The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody
tftc.io
tftc.io
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.
Replace "store of value" and "protection against inflation" with "investment" or "number go up" and see what it does to most of discourse around Bitcoin.
The intrinsic value of decentralization is the ability to operate outside any fiat system of laws or government. So that one lines up a lot with the criminal side of hiding your finances. The investment aspect sure is enticing to lots of folks, but without a real core underlying value it's just bubbles and rug-pulls. So all this has the effect, wittingly or not, of lining up the incentives of all BTC users with money launderers.
Sure there are TONS of perfectly legal reasons not to want people to track your finances. Many of them are even moral. But obviously many are neither moral nor legal. (The edge case of moral but illegal sure gets people fired up, but it's a vanishing minority of actual use.) So when the regulators come looking for criminals, we unsurprisingly get lots of sound and fury about how there are lots of perfectly valid reasons why good people will want to act in ways that make them look like criminals. Uh huh. Yes, there sure are.
Doesn't this describe every political party and megacorp in the US too...?
So yes, and I’ve been saying this since it started really getting bad in 2020, we need to completely cut enemies of the US off from our internet. There will obviously be attempts to proxy through western countries, so it needs to be strictly enforced, possibly with an identity requirement for participants.
For those against this, imagine a physical country where anyone can spawn thousands of faceless, nameless drones disguised as real people which are free to do whatever they want in society with zero risk of consequences. What would happen to that country? It would fall. As digital societies have now become larger than countries themselves, this is the very situation we’re dealing with. It’s not the utopia we hoped for, but it will be a dystopia unless action is taken.
The current, put as many bots as you want on, approach is pure war.
The main website that matched people to trade fiat for monero (localmonero) got closed recently because "reasons".
It is pretty popular and outlawed since a while. Basically the only relevant crypto currency used for purchases on the street since several years now. You can look up the number of daily on-chain transactions and tends to be on top every day.
You likely would only notice this if you need to donate money for someone with the wrong opinions or live at a non-aligned country.
--
anti-money laundering safeguards
sanctions enforcement
consumer protection
tax enforcement
fraud prevention systems
--
It is very true that technology won't get you this freedom from sensible legal requirements we impose on financial transactions.
That's obviously a good thing, but I guess people who are in crypto would disagree.
With Paypal, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, and all the payment gateways and controlled entities in between, you will be banned for a "trade secret" reason which they have no legal obligation to reveal. Example 1: https://kiwifarms.st/threads/payment-processor-censorship-vi... (You may discredit the source and ignore factual information and numerous examples at your own discretion)
When you lost the ability to pay for things, you can be starved, of food and more importantly your principles and dignity.
Like many other issues that I consider political, what is important to me and what I believe to be actually righteous in the end is more important than the issues of e.g. personal responsibility from being scammed, or criminal and money laundering transactions. Remember where the term "money laundering" came from.
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?
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)
Source:
I just thought this was worth sharing, my dad was a tech guy (though not much of a programmer), the folks on HackerNews and related sites mostly have a privacy-first worldview. But not everyone shares this view, especially those who work in or around law enforcement. Civilians who believe in the right to privacy must stand their ground in the face of this.
It's more that the privacy-first folk are the ones that bother expressing opinions in threads like this. I think these days, a large part of HN audience doesn't especially care about privacy, and a good chunk of us are the ones that created the current privacy hellscape we have.
> a large part of HN audience doesn't especially care about privacy, and a good chunk of us are the ones that created the current privacy hellscape we have.
Any thread about Signal has top comments bashing Signal over something much more minor like backups, lack of stickers, Moxie's side project with MobileCoin, and/or some conspiracy about secret backdoors. Yet, there is never an alternative offered which my grandma could use. No, she can't use Matrix. Maybe your grandma is tech literate, but mine grandma is 90. Even my parents aren't tech literate! Hell, I couldn't even get my group of PhD level CS friends to try out Matrix with me, but I could strong arm half of them into using Signal while the other half just wanted to use iMessage.
