself on television.
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.
tormeh · 1h ago
There's a lot of stupid people out there waiting for someone who knows how to speak to them. Sounding like a country bumpkin and being unimpressive to the elites is probably good qualities if you want to be that sort of person.
sdenton4 · 2h ago
Every generation gets the stupidest politics the world has ever seen... So far.
TheGRS · 24m ago
I have deep disagreements with my father on this subject. He worked as a federal agent for 30 years, mostly in digital forensics. He does not believe in the right to privacy in any of the same ways I do. Whereas I believe a right to privacy in your tools and communication is essential, he believes they infringe on the government's ability to catch criminals. Classic justification of "if you're not a bad guy, what do you have to hide?"
I just thought this was worth sharing, my dad was a tech guy (though not much of a programmer), the folks on HackerNews and related sites mostly have a privacy-first worldview. But not everyone shares this view, especially those who work in or around law enforcement. Civilians who believe in the right to privacy must stand their ground in the face of this.
HackerNewt-doms · 13m ago
"if you're not a bad guy, what do you have to hide?"
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.
yujzgzc · 15m ago
Actually that's a problem for a lot of libertarian minded tech, it starts being thought of as enabling freedom from oppressive governments and ends up being adopted by criminals - Bitcoin, Tor, etc.
In the tech industry you also find a bend of very economically self interested version of privacy, which is that giving privacy to your users is a great way to claim you didn't know anything bad was happening. I'm pretty sure that, not high minded ideals, is why Meta invests so much in e2e encryption and privacy for WhatsApp, and publicizing it - when the next horrible thing is planned using Whatsapp, it lets them disclaim all responsibility for moderating what's happening on their platform
rs186 · 3h ago
A few years ago, I tried to open a bank account, and was turned away because my visa stamp expired (despite having valid immigration status). The clueless clerk and her advisor were going through The Patriot Act to find justification.
Fortunately, other banks weren't staffed with idiots, and I was able to open an account elsewhere after providing my documents.
shaky-carrousel · 2h ago
I say you dodged a bullet, then. They are probably just as clueless handling everything else.
zerkten · 1h ago
Possibly, but this not unreasonable for regular employees. They are not paid enough to deal with the consequences of making a mistake in a low volume situation.
If they go off-piste, even when that is a valid action, then they are likely going to be penalized by their employer's compliance department. That's because that piece of bureaucracy is still required at the next stage of bureaucracy. Now level 2's life is harder. It's best just to ignore and move on. There will always be some non-zero failure rate like this as long as bureaucracies exist.
hedora · 52m ago
It’s worse than that. Roe v. Wade associated privacy with abortion in the US, so the Supreme Court eliminated the right to privacy as part of the decision to overturn Roe v Wade.
Mere criminality wouldn’t put privacy in such an indefensible position. Look at who’s president.
Eridrus · 1h ago
I think the case for why strong encryption is important is much clearer than why untraceable financial instruments are important and I don't think it's super compelling to argue that these things are actually the same, even if your opposition to government control is the same.
I think it's actually pretty clear that almost all people are not capable of secure and reliable self-custody and would be better off with an intermediary. We're not keeping our fiat currency in a safe under our bed after all.
hombre_fatal · 1h ago
I think it makes sense to start from the idea that you should be able to transfer funds to someone, like $100 to your mother, without needing the government or a megacorp to facilitate it. The same way I can gift my TV to my mom.
Whether that's cash or cryptocurrency doesn't seem to matter since your argument would also apply to cash.
Eridrus · 1h ago
If you start from an assumption that there should be no regulation, then your conclusion will be that there should be no regulation.
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.
JumpCrisscross · 1h ago
> If you start from an assumption that there should be no regulation, then your conclusion will be that there should be no regulation
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.
mothballed · 1h ago
If you start with the assumption there should be regulation, even then IDK how you get there.
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!"
Eridrus · 1h ago
Nobody here is actually even arguing about the proposal here, just repeating platitudes and analogies.
I don't actually care about this topic at all, but people should do a better job of defending their positions.
CityOfThrowaway · 1h ago
Yes, it might be true that most people aren't willing to keep their money under their beds for security reasons.
But it shouldn't be illegal or somehow indicative of criminality.
Same thing with self custody of crypto.
kspacewalk2 · 1h ago
It's not illegal. They're talking about flagging it as "suspicious". Lots of legal things are flagged as suspicious by law enforcement.
doganugurlu · 1h ago
Would that make it a probable cause for searches and seizures?
If so, that would be pretty bad right?
doganugurlu · 1h ago
I think you are conflating 2 things:
- ability to privately give money to someone (mechanism is irrelevant, by hand or by way of a blockchain)
- self-custody risks for uninformed users
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.
bsenftner · 2h ago
I have a grad school professor that owes me $1M dollars on a bet that the Patriot Act would never end. I told him he was painfully naive and not suitable to each graduate school economics with such thinking.
elictronic · 5m ago
Professor response after ignoring rambling student. Ok. Walks away.
tmn · 1h ago
Was there concrete term limits to 'never'. Otherwise I fear you were the naive one.
Snarky comment meant in good humor.
GLdRH · 1h ago
He can pick up his million dollars at the end of eternity
acaloiar · 1h ago
Unless you used different language for the bet, you lost it the moment it was made.
"Never" may be falsified by "at least once", but affirmed only by "never". So I'm afraid only you could have ever been on the hook for the $1M, and may still be!
Your prof made a good bet.
xandrius · 1h ago
He's the smart one, you haven't won yet and he knows it.
yepitwas · 1h ago
War on Terror AUMF is still in force and is why the President can just decide to bomb whatever country they want without asking for permission, now.
All that shit after 9/11 was crazy and dangerous, and some of us said that at the time, and go figure, the fucking obviously true things we were saying have turned out to be... true. What a surprise.
dragonwriter · 1h ago
> War on Terror AUMF is still in force and is why the President can just decide to bomb whatever country they want without asking for permission, now.
The War on Terror AUMF relies on a Presidential determinatiom that the targets “planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or person”.
But the President has had implicit blanket permission to bomb whoever he wants with a time limit ever since the War Powers Act was passed.
mrguyorama · 1h ago
People who protested this horse shit were called unamerican for christs sake. Bush Jr said the literal words "you are either with us, or against us". The right went into utter hysterics about France not wanting to help our BS invasion.
The right loves to say that violent rhetoric is the left's fault, while they wished us harm for not wanting to invade a random country in the middle east that wasn't even related to the terrorist attack.
Meanwhile, all that horseshit with the TSA only ever enriched a couple people connected to the admin.
yepitwas · 20m ago
> Meanwhile, all that horseshit with the TSA only ever enriched a couple people connected to the admin.
I'm pretty sure Homeland Security was only created because it was easier to steer a pile of brand-new contracts for a brand-new organization to the "right" places, than it would have been if they'd simply expanded the roles of existing parts of the government that were already supposed to be doing what Homeland was supposedly created for.
tempodox · 1h ago
And it happens exactly as predicted. Surprise!
mightysashiman · 1h ago
Democrawhat?
delusional · 2h ago
> concentrating power in a few regulated intermediaries. That’s not healthy for innovation, or democracy.
