Authorities are looking to close the gap on crypto unhosted wallets
cointelegraph.com
cointelegraph.com
So I think that an "unhosted wallet" just refers to a blob of text in a regular file ... which is exactly how I would store bitcoins if I had any.
In the United States, this is a clear-cut free speech / First Amendment issue. In the United States I can write, or say, any number I choose to.
There's a lot of hand waving reference to magic technology when discussing things like key escrow or "encryption" or "unhosted wallets". In the end, they are protected speech and cannot be limited under any interpretation of the First Amendment.
That is complete and utter nonsense. A child pornography video is just a blob of text, essentially a big number. And you certainly can be prosecuted both for distribution and for storing child pornography. just because you have the imagination to boil everything down through bits to a number does not mean the First amendment becomes a shield for anything. A tweet stating you want to assassinate the president is equally "just a number" and also not protected by the first Amendment.
What this regulation is targeting isn't the holding or sharing of the keys itself, but the use of exchanges to convert between cryptocurrency and fiat (regular) money. They want to restrict/regulate (mostly monitor for now, but more regulation is likely to follow)
a) the ability to send Bitcoin that you bought on an exchange to your own wallet, i.e. your ability to get Bitcoin that you actually control yourself with said text file
b) the ability to send Bitcoin from such a wallet to an exchange to turn them into "regular money".
Where it gets interesting is the so called Seed Phrase, https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Seed_phrase in which an unlimited number of private keys can be derived. A seed phrase can 'recreate' every key in a wallet, it could be considered a form of wallet backup. In the BIP39 standard, 12 words are used from a dictionary of 2048.
I have never interacted with a bitcoin or other crypto-currency ...
openssl genpkey -algorithm EC -outform PEM -pkeyopt ec_paramgen_curve:secp256k1 -pkeyopt ec_param_enc:named_curve
There is a native format known as WIF (wallet import format) that uses ascii encoding for private keys, allowing easy migration/copy paste: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Wallet_import_format
$ ./vanitygen -i 1rsync
Pattern: 1rsync
Address: 1rSYNCeAXmXY64GabjpGN3rcihFwZmcP3
Privkey: 5JPbRtnXStQgeGAFb49JQ7f4bx1f9fJRHnV9pawxevFG58zDjGYThe words come from a standardised wordlist, providing a rudimentary way of error checking and checksumming.
Come. On.
Why, thank you, I didn't even have to spell it out for you. That's reasonable even if the extension to CSAM isn't.
Binary streams should not come with impllicit legal chains. It's all math.
Don't want it copied? Don't make it digital. The rest of the world shouldn't be held at gunpoint over your inability to cope with trivial reproduction of information.
>Come on. You can have this back. Use it for a post that needs it.
"Capitalism" says no such thing. Property under capitalism is a consequence of scarcity; property rights exist specifically because a particular good cannot be expended for two different purposes at the same time. As such, someone must decide how the property will be used, and the entity with the right to make that decision is designated the owner. Ideas lack scarcity—the same idea can be used for any number of purposes simultaneously without being used up—and consequently are outside the capitalist definition of property.
Assigning fake "ownership" privileges to ideas infringes on the exercise of actual property rights, effectively seizing private property (including capital) for public use to to implement a policy of subsidizing the creation of new copyrightable works or patentable inventions, which is an inherently socialist exercise of government power.
Nope, you can't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
Edit: About an unhosted wallet being a clear case of freedom of speech because it can be encoded as text; even if it was, what are you expressing? The intent to evade cryptotaxes?
You'll note that one of the numbers in question[1] is published, in full, on the wikipedia page that you link to.
[1] 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Quite the opposite. You're either confused on the meaning of 'intellectual property' or 'post-modernism'.
intellectual property is a subset of property rights.
they both exist only because society deems their existence necessary.
I strongly recommend Heller & Salzman's "Mine!" [0] as a non-ideological and layperson-accessible exploration of the history and nature of property.
I don't deem the existence of intellectual "property" necessary, in fact I predict its existance will become infeasable to uphold.
Images of sexually exploited toddlers are "just numbers" too, but it doesn't seem like the DOJ buys the free speech argument.
This is why people like me have been saying, it's just best to stay away from it, or escrow everything until minds have been made up on taxation.
It will be regulated. It will look like everything else in the financial system, and tooling will be made to retroactively pin down crypto transactions at the injection point into the financial system.
I believe that is no longer true : "DNB has now revoked the registration requirement and said it will remove the wallet-verification measures as soon as possible."
https://www.coindesk.com/dutch-court-rules-bitonic-no-longer...
A crypto currency forced to be managed by centralized authorities is pretty much useless, the equivalent of having a savings bank account in some extremely volatile foreign currency.
I suppose there will be enough loopholes in foreign countries to prevent these negative effects in the short term.
No untraceable transactions.
What I envision is that somehow the de facto rules of society could operate a bit like using a decentralized software package registry. Or perhaps even explicitly that.
The biggest challenge in my mind is that humans are, in fact, animals, with strong instincts that push towards hierarchies. This creates conflict with the ideals of protocol-based free society.
But whatever form of hierarchy or authority we are stuck with, deploying these distributed protocols and tools will aid both those in power and the common man. Because ultimately most of the activity of regulation or market-making (and monopolization) is about solving logistical problems. And the leading edge for scaling logistics are decentralized technologies.
One more fantasy. Maybe the problems we have with government are due to monopoly. If we had a way to vote with our feet for better rules, such as using protocols that are more effective or fair.. but ultimately authority is enforced by killing.
What if somehow we could just collectively get together and ban killing (execution of dissidents or mass killing i.e. warfare) as a way of resolving conflicts over control? Lol. Of course, that might only make it easier for those without morals to take over. But just to keep hope alive for the human species, we should consider how our developing technologies might inform questions like that.
We’ve done a lot of interesting things in terms of POCs in the public sector over the last decade, and we’ve yet to find a way for blockchain to have a real world impact. In countries with high amount of trust in the public sector and low levels of corruption, it’s a burdensome, inefficient and expensive way to handle trust. In countries with high corruption and no trust, the smart contract doesn’t change the fact that a bunch of people with guns can still just take your land and nobody is going to come after them.
It’s sort of similar with money. The only real appliance or Bitcoin and crypto currencies is for criminal enterprises to move and exchange money. The thing about that is that these organisations have as much of an authority or violence as some nation states.
Considering Bitcoin can’t control where you use it, or how you turn it into real money, it’s really got not authority.
That’s a cop out. They have a choice.
There’s two reasons countries would do this. One is obvious: control and law enforcement. The other is to prevent the emergence of any threat to sovereign fiat currencies which are effectively weapons of economic warfare.
“The fed is a weapon,” as one finance person once said, and he called it a kind of economic Death Star. Countries with major sovereign currencies used internationally can in effect levy an imperial tax on users of the currency by exporting inflation. Seeking to “end the fed” is basically akin to trespassing on a military base and sabotaging ordinance. The US isn’t the only country they does this, but it’s probably the largest. Countries like China might want to displace the dollar, but they don’t want Bitcoin. They want to displace the dollar for the Yuan so they can pull the same trick.
But it’ll set back adoption so heavily. There are a lot of applications in the space that only become feasible once adoption is so high, so development of everything above the base layer is liable to slow down significantly.