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.
> [The Patriot Act] contains many sunset provisions beginning December 31, 2005, approximately four years after its passage. Before the sunset date, an extension was passed for four years which kept most of the law intact. In May 2011, President Barack Obama signed the PATRIOT Sunset Extensions Act of 2011, which extended three provisions. These provisions were modified and extended until 2019 by the USA Freedom Act, passed in 2015. In 2020, efforts to extend the provisions were not passed by the House of Representatives, and as such, the law has expired.
The Wikipedia article is quite confusing, and seems to imply that those two provisions expired because they were the only two provisions not sunsetted already. The table indicates that most of the law sunsetted on March of 2006:
Reauthorization of Other Patriot Act Provisions: The USA FREEDOM Act extended two other provisions from the Patriot Act that were set to expire:
"Lone Wolf" Provision: Allows for surveillance on individual terrorists who may not be directly linked to a foreign power.
"Roving Wiretap" Provision: Enables surveillance to follow a suspect even if they change their communication methods or devices.
Everyone should be super clued in whenever the government chooses to classify something as 'terrorism' because of these provisions.
There appeared to be a lot of "good things" associated with this Act but also... as things go. Not great things such as above.
It is no accident that the current admin is classifying suspected drug runners as ‘terrorists’, for example. Namely, the precedent of the Obama era droning of even US citizens under the same label.
If they are going to go to war at least go to war over something that immensely benefits Americans (such as decrease of deaths due to overdosing and consequences of addiction). Definitely better than acting as the enforcers for other nations who are too pussy to do their warring on their own.
If we’re going to war over anything it should be authorized by Congress and not just a disinterested president carrying out extrajudicial drone strikes with absolutely no legal authority in US or international law.
Perhaps you did miss the AUMF, but it was pretty prominent. While
Obviously falling short of a declaration of war, it provided a legal basis to be held against. Regardless, we’d finally stopped basically all drone activity in Afghanistan and the ME before the current warmongering admin showed back up with unrestrained drones, bluster about Jihadists in Africa, drone strikes in the Caribbean, F35s over Mexico and B2s flying around the world to drop bombs in Iran. This is the Department of War you know.
Ignoring that all the existing ‘wars’ are still ongoing and pretending like this is some more narrow focus is just silly.
We're incredibly lucky the 'just an acronym' ended that way then. Had they named it the 'Joining and Reinforcing the Nation by Satisfying Liberties and Guaranteeing Efficient Control Over Surveillance' we would have ended with the JRN SLGECOS Act.
Seeing the rise in the amount of bots on YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, basically all the major and a lot of minor social networks over the last ~decade has really been something, too. Tons and tons of people with account names that all follow similar regex's saying the same things around the same time.
I suppose it feels closer to Brave New World than 1984 but it's eerie, and those are just the accounts that stand out. I imagine the "premium propaganda" option from the companies and agencies providing the bot services are even harder to discern.
> "Live Free or Die" is the official motto of the U.S. state of New Hampshire, adopted by the state in 1945. It is possibly the best-known of all state mottos, partly because it conveys an assertive independence historically found in American political philosophy and partly because of its contrast to the milder sentiments found in other state mottos.
The patriot act is not really “a law” in the sense of being a concrete series of statements you can point to in today’s US Code. It’s more like a patch to a codebase. At the time it was passed it (like any statutory act of Congress) created and amended dozens of sections of the US code. Some of those provisions had expiration dates which have lapsed, but not all, and (apparently) not the sections this article discusses dealing with financial crimes.
I believe you have misread the comment. In 2015, it was expanded and extended until 2019. After that, it was allowed to expire and was not extended or expanded further.
"Acts" as they are passed by Congress are usually a huge collection of additions/deletions/modifications to existing law. And those changes can be unrelated and scattered across hundreds and hundreds of sections of existing statutes, each of which can have their own sunset clauses. So some of the things included in "The Patriot Act" expired, but parts are still active.
Also it dosent matter if it's expired anymore. It was kept on for 20+ Fing years. During that time it was used to permananly shred constitusional rights and human rights.
They got what they wanted from it beyond their wildest dreams.
> Whenever leftists say that "Trump is a symptom of an illness that has been metastasizing for a long time" this is what we mean.
It's also the thing I don't understand about party loyalty.
When candidate George W. Bush was running for President, he was saying all kinds of things about how big government is bad and regulation destroys small businesses etc. Clearly not consistent with what he did once he was in office. When candidate Obama was running for President, he was saying how those things Bush actually did were bad and unconstitutional, and then once he's in office he signs a Patriot Act extension, fails to pardon Snowden, etc. When candidate Trump, well, you know.
Most of this is structural, not partisan. And a lot of it is Congress even though people mostly talk about the President. The partisanship itself is structural -- get your state to use STAR voting instead of first past the post and you get more than two choices, and then liars can be evicted even if their state/district goes >60% to the left or right.
> get your state to use STAR voting instead of first past the post and you get more than two choices, and then liars can be evicted even if their state/district goes >60% to the left or right.
This. Or any cardinal voting, such ask approval, ends up being a huge win.
The system is flawed from its roots. People need a voting system that allows them to specify their conscious, not vote on strategy only. The latter only leads to a race to the bottom. Unfortunately ranked voting systems do not allow for this, and we've seen those predictions come true in places like New York.
> It's also the thing I don't understand about party loyalty.
What I don't understand is how a lot of people will state both parties are corrupt and then also be party loyal. My parents are some of these types of people, but it is also pretty common. Together we'll happily criticize any member of the left, we'll happily criticize the abstract notion of politicians, but as soon as a name like Donald Trump leaves my mouth there's accusations of communism. I've literally had conversations where we both agree Biden is too old, we both agree that the country shouldn't be run by geriatrics or anyone over 60, but as soon as the next part is mentioned about how this means I don't want Trump then they start talking about how he's a special case and will contradict everything that they said before. They literally cannot understand how I voted Biden but also happily criticize him and state that I think he was unfit to be president.
We've turned politics into religion. It's not just the right (though I'd argue it's more common), but so many people love to paint everything as black and white. Anyone who thinks the world isn't full of shades of gray is a fucking zealot and we've let that go on for too long.
> Or any cardinal voting, such ask approval, ends up being a huge win.
I kind of dislike approval voting because it's marginally worse than score/STAR to begin with, and on top of that has an ugly failure mode where the ballot looks like a first past the post ballot and then some non-trivial percentage of people don't realize they can vote for more than one candidate and you're back to being stuck with a two-party system. Whereas score makes it clear something's different but still only takes ten seconds to explain ("rate each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10").
> What I don't understand is how a lot of people will state both parties are corrupt and then also be party loyal.
Tribalism. People convince themselves that both options are bad but one is worse and then fight their own brothers who picked the other one.
But the lesser of evils is still evil and the ability to change your vote to the other team is the only leverage you have against either of them, so what happens if you relinquish it?
Given a decision between the devil you know and the devil you don't, choose the one that you have not tried.
> it's marginally worse than score/STAR to begin with, and on top of that has an ugly failure mode
To be clear, I strongly prefer STAR, but approval is the "good enough" where I'd shut up other than nerdy nit-picky conversations (which I enjoy as much as any other nerd). Approval seems to work out well enough in practice (hell, it's how most people figure out where to eat and even HN is some mixture of Approval and 3-2-1 if you can downvote lol).
The way I like to explain score vs ranking to people is like measuring things with a normal ruler vs measuring things but your ruler only has inches on it. People seem to get it and the importance of specifying how much more you like one candidate over another or how little your indifference is between some.
But I think we both understand these systems sufficiently and probably shouldn't derail. I just want to make sure we don't fall into doing the same thing I'm complaining about over here[0]
> the lesser of evils
But that's kinda my point. With the example of my parents we can agree that it is a choice between two evils but then they cannot understand how I say I hold my nose while begrudgingly choosing one rather than vote with full devotion. In reality that means one of us doesn't actually believe in a choice between the lesser of two evils[1]. They claim this, but don't act on it. I think this is strikingly common.
That is a far worse form of tribalism because they lie to themselves. They've convinced themselves they believe something that they don't actually believe in. What I'm worried about is how common this is. Even down to the mundane cliche, where I jokingly define as "something everyone can recite, but no one can put into practice." Road to hell I guess...
[1] Give me the choice between the lesser of many evils! I joke, but as much as I love cardinal voting I won't make the claim that it is a cure all. But given a choice between two evils or many evils (and no other information), I'll take many evils. My chances are better in being able to pick a lesser one.
Duverger’s law: first past the post results in two party system.
Any vote that is not proactively for the major party that is the closest to your political beliefs is effectively a vote for the major party least aligned.
> What I don't understand is how a lot of people will state both parties are corrupt and then also be party loyal.
Both teams are corrupt, but in different ways.
On my team it’s rules being bent but not broken, a few bad apples, everyone was doing it, parents wanting to give their children the best start in life, the inevitable results of the need to raise campaign funds to continue their great work, and/or they’ve already rightly been suitably punished.
On the other team it’s a problem that runs through all of them, reflecting their poor character, the lack of basic decency resulting from their hollow look-out-for-number-1 political beliefs, and is undoubtedly representative of a much wider problem that’s being covered up.
I think you missed my entire point, so much that I thank you for demonstrating it. Rather than some abstract "my parents", I can say "like this."
> Both teams are corrupt, but in different ways.
Who has denied this? Is this not such an obvious assumption that it need not be explicitly stated? Need I make clear that you and I are not in fact the same person?
This is a given.
> On my team
> On the other team
And what? We obviously have decided who we believe the lesser of evils is. That was never the point. The point is that by showing strong devotion to the lesser of two evils is still showing devotion to evil! There's a big difference between begrudgingly choosing between two evils in a rigged game and aligning with that evil.
One does not need always compare. We can both evaluate a single political party by its merits, absent of everything else, while also being able to evaluate how they stand comparatively. In fact, you can't even do the latter without doing the former first!
All you've accomplished is perpetuating the two evils. You perpetuate the evil you vote for my allowing them to excuse their actions in justification of fighting the greater. You have no power to change what you've chosen as greater and you've abdicated the power to make your lesser even less evil, instead choosing to gave it power to become more evil!
Think carefully about what you say. It's not only Siths who speak in absolutes, but evil does thrive on over-simplification.
Jesus. They were literally answering your question of “how can anyone be committed to someone they describe as a lesser evil”, very clearly not even using a specific side as the lesser evil, and you’re mad that anyone is able to elucidate or understand the reasoning used? You didn’t want to know how people do that, you just wanted to mention that they are terrible people and it’s a bad choice?
We're at a point where if that is parody then it is indistinguishable from reality. I hope you're right and that it is parody. But hell, just the other week I saw someone pull out the "bUt YoU dIdN't UsE a SoTa MoDeL" card in reference to a GPT-5 output and I mistakenly assumed this was a joke.
Sarcasm doesn't seem to translate well over the internet. Fewer clues and people conflate the ability to read with literacy. I love sarcasm, but it appears Descartes was right
> Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they’re in good company.
I hope it was sarcasm, because I didn't want to offend anyone. Perhaps I'm reading too much in the details, but highlighting my team and the other team made me think that. (Anyway, I agree that it's better to avoid sarcasm online.)
I hope you're right. I used to default to assuming sarcasm but that changed. I hope I'm wrong though, because you are right, there are enough elements where I did take a second to consider if it was
My big ask is, was it always this stupid? Like, all these huge historical events and figures, did it all go down as stupidly and clownishly as the modern USA? Was there an early 20th century fascist Europe equivalent to a man named Big Balls being beat up by children and a fascist police action being triggered as a result? Was there a Napeolonic era equivalent to a media figure known for making light of school shootings, getting killed in a school shooting, a second after again making light of school shootings? Was George III as publicly and flagrantly fellated by the court as Trump is by the media still allowed into the White House?
I feel like I can't possibly live in the stupidest era in world history so it makes me try to see other historical eras in a similar light - how can I reinterpret the past such that it also experienced a bunch of clownish nonsense?