Any thread on ZKP coins like ZCash devolve into conversations about how Monero is better.
Any thread on Firefox has a top comment about how much Firefox sucks because the icons are a bit different or how the dev tools are better or some other excuse. They all devolve into people just talking about their favorite color of Chrome (e.g. Brave, Opera, Edge). IDGAF, just install Firefox and uBlock on your family's computer, they won't notice the difference between FF and Chrome.
Or any number of other such topics. They devolve into purity tests and tribalism. The lack of perfection in some tool only becomes some excuse to continue licking the boot. Can we not acknowledge that things have flaws but that these flaws are a worthwhile cost to not living under surveillance capitalism? I hear so many people complain about surveillance capitalism and then only throw up their hands in the air to say "but what can you do?" or "it's the way things are." We're the fucking people who made it that way and we're the fucking people who continue to make things that way! Not every HN user works at big tech, but I'm willing to bet nearly every HN user is their family's goto tech support person. You at least have that power to influence your friends and family about how to solve these problems.
We're the people that other people look to for tech advice. We can have nuanced conversations all day, and I think we fucking should, but most of them turn into dumb flame wars like "vim vs emacs" or "spaces vs tabs" and all this ends up with is the system perpetuating. Can we just for one god damn month not roll around in the mud? All the time I hear about how we love merit and meritocracy. Well let's fucking do it then. And we're engineers, if there's flaws in these OPEN SOURCE SYSTEMS, then let's fucking fix them instead of just complaining about the flaws of living under the boot. Or do we just like to complain and they've won because they convinced us we have no power?
You're right that privacy and freedom should never be sacrificed for convenience or aesthetics!
E2EE messenger Wire comes from the people who created usable Skype and contributed to the royalty-free audio codec Opus (https://opus-codec.org/) which now enables WebRTC (used by modern conferencing apps including Zoom, Jitsi, GoToMeeting). They contributed to the IETF encrypted group-messaging protocol MLS (https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mls/about/), which has been ratified and lives alongside TLS.
IETF MLS is one step on a long path to messenger interoperability, e.g. Matrix plans to implement MLS. Contributors to MLS include Apple, Cisco and Facebook.
Unlike Signal, Wire never mandated disclosure of phone number or address book contacts. Their business model is paid enterprise customers, but they continue to maintain free clients for iOS, Android and web, with open-source client and server code.
Next time ask him if he'd be OK living in a glass house, since, as he's not a bad guy, he has nothing to hide.
Surely he doesn't see any point in keeping any of that information private, he's a good guy and not doing anything wrong, therefore he has nothing to hide and no use for privacy.
Just like many cops (and thieves) invest pretty heavily in physical security.
And why the first thing a cop does if another cop starts hassling them (and won’t back down) is get a lawyer. Because they know.
It’s often less about what you did or didn’t do, and sometimes more about what someone wants/needs to nail you on.
To you, he seems to believe Yes, and to him, I think you seem to believe No. Historically, the answer has been Yes, and crypto has fundamentally changed that. I think crystallizing exactly why you believe the right answer is No is essential, otherwise you're just not going to convince people on that side -- in their mind, I think, you're demanding more rights than you historically had, and at the cost of protecting the rest of the population.
everybody is a bad guy in the eyes of their political opponents.
I also really believe that this raises the bar for everyone. If the government has to work harder to prove your guilt, the case is all that much stronger when the threshold is met.
I'm probably preaching to the choir but I increasingly see arguments to the contrary as boiling down to "make things so the executive branch of the government doesn't have to work as hard" which I don't find compelling as a societal value.
The irony is that it’s precisely why GPs dad had a job, with full transparency there’s essentially no need for any type of forensics.
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.
Poe's Law strikes again, but for reference there are even several major categories:
Some things are nobody's business. If you have religious parents and you're gay, you may not want them to know that, even if your religious parents work for the government.
