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 · 38m 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.
Whenever leftists say that "Trump is a symptom of an illness that has been metastasizing for a long time" this is what we mean.
No comments yet
baggachipz · 25m 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 · 3m 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.
arduanika · 3m ago
It was pretty clear to me where this was going as of exactly 24 years ago today. They never waste a crisis or a tragedy.
htoiertoi345345 · 17m ago
Guns will preserve freedoms - don't worry guy!
ivape · 3m ago
It’s been 200 something years, and America hasn’t stopped being racist. In fact, I am quite shocked that somehow the generation of previous racists managed to raise FRESH young racists. Racists raise racists.
It’s a disgusting revelation, there’s no point in national politics. The other half of America is literally not worth dealing with.
This type of racism, which is a dark trait, underpins a demographic. You’ll never get compassion and morality out of literally … half of America. So things like “stand up against the patriot act” is basically an impossibility due to this corruption.
Mistletoe · 45m 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 · 39m 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.
conception · 41m ago
Can you imagine the world today if Bernie had won?
garciasn · 31m 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 · 23m 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.
bluGill · 33m 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 · 21m 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.
blindriver · 13m 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.
chuckadams · 3m ago
My goodness, the unmitigated gall of a political party not nominating someone who isn't even a member.
DanHulton · 6m 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.
bongodongobob · 9m ago
Yes, it would have been 4 years of zero progress because he would have been stonewalled by both parties.
disgruntledphd2 · 3m 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.
n0n0n4t0r · 44m ago
Given how the democracy is attacked, I'm not sure there will be an election in 2028
dzonga · 36m ago
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
ptaffs · 26m 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 · 17m 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.
moi2388 · 25m ago
Nonsense. Last time he also left. You’re full of shit.
LightBug1 · 13m ago
Just !
Consultant32452 · 35m ago
One less thing to worry about
mothballed · 45m ago
Ron Paul already did that. Not very popular.
thesuitonym · 40m ago
There are many reasons Ron Paul was not very popular.
aleatorianator · 41m 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.
black6 · 33m 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.
Consultant32452 · 36m 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 · 14m 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.
lordofgibbons · 24m 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.
crazygringo · 34m 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".
8organicbits · 40m ago
There's a conflict between Bitcoin as a public ledger, privacy, and money laundering.
With a bank you can have anti-money laundering and bank secrecy. Transaction are known by the bank, can be subject to subpoena or automatic reporting, but are non-public.
If you want privacy on Bitcoin you need to do things that look a lot like money laundering. Governments banning money laundering isn't a surprise. The value of Bitcoin, if transactions are fully public and attributable to pseudonyms, is questionable.
In some ways, the problem Bitcoin has is that it is inflexible. Governments want to change the rules in finance from time to time, traditional finance adapts.
chain030 · 16m ago
Essentially decentralisation sounds nice, but doesnt work in practice.
jollyllama · 14m 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 · 54m ago
I'm confused how the connection was made between "here are our guidelines for suspicious activity" and "self custody is outlawed"
mothballed · 50m 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 · 12m 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 · 9m 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).
Yeah, the .gov does that all the time. See every "basically Bruen v NYC" type case prior to Bruen.
tantalor · 27m ago
De facto vs. de justo
ThePowerOfFuet · 17m ago
De jure.
moduspol · 49m 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 · 41m 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 · 29m 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 · 11m ago
Doesn't that result in multiple transactions/transaction fees if you ever need to spend more than a single wallet contains?
moduspol · 4m 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 · 12m 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 · 25m ago
this is just standard practice
executive · 21m ago
optionality
idiotsecant · 52m 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.
Thorrez · 40m ago
>Loading up a single address with too many UTXOs degrades the entropy of a public-private key pair and makes it easier to brute force a user's private key.
Is there a realistic risk there? If I use an address a million times, how much weaker is it? And how feasible would it be for an attacker to brute for it?
cypherpunks01 · 29m 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.
csomar · 1m ago
Self-Custody is problematic for any government as it allows any citizens to accumulate any kind of wealth they have and simply "transfer" it overseas without any oversight and in a ridiculously short amount of time. Some countries (rich/developed countries) allow free capital transfer but these transfers are regulated and also some jurisdictions are sanctioned. Transferring money abroad, from the perspective of the origin country, just moves the money inside the origin country system from one party to another. So it is well within the visibility and control of the state, especially for large amounts of money.
Today, you can brain-memorize $1bn in Bitcoin and move yourself from one country to another; and depending on the country; might be able to exercise different amounts of that purchasing power. Control moves from the origin country to the reception country.
Russia and China were always hostile because of this. The Chinese authorities regarded Bitcoin as some sort of capital flight scheme. Now both Europe and the USA are too. I think Bitcoin only chance for survival, in its current form, is if these two poles do use it as a mechanism to attack one another. Mining is already balanced between East and West.
angryGhost · 32m 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
aeon_ai · 33m 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.
It's the worst kind of clickbait, and is actual, real fake news.
FergusArgyll · 5m 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
koakuma-chan · 48m 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 · 39m 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.
csomar · 9m 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.
truffet · 40m ago
Isn't Coinbase an exchange? Or do they offer a wallet as well? (Is the private key in your control?)
moduspol · 38m 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 · 34m ago
No it's not in my control but I use it because it is convenient to buy and sell.