To know the answers to all of these questions, you should really check out the Behind the Bastards podcast because that is the whole premise. Covering the lead-up to horrible situations and the inevitable slide in fascism. It's insanely detailed about covering many, many stupid fascist bastards and a few smart ones.
That's a good podcast that gets across that most of the Nazis really were just dense thugs.
One thing that it doesn't really cover is the rest of German society and how those thugs managed to get power. Weimer Germany was run by the social democrats. These people were basically 'center left.' They ended up in control after the 1919 revolution that got rid of the Kaiser, and ruled via coalition government with other centrist and center-right parties as junior members.
In general people's complaints were 1) land reform because especially in Prussia most of the land was still owned by massive landowners (Junkers) and most peasants were tenant farmers and 2) better working conditions in industry for the working poor 3) some way to get out of the economic crisis that was bad even before the depression in Germany.
The social democrats failed to deliver any of this. And mostly they spend their entire time in power battling with the Communists. This included hiring freekorps, which were paramility groups that roamed the German countryside after the war and eventually turned into brownshirts, to work with the police to attack communists. There was already a ton of state sponsored terror in the 1920s directed almost entirely at the left.
Support for the social democrats and other center parties collapsed and in the 1932 election, the nazis and communists were the big winners almost entirely at the expense of the social democrats. The center parties decided that working with the communists was absolutely beyond the pale and thought that the nazis would be more easy to manipulate, so they decided to work with Hitler and made him chancellor. Once the nazis had their foot in the door, as it were, and given that they had contempt for democracy and the rule of law, they used every dirty trick they could after that to consolidate power.
> One thing that it doesn't really cover is the rest of German society and how those thugs managed to get power.
Just to clarify for other folks, there are many episodes re: Nazis, but it also covers everything from Khmer Rouge to more modern coverage that's truly the more banal kind of evil, covering the worst and most destructive grifters. So while it's definitely kinda preoccupied with fascism, there's another through-line with dis/misinformation, etc etc.
I do agree with your basic criticism though, fair to say the general show format for dictators is 1st part bio which is frequently unremarkable, then the 2nd part is appalling crimes. How society was complicit/tolerant enough to allow the decline to happen is usually sidelined. On the other hand though, it's kind of always the same and pretty simple. To the extent it's not simply hidden or covered up, it works like this. After things are definitely very shitty, whatever misguided optimism folks can muster is usually all about "harming the out-group will help somehow!". (It doesn't.)
But the astute dictator (or their advisors) can rely on and exploit that kind of tribalism. Common sense, static value-systems, or any sensitivity to blatantly hypocritical statements/behaviour etc just are not things that the common person can really hang on to once they are angry/impoverished/aggrieved/hungry
To know the answers to all of these questions, you should really check out the Bbehind the Bastards podcast because that is the whole premise. Covering the lead-up to horrible situations and the inevitable slide in fascism. It's insanely detailed about covering many, many stupid fascist bastards and a few smart ones.
Well, I at least know that teenagers were considered adults, not children, in the past and were expected to be responsible. Maybe that change is a big part of the problem.
Excellent question.
There are two easily readable sources I know of covering historical events of the sort you're asking about.
The first is Barbara W. Tuchman's The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam,
where the entire premise is that stupid people did stupid things and then doubled down on stupidity as they went along.
The second is Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,
in which Hannah Arendt details just how dull and unimaginative Eichmann was.
She writes, "it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown",
and suggests that Eichmann was not especially different from anyone he worked for,
right up to the top.
History doesn't seem clownish because of the way it is recorded and taught.
Even Arendt's writing is cool and formal compared to the histrionics we see on social media and many news outlets.
> Was there a Napeolonic era equivalent to a media figure known for making light of school shootings, getting killed in a school shooting, a second after again making light of school shootings?
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
and subsequent events leading to the start of the First World War,
were filled with errors and stupidity,
so much that history mostly lumps them all under the term "July Crisis",
and rarely goes into detail.
If you're familiar with the Abilene paradox,
you have a framework for how the Great War started as the result of collective actions by soldiers, diplomats, and national leaders.
What an excellent video essay, thanks for sharing. On the second watch, after removing the expectation of an alternative history, Civil War hit me really hard that a future civil war would be absurd and horrific.
That contrasts well with how most of the media present events as somehow well thought out and considered.
Many stories somehow manage to make even the most unhinged, word salad rants into thoughtful position statements,
followed up with a bland bit of "other side" objection.
Surely there was a lot of stupidity in Nazi Germany and hence the appalling results, but I think that during the second half of the 20th century most actors in western history were much less stupid than now, although maybe I'm just being naive.
Apparently (can't be bothered to fact check this) the nazis liked having parades in the dark because it was easier to propagate the idea of the nazi ubermensch when you couldn't see that the dedicated members of the nazi party were generally on the uglier side of average. As you'd expect of dissatisfied radicals, really. Probably same reason there's a stereotype of right-wing people on social media having a profile picture of themselves in a car with sunglasses on.
Anyway, as stupid as this is, Americans are generally literate, with access to unadulterated messages from the other side of the world. Imagine how stupid things were when 95% were illiterate and all information passed through a giant game of telephone before it arrived to you.
> Anyway, as stupid as this is, Americans are generally literate, with access to unadulterated messages from the other side of the world. Imagine how stupid things were when 95% were illiterate and all information passed through a giant game of telephone before it arrived to you.
I agree, but the other side of this is that we're open to manipulation coming from anyone around the world, and sometimes that game of telephone can act as an effective bullshit filter.
> how can I reinterpret the past such that it also experienced a bunch of clownish nonsense?
The thing is, you don't know what happened in the past - you weren't there. What you have is a lot of stories and films that bring that to life for you.
Personally, I'm pretty sure nothing in the implementation has changed, but that the goals being sought have changed, as has the technology and therefore the implementation.
This rings poignant now that I finally got around to reading The Three-Body Problem. It starts off depicting struggle sessions during the cultural revolution in China in the 60s, in which they're beating a physicist to death for teaching relativity because Einstein gave imperialists the bomb. It's so stupid, that if it was fiction, I wouldn't find it realistic that people would be this stupid.
To be clear, the book is fiction, but struggle sessions and beating physicists to death is not.
Do you have a citation for an actual physicist being beaten to death because of their views on physics or was the book exaggerating for the sake of the plot and promoted widely in the west because it promoted anticommunism?
For what it’s worth I like the show just not that part.
What didn't you like about that part, just the depiction of violence while everyone watched and did nothing?
I'll preface with, I am a communist so I have no anti communist tendencies.
But, that is what struggle sessions were like, and their most frequent locations were in classrooms, and their most frequent targets were teachers and professors. And they'd often drag in random peasants to watch. I remember one quote that was like, feeling bad for these peasants who have no idea wtf is going on or why they're watching some professor get beat half to death.
The CPC's reasons for the struggle sessions were cynically open-eyed: they wanted people to participate so that people were involved and culpable with the state violence against "counter revolutionaries."
This is why the PRC's communist revolution was flawed from the start and doomed to slide into deep authoritarianism, which holds out as a historical fact now.
Btw for what it's worth the book really isn't all that anti communist, or anti CPC at least. Criticism of the cultural revolution is allowed in the PRC now, or the author never would have been allowed to publish.
Details vary but from time-to-time, yes, things do go this wildly off the rails.
You could argue that the entirety of Europe declaring war on itself over the death of one royal (and not even a reigning monarch; an heir-apparent) is such an example; tens of millions dead over something as transient as birthright rulership. Others that come to mind are much of the reign of Henry VIII (everyone knew he was dangerously paranoid, nobody with the potential to do so mounted an overthrow of his power, and his son was shaping up to be worse and England was narrowly spared his reign by the luck of his own bad health). Then there's the French overthrow of a monarchy to replace it with a bloody civil war that liquidated, among others, most of the people who overthrew the monarchy (and replaced it with an empire).
>>You could argue that the entirety of Europe declaring war on itself over the death of one royal (and not even a reigning monarch; an heir-apparent) is such an example
I mean that was just an excuse, in hindsight it's completely obvious that Europe was gearing up for war for years prior to the event. Just like now it seems completely possible that we might end up in a war or even civil war in some countries over a (seemingly) minor event - it's just going to be a spark that sets off the powder keg.
>I feel like I can't possibly live in the stupidest era in world history.
Your statistical intuition is sound, and while there are many historical sources describing very stupid events (VSE) dating as far back as recorded history, it is difficult to appreciate the outer bounds of the stupidity range because what has been written is a small fraction of the history that people have lived for at least 100,000 years.
So while I feel we are living in the stupidest era in history (the SEIH), I must conclude that we don't.
I think what's more important, is that you have a device that will broadcast you a personalized feed of whatever the most engaging stupidity in the world is, at that very moment, 24/7. The magnitude of this passive exposure is far greater than even the rate of spread.
I generally agree, but if we assume that the amount of history scales proportional to the number of humans, then it's not so clear cut, as there's never been more humans alive than now. In other words, there's just more history to be dumb in, nowadays, than before.
You would have to define what stupid is. We have some definition of crazy, which is, doing something that doesn’t work over and over.
Recurring racism is either crazy (as in, it doesn’t work but people keep doing it), or, it … works for some people. It makes them feel better, builds camaraderie and unity amongst a group. So in practical terms, I don’t know if we can call this stupid or crazy.
The word we might be looking for is “rotten”. To watch the evil of the past and continue to harbor any adjacent attitudes absolutely does qualify as “one of the the most rotten eras”, especially because our era was educated on the past and given so much comfort and luxury.
——
I wanna expand why I am honing in on racism. I can only define the American Right as something that has battery pack that is powered by hate. I can’t find the source of the hate. There’s no foreign occupier in America, there’s no evil army here locking people up. The hatred is rooted somewhere, and the core emotion of hatred is the fertile ground for all the obstinance (why nothing good seems to take initiative in this country).
It doesn’t take a genius to say “hey, I think this multi century issue of white racism is still here guys”, like discovering that a alien monster was on the ship all along, lingering, a horror movie.
Edit:
Get the audiobook for this. You can hear just how crazy things have always been:
I listen to this on nice walks, and I’ve literally had to stop in the middle of walking to laugh at the absurdity of it all. It’s surreal and relevant to what’s going on today, as usual.
Problem could be economical. The rich want to get richer and more powerful, the poor and rest of the 99% have issues. Solving a lot of these issues would mean less wealth and power for the rich. So they need to create scapegoats. And racist stereotypes are probably the easiest way to do that. Close second are the people who think differently than [your_group].
helps that the same rich people have lots of influence over what the rest sees, hears and thinks.
They say money is the root of all evil, and I think that is the core issue. It's unchecked greed and blind nationalism. Political and racial polarization is profitable. Selling guns and ammo is profitable. Being a corrupt politician who helps their rich friends make more money is profitable.
The more I study 20th century fascism - and by "study" I mean "listen to podcasts like Behind the Bastards" - the more I learn that, yes, they were just as goofy and cringe in their time as their modern equivalents. Hitler was seen as a bit of a comic buffoon with his over-the-top rhetoric, he had an Austrian accent which made him come off as a country bumpkin, and many people were unimpressed by him. Trump in 2016 was a joke, a C-list celebrity game show host only known for being rich and sleazy and playing himself on television.
The core elements are usually similar. Fetishism of militarism often by people who never see a day of combat, occult and antiscientific beliefs, grifts, purges and nepotism, brutish mocking cruelty. The Nazi Totenkopf was the shiba inu of its day.
History doesn't repeat but it does rhyme. I think the lesson here is people tend to understimate what they can't respect. Thinking "no one would be stupid enough to take this guy seriously" is often a mistake.
There's a lot of stupid people out there waiting for someone who knows how to speak to them. Sounding like a country bumpkin and being unimpressive to the elites is probably good qualities if you want to be that sort of person.