How are "regulated intermediaries" not democratic? If they're regulated by the democratically elected government, that seems entirely democratic to me.
dmix · 1h ago
He said "not healthy for democracy", that doesn't imply the process to create the law wasn't democratic.
Democracy always has the risk of sabotaging itself by naive actors who don't respect fundamental freedoms because they fear the public.
baggachipz · 3h ago
If only there were some sort of loud opposition to this act, predicting exactly the situation we're in today. Our elected representatives would have had to take a hard look at this and reject it due to its danger!
criddell · 3h ago
Couldn't agree more. Blocking SOPA / PIPA a decade or so ago was a nice reminder that when enough people speak up, bad laws can be avoided.
righthand · 2h ago
At the same time the legislature snuck in turning the US into a police state into the 2012 Defense spending bill. So while SOPA and PIPA was defeated, people did not pay “enough” attention in the end.
If we had that kind of reaction to making your internet worse as we did to making our rights worse we would be better off.
Mistletoe · 4h ago
Maybe in 2028 a presidential candidate can run with removing the Patriot Act as one of their campaign points. I suspect the world will be very different then. The America I knew, remembered, and loved started dying with the passage of the Patriot Act.
Xelbair · 3h ago
Given how patriot act survived many terms of both republicans and democrats i highly doubt it.
It is a extremely convenient act for whoever is in power.
mothballed · 3h ago
There needs to be something like the federal equivalent of a referendum. I think with that, it would be possible to get rid of the patriot act and legalize weed, both of which seem to have popular support but zero chance of majority of representatives backing because they don't want to be liable for the worst-case corner-cases in the aftermath.
runako · 2h ago
We are constantly voting in primaries and general elections. We vote in federal elections every two years, state elections generally at least as frequently, though often not in federal election year. We vote for mayor and city council and insurance commissioner and Secretary of State and county commission.
We don't need a referendum, we just need to choose representation that wants the same things we want. (Alternate formation: Americans do not want these things as much as some of us think they do.)
mothballed · 2h ago
By referendum I meant to be able to vote directly on a specific law.
If you look at how weed was legalized, it required a referendum in many (most?) states because no representative wants to be the guy that has his face plastered everywhere when some kid dies after he smokes some legal weed and smashes into a pole, even if most his constituents wanted the policy.
Representatives generally have to be risk averse to get to the point they can even represent people on issues. This means they are extremely reluctant to vote for anything that might come back to bite them somehow, even if it is popular.
>Alternate formation: Americans do not want these things as much as some of us think they do
There is extremely overwhelming evidence that a supermajority of americans have wanted medical marijuana to be federally legal for many years. And overwhelming evidence the representatives have not been successfully bringing that forward.
runako · 1h ago
Absolutely.
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.
mrguyorama · 58m ago
>If you look at how weed was legalized, it required a referendum
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.
mothballed · 39m ago
The federal government is currently controlled by Republicans, so it seems relevant regardless of whether you think they should be in power or not, no?
ksenzee · 1h ago
The first-past-the-post system, combined with our current primary system, is set up such that most Americans do not get the representation they actually want, and Congress is made up of extremists. We don’t have the Congress we have because most Americans actually want it that way.
conception · 3h ago
Can you imagine the world today if Bernie had won?
garciasn · 3h ago
An interesting what-if scenario; but, let's assume Sanders won and all else remained largely the same as it has:
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.
smallmancontrov · 3h ago
Yes. There are a few moments when Biden floated something that sounded like a promise made to Bernie and it got laughed out of congress by both sides of the aisle. The "capital gains income is income" proposal is probably the cleanest example. There would have been more of that and not a lot done. To make real change, you need congress on board and possibly the courts too.
ta1243 · 1h ago
> 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
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.
bluGill · 3h ago
Many people will imagine things. However history constantly suggests that most of those are very different from the reality that results.
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.
bluSCALE4 · 3h ago
Sanders is gutless and acts like the Democrats are the greater of the two evils even as they silenced him and prevented from being their front runner.
Aunche · 3h ago
Just because a politician does the most virtue signaling towards the left doesn't mean that they'll produce the most progressive results. Bernie has a very poor track record of coalition building. He was getting into fights with Manchin even though he was needed as the 50th vote for the American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act.
palmfacehn · 2h ago
He's never been a champion of financial freedom on an individual basis. He's consistently advocated for deeper and more intrusive regulations on cryptocurrencies.
PleasureBot · 2h ago
Probably very similar unfortunately. The current state of US politics is that any policy further than center or maybe slightly left of center has a snowball's chance in hell of making it through Congress. The best case scenarios is probably what Biden accomplished: temporarily pausing the slide into far-right authoritarianism. Maybe he's able to pass some extremely watered down version of health care reform or tax reform but that seems unlikely. Certainly nothing like true progressive platform he ran on is possible in the US right now.
dboreham · 1h ago
I'm guessing similar to the Obama administration. E.g. he couldn't get proper healthcare reform passed.
bongodongobob · 3h ago
Yes, it would have been 4 years of zero progress because he would have been stonewalled by both parties.
disgruntledphd2 · 3h ago
I think the big difference would have been around Covid. The Trump administration really, really dropped the ball there, and a potential Sanders administration might have done better (i.e. invested money in preventing it from getting out of Asia, as was done for SARS 1).
Now, that might not have worked but anything might have had a pretty large impact on global/US deaths.
AngryData · 1h ago
That still sounds like a dream compared to everything else we have seen done.
blindriver · 3h ago
He was sabotaged by the DNC. Even Elizabeth Warren said that the nomination process was rigged by the DNC. Absolute corruption and the world would absolutely be a different place.
But his support of ratcheting up the Ukraine war disappointed profoundly. That’s not the Bernie I would have voted for.
ActorNightly · 1h ago
That has been disproven. He ran again in primaries during 2020 and did horribly there. The progressives are just not popular, and they don't really do much to work with the rest of the Democrats. Unlike Republicans, where the party forerunner basically gets unilateral support from everyone Republican including those he personally insulted or harmed.
DanHulton · 3h ago
Alternatively, it could have been over long ago with a lot less loss of life, if Ukraine had been supported more full-throatedly, instead of allowing to drag on as it has.
Sometimes you gotta rip that bandaid off.
throawaywpg · 1h ago
supporting Ukraine has always been in America's interests. How embarassing it must be for Trump to be publicly humiliated by Putin over a cease fire.
JumpCrisscross · 1h ago
> a presidential candidate can run with removing the Patriot Act as one of their campaign points
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.
No comments yet
mothballed · 4h ago
Ron Paul already did that. Not very popular.
thesuitonym · 3h ago
There are many reasons Ron Paul was not very popular.
aleatorianator · 3h ago
popular means whatever Hollywood decided to like
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.