People have proprietary secrets. A drug company or tech company can't be spending a billion dollars on 95%-finished R&D only to have a random cop take a $10,000 bribe to hand it over to a foreign competitor.
It's important to protect the political opposition from the incumbents. The thing Nixon had to resign over? That.
Sometimes the bad guys work for the government. If your abusive ex is a cop, they shouldn't be able to trivially find you without a warrant.
The government shouldn't be able to go on a fishing expedition. If you do something that isn't illegal, or that you have a right to do, that shouldn't be an excuse to trawl through your life so you can be prosecuted for breaking a law that everybody breaks but only people who step on the toes of the powerful are prosecuted for.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -Cardinal Richelieu
"Saying you don't need privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't need freedom of speech because you have nothing to say." -Edward Snowden
You: "But you are randos on the internet, not the government!"
So I can get any of that from anyone if I just bribe the right government official? Or if I want that info for nefarious purposes I just have to get hired at the right agency? Or I can lobby to get a law passed that says everyone with the sequence "GATTACA" at a particular site on chromosome 7 is inherently evil and must be locked away for the public good? (Oh, what a surprise, it turns out that DNA sequence is incredibly common only for your particular race, huh.) Or if you're a celebrity, any cop can demand to search your phone without a warrant and get all of your private photos to sell to tabloids? You're genuinely ok with all of this? You find people who are concerned about these things suspicious?
Laws change. People in power do not always have your best interests at heart.
Millennials see reality through the lens of 'Squid game' and 'Hunger games.' Meanwhile boomers think we're Snowflakes. They don't understand that we're fighting a relentless psychological war in a hyper-competitive environment of scarcity.
Honestly, if I had spent 30 years of my life trying to catch criminals, I would probably believe the same. Just like dermatologists telling everyone to put on sunscreen at all times (because they see skin cancer cases on the daily), criminal prosecutors often live in a bubble, where crime happens all the time and everywhere, and you can never have enough sophisticated tools to catch the perpetrators. They completely forget that normal life away from crime exists, too.
Even the companies that don't make money from ads have no qualms just letting Google or Facebook collect data about their website visitors.
In the tech industry you also find a bend of very economically self interested version of privacy, which is that giving privacy to your users is a great way to claim you didn't know anything bad was happening. I'm pretty sure that, not high minded ideals, is why Meta invests so much in e2e encryption and privacy for WhatsApp, and publicizing it - when the next horrible thing is planned using Whatsapp, it lets them disclaim all responsibility for moderating what's happening on their platform
This is such a sham though.
You have some privacy-protecting technology everyone would benefit from. Ordinary people don't really understand it but would use and benefit from it if it was the default.
Laws are passed that make it illegal to use or otherwise highly inconvenient, e.g. you have to fill out an onerous amount of paperwork even if you're not doing anything wrong. Ordinary people are deterred from using it and ordinary systems don't adopt it. Criminals continue using it because they don't care about breaking the paperwork laws if they're already breaking the drug laws.
Then people say look at this evil technology that only criminals use! As if the reason others don't use it wasn't purposeful.
Yes. Both are real facets of this type of tech. For all the handwringing about "but what if fascism" that we have here in the US, I'm pretty sure 90% of the actual worries American cryptocurrency users have in their hearts is either about tax evasion, money laundering, or using crypto to buy/sell something illegal (Granted, there are some things illegal to buy/sell that there could be an ethical argument shouldn't be illegal -- probably certain drugs for instance). If someone has made bitcoin transactions to say, donate to EFF, Planned Parenthood or ACLU, I would take a bet of 5 Bitcoin that he isn't going to be imprisoned for that fact in this country. Yes, even though Trump is President.
But I think we who believe in privacy make ourselves look bad if we try to pretend that there isn't a ton of that stuff going on.
It's a reasonable opinion to say that privacy is good, but I think the thing to argue and "prove" is that it outweighs the fact that this technology also enables all this bad stuff. Which is a value judgment and thus you need to convince people, rather than just point to the word "Freedom" and assert.