Do you mean republicans? That’s different. I have some sympathy for the whole small government thing. I even kinda vote that way myself. But there’s a certain kind of person who will instantly vote for a “man of the people” who “tells it like it is” and promises that he’ll fix everything and says the foreigners took your jobs. And we have a term for those people.
Honestly I'm realizing they're right, I've seen multiple comments here promoting the great replacement conspiracy. Personally I don't mind calling such people stupid, but, they are on HN.
How else do you describe people who didn't know what a tariff was, didn't care to check how it works, blindly believes that other countries will pay for it (especially after Mexico didn't really pay for the wall the first time around?), and will likely still believe whatever misinformation they're fed next time?
I have deep disagreements with my father on this subject. He worked as a federal agent for 30 years, mostly in digital forensics. He does not believe in the right to privacy in any of the same ways I do. Whereas I believe a right to privacy in your tools and communication is essential, he believes they infringe on the government's ability to catch criminals. Classic justification of "if you're not a bad guy, what do you have to hide?"
I just thought this was worth sharing, my dad was a tech guy (though not much of a programmer), the folks on HackerNews and related sites mostly have a privacy-first worldview. But not everyone shares this view, especially those who work in or around law enforcement. Civilians who believe in the right to privacy must stand their ground in the face of this.
> the folks on HackerNews and related sites mostly have a privacy-first worldview
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.
Case in point:
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?
> there is never an alternative offered which my grandma could use
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.
That was supposed to be the whole point of the Free (Libre) Software movement, not about cost/price and not about features/functionality... it was about being in control of your destiny and not being chained to the whims of a corporation!
You're right that privacy and freedom should never be sacrificed for convenience or aesthetics!
Not to mention just the practicality of it all. Like good god, how much time do we waste on rewriting the same little subprograms? But then again, I don't understand how people make a few hundred thousand a year and can't kick back some beer money for software we use every day. A solvable problem, needing only a minority to contribute, but nearly none do.
You should ask him if he's ever worked with someone who's pulled information on someone else for personal matters. Or if he'd be okay with personal information being pulled about himself. I'm usually surprised when people believe in the political process so much they can't fathom a government who will abuse their powers to undermine democracy.
Maybe ask if he has ever exceeded the speed limit, or run a red light, or failed to signal a turn. All things that could be monitored by a smartphone and reported to the police automatically.
Have him publish his full name, date of birth, social security number, mother's maiden name, bank checking and routing numbers, credit card numbers + expiration dates + cvv numbers, nude photos of his wife, nude photos of himself, all of the search history from all of his browsers online, all visible to the public.
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.
I think the crucial bit you're missing is that the fundamental disagreement boils down to whether a properly-signed-and-executed warrant ought to be sufficient for the government to get its hands on evidence or otherwise do what it needs to do to deliver justice.
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.
No, historically the vast majority of communication was not recorded, and so a warrant could not be used to access the communication. The fact of the modern world is that for the first time in history almost everything we do is recorded, and so subject to those warrants.
I'm not sure what you're saying "no" to. Nothing you wrote contradicts what I wrote. Anything that was recorded was fair game. The whole point here is that you're arguing reality has changed and thus so should the legal rights people are granted, whereas this person's father is simply saying that our current legal rights imply a different conclusion. These two sides are not contradictory; they're just talking past each other.
the problem is that technology has changed so much that it's legitimately hard to apply 18th-century laws to 21st-century life:
- does the plain view doctrine allow TSA to look under your clothes with mmWave sensors? or to peek through your walls with IR cameras? to use laser microphones to listen in on a conversation? to use EM emissions from your computer to conduct a side-channel attack?
- does the third-party doctrine allow police to read your emails (unlike actual letters) without a warrant? or your papers on Google Docs? to access streaming cloud backups from your home security cameras? to buy your location data from data brokers?
- does your fifth amendment right against self-incrimination protect you from confessing your passwords? from taking a polygraph? from measuring your P300 signal as you look at a lineup? from using fMRI to reconstruct images from your visual cortex?
- does the right to bear arms include AR-15s? machine guns? loitering munitions? tactical nukes? ICBMs?
there's a scale from textual pedantry to handwavy analogies. courts are increasingly going on vibes and hacking together post-hoc justifications because the source material is too abstract and too dated to allow any straightforward reading.
If we're sticking to current legal rights when reality changes, then the state can live with their current tools when the math protecting my communication changes. Wiretap my encrypted communication streams all you want, don't suddenly compel me to decrypt them for you - the law has no provisions for that, and in fact, that violates the fifth amendment right against self-incrimination.
No offense to your father but I've always felt like the "innocent until proven guilty" philosophy is expansive and fundamental privacy rights are part of that principle. That is, the underlying principle isn't "innocent until proven guilty" but something more akin to "your complete autonomy should be assumed by default, and the government should have to clear an extremely high threshold to constrain it".
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.
This is the crux of my belief system on the topic too. Along with the associated “burden of proof” and how making it less burdensome should not be anyone citizens goal or responsibility.
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.
Sadly, Percisely.
Digital Forensics (the evidence of nothing by the way, a great book), is approaching little more than gluing together datasets from various completely fungible entities.
I too could be a master investigator if I could simply compel various busnisses to gift me the tables needed!
The eventuality is of course a dystopian thought police situation, where simply thinking or even Googling something suggesting you were even contemplating something illegal will be grounds to charge you with the crime.
What does he think if "government's ability to catch criminals" becomes "government's ability to attack political opponents"? I suppose he has a privileged position, as part of the incorruptible rule-of-law democratic land of the free, but people in other countries may not be so well off.
> Whereas I believe a right to privacy in your tools and communication is essential, he believes they infringe on the government's ability to catch criminals.
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.
> No one ever answers the “what do you have to hide” question, which is a little sus.
Poe's Law strikes again, but for reference there are even several major categories:
Some things are nobody's business. If you have religious parents and you're gay, you may not want them to know that, even if your religious parents work for the government.
People have proprietary secrets. A drug company or tech company can't be spending a billion dollars on 95%-finished R&D only to have a random cop take a $10,000 bribe to hand it over to a foreign competitor.
It's important to protect the political opposition from the incumbents. The thing Nixon had to resign over? That.
Sometimes the bad guys work for the government. If your abusive ex is a cop, they shouldn't be able to trivially find you without a warrant.
The government shouldn't be able to go on a fishing expedition. If you do something that isn't illegal, or that you have a right to do, that shouldn't be an excuse to trawl through your life so you can be prosecuted for breaking a law that everybody breaks but only people who step on the toes of the powerful are prosecuted for.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -Cardinal Richelieu
"Saying you don't need privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't need freedom of speech because you have nothing to say." -Edward Snowden
- Megacorporations cozying up to government in exchange for access to this information, for a competitive advantage, targeted advertising, etc. Lawmakers will bend over backward for corporations if they are promised "job creation" in their districts, or it could be lobbying or even straight-up bribery. We have a sitting supreme court member who openly takes bribes and he's suffered no consequences for it. It's not hard to imagine data the government collected in a giant dragnet being shared with generous campaign contributors.
- Laws changing to target an out-group. Remember how the government was keenly interested in people's period-tracking apps so they could imprison people who they suspected had an abortion? It doesn't matter whether your private data could incriminate you now, it's dangerous if it could incriminate you from any future government that is hostile to you.
That's all as may be, and I agree those are relevant points, but the overarching principle, IMNSHO, is that "my business is my business and not anyone else's." Full stop.
Okay, so reply with your credit card numbers, links to all your cell phone photos, your DNA test results, your passwords, and your medical history. What do you have to hide?
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.
No need to even use police corruption. A brief look at the current US government, and how it suddenly came to be in the freeest and most democratic of countries, ought to suffice to show why not any government should ever get a free pass.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic but imo the lack of answers is because the phrasing begs the question. If you change "hide" to "protect" it suddenly becomes a bit more of a different proposition.
Boomers were raised in a high trust society, they think that the powers-that-be are fundamentally good. They don't see how easily it could be corrupted.
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.
The typical HN person works as a software engineer, and the typical software company makes money, either directly or indirectly, via targeted ads. And these ads are served via a surveillance infrastructure that would not be out of place in a dystopian science fiction novel.
Even the companies that don't make money from ads have no qualms just letting Google or Facebook collect data about their website visitors.
Actually that's a problem for a lot of libertarian minded tech, it starts being thought of as enabling freedom from oppressive governments and ends up being adopted by criminals - Bitcoin, Tor, etc.
In the tech industry you also find a bend of very economically self interested version of privacy, which is that giving privacy to your users is a great way to claim you didn't know anything bad was happening. I'm pretty sure that, not high minded ideals, is why Meta invests so much in e2e encryption and privacy for WhatsApp, and publicizing it - when the next horrible thing is planned using Whatsapp, it lets them disclaim all responsibility for moderating what's happening on their platform
> Actually that's a problem for a lot of libertarian minded tech, it starts being thought of as enabling freedom from oppressive governments and ends up being adopted by criminals - Bitcoin, Tor, etc.
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.
I'm not disagreeing with your general point but in the specific case of Bitcoin I can't think of any laws that have been passed which make it highly inconvenient to use relative to other financial assets. If anything, it seems like legislators (at least in the US) have taken something of a laissez faire attitude toward the technology. Regulators have been more aggressive (e.g. the Treasury) but they're largely just enforcing existing laws which, again, apply to other financial assets.
> I'm not disagreeing with your general point but in the specific case of Bitcoin I can't think of any laws that have been passed which make it highly inconvenient to use relative to other financial assets.
The issue is that it's treated as a "financial asset" to begin with, which de facto inhibits its use as a currency. You want to pay for a sandwich with cash? Hand them bills, get sandwich. You want to pay with cryptocurrency? File securities paperwork. Who is going to do that?
By comparison, things like foreign currencies that float against the dollar aren't reported when the transaction amount is below a threshold.
Using HTTPS to check Gmail and send messages isn't what I'd call libertarian tech. You're still communicating everything in cleartext to Google, whoever you're emailing with, and whoever subpoenas Google or the other provider.
> starts being thought of as enabling freedom from oppressive governments and ends up being adopted by criminals - Bitcoin, Tor, etc
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.
Donating in public associates you with that charity. If that charity happens to be politically different from people in power it can use it against you.
We have to decide what kind of society we want. One with locks on doors or a world where that is illegal. Bad guys use locks and so do regular people. Taking away everyone's freedom and safety because it makes it easier to catch "bad guys" is not worth the tradeoffs in terms of safety / privacy or creating a society worth living in.
> 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.
Yet. They want to execute people for being trans in Florida, by separately passing laws that child abusers get executed, and that being trans == child abuse. It's not hyperbolic to worry that donating to a trans rights organization could make you a governmental target. Scammers might steal some of my money, but they're not going to abduct me off the street into unmarked vans in front of my kids.
> 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.
This is archaic thinking, today all it takes is the president tweeting about your donations for your family to have to go into hiding forever.
A few years ago, I tried to open a bank account, and was turned away because my visa stamp expired (despite having valid immigration status). The clueless clerk and her advisor were going through The Patriot Act to find justification.
Fortunately, other banks weren't staffed with idiots, and I was able to open an account elsewhere after providing my documents.
Possibly, but this not unreasonable for regular employees. They are not paid enough to deal with the consequences of making a mistake in a low volume situation.
If they go off-piste, even when that is a valid action, then they are likely going to be penalized by their employer's compliance department. That's because that piece of bureaucracy is still required at the next stage of bureaucracy. Now level 2's life is harder. It's best just to ignore and move on. There will always be some non-zero failure rate like this as long as bureaucracies exist.
I think the case for why strong encryption is important is much clearer than why untraceable financial instruments are important and I don't think it's super compelling to argue that these things are actually the same, even if your opposition to government control is the same.
I think it's actually pretty clear that almost all people are not capable of secure and reliable self-custody and would be better off with an intermediary. We're not keeping our fiat currency in a safe under our bed after all.
I think it makes sense to start from the idea that you should be able to transfer funds to someone, like $100 to your mother, without needing the government or a megacorp to facilitate it. The same way I can gift my TV to my mom.