AlecSchueler · 2h ago
It's called the patriot act, anyone fighting it is instantly framed as anti-American.
n0n0n4t0r · 4h ago
Given how the democracy is attacked, I'm not sure there will be an election in 2028
owlbite · 1h ago
There will almost certainly be an election in 2028. The degree to which it will be rigged through gerrymandering, voter intimidation, voter suppression and/or blatant cheating is a different question.
krapp · 1h ago
The answer is "as much as legal, and maybe a little more" as with all American elections.
you don't make improvements to a house, adorn it with gold all over, make 200m improvements if you have the intention of leaving.
behaviour says more than words
hamdingers · 2h ago
Every president remodels and redecorates the White House, often to a much greater degree. The consternation over it is an intentional distraction.
dboreham · 1h ago
It's done as an intentional distraction. The guy is a top class troll after all.
ptaffs · 3h ago
i think the person you are talking about doesn't treat houses like most people, i mean he (and his kind) lives for short term gratification and will move on to another house and decorate that with gold.
potato3732842 · 3h ago
>he (and his kind) lives for short term gratification and will move on to another house and decorate that with gold.
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.
ta1243 · 1h ago
You don't adorn it with gold if you have taste.
Trump is not going to live much longer than 2028 anyway.
krapp · 45m ago
I think he had a stroke at the 9/11 ceremony and no one is talking about it yet.
And there was definitely some weirdness with his hand, the absence that convinced people he was dead, some odd rumors about his shirt sleeve and suit implying he was hiding medical devices or some kind of injury, an "AI" glitch in a recent video which may have been debunked, and his obvious mental and emotional degradation when confronted with the Epstein stuff.
I am absolutely convinced Trump is only being kept alive by ritual blood sacrifice or that he's being puppeted by Grok through a Neuralink or something.
Biden got taken down by the the "crippling senile dementia" meme because it's only a problem when it's Democrats, but Trump seems worse off than Biden ever was. The bastard will probably live another thirty years though, somehow.
Consultant32452 · 3h ago
One less thing to worry about
black6 · 3h ago
I might turn out to vote if there was a candidate whose sole platform plank was to repeal as many existing laws as possible.
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.
ActorNightly · 2h ago
1) If Trump somehow survives till 2028, there aren't gonna be elections in 2028 (or at least fare ones, if Democratic candidate wins Trump is gonna declare national emergency on suspect of voter fraud). TBD if Vance and the other crazies are in the same boat.
2) America started dying way before when we thought things like being anti woke was more important than policy.
ivape · 3h ago
No candidate can do that. The children were raised to be racist and ignorant. That basically means you are going to deal with poorly raised feral racist and entitled children. You aren’t going to rehabilitate that in your lifetime, the childhoods are fucked up. Maybe in 30-40 years these people will have a come to Jesus moment, but we don’t have a malleable national moral character to appeal to helpful sensibilities given how poorly the prior generation failed at raising proper children with good moral character.
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.
Consultant32452 · 3h ago
the average man does not want to be free. he simply wants to be safe.
~H.L. Mencken
The bad guys will say you only need privacy if you’re guilty and the plebs will lap it up
LightBug1 · 3h ago
We all remember fighting this battle at the time ...
Great to know our prediction of where this would end up was right.
Tragic to know our prediction of where this would end up was right.
I can only hope those at the time who denied this are caught up in said dragnet. A bit like immigrants voting for Trump, I digress.
jmyeet · 5m ago
This should surprise literally nobody. Let me briefly explain the US political landscape.
Classic liberalism is a pollitical and moral philosophy that came about in the last 600+ years that (among other things) enshrined individualism and private property. This evolved hand in hand with enclosures (ie private property) and ultimately led to capitalism as an economic system.
Colloquially, "liberal" is used to describe someobody who is socially progressive, typically a Democrat, but that really has nothing to do with the origins.
Neoliberalism is what liberalism evolved into, primarily in the 20th century. The key principles are that capitalism (the "free market") is the solution to basically all problems and deregulation (to increase profits, basically).
Everybody is a (neo)liberal. Democrats and Republicans both. Note that "leftists" are by definition not neoliberals and are anti-capitalist but people often mistakenly use terms like "liberal" and "leftist" interchangeably when they couldn't be more different.
Imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. Fascism is capitalism in crisis. The Democratic Party as it exists in the US today, is controlled opposition.
So we come to the Overton window. This is how it goes:
1. Republicans pass some legislation like the Patriot Act to take away rights, usually under the guise of "security". The Patriot Act of course was passed in the aftermath of 9/11;
2. Ultimately the Democrats get in office and... don't reverse it. It becomes the new normal. They do this by being institutionalists. But defending institutions is merely an excuse for inaction.
3. Come the next election the Patriot Act or the border wall or whatever will the new normal and some even more fascist legislation will be on the table. As an example, try and find the daylight between the immigration plan of the Kamala Harris 2024 campaign and the Trump 2020 immigration plan (that Democrats opposed at the time).
Nobody cares about our individual rights. Things continue to get worse because both parties will always choose the US imperial project and the profits of corporations over your rights. We are six companies in a trenchcoat.
crazygringo · 3h ago
The headline is not supported by the article.
The actual list of "suspicious activities" in the article is about pooling, structuring, delaying transactions -- the stuff you do to hide activity, whether for good or bad.
It says nothing whatsoever about self-custody. The author makes the imaginary leap because they say they personally recommend doing all those things with self-custody. But they're totally separate things.
So as far as I can tell, the headline is just false clickbait.
They also claim:
> If enacted, any user who leverages these tools will be flagged as a suspicious... and could potentially be sent to prison.
I don't think that's the case? Having a transaction considered suspicious doesn't send you to prison. At best it seems like traditional banks might not permit a transaction, or it could be used as supporting evidence for separate actual illegal activities like money laundering? But going to prison requires being convicted of an actual crime. Not just activity that is "suspicious".
decimalenough · 3h ago
The draft text explicitly bans single-use addresses, which are used by any self-respecting wallet (Exodus, Ledger, Trezor) these days.
The actual problem with the article/headline is that the "Patriot Act" has expired. Although I'm sure there are plenty of similarly vague laws that could be used to justify this.
lukeschlather · 1h ago
What text are you referring to? The article has a screenshot of a tweet with a screenshot of an excerpt that seems fair to paraphrase as "anyone behaved in this sort of activity is suspicious." I don't see anything about a ban and if you're only using single-use addresses that seems probably not suspicious in absence of all the other things which if you're doing all of them, seem objectively like they can only be described as money laundering.
observationist · 1h ago
If you've got nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about!
Nobody will ever run afoul of the system or fall through the cracks.
We only have the best and brightest bureaucrats who won't make mistakes.
Nobody will ever be attacked with this for politicized reasons.
This will never be used to debank or isolate or penalize or attack an innocent person.
And even if it did, the government would never use its immunity from prosecution to evade accountability!
Don't be paranoid, and don't worry! We're the good guys!
JumpCrisscross · 1h ago
> If you've got nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about!
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.
chaostheory · 52m ago
Observationist forgot to add a /s to the end of their comment
JumpCrisscross · 37m ago
It wasn't missed. Dodging the slipper-slope surfers is practically table stakes for discussing surveillance.
pessimizer · 2h ago
> The author makes the imaginary leap because they say they personally recommend doing all those things with self-custody.