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.
Except that people are people, and people make mistakes, and it doesn't take a lot of mistakes to fail in your opsec, and then your whole plot unravels.
I would consider leaving UK very seriously if I was building a life there now, as an example.
Unfortunately in 2025 it is a race to the bottom. While some countries (such as the UK) are sinking faster than others, there isn't a single country I can think of that is moving in the right direction when it comes to privacy, free speech and civil liberties.
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.
Today you get away with it, they make it harder but it would still be better than the old one.
People manage to corrupt and hack things inevitably as long as it is static, changing systems can obviously be good just for this reason only. It also brings questions about why the current system is the way it is.
The wording is confusing. Two provisions expired, not the entire Patriot Act.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250306093943/https://www.nytim...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act#Section_expiration...
But then they say "The first act reauthorized all but two Title II provisions. Two sections were changed to sunset on December 31, 2009"
But the first act was passed in 2005, and so it's unclear whether it reauthorized provisions only until 2006 or a longer term.
Unfortunately, that doesn't mean a whole lot, as many of the provisions live on in the USA Freedom Act.
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.
They got what they wanted from it beyond their wildest dreams.
It's also the thing I don't understand about party loyalty.
When candidate George W. Bush was running for President, he was saying all kinds of things about how big government is bad and regulation destroys small businesses etc. Clearly not consistent with what he did once he was in office. When candidate Obama was running for President, he was saying how those things Bush actually did were bad and unconstitutional, and then once he's in office he signs a Patriot Act extension, fails to pardon Snowden, etc. When candidate Trump, well, you know.
Most of this is structural, not partisan. And a lot of it is Congress even though people mostly talk about the President. The partisanship itself is structural -- get your state to use STAR voting instead of first past the post and you get more than two choices, and then liars can be evicted even if their state/district goes >60% to the left or right.
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?
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.
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.
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.
My takeaway though is that human societies abhor a power vacuum: no matter what my libertarian and ultraliberal friends imagine, there must be a strongman. At least with democracy, we have the opportunity to somewhat influence who that is.
You lost all interest because Bitcoin became attractive to people who deal with companies who insist on KYC? How is that in any relation to the underlying code or mantra that Bitcoin is about?
All that this is saying is that the government will try to track money movement to pursue criminal activity, including, unfortunately the criminal activity of moving money in a way that looks sketchy. This is something that we have decided we have to live with.
[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/10/23/2023-23...
Crypto is increasingly no different than traditional banking in anyways that are beneficial, and remains different in ways that can only be harmful to the individual (market manipulation, wild speculation, lack of institutional regulation) etc.
I don't know how anyway remotely interested in decentralized crytpocurrencies can see this as "click bait".
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.
> that's cash
Our world worked with cash before. Sure, it wasn't perfect, but are those imperfections worse than the mass invasion of our privacy? There's no perfect system, so the only question is how we weight certain issues, not that flaws exist. If we purity test then the only winners are the immoral people who are willing to lie and deceive so that their choice appears to pass said purity tests. They love us to spend our time infighting because that's less time working against them.
Now, drug dealers sometimes do just do as many transactions as possible with cash, outside the banking system, for that reason. But they're hindered by these anti-laundering regulations, which is considered a good thing by most.
To me then it sounds reasonable to impose similar limits and reporting obligations - treating crypto as much like cash as is practical - when it comes to exchanging crypto for dollars in any way. It doesn't prevent Bad People from conducting transactions in BTC directly, but they have always been able to do so with cash for some things.
But it shouldn't be illegal or somehow indicative of criminality.
Same thing with self custody of crypto.
The first one is the privacy argument.
Would you be comfortable if you’re not allowed to give the cash in your pocket to someone without someone watching over? If the answer is no, you are pro privacy for financial transactions.
Cash has the privacy feature as a default. You can argue that 3rd parties that help you send cash don’t have to offer any privacy, but BTC isn’t that, and forcing it to be that way is an attack on privacy.