Whether that's cash or cryptocurrency doesn't seem to matter since your argument would also apply to cash.
Start from the assumption of liberty and the freedom of association. Unfortunately, most people don't believe in human liberty and prefer varying degrees of slavery.
> If you start from an assumption that there should be no regulation, then your conclusion will be that there should be no regulation
To be fair, they argued against intermediation. Not regulation. Requiring a filing for every $100 cash transfer to one's mother would satisfy their requirement.
Regulation is a controlling mechanism that puts constraints on what people can and can't do. Some constraints will enable more things to happen because it reduces certain risks (e.g. property rights and laws against stealing enable investment and development of property).
But when there is too much regulation it has the opposite effect, and instead of enabling progress it stifles it. It acts as a calcification that slows change and makes society less adaptable.
So it's not that regulation is bad, it's that too much regulation can be bad.
Now in terms of regulating people's abilities to transact specifically: in a health democracy putting some regulations on transactions will probably have a positive effect because it can limit abuse and risk, and therefore increase freedom for honest people to make transactions. However when a civilization reaches the point in its life cycle when it is transitioning from a healthy plurality into authoritarianism, the risk of over-regulation of transactions skyrockets and the elimination of privacy when transacting is extremely likely to lead to tyranny.
When someone acts like regulating transactions is inherently bad, they're either repeating something they heard and didn't question, or they're assuming the people they are speaking to are educated in history and have a healthy fear of tyranny.
If you start with the assumption there should be regulation, even then IDK how you get there.
You're regulating an "untraceable" utterance of a string of data.
Pragmatically it's worse than trying to stop fentanyl, which is already impossible, and even trying to stop it has just made the gangs that much more powerful because they now control whole small nation-state tier light-infantry militias funded by black-market profits induced from trying to ban it.
I honestly don't see any way to effectively ban cryptocurrency that has net positive utility. "Yay we caught some criminals, all it cost us was a dystopia!"
I don't see how I made any less fortified, less relevant of a claim than you did.
You added that most people would be better off with intermediated financial transactions which is probably true for most day to day transactions, but the TFA proposal brings up the question of whether everyone should be forced to use an intermediary.
For example, just using single-use addresses would be considered suspicious, probably just because it complicates basic taint analysis. Yet that's a fundamental component of privacy, and to do otherwise is akin to how Venmo lets people see your own transaction history (a very odd feature btw).
>Nobody here is actually even arguing about the proposal here, just repeating platitudes and analogies.
Well, given that they're responding to this:
>I think it's actually pretty clear that almost all people are not capable of secure and reliable self-custody and would be better off with an intermediary. We're not keeping our fiat currency in a safe under our bed after all.
Why would you not expect people to argue in the style you presented them?
Exactly! I want digital cash. We have the technology to do that, so why not? The tech crowd hyped up Bitcoin, but why never privacy coins? Any single flaw becomes killer, even if the flaw is unrelated to privacy or even petty. Hell, I'd even take a US ZKP-based stable coin that was pre-mined (but had strong privacy guarantees) and had even a small (like 0.1-0.5%) gas fee that ended up acting as some form of consumption tax. At least then there's some guarantee of tax revenue while maintaining the notion that Big Brother doesn't need to know I gave my friend some beer money.
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.
Cash and crypto do share similar properties that way... but with cash, you can't deposit say, $1,000,000 in cash into a bank, where you can use it for a lot more types of transactions, without forms being filed with the government, in order to both instill fear into the hearts of drug dealers and gangsters (etc) and to help catch them if they're dumb enough.
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.
The far left doesn't believe in the idea of property ownership in the traditional sense. So no, I think the premise that you can transfer property to anyone without the government tracking it is incorrect. Taxes could theoretically be imposed, registration might be required to comply with a social "program" they are implementing, etc.
Yeah, with the appalling civil forfeiture concept that I hope everyone is aware of, I also feel uncomfortable with this word "suspicious."
In brief summary: If the police search your car (let's just assume probable cause exists) in a routine traffic stop and find say, $50,000 in cash in a bag, they can charge the cash with a crime and arrest it, and unlike a person, it's guilty until definitively proven innocent. I don't think that's fair. And it's a big reason that holding more than a little cash is financially risky.
On the other hand, up till now I'd argue it's more risky (just specifically in terms of potential for loss of the money) to have your BTC in Coinbase or say, FTX where mine was, than in self-custody. These notions may reverse if your crypto private keys can be seized automatically as "suspicious," and the civil forfeiture thing has proven that the police will do that.
I think you are conflating 2 things:
- ability to privately give money to someone (mechanism is irrelevant, by hand or by way of a blockchain)
- self-custody risks for uninformed users
The first one is the privacy argument.
Would you be comfortable if you’re not allowed to give the cash in your pocket to someone without someone watching over? If the answer is no, you are pro privacy for financial transactions.
Cash has the privacy feature as a default. You can argue that 3rd parties that help you send cash don’t have to offer any privacy, but BTC isn’t that, and forcing it to be that way is an attack on privacy.
I don't have a predetermined opinion on whether it is good or bad for cash to be untraceable.
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.
The main argument for privacy is that a lack of privacy is the primary vehicle of crimes against humanity.
When you do not have privacy, you must then have trust. You are trusting, typically blindly, that your governments and other organizations will not use knowledge against you.
Before the Holocaust, Germany built a registry of known Jews by census. Obviously at the time, nobody knew what it could be used for, the latent evil within just plain information. It was done innocently, naively.
The same applies to all privacy violations. Yes, we could monitor, record, and analyze all text messages. Sure.
What are the consequences of that? What if you live somewhere where being gay is punishable by execution? What if you out yourself?
What if you're not even gay, but it seems as though you might be?
Or what if you live in an authoritarian state, and dissent is punished with death? Your government has cornered you. They can do whatever they like, and you cannot so much as vocalize complaints.
You may say, "oh well this isn't the case for me, so who cares?"
Yes, now, in this particular point in time, in your very specific place. What garantees do you have that things stay that way? None. You are blindly trusting that those who hold your information will not weaponize it.
You have given your enemies a gun, loaded it for them, held it up to your forehead, and said "please don't pull the trigger"
As a thought experiment, imagine how differently the underground railroad would look if everyone had smartphones that were tracked and communications surveilled.
This seems like an argument against the state in every form, you could say the same thing about the government collecting taxes, having a police department, courts etc.
Unless you are a committed anarchist though, you likely see a limit to the use of the precautionary principle as applied to state capacity in general.
Why is this argument sufficient to stop the state from monitoring financial transactions, but not sufficient to prevent the existence of a justice system?
> This seems like an argument against the state in every form, you could say the same thing about the government collecting taxes, having a police department, courts etc.
Yes and no.
Yes in that: all of those tools can be abused.
We need to take steps to ensure they are not, and we need to actively deprive the government of tools they can use for evil. The US has fought wars over this, which we why we created the constitution as we did.
No in that: information is both everlasting and fundamental. Privacy does not address bits or paper, those are proxies. Privacy addresses the human mind. This is the key people miss when they try to make an analogy.
The police and justice system only address actions by their nature. They are fundamentally restricted.
Private violations go to a deeper, lower, level. They attack the precursor to actions - thoughts and identity. Who you are, and what you believe.
What does this mean in practice?
Suppose I am a terrorist. If I want to avoid the justice system, it's simple. I will not commit acts of terror. I am untouchable, no amount of police activity can compromise my life or liberty.
Suppose we, instead, don't look at actions, and attack privacy. Suppose you deduce I am a terrorist. Maybe from the color of my house, from the jokes in my messages, from my patterns of movement, from the length of my hair, from the activities at my job.
Now, I can no longer avoid the attack, because it is intrinsic to my character. Like a stain, or a marker.
In theory this sounds like a good thing: we caught terrorists before they could commit terror.
But notice something: we cannot know someone's identity or beliefs. Mind reading is currently impossible. We are trying to implement thought crimes, without the ability to know thoughts.
This is compounded with the fact that surveillance is forever. Every data point collected on you, we should assume, will outlive you.
It does not matter if you're not actually a terrorist and you're just a brown person, and then you spend the next 10 years donating to children's hospitals. The damage is done.
This is all, of course, the happy path: we're trying to get terrorists. I'm assuming the government is not evil.
But, that's a bad assumption, isn't it? Time passes whether you want it to or not. What is good tomorrow is not what is good today.
This doesn't mean privacy should be absolute. But it does mean that a complete lack of privacy is disasterous.
Up until right about now, that has simply not been possible. We are limited by the physical world and technology.
What we have right now is a fatal combination of unprecedented surveillance tools and a complete disdain for privacy.
Make no mistake: such a combination will result in casualties never before seen to mankind. This allows a type of warfare and destruction that operates at a more fundamental level than primitive guns and tanks. Even nuclear weaponry is nothing in the face of the absolute dissolution of privacy.
If you don't agree with me, I don't need to kill you or your family. I don't need to invade your country. I know what everyone is thinking, so I will change their thoughts, and now you do not disagree with me. Think supercharged propaganda and complete silence of dissent.
> 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.
Now imagine that "someone" hates people like you, has the power to hurt you with impunity and is actively looking for any excuse to do so.
almost all people are not capable of secure and reliable self-custody and would be better off with an intermediary
I agree, send me your bank account login info and I can keep it safe for you.
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.
I have a grad school professor that owes me $1M dollars on a bet that the Patriot Act would never end. I told him he was painfully naive and not suitable to each graduate school economics with such thinking.
Unless you used different language for the bet, you lost it the moment it was made.
"Never" may be falsified by "at least once", but affirmed only by "never". So I'm afraid only you could have ever been on the hook for the $1M, and may still be!
Still though, bad bet. The other guy can easily keep arguing that it's still just a few more years from being repealed, until one of you dies of old age.
Unless your bet was that "it will be strengthened before it is repealed" and then his position was that "it would be repealed without ever being strengthened." Still possible for neither to happen indefinitely though, leaving the bet pending.
If the United States ends, I win. It's looking pretty probable today, with this inescapable cascading of everything traditionally considered American Values, and the POTUS openly defying the US Constitution with zero repercussions beyond wimpy whispered protests. Then there is the media doing EVERYTHING in it's power to accelerate this destruction...
It’s worse than that. Roe v. Wade associated privacy with abortion in the US, so the Supreme Court eliminated the right to privacy as part of the decision to overturn Roe v Wade.
Mere criminality wouldn’t put privacy in such an indefensible position. Look at who’s president.
Agamben wrote some interesting analysis of this [1], expanding on the concept of the "state of exception", which was a older concept introduced by a much more odious man who employed it very effectively in the early 20th century. Agamben argued that modern governments now try to create permanent states of exception, of which I would argue the Patriot Act is a perfect example.
Thank you for writing this. You are absolutely correct and made me step back to realize that the dollar is a global reserve currency and the US will do everything it takes to keep it that way.
No one willingly gives up power and if it’s the U.S. government there is a large ecosystem worth hundreds of billions around the patriot act, it’s never going to be sunset, and it not going to grow
War on Terror AUMF is still in force and is why the President can just decide to bomb whatever country they want without asking for permission, now.
All that shit after 9/11 was crazy and dangerous, and some of us said that at the time, and go figure, the fucking obviously true things we were saying have turned out to be... true. What a surprise.
> War on Terror AUMF is still in force and is why the President can just decide to bomb whatever country they want without asking for permission, now.
The War on Terror AUMF relies on a Presidential determinatiom that the targets “planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or person”.
But the President has had implicit blanket permission to bomb whoever he wants with a time limit ever since the War Powers Act was passed.
People who protested this horse shit were called unamerican for christs sake. Bush Jr said the literal words "you are either with us, or against us". The right went into utter hysterics about France not wanting to help our BS invasion.
The right loves to say that violent rhetoric is the left's fault, while they wished us harm for not wanting to invade a random country in the middle east that wasn't even related to the terrorist attack.
Meanwhile, all that horseshit with the TSA only ever enriched a couple people connected to the admin.