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.
roenxi · 2h ago
That is an attack on self-custody. If you hold Bitcoin you now have an elevated risk of being picked up in some dragnet and suffering random consequences in unrelated parts of the financial system for reasons that you don't understand. If Bitcoin holders weren't alerted by articles like this, there is actually a pretty reasonable chance that they go in, experiment with Bitcoin and trip off a surveillance system as being "suspicious".
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.
JumpCrisscross · 1h ago
> If you hold Bitcoin you now have an elevated risk of being picked up in some dragnet and suffering random consequences in unrelated parts of the financial system for reasons that you don't understand
This is exxageration. If you operate a cash business, you're under the same heightened supervision.
zerkten · 1h ago
>> That is an attack on self-custody. If you hold Bitcoin you now have an elevated risk of being picked up in some dragnet and suffering random consequences in unrelated parts of the financial system for reasons that you don't understand.
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.
lordofgibbons · 3h ago
Bitcoin maximalists are learning that having a non-fungible and fully traceable ledger might be a problem. Even Satoshi called this out! As is, BTC is somewhat of a privacy nightmare. All of your transactions are on the public ledger for anyone with basic knowledge of statistics to correlate and see all of your transactions. Blockchain Analytics is big business!
All the things the Treasury is considering to be "suspicious activity" simply can't be tracked with something that's non-fungible and untracable like Monero. This suspicious activity - aka privacy - is just how all monero transactions are done.
tchock23 · 2h ago
That assumes Bitcoin maximalists ultimately see it as a means of transaction. The ones I come across in the wild are purely maximalists for speculative purposes and couldn’t care less about the “practical” use cases for it.
rocqua · 2h ago
But with Monero, you see that it is effectively shut off from the Fiat ecosystem entirely. The proposal here clearly lays out how bad Bitcoin is for privacy. But it's not like the more private alternatives are actually allowed to be viable alternatives.
ibejoeb · 2h ago
Yeah. I understand the excitement over the past two decades about the possibility of cryptocurrencies, but it came with a lot of naivete. After the fight to create sovereign central banks, did anyone seriously think that they were just going to give it up? Sure, maybe they can't stop you technologically, but it's very easy to simply make it unlawful, and then the men (and robots) with guns call.
SubiculumCode · 1h ago
Very true. In my opinion, and strictly from an American-centric view, privacy should only extend to transactions within borders between citizens. As soon as it involves transactions from outside our borders, then it is a national security concern. We know, right now, that both Russia and China are fueling internal political tension via massive and sophisticated disinformation/influence campaigns, a certain part of which involves paying influencers, extremists, shady media outlets, maybe a Representative or three in America to push their agendas, foment discontent aiming to destabilize and control the United States. Monero is definitely being used in this information warfare. I am pro-privacy, pro- individual rights, but we have to resolve this central tension of these things and the very real hyper connected world we live in which very real nation-state enemies. I am at the point where I think restricting the internet to allied countries might actually be a good idea, as currently we are leaving citizens unprotected from every nation-state actor who wishes to manipulate us with targeted, data-analytic, bot- and ai-empowered campaign against us. It is out of control, and as long as a monetary instrument like crypto enables that attack surface, it will be hard for me to support crypto-maxamialism.
thrance · 3h ago
If Monero ever came close to Bitcoin's popularity, it would be outlawed. Plain as that. You can't get freedom through technology.
nunobrito · 2h ago
Monero has already been delisted from relevant exchanges last year because "reasons".
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.
user34283 · 2h ago
Freedom here means transacting without:
--
anti-money laundering safeguards
sanctions enforcement
consumer protection
tax enforcement
fraud prevention systems
--
It is very true that technology won't get you this freedom from sensible legal requirements we impose on financial transactions.
That's obviously a good thing, but I guess people who are in crypto would disagree.
palmfacehn · 1h ago
Conversely, property rights are also a good thing. I don't agree that it is as simple as you present it. Even if you believe that the state has a right to confiscate, regulate or inflate away value for a "greater collective good", reasonable people might also recognize the potential for abuse.
So no, it isn't obviously a "good thing", unless you reject these nuances in favor of an all powerful state.
user34283 · 1h ago
Talk about rejecting nuance, but now the state is "all powerful" because you can't transact privately.
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.
palmfacehn · 1h ago
Even if you accept those premises, reasonable people would expect limits on the power of the state to infringe upon property rights, even when backed by a popular majority. Furthermore, the principle of individual self-ownership is a key starting point for modern, liberal ideas of law. Of course you are free to reject those premises, but I would characterize that as authoritarian rather than obvious.
user34283 · 1h ago
Property rights exist within a legal framework defined by the people, through law.
What you're talking about here with self-ownership and the state "infringing" upon property rights when you're taxed and can't transact privately, it seems less than "reasonable".
It seems like you're trying to paint routine and widely accepted functions of democratic governments as if they were unreasonable, authoritarian overreach.
immibis · 1h ago
Both should be limited. Almost everything should be limited. Deciding the limits is called politics.
palmfacehn · 46m ago
Political solutions are often messy and complex. Pragmatic fixes are rarely obvious and overreaches are common. Reforms are ongoing. Conversely, absolutists have no use for nuance.
In an organized society there is no absolute right to personal property, there never has been and there never will be.
Mouvelie · 2h ago
Which, I believe, would make it even more prevalent. It would be the confession that they cannot control it, and while most people would be deterred by this, I can see a shadow economy growing because (or thanks ?) to this.
1gn15 · 2h ago
It's not so black and white. Obviously social and political change is the goal. But in the meantime technology can help if you're living under repression.
Take VPNs and Tor helping people jump the Great Firewall of China for example. Obviously, yes, this is a political problem; the GFW shouldn't exist. But it would be foolish to dismiss the technology as a vital part of fighting back against the state.
immibis · 1h ago
Monero is outlawed in the EU. It's not illegal to possess, but no business is allowed to touch it.
Which proves that it does what it says. (Much like when the police suspect someone of being a drug dealer for using GrapheneOS)
GeoAtreides · 2h ago
You are being downvoted, but you are correct. I am east european and I know how hard the fist of the State hits. Sometimes I think westerners see technology like some special moves that you can quickly combo so you can defeat the evil boss at the end. No, there are no special moves, just a boot stamping on a human face -- forever.
mindslight · 1h ago
> You can't get freedom through technology
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?
8organicbits · 3h ago
There's a conflict between Bitcoin as a public ledger, privacy, and money laundering.
With a bank you can have anti-money laundering and bank secrecy. Transaction are known by the bank, can be subject to subpoena or automatic reporting, but are non-public.
If you want privacy on Bitcoin you need to do things that look a lot like money laundering. Governments banning money laundering isn't a surprise. The value of Bitcoin, if transactions are fully public and attributable to pseudonyms, is questionable.
In some ways, the problem Bitcoin has is that it is inflexible. Governments want to change the rules in finance from time to time, traditional finance adapts.