I think arguments for privacy are pretty poorly argued and often come down to "isn't the idea of someone watching you icky" which this thread is not disabusing me of.
almost all people are not capable of secure and reliable self-custody and would be better off with an intermediary
Believing a profit-motivated corporation or individual is trustworthy long term especially in an age of quick mergers and acquisitions is .. deeply naive to say the least.
Only because Americans haven't had a proper large-scale bank crash for a while now. In countries where it does happen, people very much do keep their fiat currency "under the mattress" though. And it's good that they have that option.
Is there a realistic risk there? If I use an address a million times, how much weaker is it? And how feasible would it be for an attacker to brute for it?
The security concerns start happening after an address spends a UTXO. Before a P2WPKH (segwit) address is used, only the public key hash is known. In order to spend from it, the full public key needs to be revealed. That's why it's recommended to use single-use addresses, because a quantum computing attack or elliptic curve vulnerability could be used against an address where the attacker knows the public key, but would not work against an address where the pubkey has not yet been revealed.
So, the main security change happens after you spend from an address the first time. Subsequently, there are theoretical vulnerabilities that could occur after an address is spent from many times, but really only if the signer is malicious like dark skippy, or faulty and doesn't properly follow RFC 6979 deterministic signatures, leaking some signature entropy which could be used to crack the private key. The latter has happened with some bad custom wallet implementations, but these attacks are even further in the realm of theoretical, not super realistic, require faulty software/firmware to be implanted into signing devices.
Post quantum algorithms have been available. You can do it today. Why not for bitcoin?
In reality, there are very few current real world implementations. This article makes it seem that RSA is under active exploitation. If it is, bitcoin is not the first target IMO
"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.
Snarky comment meant in good humor.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
It was forbidden to have more than 5 ounces of gold.
it's not the developers of bitcoin's fault your entire reg compliance apparatus was constructed on requiring intermediaries
In their defense, there might be some issues with circumventing such controls. Money laundring, fraud, market manipulation and sanction circumvention aren't always positive for society at large
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.
It is a extremely convenient act for whoever is in power.
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.
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
even if mention of "the patriot act" is an obvious signal, there are many such contexts but an explicit tagging makes quick parsing easier. Same for mention of the government/authorities/police/military/administration/constitution/president etc.
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.
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.
All that shit after 9/11 was crazy and dangerous, and some of us said that at the time, and go figure, the fucking obviously true things we were saying have turned out to be... true. What a surprise.
The War on Terror AUMF relies on a Presidential determinatiom that the targets “planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or person”.
But the President has had implicit blanket permission to bomb whoever he wants with a time limit ever since the War Powers Act was passed.
The right loves to say that violent rhetoric is the left's fault, while they wished us harm for not wanting to invade a random country in the middle east that wasn't even related to the terrorist attack.
Meanwhile, all that horseshit with the TSA only ever enriched a couple people connected to the admin.
I'm pretty sure Homeland Security was only created because it was easier to steer a pile of brand-new contracts for a brand-new organization to the "right" places, than it would have been if they'd simply expanded the roles of existing parts of the government that were already supposed to be doing what Homeland was supposedly created for.
Well you know, they are the ones constantly comparing Republicans to Hitler, the Nazis, calling them fascists, making direct claims that electing Trump would lead to the end of democracy, having "punch Nazis" be a rallying cry, and so on. Not really crazy to see how that might influence people to think that killing Trump or even a conservative podcaster is necessary to save the world.
Any upcoming changes to privacy regulations are going to be to further that goal, not to crack down on crime.
Well that's not true... The key doesn't change because you added more bitcoin
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.
--- Point 1
Crime is real. Can we agree on that?
If you were in charge of identifying and locating criminals based on on-chain transaction data, what are the list of guidelines you'd put together to use PUBLIC DATA to determine suspicious behavior?