> 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.
> The right loves to say that violent rhetoric is the left's fault
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.
Generally, accounted instances of credible calls for political violence originate far more often from the right side of the political spectrum[0], in fact it’s nearly their entire domain at this juncture (remember that both attempts on Trump’s life were carried out by registered Republicans, for example)
Additionally, it’s disingenuous to say allegory statements to the behaviors of a person is inciting violence. Calling someone Hitler, describing them as “like Hitler” etc are not credible calls to violence. They aren’t even inherently violent in so far as they suggest nothing as to what to do with that information
Trump's the guy who suggested when he ran against Hillary that the "second amendment people" would be the only ones who could "do anything about it" if she won. Like, holy fucking shit, and then Republicans elected him president after he said that! TWICE!
The right's been laughing it up for decades when liberals get attacked, and calling for aid for their attackers (Kirk did this exact thing with Paul Pelosi, and was, I kid you not, in the middle of trying to blame trans people for the prevalence of mass shootings in the US when he got shot). Calling families of shooting victims crisis actors. Working people up over invented child abuse conspiracies to the point that folks get violent over it. The left aren't the ones doing most of the actually killing people over politics for the last couple decades, at least. There hasn't been significant rates of political violence from the left since like the '70s.
AI Apocalypse Now image of scene in which a large assault featuring napalm takes place, with Trump inserted, re: invading Chicago, and shit like "Chicago's going to learn why we're calling it the Department of War"? This isn't coming from fringe randos, this shit's from republicans holding positions of power and their immediate advisors. These are just examples, there's a constant stream of this stochastic terrorism and actual threats of violence from leaders on the right. It's a huge part of their messaging. Where's Obama talking about West Virginia like it's a foreign country that's wronged us and we're getting ready to Shock and Awe their asses? Doesn't happen.
The left isn't pulling these comparisons out of nowhere, you know? They're comparing them to fascists because they target minorities and promote political violence fucking constantly (plus commit it! Rather often!) while publicly describing and then following through on plans to centralize power to the executive. I know there's a set of somewhat politically-disconnected folks who are super dedicated to the "both sides are equally, but differently, bad, and this doesn't vary over time" thing as if it's a law of nature, but it's extremely not true, in fact.
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.
There needs to be something like the federal equivalent of a referendum. I think with that, it would be possible to get rid of the patriot act and legalize weed, both of which seem to have popular support but zero chance of majority of representatives backing because they don't want to be liable for the worst-case corner-cases in the aftermath.
We are constantly voting in primaries and general elections. We vote in federal elections every two years, state elections generally at least as frequently, though often not in federal election year. We vote for mayor and city council and insurance commissioner and Secretary of State and county commission.
We don't need a referendum, we just need to choose representation that wants the same things we want. (Alternate formation: Americans do not want these things as much as some of us think they do.)
By referendum I meant to be able to vote directly on a specific law.
If you look at how weed was legalized, it required a referendum in many (most?) states because no representative wants to be the guy that has his face plastered everywhere when some kid dies after he smokes some legal weed and smashes into a pole, even if most his constituents wanted the policy.
Representatives generally have to be risk averse to get to the point they can even represent people on issues. This means they are extremely reluctant to vote for anything that might come back to bite them somehow, even if it is popular.
>Alternate formation: Americans do not want these things as much as some of us think they do
There is extremely overwhelming evidence that a supermajority of americans have wanted medical marijuana to be federally legal for many years. And overwhelming evidence the representatives have not been successfully bringing that forward.
The catch is that when voters vote at all levels, they express by their choices that e.g. marijuana legalization is not a high priority. So voters might well vote to legalize if given that standalone choice, but it's not obvious to me that it's a good idea to insulate representatives from their inaction.
> no representative wants to be the guy
So on this, a number of states arrived at some level of legalization exactly this way. Legalization laws were signed by governors as diverse politically as Kay Ivey in Alabama and Tim Walz in Minnesota.
There's no statutory reason that voters in e.g. South Carolina cannot choose representation as amenable to legalization as Beshear in Kentucky or Reeves in Mississippi. Referenda also are subject to faithful implementation by representatives, so attempting to side-step the choice of representatives is not necessarily going to be fruitful.
>If you look at how weed was legalized, it required a referendum
It only required a referendum in some states because most US states are controlled by Republican governors and legislatures who openly defy what their own constituents want without fear of being voted out, because republicans vote republican no matter what. Republican voters will say "I want to legalize weed", their elected representative spouts literal DARE propaganda about weed that republican voters KNOW is false since they literally smoke weed (illegally, how about that), but they STILL re-elect those politicians, because it's more important to not have a democrat in office than to actually get what you democratically voted for.
Here in Maine, we passed a referendum to legalize weed. It passed. Lepage spent the next 4 years of his Governor term refusing to implement it, entirely. Like he just criminally defied the will of the public. As soon as Mills took office, the state built up a framework for recreational weed and IMO it's pretty good compared to other states, which is probably why we have literal Chinese gangs growing illegal weed all over the state :/
You see the same thing in every Republican state that allows citizen referendums. The public passes a referendum, and the republican politicians of the state just utterly defy it, and they do not get voted out
Democrat politicians respect citizen referendums, even when they are stupid and against democrat policies, like in California where Uber is not an employer because that's how the people voted.
The federal government is currently controlled by Republicans, so it seems relevant regardless of whether you think they should be in power or not, no?
> Democrat politicians respect citizen referendums, even when they are stupid and against democrat policies, like in California where Uber is not an employer because that's how the people voted.
LOL what, apparently you forgot about Proposition 187, which California voters voted "yes" on, got tied up in the courts, and then when a Democrat governor came into power he let the appeals die.
Proposition 8: voters voted to ban gay marriage, courts said "nah we're not going to do that." Judges aren't technically politicians but that line is a little blurry at times.
The first-past-the-post system, combined with our current primary system, is set up such that most Americans do not get the representation they actually want, and Congress is made up of extremists. We don’t have the Congress we have because most Americans actually want it that way.
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.
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.
> Unless the Sanders Administration had a very favorable or majority Democrat Congress aligned with his progressive wing, many proposals would be outright blocked or heavily compromised
This is a feature, and why Trump's second term is so different to his first, or Bidens, or Obamas, or Bush, or Nixon. You'd probably have to go back to FDR for such sweeping changes to the US state.
Trumps first term was overturning norms in behavior, but not overturning the way the entire governing system works, all four estates.
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.
Just because a politician does the most virtue signaling towards the left doesn't mean that they'll produce the most progressive results. Bernie has a very poor track record of coalition building. He was getting into fights with Manchin even though he was needed as the 50th vote for the American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act.
He's never been a champion of financial freedom on an individual basis. He's consistently advocated for deeper and more intrusive regulations on cryptocurrencies.
Probably very similar unfortunately. The current state of US politics is that any policy further than center or maybe slightly left of center has a snowball's chance in hell of making it through Congress. The best case scenarios is probably what Biden accomplished: temporarily pausing the slide into far-right authoritarianism. Maybe he's able to pass some extremely watered down version of health care reform or tax reform but that seems unlikely. Certainly nothing like true progressive platform he ran on is possible in the US right now.
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.
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.
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.
That has been disproven. He ran again in primaries during 2020 and did horribly there. The progressives are just not popular, and they don't really do much to work with the rest of the Democrats. Unlike Republicans, where the party forerunner basically gets unilateral support from everyone Republican including those he personally insulted or harmed.
> a presidential candidate can run with removing the Patriot Act as one of their campaign points
I've worked on privacy regulation. This would not get votes. The unfortunate fact is that the people most passionate about these issues are also tremendously lazy or extremely nihilistic. (Maybe it comes with the territory of not trusting institutions.)
Either way, privacy advocates can rarely muster even a dozen calls to electeds, let alone credibly threaten backing a primary opponent. The reason SOPA/PIPA worked is it animated a group of tech advocates beyond those with ideological opposition to surveillance.
There will almost certainly be an election in 2028. The degree to which it will be rigged through gerrymandering, voter intimidation, voter suppression and/or blatant cheating is a different question.
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.
>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.
> Biden got taken down by the the "crippling senile dementia" meme because it's only a problem when it's Democrats
Democrats felt both Biden and Trump were far too old and senile to be in charge. And they were right.
The problem is that Republicans only felt it was Biden.
Remember when having a "consensual" blowjob from an intern was almost enough to get a president fired? Remember when presidents resigned when the public found out they were involved in organising a break-in?
That world has long gone, social media saw to that.
This is his second, ostensibly last, term, meaning he will have an uphill battle at best to convince the public that he should get another term for some bullshit reason. His last term ended with him obviously trying to prevent the next guy from taking over. He obviously wants to be in power. It's disingenuous to say there is no basis. Whether it's likely is another matter but this is intellectually dishonest.
I'm not sure that democrats enact/write less laws. If they don't enact (or write) less laws, i cannot see how the aggregate number of laws reduces.
This, apparently, is a "hard" statistical (research) problem, even though i've seen reporting on this exact subject, along the lines of "number of lines in bills written by each party" or similar. but the top 2 are democrats. I think "enacted" is a different metric, but i'm still pretty certain that democrats lead on "enacted" legislation, at least in the last 25 years.
No candidate can do that. The children were raised to be racist and ignorant. That basically means you are going to deal with poorly raised feral racist and entitled children. You aren’t going to rehabilitate that in your lifetime, the childhoods are fucked up. Maybe in 30-40 years these people will have a come to Jesus moment, but we don’t have a malleable national moral character to appeal to helpful sensibilities given how poorly the prior generation failed at raising proper children with good moral character.
Basically, a good portion of White America are gone cases. You won’t be able to explain to gone cases anything. That’s the reality of America.
1) If Trump somehow survives till 2028, there aren't gonna be elections in 2028 (or at least fare ones, if Democratic candidate wins Trump is gonna declare national emergency on suspect of voter fraud). TBD if Vance and the other crazies are in the same boat.
2) America started dying way before when we thought things like being anti woke was more important than policy.
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!
At the same time the legislature snuck in turning the US into a police state into the 2012 Defense spending bill. So while SOPA and PIPA was defeated, people did not pay “enough” attention in the end.
If we had that kind of reaction to making your internet worse as we did to making our rights worse we would be better off.
This has been a growing feeling for me too, seeing many users on various platforms go from mocking the murders of non-white people to claiming that their political opposition is hateful due to recent events. I used to think that being accepted in society was just a matter of integrating culturally (which I thought was fair), but the way people have been emboldened to say the most awful things has been changing my mind.
I mean, we have to be practical in our condemnation. I feel we had that somewhere around the 2010s, where we accepted that you can’t change a racist 80 year old. Fine, I think America accepted that.
But how the living fuck did that prior generation PASS ON the racism (and it’s way more than that, misogyny, economic selfishness, or wholesale disconnect in their economics to the point they don’t even vote for their economic interest).
HOW? How did they take 1 year olds in 1990-2010 and make them like the previous generation? People are not understanding what a huge sin this was. You CANNOT raise the children in an ideology that was nationally condemned and fought over for decades. It was an utter failure, no one was watching the kids.
This shit is so deep rooted that I am at a loss. To put it clearly, this is how anticlimactic America has been the last 20 years:
1) Imagine watching American History X
2) And instead of Ed Norton coming to a rebirth moment of shedding his racism and turning a new leaf, he stays a racist, doubles down, and also raises racist children.
It's really interesting to me that you seem to assume that non-racism is the default state, and that humans have to be taught to be racist.
Based on what I've seen in the world looking across all the countries I am familiar with, including the US, I have to say I think the opposite is true.
Anyone with experience teaching children could tell you that racism is taught. It's just not baked in for kids.
However it's also not a very interesting question imo. You will never "reset" a generation from any aspect of culture, and now that we're in the global information age it's triply impossible. We don't need to fool around with naturalist fallacy - it's enough to say that racism is bad and we should get rid of it.
I have experience teaching children. They typically don't experience the scarcity that leads to fear and tribalism among adults. Tribalism doesn't have to be taught.