JumpCrisscross · 1h ago
> There's a conflict between Bitcoin as a public ledger, privacy, and money laundering
There is, to be fair, a legitimate debate to be had about dismantling our anti-money laundering infrastructure.
skeezyboy · 2h ago
>If you want privacy on Bitcoin
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?
chain030 · 3h ago
Essentially decentralisation sounds nice, but doesnt work in practice.
ddtaylor · 2h ago
Most governments aren't decentralized in their structure, which causes the "problem". If you have private entities that coordinate with each other it works quite well, but the world is very used to big centralized governments that "solve" all their problems.
chain030 · 2h ago
And, so what? You've posted a whole load of nothing.
ddtaylor · 1h ago
It's a pretty direct response to your claim that "decentralisation sounds nice, but doesn't work in practice". Decentralization has worked in practice many times in many ways.
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.
fsflover · 2h ago
Did you hear about the Internet?
lokar · 1h ago
Crime is pretty heavily regulated on the Internet, has been for years. If that regulation had been impossible, it would not have been allowed to grow, and would have been shut down / banned.
fsflover · 1h ago
You should check out I2P.
chain030 · 2h ago
The internet for the average person has converged to a handful of products and services.
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.
fsflover · 2h ago
People prefer centralized services until they enshittify, after which people move to the next thing, thanks to the decentralization.
chain030 · 2h ago
Google, Meta and so on are not dying.
So whats your point fella?
fsflover · 1h ago
It might be slow for the megacorps, which don't even try to follow laws, but
Bitcoin, tor, bittorrent are all perfect examples of decentralization simply not working in practice
atomic128 · 1h ago
I can't tell if you are being sarcastic. Obviously Bitcoin doesn't "work" for any purpose. But in contrast, Tor obviously works. Here are constantly updating HTTP response dumps from the Tor hidden service ecosystem: https://rnsaffn.com/zg4/ (NSFW) There is a lot happening inside the Tor network.
ddtaylor · 1h ago
It's been terrible that BitTorrent doesn't work anymore. I can only download 10TB of all the movies and TV shows our family has ever wanted spanning 60 years. It has to run off this massive server in the closest as big as our cat! Sucks our grandma can't access it from across the country via Tailscale and a bit of DNS abuse.
Nifty3929 · 3h ago
A lot of people keep looking for technology solutions to political problems. The fact is that privacy, especially of financial transactions, is becoming illegal. Any technology that allows you to send or spend money anonymously will be attacked by our governments. They won't be allowed.
You can argue about whether you can get away with it due to difficulty of enforcement, but all that does is turn us all into criminals. They won't put ALL of in jail, but they can put ANY of us in jail - the ones they don't like.
ddtaylor · 1h ago
> The fact is that privacy, especially of financial transactions, is becoming illegal. Any technology that allows you to send or spend money anonymously will be attacked by our governments. They won't be allowed.
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.
user34283 · 2h ago
Spot on.
Some think we need financial freedom, but in reality it's the freedom to fund scams and malware, launder money, dodge taxes, and buy stuff that’s illegal.
That won't become legal just because you use "Monero" or whatever. Obviously we can't have privacy for financial transactions.
rocqua · 2h ago
You forgot a few things on that list that people would like freedom for:
advocating for (or against) trans rights, protesting against the deportation of migrants, advocate against gun-control, and donating to (anti) palestinian causes
Are just a few things that people would like the freedom to do.
The point being, financial privacy is an important part of having a functioning democracy. But at the same time, financial control and limits are also an important part of a functioning democracy, for e.g. the 'freedoms' you mention.
In the end, neither perfect privacy, not perfect surveilance are what we need. The best solution will be somewhere in the middle, with nuance.
user34283 · 1h ago
> financial privacy is an important part of having a functioning democracy
No, I don't think it is. Perhaps privacy for speech and voting are.
realo · 1h ago
Heinous speech is allowed in the USA but is totally illegal in Canada.
I live in Canada. Anonymous heinous speech? No thank you. Go away.
doganugurlu · 1h ago
How is privacy for voting different than privacy for funding the candidate?
ianmiers · 2h ago
This is inaccurate and in a hilarious way.
Treasury is not coming after Bitcoin. There's an update in an ongoing rulemaking process that got reported here[0] as banning mixing and privacy tools. It may have been blown out of proportion[1], but I am not a lawyer, and certainly banning these tools would be bad. The thing is, Bitcoin's not private—every transaction is public for everyone to download. It's Twitter for your bank account. And that comes with serious privacy, safety, and boring commercial counterparty risks that should be addressed. These kinds of tools exist to mitigate that problem. The irony is that Bitcoin has largely refused to address this obvious issue, so no, Treasury isn't coming for Bitcoin. Indeed, there been years of people arguing Bitcoin would be just fine with no privacy protections.
[0] https://www.therage.co/us-government-to-bring-patriot-act-to...
[1] https://x.com/valkenburgh/status/1966174324701778071"
jollyllama · 3h ago
This would come as no surprise, since all the original promises of Bitcoin circa 15-ish years ago are long dead. The turning point occurred when all exchanges agreed to report transactions directly to the IRS. I say this as someone who had an interest prior to that but lost all interest when the Crypto community sold out its ideals and consented to certain regulations in the interest of mass marketing cryptocurrency for the purpose of speculative profit.
elif · 4h ago
I'm confused how the connection was made between "here are our guidelines for suspicious activity" and "self custody is outlawed"
mothballed · 4h ago
It can be hard to figure out exactly what is outlawed with banking interactions. It seems a lot of the KYC/AML stuff is based on industry best practices and guidelines. There's no law you need a state ID with address to open a bank account, but when I tried to open up a bank account without an address I found it basically impossible. The bank will then cite that these practices are what they're held to as law, because the law itself is vague and relies on more nebulous customs.
So what is called "guidelines" one day becomes legally binding later with no act of congress.
Unfortunately there's a massive swath of mere guidelines and regulation that end up having legal binding. For instance, a Navy sailor was recently sent to jail for 20 years for having gun parts that were cut up the wrong way, the "wrong way" being the right way with previous mere guidance and the wrong way apparently being the fact that some time since then the guidance changed but not the law.
potato3732842 · 3h ago
That's the whole point. They can't overtly outlaw things because aggrieved parties would sue and win. So they soft outlaw them with expensive record keeping requirements and ambiguity because no business big enough to win but smaller than a giant mega-corp will intentionally risk going toe to toe with the government in court as doing so would likely be financially ruinous.
And even if the government doesn't look like it's disposed to do that in your situation you're still sticking your neck out by deviating from the herd because then you can't screech "standard business practice" when some contrived chain of facts results in you fending off a civil suit for whatever reason.
This isn't just a banking thing or a guns thing, you see examples in every industry once you know the pattern.
mothballed · 3h ago
As long as the government only tazes your dogs and ruins your business, you can't even sue against the law even on constitutional grounds.
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).
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.
tantalor · 3h ago
De facto vs. de justo
ThePowerOfFuet · 3h ago
De jure.
moduspol · 4h ago
> creating and using single-use wallets, addresses, or accounts, and sending [cryptocurrency] through such wallets, addresses, or accounts through a series of independent transactions
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.
elif · 3h ago
What you quoted is regarding the use of a SERIES of single use wallets. What is the "normal Bitcoin" use case for funneling money through a chain of throwaway wallets?
moduspol · 3h ago
The quote is "single-use wallets, addresses, or accounts." If you download any normal Bitcoin wallet today, it'll use a series of words to derive a series of private keys that are used by the wallet. Each one gets a different address.