Mistletoe · 45m ago
Use a hardware wallet like Trezor.
cypherpunks01 · 27m ago
Yes, and for even higher security, use a bitcoin-only airgapped hardware wallet like Coinkite's Coldcard or Foundation's Passport Core.
jmclnx · 33m 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" :)
sneak · 16m 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.
mikemarsh · 16m ago
"The Patriot Act. Read it."
tw04 · 57m ago
Which has been why I've said over the long run all the crypto-bros are just delusional. No nation is going to give up their self-determination because someone thinks countries having self-control of their monetary policy is "authoritarian" or whatever such non-sense. Regulators could and will ignore it until it becomes a problem, and then they won't and will either exert control over it through regulation or exert control over it through ciminal prosecution.
randallsquared · 39m ago
> nation is going to give up their self-determination because someone thinks countries having self-control
Nations do not have selves. That's taking the analogy too far. I do agree that they will definitely continue trying to exert control, though. It's kinda their thing.
padjo · 41m ago
Yep, the belief that governments would just give up control of money always seemed incredibly naive to me too.
diggan · 29m ago
On the other hand, doesn't all "wouldn't it be nice if it was like this?" look naive and wild before they were implemented/fought through?
Things like "Womens right to vote", "Civil rights" or even democracy was seen as completely backwards and naive at one point in history (and still is in some places), but today we kind of see it as something good to strive for, most of the times.
I'm not saying it's 100% the same for cryptocurrencies, but isn't there a chance it's something similar at least?
truffet · 36m ago
Forcing the government to radicalise our compatriots is also a win condition.
pavlov · 38m ago
I don’t mind seeing the crypto bros hoisted by their own orange-tinted petard.
They supported an authoritarian because they thought they could buy him off with shitcoin corruption billions. Turns out he’s still an authoritarian after he’s taken the money and done the rug pull.
mothballed · 25m ago
It would also be delusional to think crypto-bros will give up their self-determination to the nation-state.
lazide · 51m ago
Unless they personally can profit from the situation anyway. Then they’ll often do perfunctory PR prosecutions while taking kickbacks. See things like prosecutions around prostitution for one usually pretty clear example.
techterrier · 56m ago
it's another $5 wrench situation
mothballed · 16m ago
Sure but now you need a $5 wrench to essentially force a guy to tell you where he buried the gold, rather than just walking to the bank and taking it. I don't see that as some kind of win for the guy with a wrench, especially when you realize the bank manager is way less likely to be a violent nutter sov-cit.
rvnx · 50m ago
The solution is to store your money on a wallet where you do not have the private key. This way if you cannot access your funds nobody will be able to coerce you.
ceejayoz · 43m ago
Their solution to that is "rot in jail for a long time, then".
Demonstrating that if you wait long enough (14 years in that case), you can get away without loosing the funds, even from the state?
> On July 10, 2009, Chadwick was ordered released from prison by Delaware County Judge Joseph Cronin, who determined his continued incarceration had lost its coercive effect and would not result in him surrendering the money.
ceejayoz · 21m ago
His finances are gonna be under close inspection for the rest of his life, and fourteen years is a lot to lose.
diggan · 3m ago
2.5 million was a lot in 1992, and who knows what that amount is today, if they've offloaded it to somewhere it earns interest. I know plenty of people who day-by-day sacrifice their time for way less than ~500 per day which that ends up being if we assume the money been still since they were arrested.
ceejayoz · 34s ago
But none of that matters if it's fundamentally inaccessible. The instant he spends outside of his known means, they have evidence he's accessed the funds and can jail him for contempt again. Travel is probably barred.
rafterydj · 43m ago
In that case the obvious move from the 5$ wrench perspective is to hit you with it until you tell them where the private key is kept, because you would need to have it somewhere.
incone123 · 41m ago
The key must exist somewhere and the wrench may make you reveal that information instead.
ProjectArcturis · 27m ago
I for one am not alarmed that the government might want to take a closer look at an asset whose primary use, outside of financial speculation, is crime.
btbuildem · 1h ago
Not a huge surprise, unfortunately.
esafak · 42m ago
I'm surprised because I thought the Trump administration was hot on crypto.
chii · 34m 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 · 28m 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 · 16m ago
Sure, the approved and controlled kind. Wheels of government turn so slow this idea probably started several administrations ago.
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
We're truly living in Orwell's world.
No comments yet
It’s a disgusting revelation, there’s no point in national politics. The other half of America is literally not worth dealing with.
This type of racism, which is a dark trait, underpins a demographic. You’ll never get compassion and morality out of literally … half of America. So things like “stand up against the patriot act” is basically an impossibility due to this corruption.
It is a extremely convenient act for whoever is in power.
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.
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.
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.
Now, that might not have worked but anything might have had a pretty large impact on global/US deaths.
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.
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.
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.
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 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".
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Well that's not true... The key doesn't change because you added more bitcoin
--- 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.
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.
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
> 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" :)
The state will never allow large scale financial privacy because it poses an existential threat to the state.
Nations do not have selves. That's taking the analogy too far. I do agree that they will definitely continue trying to exert control, though. It's kinda their thing.
Things like "Womens right to vote", "Civil rights" or even democracy was seen as completely backwards and naive at one point in history (and still is in some places), but today we kind of see it as something good to strive for, most of the times.
I'm not saying it's 100% the same for cryptocurrencies, but isn't there a chance it's something similar at least?
They supported an authoritarian because they thought they could buy him off with shitcoin corruption billions. Turns out he’s still an authoritarian after he’s taken the money and done the rug pull.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Beatty_Chadwick
> On July 10, 2009, Chadwick was ordered released from prison by Delaware County Judge Joseph Cronin, who determined his continued incarceration had lost its coercive effect and would not result in him surrendering the money.