Younger generations are probably more racist than their parents but not their grandparents. There are a lot of reasons this probably happened, and it wasn't something done to infants, but transpired over the last 10-15 years.
I think part of it is being raised on the internet right as the cultural backlash against progressivism, "cancel culture" and Obama started to accelerate across social media, and right-wing grifting became big business after Gamergate.
Yeah, that's the thing. Even if the Trump presidency ends and the next guy somehow actually undoes all the political damage (unlikely), how does the country recover from the social consequences? It won't happen within a generation.
Ideologically we're probably quite aligned. However I disagree with you. Having traveled a lot of the USA, I've found Americans to be surprisingly much less racist than I expected.
Absolutely there are nests of racist snakes, the KKK still continues after all and we have out and out nazis like Nick Fuentes getting page time in the NYTimes, so something is rotten in that country. Even still, compared to my travels throughout Europe, the USA has something unique about its diversity. It does seem like there's something different about the American identity superseding race and religion.
Compare to a country where your statement might be true, insomuch as it's a massive population of practically lost-cause racists: Israel. I've had several conversations with Israelis and my main takeaway is that the government has spent the last couple generations doing its utmost to convince everyone in the country that the planet is a zero-sum ongoing tribal war. The racism there is ingrained not just into the culture but into the law.
Having met people like that, I tempered my aggressively leftist America takes. America has issues but I've encountered way more flagrant and disgusting forms of racism in a year of travels through Europe than I did in decades of travel in the USA. I feel like I didn't know what racism really is until I left the USA.
> concentrating power in a few regulated intermediaries. That’s not healthy for innovation, or democracy.
How are "regulated intermediaries" not democratic? If they're regulated by the democratically elected government, that seems entirely democratic to me.
> Democracy always has the risk of sabotaging itself by naive actors who don't respect fundamental freedoms because they fear the public.
That sounds like a very radical statement. How are we to decide on these "fundamental freedoms" without putting them through the same democratic process we usually employ? Are we to ask the king for his opinions on how our democracy must be restricted? Are we to ask you? If the democratically elected officials "feat the public" what are they fearful of? Not getting elected? Are you implying the democratically elected officials shouldn't do what the public want?
Additionally, do these "fundamental freedoms" include the right to transact with any counterpart at any point? I have not found that right in any established human rights framework.
As a quite political teenager (not even from the US, never been there to this day) I argued that this law is going to stay. I wish I would have been wrong. These types of laws are not a good thing to have in the hands of power-hungry narcissists that like to rule not represent.
This should surprise literally nobody. Let me briefly explain the US political landscape.
Classic liberalism is a pollitical and moral philosophy that came about in the last 600+ years that (among other things) enshrined individualism and private property. This evolved hand in hand with enclosures (ie private property) and ultimately led to capitalism as an economic system.
Colloquially, "liberal" is used to describe someobody who is socially progressive, typically a Democrat, but that really has nothing to do with the origins.
Neoliberalism is what liberalism evolved into, primarily in the 20th century. The key principles are that capitalism (the "free market") is the solution to basically all problems and deregulation (to increase profits, basically).
Everybody is a (neo)liberal. Democrats and Republicans both. Note that "leftists" are by definition not neoliberals and are anti-capitalist but people often mistakenly use terms like "liberal" and "leftist" interchangeably when they couldn't be more different.
Imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. Fascism is capitalism in crisis. The Democratic Party as it exists in the US today, is controlled opposition.
So we come to the Overton window. This is how it goes:
1. Republicans pass some legislation like the Patriot Act to take away rights, usually under the guise of "security". The Patriot Act of course was passed in the aftermath of 9/11;
2. Ultimately the Democrats get in office and... don't reverse it. It becomes the new normal. They do this by being institutionalists. But defending institutions is merely an excuse for inaction.
3. Come the next election the Patriot Act or the border wall or whatever will the new normal and some even more fascist legislation will be on the table. As an example, try and find the daylight between the immigration plan of the Kamala Harris 2024 campaign and the Trump 2020 immigration plan (that Democrats opposed at the time).
Nobody cares about our individual rights. Things continue to get worse because both parties will always choose the US imperial project and the profits of corporations over your rights. We are six companies in a trenchcoat.
That's a very nice lecture, but I think it's almost entirely digressive.
The "success" of the Patriot Act really has nothing to do with classic liberalism, neoliberalism, leftists, Democrats, Republicans, or Kamala Harris. These are the current background details in which an age-old dynamic plays out: A threat gives those in power a chance to grab more power and they take it. Once they have it they do not give it up easily.
It just boils down to a truism: Those who seek power seek power. There's really nothing more to it than that.
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 draft text explicitly bans single-use addresses, which are used by any self-respecting wallet (Exodus, Ledger, Trezor) these days.
The actual problem with the article/headline is that the "Patriot Act" has expired. Although I'm sure there are plenty of similarly vague laws that could be used to justify this.
What text are you referring to? The article has a screenshot of a tweet with a screenshot of an excerpt that seems fair to paraphrase as "anyone behaved in this sort of activity is suspicious." I don't see anything about a ban and if you're only using single-use addresses that seems probably not suspicious in absence of all the other things which if you're doing all of them, seem objectively like they can only be described as money laundering.
I think single-use address use should not be marked as suspicious on its own but I agree in combination with other things in that screenshot I think it should. That's the "reasonable" line I have. This seems like the right balance for AML laws.
The rest of the discussion in this thread is awful. The article title is clickbait. The comments are mostly generic tangents about "crypto bad" or "muh surveillance". Guess it's par for the course when discussing cryptocurrency on this site.
The article has some references but not to a "draft text". The article makes no claims that a bill or other regulation-with-text is in the works. The image that serves as the topic of the article is apparently a tweet of the author of the article.
If you've got nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about!
Nobody will ever run afoul of the system or fall through the cracks.
We only have the best and brightest bureaucrats who won't make mistakes.
Nobody will ever be attacked with this for politicized reasons.
This will never be used to debank or isolate or penalize or attack an innocent person.
And even if it did, the government would never use its immunity from prosecution to evade accountability!
Don't be paranoid, and don't worry! We're the good guys!
> If you've got nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about!
We curtail commercial speech relative to political speech to protect against fraud. Regulating financial activity is deeply precedented, especially in contexts where whether it's an individual person or group of people is ambiguated.
That is an attack on self-custody. If you hold Bitcoin you now have an elevated risk of being picked up in some dragnet and suffering random consequences in unrelated parts of the financial system for reasons that you don't understand. If Bitcoin holders weren't alerted by articles like this, there is actually a pretty reasonable chance that they go in, experiment with Bitcoin and trip off a surveillance system as being "suspicious".
It is unlikely that we know what the penalties for suspicious transactions are in the US legal system. That seems like a matter that should have come before FISA Court at some point so we won't see public records of what the case law is. Even if it hasn't the actual workings of the financial control the US exercises aren't exactly secret but they also aren't exactly easy to follow.
> If you hold Bitcoin you now have an elevated risk of being picked up in some dragnet and suffering random consequences in unrelated parts of the financial system for reasons that you don't understand
This is exxageration. If you operate a cash business, you're under the same heightened supervision.
>> That is an attack on self-custody. If you hold Bitcoin you now have an elevated risk of being picked up in some dragnet and suffering random consequences in unrelated parts of the financial system for reasons that you don't understand.
This is based on the idea that there is some exception from previous rules and regulations. Before Bitcoin existed, lots of these rules were formulated. Now Bitcoin is on the scene and has evolved best practices for self-custody that ignore everything that went before. Bitcoin becoming more popular and integrated means that the rules from US financial system will start to be applied.
There is no surprise in this. If more effort was put into mitigating the concerns of the US financial system (or others) then things like this wouldn't happen. However, the truth is that the philosophies are incompatible so it's just a war of attrition that will unsurprisingly result in conformance to US financial regulation.
> The author makes the imaginary leap because they say they personally recommend doing all those things with self-custody.
It is because if you can't do those things, bitcoin has no use. Its only functions are to dodge laws and transfer money, and it's bad at transferring money.
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.
That assumes Bitcoin maximalists ultimately see it as a means of transaction. The ones I come across in the wild are purely maximalists for speculative purposes and couldn’t care less about the “practical” use cases for it.
There are two components to price: what the thing is worth, and what you might be willing to convince someone else to buy it from you in the future for. The latter is the speculative component. The former must be related to some intrinsic property of the thing. For example, an orange has some minimum price, because if nothing else it's composed of matter and so can weight things down. If bitcoin is useless to transact, then its intrinsic worth is zero, so its price is 100% speculative. That's not so much a bubble as just air being pressurized by no container.
This is subjective. Value is subjective. This is taught in many introductory economics classes.
> an orange has some minimum price, because if nothing else it's composed of matter and so can weight things down
You talk as if "minimum price" is objective. The "minimum price" you're referring to here is the most useless, but valued, property of the object for you. For other people, having weight can be a burden.
> If bitcoin is useless to transact, then its intrinsic worth is zero, so its price is 100% speculative
Again you speak as if as if everyone assumes the same value system as you, but differ only in a penchant for gambling in the form of price speculation.
>You talk as if "minimum price" is objective. The "minimum price" you're referring to here is the most useless, but valued, property of the object for you. For other people, having weight can be a burden.
It doesn't matter. The things oranges are good for are known, even if they're not applicable to you personally. Those applications are objective. It is objectively true that oranges are edible, even if you subjectively don't like them. It is objectively true that an orange can weight paper down, even if you can't carry even a single orange more right now.
Of course, sometimes there's an asymmetry of information where someone might price something incorrectly (e.g. someone doesn't know that oranges can now be used as fusion fuel, so he sells it for less). But the fact that we can say that the price is "incorrect" means there is a correct price.
>Again you speak as if as if everyone assumes the same value system as you, but differ only in a penchant for gambling in the form of price speculation.
I don't see you giving any examples of what Bitcoin is good for.
Store of Value. Digital gold, with the added utility of being able to teleport across jurisdictions and being able to plug directly into the next wave of smart contracts and decentralized securitization. It's no more complicated than that.
(No, gold does not primarily derive its value from practical applications).
These tools have practical application within the financial system. Speaking as a portfolio manager, gold has drawbacks. For example there was turmoil in the gold market from the recent Trump tariffs because of Swiss refining. It's a physical product that has to be stored, which means it has negative carry/costs money to hold, and if you get it through futures you have to deal with the futures term structure. Crypto also has rich volatility to work with (useful for many classes of trader), and it can even be relative value traded against peers. With Gold you end up going to industrial metals or to Silver (which is frankly an awful asset to manage in a portfolio or trade, outright worse than some of these alt-coins).
Simply put, it's a new asset with many highly unique characteristics, that has a good mix of store-of-value and speculative elements. It's also highly liquidity sensitive (vs Gold which has a much slower impulse, because it is heavily influenced by Central Bank Reserve activity, which isn't great to have to deal as the driving factor in an asset price because it's so opaque), and cleanly embeds risk-off/risk-on animal spirits.
Let's see you are a fund manager and are looking to add persistent alphas like Trend and Volatility Risk Premium to a portfolio. Crypto can be a good addition to these systematic trading programs because it's uncorrelated with other asset classes.
Granted, I'm no "Bitcoin Maxi" (despite living offshore with the tax-dodging crypto crowd for a year, I only did my first crypto trade this year), and will be the first to admit that the majority of the space is rank speculation and wretched excess, to quote Munger, but I'm begrudgingly admitting that it's a neat asset, although I think some of the ones like ethereum that are built more around the utility aspects of distributed computing and smart contracts have more use cases. BTC is primarily the gold equivalent in the crypto universe.