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.
Ajedi32 · 3h ago
Doesn't that result in multiple transactions/transaction fees if you ever need to spend more than a single wallet contains?
moduspol · 3h ago
A transaction can have multiple inputs and outputs, and with these Bitcoin wallets, they always do. Pretty much any transaction you make is going to look like it's going to at least two places: the actual intended recipient for the amount you wanted to send, and another (probably new) address that you control. The inputs could be from a single one of your addresses or multiple.
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.
jrmg · 3h ago
People are interpreting the ‘and’ here as meaning ‘either of these things’ rather than ‘these things in sequence’ as you (and I) do.
whimsicalism · 3h ago
this is just standard practice
executive · 3h ago
optionality
idiotsecant · 4h ago
Because just about all those practices are what reasonable users of the protocol would do, and making your transactions 'suspicious' is synonymous with all the big players refusing to deal with you. It's a way of prohibiting behaviour outside the force of law, which is even more insidious.
andrewla · 55m ago
This is pure click bait that relies on a deliberate misreading of a 2023 notice [1] that tries to imply that "self custody" is being attacked in any form.
All that this is saying is that the government will try to track money movement to pursue criminal activity, including, unfortunately the criminal activity of moving money in a way that looks sketchy. This is something that we have decided we have to live with.
>Loading up a single address with too many UTXOs degrades the entropy of a public-private key pair and makes it easier to brute force a user's private key.
Is there a realistic risk there? If I use an address a million times, how much weaker is it? And how feasible would it be for an attacker to brute for it?
cypherpunks01 · 3h ago
Strictly speaking, loading an address with many UTXOs has no effect on security of the receiving address at all (beyond increasing its public profile).
The security concerns start happening after an address spends a UTXO. Before a P2WPKH (segwit) address is used, only the public key hash is known. In order to spend from it, the full public key needs to be revealed. That's why it's recommended to use single-use addresses, because a quantum computing attack or elliptic curve vulnerability could be used against an address where the attacker knows the public key, but would not work against an address where the pubkey has not yet been revealed.
So, the main security change happens after you spend from an address the first time. Subsequently, there are theoretical vulnerabilities that could occur after an address is spent from many times, but really only if the signer is malicious like dark skippy, or faulty and doesn't properly follow RFC 6979 deterministic signatures, leaking some signature entropy which could be used to crack the private key. The latter has happened with some bad custom wallet implementations, but these attacks are even further in the realm of theoretical, not super realistic, require faulty software/firmware to be implanted into signing devices.
Mouvelie · 2h ago
I feel like growing up is realizing that the government is just a big gang. They do what they want and will enforce with menace what they want. They can change the rules, take your stuff and it ain't stealing because they said so. Sigh.
amanaplanacanal · 1h ago
On the other hand you get to vote who is in the gang. So choose wisely.
nisegami · 1h ago
I recognized it in the opposite direction, after observing that gangs inevitably end up being quasi-states within their turf. They demonstrate almost everything I associate with statehood except for issuing their own currency. From there, the reverse (that governments are just big gangs) also flows naturally.
SubiculumCode · 1h ago
M question was on what legal/Constitutional basis does the Treasury have for expanding the Patriot Act? Is it because the law provides powers to the Treasury department to define areas that the law should apply? Or is it a case where the administration (once again) is assuming it can do something, the Constitution be damned?
theturtle · 2h ago
Find a way that is costs trump money or prevents him from making money, and this stuff will vanish instantly.
lokar · 1h ago
Small potatoes. Once he controls the Federal reserve they can print money and give it to him (in the guise of a sovereign wealth fund).
loeg · 1h ago
The screenshot-of-a-screenshot seems to be talking about mixers (e.g. TornadoCash). But ultimately, what did you expect?
It was forbidden to have more than 5 ounces of gold.
Mouvelie · 2h ago
Good for Bitcoin, then ? Is it becoming a form of Gold, for real ?
HPsquared · 2h ago
Anything which threatens to rock the financial boat too much will be banned.
MASNeo · 2h ago
If there would have been better policing of digital currency by its users against criminal actors, perhaps digital assets would be spared the attention and now regulation. Sadly, increasing adoption and privacy guarantees lure criminals same as legitimate users.
hedora · 36m ago
The US is being run by a convicted felon and is in the process of converting to a totalitarian state.
Any upcoming changes to privacy regulations are going to be to further that goal, not to crack down on crime.
drumhead · 2h ago
Considering how they're clamping down on anonymity wherever they can, crypto wasnt going to escape their clutches for very long. How long before its seperated from it original aim and just turned into a gambling token.
user34283 · 2h ago
> How long before its seperated from it original aim and just turned into a gambling token
Always has been.
I mean it was useful for online gaming related transactions, like 15 years ago.
Ever since it has become a more obvious scam with every passing year.
Today you can barely post about it on most major platforms without immediately spawning multiple spam comments trying to part you from your money.
Real value crypto adds to the economy: ~0.
Once this scam inevitable comes crashing down, it will probably take the stock market with it. And all for nothing but the enrichment of early crypto adopters.
matwood · 1h ago
Sounds like the cryptobros are about to have their turn with the Trump leopard eating their face...
mrguyorama · 39m ago
They didn't care when he personally rugpulled them for billions, why would this disrupt their sycophancy?
lokar · 1h ago
negative 10 years
Hendrikto · 2h ago
> We shouldn't have to live in a world where standards cater to the lowest common denominator, in this case criminals, and make things worse off for the overwhelming majority of the population.
hooverd · 24m ago
I'm convinced the the capital-c Crypto industry hates crypto. Don't use it as a currency! Give us interest free loans (stablecoins) and gamble!
angryGhost · 3h ago
> Loading up a single address with too many UTXOs degrades the entropy of a public-private key pair and makes it easier to brute force a user's private key.
Well that's not true... The key doesn't change because you added more bitcoin
dbdr · 2h ago
The quote does not say that the key changes. It says that each transaction makes it (a bit) easier to perform a brute force attack.
bilsbie · 2h ago
I always wonder why monero isn’t more popular?
nunobrito · 2h ago
Overton window. There is a lot of funding for youtube influencers to play with casino coins that are transparent and traceable. Those are basically looking for "money goes up" and don't really care about the crypto part.
Monero is only on the news for negative reasons when someone tries to bring it down or delists from yet another exchange. There isn't funding to make it popular, which I guess in the end it is really up to Monero users from pushing it up.
rocqua · 2h ago
On- and off- ramps suck. And there isn't much speculative value. So it misses the main 'use case' of crypto.