If you're competent, at all, the list would look like this. Let's not immediately jump to "self custody is gonna be outlawed"
----
Point 2
Bitcoin was designed this way. This data is public. This is HOW THE DAMN THING WORKS.
This article is written by a "Seasoned Bitcoiner", which is a term that reveals just how cooked they are. They haven't come to terms with the fact that the Bitcoin price is predicated on being the first, but certainly not the best public blockchain for realizing the goals of a global decentralized currency, whether you agree that's even a possibility or not.
Some people adopt ignorance -- Others were born in it, molded by it.
Arresting someone selling guns on the street doesn't stop much - they're quickly replaceable, you need to identify and determine where the guns are coming from. Same with human trafficking, drug trafficking, selling fake goods, and nearly every crime.
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.
Satoshi's whitepaper expanded BTC as time-stamp server for preventing DDOS on fax lines.
does bitcoin or UTXO's somehow for some reason generate multiple PUBLIC keys for the same private key?
BTC is in a much worse situation than gold was in 1970. The government has the technology to follow transactions and require BTC transactions to be done on their chain with their BTC equivalent GBTCs. That is until the government decides to issue print more BTC equivalents
$0
Am I misunderstanding you?
Every aspect of the modern financial system exists for a reason. It evolved over time to deal with problems. Things like reversible transactions are a feature not a bug.
Bitcoin is where all the gold bugs went who lamented the end of the gold standard. Most of these people didn't understand that at no point in history was the US dollar 100% backed by gold (or silver, originally). Never.
What backs the US dollar isn't gold or oil or anythihng else we dig up out of the ground. It's long schlong of the US military.
I've also said that crypt currency exists only because the government hasn't shut it down. All it would take is a policy change from the US government to say banks who have access to the US financial system cannot trade in Bitcoin and it would be over. Yes you could still have wallets (at least until the government starts going after Bitcoin farms, which again it could do) but what would you do with those coins?
Bitcoin is not, never has been and never will be an escape from the perils (some real, many imagined) of fiat currencies.
It is a fantastic escape from debasement of fiat, and always has been an escape from the perils of fiat currencies. It was created for this very purpose in 2009, and has absolutely achieved this goal. A 2019 $ vs a 2025 $ are significantly different purchasing power. Yet a 2019 BTC vs a 2025 BTC shows remarkable capital appreciation. You can pick any time scale you like, and except for very specific edge cases, it has in general been a great hedge against debasement of fiat, and will continue to be.
I have been able to preserve the purchasing power of my savings for over a decade now, and still keep buying every week.
Why would this be any different the next decade? (beyond the attenuation effect from more capital flowing into the space?).
That’s my point.
You can make it worth whatever you want but if you’re not guaranteed to be able to redeem it, you’re calling that currency on something else.
That something else is the US military, ultimately.
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/).
Also, always remember native coinjoin.
Also, what is that problem you mention with coinjoin? Please provide details.
> 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" :)
But more importantly it doesn’t seem like the government is trying to ban anything, they’re just extending the anti-fraud / anti-money laundering measures enjoyed by the ‘traditional’ financial institutions to the world of cryptocurrency.
Those measures don’t prevent people from doing ‘suspicious’ things, they just treat certain transaction types with more care because of the increased likelihood that they are evidence of a crime.
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.
Fortunately, other banks weren't staffed with idiots, and I was able to open an account elsewhere after providing my documents.
Mere criminality wouldn’t put privacy in such an indefensible position. Look at who’s president.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Agamben#State_of_Excep...
At the time it was pretty clear that the federal government was going make a large and permanent power grab.
How are "regulated intermediaries" not democratic? If they're regulated by the democratically elected government, that seems entirely democratic to me.
Isn't that the actual point? of laws like this? Keeping those in power in power and further entrenching the moats around them.
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.
I'd argue that Bitcoin has been effectively immune to attacks like this by governments for nearly a decade.