Step back one more level and I'd argue there's some deeper evolution going on as well in regards to money as technology. This isn't a process that anyone totally controls. The modern Eurodollar system (Eurodollars as in offshore dollars and derivatives, 20 trillion in size, not the currency Euro) that underpins the global financial system spawned out of the ether of many would argue petrodollars, and we didn't fully get a practical or theoretical handle on it until things like the Asian financial Crisis decades later. I'll immediately say that in no way am I saying "Bitcoin is the future of money", but the recent securitization wave in the crypto space does smell to me like the system pushing into new meaningful directions. Stablecoins that can be re-hypothecated across borders without regulation and frictionlessly lever up seems like the next obvious step that will naturally take hold. Right now the Eurodollar system and thus the global financial system is tied together with a huge hedge-fund driven basis trade which propagates out fed policy via an arbitrage. It's pretty obvious that this isn't always going to be the case and eventually that link is going to be severed. Likewise with the repo market and Tbills which is where systemic leverage originates - this is another pretty arbitrary thing that has been concocted, and don't be surprised if new strange things develop.
LOL. You're about seven years behind on the narrative. Nobody "stores value" in Bitcoin by deliberate choice. Anyone who does either doesn't know what they're doing or can't sell off their holdings. Volatility is an awful property for a store of value.
>being able to plug directly into the next wave of smart contracts and decentralized securitization
Just to button up that bottom part, since it sounds a bit wonky. It looks like there's a new sort of Eurodollar system developing, which is more accessible and more democratized. That's pretty cool.
Ex: Tether was a 7th largest purchaser of US debt in 2024, ahead of South Korea and Germany.
Instead of EuroDollars (offshore dollar denominated deposits in non-us regulated institutions - say two non-us countries denominate alone in US dollars, they have spawned additions to the global dollar liquidity system without US involvement) you have stablecoins. Some of these stable coins are backed by hard US assets (just like foreign banks May hold hard dollars or TBills to cover their exposure), but some will inevitably not be and there will be a spectrum of risk and creditworthiness that will naturally arise. Likewise, these stable coins are passed around, lent and re-lent, which originates leverage in the crypto space, much like how we use Repo markets in the "real" financial system.
To dig into the history a bit more, after the GFC things like Repo and bank reserve requirements were tightened up quite a bit. No more sending off your dubious credit default swaps to repo to originate leverage every day if you are Bear Sterns, for example. Within developed was what we know as Shadow banking (which really isn't a descriptive term for it), and to me all of this crypto stuff is really just part of that offshoot Shadow banking narrative since the GFC.
History also has a tendency to repeat itself which crypto seems to be rapidly doing. Let's look back a few years ago with the banking crisis in the US, that was really a repeat of the savings and loan crisis from 40 to 50 years ago. So in a sense we're sort of on track for the new crop of humans to repeat some of the narratives that came after that are we not? Let's take that hard data point that tether, a stable coin, is now a huge holder of US debt. There's a reason why we have entities like the FED that step in to backstop these markets (like in 2020). Let's see the crypto market keeps developing, and is highly automated and mechanized as expected. Let's say something like a security flaw in one of the major backbones with regards to quantum computing starts a bank run in the space, and these stable coins start having to liquidate their treasury holdings aggressively and mechanistically. Well there's a classic reflexive loop that in the regulated financial system regulators would step into stop. Now because it's US debt to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars in real supply, this could be an actual, perhaps even mid-sized financial crisis! At the end of the day this sort of thing is exactly what I expect us to keep doing occasionally, after all humanity needs to relearn its lessons within new frameworks!
As for Bitcoin, it's the gold equivalent in this parallel shadow liquidity complex.
So yes, wonkish, but imo all of this stuff is pretty interesting and maybe even under discussed. Probably more useful to think about than stock price going up or stock price going down...
And then a note on why traditional financial participants seem to be getting on board with crypto, even people who may have initially been against it. I think it has something to do with how liquidity sensitive this stuff is. We live in a world where liquidity is ever more dominant a factor in financial markets, yet a bit paradoxically it's harder than ever to measure it. Let's take something like levels of reserves in the banking system, that thing which if it gets too low spikes repo rates and can cause an overnight crisis. Even the FED doesn't exactly know how to measure this and is largely guessing. There was an interesting research paper a little while back that proposes a new measuring system where they hook into bank transactions and measure if payments are a little late, like "did this bank pay their bill at 10am or 11:30". Believe it or not, that sounded like a large improvement over the higher frequency stuff we have! LIBOR was also replaced with SOFR, so the embedded overnight lending risk between financial institutions is not as viewable as it once was (granted LIBOR was manipulated, so at least that's better...) I've increasingly seen crypto used as a liquidity monitor. Ex: if Bitcoin explodes higher and diverges from the S&P, people will take that data point with sometimes even medium seriousness. That alone may be adding a chunk of legitimacy to the thing, and it may be self-reinforcing. Compared to the current insights we have the true nature of liquidity, maybe it isn't even that crazy an idea.
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.
Not saying anything new here, but at the core there are only a few key reasons for using bitcoin: investment, hiding your finances, and the idealism of de-centralization.
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.
But with Monero, you see that it is effectively shut off from the Fiat ecosystem entirely. The proposal here clearly lays out how bad Bitcoin is for privacy. But it's not like the more private alternatives are actually allowed to be viable alternatives.
ironically, the inconvenience of exchanging Monero for fiat helps Monero be used as an actual currency. rather than exchanging Monero for cash and then buying things with cash, Monero is exchanged for the things itself.
Yeah. I understand the excitement over the past two decades about the possibility of cryptocurrencies, but it came with a lot of naivete. After the fight to create sovereign central banks, did anyone seriously think that they were just going to give it up? Sure, maybe they can't stop you technologically, but it's very easy to simply make it unlawful, and then the men (and robots) with guns call.
Very true. In my opinion, and strictly from an American-centric view, privacy should only extend to transactions within borders between citizens. As soon as it involves transactions from outside our borders, then it is a national security concern. We know, right now, that both Russia and China are fueling internal political tension via massive and sophisticated disinformation/influence campaigns, a certain part of which involves paying influencers, extremists, shady media outlets, maybe a Representative or three in America to push their agendas, foment discontent aiming to destabilize and control the United States. Monero is definitely being used in this information warfare. I am pro-privacy, pro- individual rights, but we have to resolve this central tension of these things and the very real hyper connected world we live in which very real nation-state enemies. I am at the point where I think restricting the internet to allied countries might actually be a good idea, as currently we are leaving citizens unprotected from every nation-state actor who wishes to manipulate us with targeted, data-analytic, bot- and ai-empowered campaign against us. It is out of control, and as long as a monetary instrument like crypto enables that attack surface, it will be hard for me to support crypto-maxamialism.
> a certain part of which involves paying influencers, extremists, shady media outlets, maybe a Representative or three in America to push their agendas, foment discontent aiming to destabilize and control the United States.
Doesn't this describe every political party and megacorp in the US too...?
One of the biggest platforms this happens through is Reddit, and they intentionally leave it wide open. You don’t even have to have an email address to register and start posting. Bots make these platforms a fortune, and they’re happy to sell out their country to foreign influence for a dime.
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.
I used to be against the real ID moves of early social media platforms, and now I wonder. How would information spread if social media users on X, for example, were clearly identified as 1 to 1 associated with a named person? Sore they might spread something, but unless that guy in Russia has an American ID, then he's not posting.
The current, put as many bots as you want on, approach is pure war.
Exactly. The basis of the problem is an unlinking of actions and real world consequences. People wil do whatever they want when consequences no longer exist.
Monero has already been delisted from relevant exchanges last year because "reasons".
The main website that matched people to trade fiat for monero (localmonero) got closed recently because "reasons".
It is pretty popular and outlawed since a while. Basically the only relevant crypto currency used for purchases on the street since several years now. You can look up the number of daily on-chain transactions and tends to be on top every day.
You likely would only notice this if you need to donate money for someone with the wrong opinions or live at a non-aligned country.
Freedom with crypto means I can pay bills without unjust barriers, and no individual and especially no "financial institution" (ultimately the governments) decides if my transaction goes through or can confiscate the money without confiscating me.
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.
Conversely, property rights are also a good thing. I don't agree that it is as simple as you present it. Even if you believe that the state has a right to confiscate, regulate or inflate away value for a "greater collective good", reasonable people might also recognize the potential for abuse.
So no, it isn't obviously a "good thing", unless you reject these nuances in favor of an all powerful state.
Even if you accept those premises, reasonable people would expect limits on the power of the state to infringe upon property rights, even when backed by a popular majority. Furthermore, the principle of individual self-ownership is a key starting point for modern, liberal ideas of law. Of course you are free to reject those premises, but I would characterize that as authoritarian rather than obvious.
Property rights exist within a legal framework defined by the people, through law.
What you're talking about here with self-ownership and the state "infringing" upon property rights when you're taxed and can't transact privately, it seems less than "reasonable".
It seems like you're trying to paint routine and widely accepted functions of democratic governments as if they were unreasonable, authoritarian overreach.
Authoritarian overreach is itself a routine and widely accepted aspect of democratic governments. Authoritarians get 1 vote/person, same as everyone else. They're allowed to advocate for policies and score the occasional outrageous political win, just like everyone else. There are a lot of them out there and they are a significant political force.
Something being routine and done democratically is no defence at all of it being liberal or in line with the principle of property rights. Or even of it being legal in a lot of instances, democratic governments lose legal challenges quite regularly.
And in this case, attacks on private transactions are absolutely unreasonable authoritarian overreach. The government doesn't need to surveil people when they have no reason to suspect those people of wrongdoing.
Voters generally seem willing to embrace authoritarian solutions when it is applied to the things they dislike. The political classes have multiple incentives to appeal to those voters. Outside of a few outliers, neither group generally concerns themselves with the underlying principles of civil liberties until their favored causes are attacked. Hypocrisy abounds. Reasoning from first principles is dismissed as ideological extremism.
From here it is easy to see how the incentives of a democratic-regulatory-state work against property rights, free speech, privacy rights and other civil liberties.
Absolute financial privacy is not a liberal principle.
It's a fantasy cooked up by crypto enthusiasts and anti-government ideologues. You cannot enforce sanctions, prevent money laundering, protect consumers, or collect taxes if transactions are private.
It may come as a surprise, but there were periods where taxes were contributed voluntarily or sworn under oath that they were accurate tabulations. Early Hamburg is a strong example here. There was an honor associated with paying taxes for wealthy merchants.
Alternatively, without those positive incentives towards payment, we might consider the comparative value of evading taxes and taking upon risk vs. paying a less onerous tax. From these exclusively negative consequences, the taxpayer compares the burden of compliance with the effort required and the risks of non-compliance. This is well known in the modern era as The Laffer Curve.
So I have to disagree once again. Empirically, we can see that is possible to collect taxes when there the perceived value of the services provided by the state is a net win for the tax payer. Taxes can also be collected when the burden of payment is less than the cost of evasion.
When states fail to deliver value taxpayers understandably become dissatisfied. When compliance is onerous and rates high, authoritarian enforcement measures become necessary. From this point it is easy to see how cryptocurrencies provide the kind of utility you disparage.
"The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks", this is Satoshi's inscription on the BTC genesis block. It may suggest that mismanagement by (arguably authoritarian) central planners gave rise to the popularity of cryptocurrencies. Perhaps the reason cryptocurrencies exist is because of the incompetence or authoritarian means of the state.
There's room in the middle to disagree, but the extreme case you've made here reads as authoritarian. Especially in the context of the article.
Ah, I've made an "extreme case" now? That's rich. I essentially argued for the necessity of basic financial enforcement that every functioning democracy relies on.
I guess you consider it authoritarian when you don't get to bypass those controls by using crypto.
The honors-based tax system that worked in a small oligarchic city-state of 25k is hardly going to scale to modern democracies with millions of taxpayers.
Political solutions are often messy and complex. Pragmatic fixes are rarely obvious and overreaches are common. Reforms are ongoing. Conversely, absolutists have no use for nuance.
Something being imperfect doesn't mean that getting rid of it is an improvement.
Should civil forfeiture be heavily reformed, and is it being obviously abused? Yes. Is the ability to use cryptocurrency to bypass sanctions, fund oppressive regimes, drive criminal empires, and power a new generation of scams a much worse problem? Absolutely.