Its by far the best crypto-currency for making payments. But people care very little about making payments with crypto, and exchanging between Fiat and Monero is very difficult, so its not an easy payment system either.
chaostheory · 39m ago
Assuming this is true, how would this be enforced and tracked?
overfeed · 2h ago
The Bitcoin lobby are definitely getting their money's worth.
skeezyboy · 2h ago
thats ma boi trump, back at it again with the absolute opposite of what he said hed do!
koakuma-chan · 4h ago
As someone who hasn't read the article, is holding bitcoin in your own wallet going to become illegal? Also, which wallet do you guys recommend, I use Coinbase but it sucks.
moduspol · 3h ago
It doesn't look like that explicitly will become illegal, but this part undermines a lot of the value of it:
> creating and using single-use wallets, addresses, or accounts, and sending [cryptocurrency] through such wallets, addresses, or accounts through a series of independent transactions
That's the default way Bitcoin wallets work, and it helps a ton to improve privacy. If we were limited to always reusing the same few addresses, it'll be very easy for not just law enforcement but ANYONE to see just how much Bitcoin you have.
If that's a small amount, it's not a risk. If it's a big amount, now you've got a target on your back. For me to accept Bitcoin payments, I need to publish my address, and from that address, you'll be able to see how much Bitcoin I have (and trace other transactions) over time.
Imagine everyone in town knowing that you've got six figures (or more) of money that can undoubtedly be extracted from you by invading your home, taking family members hostage, etc. At that point, you may think it's safer to keep it in an exchange, and you may be right.
truffet · 3h ago
Isn't Coinbase an exchange? Or do they offer a wallet as well? (Is the private key in your control?)
moduspol · 3h ago
Coinbase is an exchange, but they also acquired a standalone wallet that's been rebranded a few times, but now it seems to be called Base (Formerly Coinbase Wallet).
koakuma-chan · 3h ago
No it's not in my control but I use it because it is convenient to buy and sell.
csomar · 3h ago
If you are in Europe, it already kinda is. You need to declare/KYC that wallet. Europe also want these self-custodial wallets to become "accessible" somehow to the authorities.
Mistletoe · 4h ago
Use a hardware wallet like Trezor.
cypherpunks01 · 3h ago
Yes, and for even higher security, use a bitcoin-only airgapped hardware wallet like Coinkite's Coldcard or Foundation's Passport Core.
jmclnx · 3h ago
Good luck with that. If you are on a 'real' OS like Linux or BSD and have *coins there, I doubt anyone would know. Especially if you have disk encryption and using a trusted VPN or tor or something like that. Remember to enable MAC spoofing too.
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" :)
Self-Custody is problematic for any government as it allows any citizens to accumulate any kind of wealth they have and simply "transfer" it overseas without any oversight and in a ridiculously short amount of time. Some countries (rich/developed countries) allow free capital transfer but these transfers are regulated and also some jurisdictions are sanctioned. Transferring money abroad, from the perspective of the origin country, just moves the money inside the origin country system from one party to another. So it is well within the visibility and control of the state, especially for large amounts of money.
Today, you can brain-memorize $1bn in Bitcoin and move yourself from one country to another; and depending on the country; might be able to exercise different amounts of that purchasing power. Control moves from the origin country to the reception country.
Russia and China were always hostile because of this. The Chinese authorities regarded Bitcoin as some sort of capital flight scheme. Now both Europe and the USA are too. I think Bitcoin only chance for survival, in its current form, is if these two poles do use it as a mechanism to attack one another. Mining is already balanced between East and West.
anjel · 2h ago
Sounds like capital flight is anticipated to become a thing. Why might that be?
FergusArgyll · 3h ago
The tweet says "could be labled suspicious" the article says could be made illegal.
I've never heard of this website but if your only source is a tweet and you misrepresent it, I don't believe it.
I'll take bets: By EOY 2026 it will be legal in the US to use single use addresses
sneak · 3h ago
Financial privacy and national security are fundamentally at odds. With financial privacy and real freedom, you can hire a competing army.
The state will never allow large scale financial privacy because it poses an existential threat to the state.
graemep · 3h ago
It is a nuisance to the state.
I do not see how it is an existential threat.
Nation states existed for centuries in which money was frequently held as cash and even large transactions were often done in cash. its still common (or was until very recently) in a lot of (mostly poor) countries
> With financial privacy and real freedom, you can hire a competing army.
Having the money to pay an army is a long way from hiring one. Recruitment and buying military equipment at any scale would be obvious.
jmyeet · 1h ago
Bitcoin is a perfect microcosm for the tech sector in what happens when people who don't know how something works and refuse to understand it, try to replace it.
Every aspect of the modern financial system exists for a reason. It evolved over time to deal with problems. Things like reversible transactions are a feature not a bug.
Bitcoin is where all the gold bugs went who lamented the end of the gold standard. Most of these people didn't understand that at no point in history was the US dollar 100% backed by gold (or silver, originally). Never.
What backs the US dollar isn't gold or oil or anythihng else we dig up out of the ground. It's long schlong of the US military.
I've also said that crypt currency exists only because the government hasn't shut it down. All it would take is a policy change from the US government to say banks who have access to the US financial system cannot trade in Bitcoin and it would be over. Yes you could still have wallets (at least until the government starts going after Bitcoin farms, which again it could do) but what would you do with those coins?
Bitcoin is not, never has been and never will be an escape from the perils (some real, many imagined) of fiat currencies.
It's the worst kind of clickbait, and is actual, real fake news.
ExpertAdvisor01 · 1h ago
Only section 215 related to FISA surveillance expired.
Your comment is nonsense.
johnwheeler · 2h ago
Well, hopefully this will help prevent Bitcoin's biggest use case, which is criminal finance and money laundering. Why wouldn’t we want that?
rocqua · 1h ago
For very similar reasons why the US has the 5th amendment, why blanket surveillance is not considered a good thing by functioning democracies, and why most people want their porn-viewing habits to remain private.
There are plenty of bad things that need to be prevented, but a functioning democracy requires the ability to act outside the surveillance of both your peers, and the currently sitting government.
vvpan · 1h ago
What sources do you have that support that claim?
resters · 2h ago
It will be interesting to see how the pro-Trump crypto bros react to this. Likely by now the whole group has had a chance to invest heavily in various altcoins or whatever will be the beneficiary of government largesse, so these proposed (and difficult to enforce) restrictions are likely intended just to pump those for quick profits.
I'd argue that Bitcoin has been effectively immune to attacks like this by governments for nearly a decade.
mikemarsh · 3h ago
"The Patriot Act. Read it."
shadowgovt · 1h ago
This is not terribly surprising. Control of the monetary system is a key responsibility of the US federal government; it was always going to be the case that if Bitcoin became a meaningfully-sized part of the financial system the government would impose regulation.
Now we get to see how enforceable it is (and I suspect it's more enforceable than people wanted to assume... They can jail you indefinitely for refusing to divulge a password if the court finds it is not a violation of your Fifth Amendment rights to divulge it. https://xkcd.com/538/).
tolmasky · 2h ago
Does no one else find it weird seeing anything from this administration "anti-Bitcoin" at all? I wouldn't be surprised by this headline during a previous administration, but generally speaking, this administration has been very Bitcoin-friendly (and Bitcoin institutions friendly right back). To be clear, the simplest answer is "sure but that doesn't mean they have to agree on everything". But I would like to propose that if you ask the simple question of "who does this benefit?" it may suggest we are witnessing a different phenomenon here.