I think this might be the first indication that what we currently call "institutional Bitcoin supporters" are not "Bitcoin supporters" at all, or rather, what they call "Bitcoin" is not what you and I call "Bitcoin". Services like Coinbase and BTC ETFs don't really suffer from this development at all. In fact, I think it's quite obvious that obviously benefit from something like this (at least from the first-order effects). What's the alternative to self custody? Well... third-party custody. Especially since they are already bound up by KYC rules, right? Their is a cynical reading that there's nothing inconsistent with this development if you consider "institutional Bitcoin's" goals to primarily be replacing existing financial power structures with themselves. "Bitcoin" is just a means to an end. Their goals were only incidentally aligned with individual BTC holders since they were previously in similar circumstances as the "out group". Previous administrations were as suspicious of "Bitcoin companies" as any individual Bitcoin holder, perhaps even more so. But that's not the case anymore. Bitcoin companies have successfully been brought into the fold, so it's not even that they're necessarily "betraying" the values of Bitcoin true believers, you might argue that interpretation of shared values was entirely inferred to begin with.
Critically though, I think an important consequence of this is that Bitcoin purists and skeptics should realize that they arguably now have more in common than not, at least in the immediate term, and may be each other's best allies. In my experience, for most the existence of Bitcoin, its skeptics haven't really seen Bitcoin as a "threat." Instead, to admittedly generalize, their critiques have been mostly about Bitcoin being "broken" or "silly" or "misunderstanding the point of centralized systems", etc. These aren't really "oppositional" positions in the traditional "adversarial sense," more dismissive. In fact, the closest thing to an "active moral opposition" to Bitcoin that I've seen is an environmental one. IOW, Bitcoin true believers think about Bitcoin way more than Bitcoin skeptics do. Similarly, Bitcoin true believers really have nothing against skeptics other than... the fact that they occasionally talk shit about Bitcoin? IOW, Bitcoin skeptics are not "the natural enemy Bitcoin was designed to defeat".
But if you think about it, "institutional Bitcoin" sort of embodies something both these camps generally have hated since before Bitcoin. Whether you believe Bitcoin to be a viable answer or not, it is undeniable that the "idea" of Bitcoin is rooted in the distrust of these elitist financial institutions, that evade accountability, benefit from special treatment, and largely get to rig the larger system in their favor. Similarly, I don't think Bitcoin skeptics like these institutions or are "on their side". In fact, perhaps they'd argue that they predicted that Bitcoin wouldn't solve any of this and would just be another means of creating them. But IMO what they should both realize is that the most important threat right now is these institutional players. They are in fact, only "nominally" Bitcoin in a deep sense. From the perspective of true believers, their interests are actually in now way "essentially" aligned with any "original Bitcoin values," and from the perspective of skeptics, the threat they pose has very little to do with their use of "the Bitcoin blockchain".
They are arguably just another instantiation of the "late stage capitalist" playbook of displacing an existing government service in order to privatize its rewards. Coinbase could be argued to have more in common with Uber than Ledger wallets. Instead of consolidating and squeezing all the value from taxis though, the play is to do the same with currency itself. It is incidental that Uber happened to be so seemingly "government averse". In this context, it's actually helpful to cozy up to the government and provide the things government departments want that make no difference to fintech's bottom line (such as KYP). In fact, that might be their true value proposition. Bitcoin only enters the conversation because in order to replace a currency, you do... need a currency. Bitcoin was convenient. It was already there, it had a built-in (fervent) user base that was happy to do your proselytizing for you, and even saw you as a good "first step" for normies that couldn't figure out to manage their own wallet. The Bitcoin bubble was already there, why fight it when you can ride it?
Again, I think this is highly likely to be against the values of Bitcoin true believers and skeptics alike, and I also think that if the above is true, it represents an actual danger to us all. Recent events with credit card processors have already demonstrated that payment systems have proven to be incredibly efficient tools at stifling speech. In other words, this is arguably an "S-tier threat", on par with or perhaps worse than any sort of internet censorship or net neutrality. If so, we should treat it as such and work together.
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'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