I think this might be the first indication that what we currently call "institutional Bitcoin supporters" are not "Bitcoin supporters" at all, or rather, what they call "Bitcoin" is not what you and I call "Bitcoin". Services like Coinbase and BTC ETFs don't really suffer from this development at all. In fact, I think it's quite obvious that obviously benefit from something like this (at least from the first-order effects). What's the alternative to self custody? Well... third-party custody. Especially since they are already bound up by KYC rules, right? Their is a cynical reading that there's nothing inconsistent with this development if you consider "institutional Bitcoin's" goals to primarily be replacing existing financial power structures with themselves. "Bitcoin" is just a means to an end. Their goals were only incidentally aligned with individual BTC holders since they were previously in similar circumstances as the "out group". Previous administrations were as suspicious of "Bitcoin companies" as any individual Bitcoin holder, perhaps even more so. But that's not the case anymore. Bitcoin companies have successfully been brought into the fold, so it's not even that they're necessarily "betraying" the values of Bitcoin true believers, you might argue that interpretation of shared values was entirely inferred to begin with.
Critically though, I think an important consequence of this is that Bitcoin purists and skeptics should realize that they arguably now have more in common than not, at least in the immediate term, and may be each other's best allies. In my experience, for most the existence of Bitcoin, its skeptics haven't really seen Bitcoin as a "threat." Instead, to admittedly generalize, their critiques have been mostly about Bitcoin being "broken" or "silly" or "misunderstanding the point of centralized systems", etc. These aren't really "oppositional" positions in the traditional "adversarial sense," more dismissive. In fact, the closest thing to an "active moral opposition" to Bitcoin that I've seen is an environmental one. IOW, Bitcoin true believers think about Bitcoin way more than Bitcoin skeptics do. Similarly, Bitcoin true believers really have nothing against skeptics other than... the fact that they occasionally talk shit about Bitcoin? IOW, Bitcoin skeptics are not "the natural enemy Bitcoin was designed to defeat".
But if you think about it, "institutional Bitcoin" sort of embodies something both these camps generally have hated since before Bitcoin. Whether you believe Bitcoin to be a viable answer or not, it is undeniable that the "idea" of Bitcoin is rooted in the distrust of these elitist financial institutions, that evade accountability, benefit from special treatment, and largely get to rig the larger system in their favor. Similarly, I don't think Bitcoin skeptics like these institutions or are "on their side". In fact, perhaps they'd argue that they predicted that Bitcoin wouldn't solve any of this and would just be another means of creating them. But IMO what they should both realize is that the most important threat right now is these institutional players. They are in fact, only "nominally" Bitcoin in a deep sense. From the perspective of true believers, their interests are actually in now way "essentially" aligned with any "original Bitcoin values," and from the perspective of skeptics, the threat they pose has very little to do with their use of "the Bitcoin blockchain".
They are arguably just another instantiation of the "late stage capitalist" playbook of displacing an existing government service in order to privatize its rewards. Coinbase could be argued to have more in common with Uber than Ledger wallets. Instead of consolidating and squeezing all the value from taxis though, the play is to do the same with currency itself. It is incidental that Uber happened to be so seemingly "government averse". In this context, it's actually helpful to cozy up to the government and provide the things government departments want that make no difference to fintech's bottom line (such as KYP). In fact, that might be their true value proposition. Bitcoin only enters the conversation because in order to replace a currency, you do... need a currency. Bitcoin was convenient. It was already there, it had a built-in (fervent) user base that was happy to do your proselytizing for you, and even saw you as a good "first step" for normies that couldn't figure out to manage their own wallet. The Bitcoin bubble was already there, why fight it when you can ride it?
Again, I think this is highly likely to be against the values of Bitcoin true believers and skeptics alike, and I also think that if the above is true, it represents an actual danger to us all. Recent events with credit card processors have already demonstrated that payment systems have proven to be incredibly efficient tools at stifling speech. In other words, this is arguably an "S-tier threat", on par with or perhaps worse than any sort of internet censorship or net neutrality. If so, we should treat it as such and work together.
btbuildem · 4h ago
Not a huge surprise, unfortunately.
esafak · 3h ago
I'm surprised because I thought the Trump administration was hot on crypto.
chii · 3h ago
They might be pro-crypto, but you're not in their group of special people allowed to anonymously own it. You have to use a wallet service owned by someone in that group, so that you're always under control.
moduspol · 3h ago
The vast majority of (especially less tech-savvy) crypto people are in it for the speculation. They have no interest in self-custody.
incone123 · 3h ago
Sure, the approved and controlled kind. Wheels of government turn so slow this idea probably started several administrations ago.
aeon_ai · 3h ago
I'm going to take a different tack on this one.
---
Point 1
Crime is real. Can we agree on that?
If you were in charge of identifying and locating criminals based on on-chain transaction data, what are the list of guidelines you'd put together to use PUBLIC DATA to determine suspicious behavior?
If you're competent, at all, the list would look like this. Let's not immediately jump to "self custody is gonna be outlawed"
----
Point 2
Bitcoin was designed this way. This data is public. This is HOW THE DAMN THING WORKS.
This article is written by a "Seasoned Bitcoiner", which is a term that reveals just how cooked they are. They haven't come to terms with the fact that the Bitcoin price is predicated on being the first, but certainly not the best public blockchain for realizing the goals of a global decentralized currency, whether you agree that's even a possibility or not.
Some people adopt ignorance -- Others were born in it, molded by it.
goda90 · 3h ago
What crime needs to be identified based on transactions? Tax evasion? I can't think of any others that don't leave behind a real world mark that would be the thing that initiates investigation.
otterley · 2h ago
Money laundering is the obvious one—and the primary reason crypto’s value is as high as it is.
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.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act
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.
Being confusing, I'm almost certain, was the entire point.
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.
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.
Note to self: stay out of New Hampshire.
> The Treasury Is Expanding The Patriot Act To Attack Bitcoin Self Custody
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?
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWBzZJxhQtY
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
Mere criminality wouldn’t put privacy in such an indefensible position. Look at who’s president.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Snarky comment meant in good humor.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_1933_German_parliamen...
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.
And there was definitely some weirdness with his hand, the absence that convinced people he was dead, some odd rumors about his shirt sleeve and suit implying he was hiding medical devices or some kind of injury, an "AI" glitch in a recent video which may have been debunked, and his obvious mental and emotional degradation when confronted with the Epstein stuff.
I am absolutely convinced Trump is only being kept alive by ritual blood sacrifice or that he's being puppeted by Grok through a Neuralink or something.
Biden got taken down by the the "crippling senile dementia" meme because it's only a problem when it's Democrats, but Trump seems worse off than Biden ever was. The bastard will probably live another thirty years though, somehow.
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.
2) America started dying way before when we thought things like being anti woke was more important than policy.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Which proves that it does what it says. (Much like when the police suspect someone of being a drug dealer for using GrapheneOS)
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?
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.
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.
So whats your point fella?
> Google
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
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44580682
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.
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.
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...
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
It was forbidden to have more than 5 ounces of gold.
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.
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.
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.
I'd argue that Bitcoin has been effectively immune to attacks like this by governments for nearly a decade.
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 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.
--- 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.