Proponents of a system explicitly designed to enable financial fraud shocked when governments apply fraud rules to them, news at 11.
Which, I believe, would make it even more prevalent. It would be the confession that they cannot control it, and while most people would be deterred by this, I can see a shadow economy growing because (or thanks ?) to this.
It's not so black and white. Obviously social and political change is the goal. But in the meantime technology can help if you're living under repression.
Take VPNs and Tor helping people jump the Great Firewall of China for example. Obviously, yes, this is a political problem; the GFW shouldn't exist. But it would be foolish to dismiss the technology as a vital part of fighting back against the state.
You are being downvoted, but you are correct. I am east european and I know how hard the fist of the State hits. Sometimes I think westerners see technology like some special moves that you can quickly combo so you can defeat the evil boss at the end. No, there are no special moves, just a boot stamping on a human face -- forever.
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?
A lot of people keep looking for technology solutions to political problems. The fact is that privacy, especially of financial transactions, is becoming illegal. Any technology that allows you to send or spend money anonymously will be attacked by our governments. They won't be allowed.
You can argue about whether you can get away with it due to difficulty of enforcement, but all that does is turn us all into criminals. They won't put ALL of in jail, but they can put ANY of us in jail - the ones they don't like.
> The fact is that privacy, especially of financial transactions, is becoming illegal. Any technology that allows you to send or spend money anonymously will be attacked by our governments. They won't be allowed.
It's probably a bit worse than that. It's not specific to transactions or spending.
Eventually any IP talking to another IP without the mandatory metadata to link it to a physical identity will be illegal.
Right now there is a hodge-podge of solutions that piggy-back on the phone networks, wires, etc. that used to give LEO enough actionable information to track some criminals. But most of that has been obsoleted by modern cryptography.
Don’t understand this pessimism. There are a large number of countries in the world. You can migrate out of a country if they start doing insane things like this.
I would consider leaving UK very seriously if I was building a life there now, as an example.
>Don’t understand this pessimism. There are a large number of countries in the world. You can migrate out of a country if they start doing insane things like this.
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.
> 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.
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.
You forgot a few things on that list that people would like freedom for:
advocating for (or against) trans rights, protesting against the deportation of migrants, advocate against gun-control, and donating to (anti) palestinian causes
Are just a few things that people would like the freedom to do.
The point being, financial privacy is an important part of having a functioning democracy. But at the same time, financial control and limits are also an important part of a functioning democracy, for e.g. the 'freedoms' you mention.
In the end, neither perfect privacy, not perfect surveilance are what we need. The best solution will be somewhere in the middle, with nuance.
One man one vote is a little different from one dollar one word, or one dollar one vote.
In most civilized countries you have privacy in the voting booth (because without it, buying votes becomes trivial), but no privacy in financing campaigns.
Some of those countries even have rules about when campaigns can and cannot run, because there are benefits to living in a society that's not actively bombarded by polarizing political screeching 24/7. It does some to cut down the influence of dollars in politics.
I guess it makes people in the advertising business, and people looking to buy political influence very unhappy.
This is a very narrow way to see it. Technological advancements can and did massively affect politics and other parts of life.
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.
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.
No, there really isn't. Money laundering has been a huge problem enabling all sorts of crimes and issues. There is no debate to be had on the benefits of prohibiting it, and you have to be very deep in the Silicon Valley rabbit hole to think even 5% of the population of any nation would support doing away with those rules.
its like html being using for full blown applications.... its the wrong application of the tech. If you dont want people to see where you send stuff why would you pick a technology designed to do that?
Most governments aren't decentralized in their structure, which causes the "problem". If you have private entities that coordinate with each other it works quite well, but the world is very used to big centralized governments that "solve" all their problems.
It's a pretty direct response to your claim that "decentralisation sounds nice, but doesn't work in practice". Decentralization has worked in practice many times in many ways.
Also, you can have reputability AND decentralization, that's actually a fundamental component of how any Blockchain system works. When you mine a block you sign it to ensure nobody else can resubmit your work and take credit.
Crime is pretty heavily regulated on the Internet, has been for years. If that regulation had been impossible, it would not have been allowed to grow, and would have been shut down / banned.
The internet for the average person has converged to a handful of products and services.
Your point being?
People prefer centralised stuff since it takes care a lot of stuff for them. They dont actually care all that much about technology that yield decentralised outcomes. I know that may be difficult for many here to comperehend.
> people move to the next thing, thanks to the decentralization
This does not quite follow. Care to explain more? What I observe in practice is that people move from one centralized service to the next centralized service (e.g., X->BlueSky) but rarely from centralized to decentralized.
Most services aren't decentralized, but the Internet itself is decentralized, which allows to set up these independent services that can compete with each other.
It's been terrible that BitTorrent doesn't work anymore. I can only download 10TB of all the movies and TV shows our family has ever wanted spanning 60 years. It has to run off this massive server in the closest as big as our cat! Sucks our grandma can't access it from across the country via Tailscale and a bit of DNS abuse.
I can't tell if you are being sarcastic. Obviously Bitcoin doesn't "work" for any purpose. But in contrast, Tor obviously works. Here are constantly updating HTTP response dumps from the Tor hidden service ecosystem: https://rnsaffn.com/zg4/ (NSFW) There is a lot happening inside the Tor network.
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.
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.
As long as the government only tazes your dogs and ruins your business, you can't even sue against the law even on constitutional grounds.
See Knife Rights V Garland. []
No one had been convicted in the past 10 years for violating the switchblade act, so the state ruled the law couldn't be challenged ("no standing"), even though it was actively being used to ruin people's businesses and raid their homes (the government would just give everything back a few years after doing so and not go through with charges).
It explains how KYC and AML law function as a stochastic control on crime. How that is difficult to do through actual laws, and what the downsides of this system are.
> 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.
Yes. Single-use addresses protect me. If you store your entire balance under a single address then anybody you transact with can see your entire balance by lookup up the transaction. Single-use addresses protects you from people snooping around looking for worth while $5 wrench attacks.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is pure click bait that relies on a deliberate misreading of a 2023 notice [1] that tries to imply that "self custody" is being attacked in any form.
All that this is saying is that the government will try to track money movement to pursue criminal activity, including, unfortunately the criminal activity of moving money in a way that looks sketchy. This is something that we have decided we have to live with.
It's not "pure click bait" for anyone that has followed along with the crypto community since the early days. This is basically an official stake in the heart for anyone that even loosely held on to the original ideals behind crypto.
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".
It's a two year old note talking about mixers and money laundering and it's being misrepresented as a new government stance against self-custody. That's why it's click bait.
I feel like growing up is realizing that the government is just a big gang. They do what they want and will enforce with menace what they want. They can change the rules, take your stuff and it ain't stealing because they said so. Sigh.
You only get two options for each vote, and there is no reason that one or both of the options would need to be aware of or be in favor of an acceptable solution to the given problem. In fact, the chance of that happening is vanishingly small.
I recognized it in the opposite direction, after observing that gangs inevitably end up being quasi-states within their turf. They demonstrate almost everything I associate with statehood except for issuing their own currency. From there, the reverse (that governments are just big gangs) also flows naturally.
To your point: gangs of various stripes pay blood money to the families of fallen members; they also fund or support community programs to curry good favor.
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.
sometimes you wonder if people have become so thoroughly captured by the status quo they can no longer even conceive of a monetary system existing that is not entirely dependent on custodians acting on someone's behalf
it's not the developers of bitcoin's fault your entire reg compliance apparatus was constructed on requiring intermediaries
It's fundamentally unsurprising that the custodians of the existing system don't like a system built on the premise of circumventing it
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
>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?
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.
so the risk to the wallet holder is the exact same risk that exists for every single HTTPS connection right now?
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
Yes, TLS encryption has similar potential risks, quantum and other elliptic curve vulnerabilities.
Quantum resistant algorithms are under heavy discussion in bitcoin dev mailing list, and have been for awhile. I think the signature sizes for leading algorithms are still too large to be practical within existing block size limits, but of course lots of things would probably have to change in a quantum emergency. Bitcoin devs tend to be extremely conservative with making new changes (in part because it attracts a lot of contrarians) so it's going to take a long time for people to agree on the right architecture for a quantum resistant scheme in bitcoin, but it will happen, BIPs are in the works like BIP-360 which outlines some potential structure for it.
Bitcoin is more a rug pull then ever, it's just that the "right" people are in charge of when and how the rug is pulled so it's becoming legitimized in all the ways that benefit those people and de-legitimized in all ways that benefit the individual.
M question was on what legal/Constitutional basis does the Treasury have for expanding the Patriot Act? Is it because the law provides powers to the Treasury department to define areas that the law should apply? Or is it a case where the administration (once again) is assuming it can do something, the Constitution be damned?
On- and off- ramps suck. And there isn't much speculative value. So it misses the main 'use case' of crypto.
Its by far the best crypto-currency for making payments. But people care very little about making payments with crypto, and exchanging between Fiat and Monero is very difficult, so its not an easy payment system either.
Overton window. There is a lot of funding for youtube influencers to play with casino coins that are transparent and traceable. Those are basically looking for "money goes up" and don't really care about the crypto part.
Monero is only on the news for negative reasons when someone tries to bring it down or delists from yet another exchange. There isn't funding to make it popular, which I guess in the end it is really up to Monero users from pushing it up.
That's a long-winded explanation of the fact that most people don't care about Monero's privacy benefits, so the only way Monero will be more popular is if someone funds a marketing campaign for it.
This is inaccurate and in a hilarious way.
Treasury is not coming after Bitcoin. There's an update in an ongoing rulemaking process that got reported here[0] as banning mixing and privacy tools. It may have been blown out of proportion[1], but I am not a lawyer, and certainly banning these tools would be bad. The thing is, Bitcoin's not private—every transaction is public for everyone to download. It's Twitter for your bank account. And that comes with serious privacy, safety, and boring commercial counterparty risks that should be addressed. These kinds of tools exist to mitigate that problem. The irony is that Bitcoin has largely refused to address this obvious issue, so no, Treasury isn't coming for Bitcoin. Indeed, there been years of people arguing Bitcoin would be just fine with no privacy protections.
[0] https://www.therage.co/us-government-to-bring-patriot-act-to...
[1] https://x.com/valkenburgh/status/1966174324701778071"
If there would have been better policing of digital currency by its users against criminal actors, perhaps digital assets would be spared the attention and now regulation. Sadly, increasing adoption and privacy guarantees lure criminals same as legitimate users.
On a long enough timeline, having anything stored in local hardware is going to be suspicious. Not surprised to see government embrace of crypto lead to increased scrutiny.
Considering how they're clamping down on anonymity wherever they can, crypto wasnt going to escape their clutches for very long. How long before its seperated from it original aim and just turned into a gambling token.
Original aim was that people don't deposit Bitcoins into a bank, Coinbase etc, but use it to freely transact between themselves, outside of gov control.
> How long before its seperated from it original aim and just turned into a gambling token
Always has been.
I mean it was useful for online gaming related transactions, like 15 years ago.
Ever since it has become a more obvious scam with every passing year.
Today you can barely post about it on most major platforms without immediately spawning multiple spam comments trying to part you from your money.
Real value crypto adds to the economy: ~0.
Once this scam inevitable comes crashing down, it will probably take the stock market with it. And all for nothing but the enrichment of early crypto adopters.
> 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
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.
What crime needs to be identified based on transactions? Tax evasion? I can't think of any others that don't leave behind a real world mark that would be the thing that initiates investigation.
Following the money is important to investigating all sorts of crimes, as most crimes are done for money.
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.
> We shouldn't have to live in a world where standards cater to the lowest common denominator, in this case criminals, and make things worse off for the overwhelming majority of the population.
LOL, the BTC people who thought "Digital Gold" was a good slogan are going to learn what happened to self custody of gold and the gold standard.
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
Despite the origin of HN being in the US, given that the current community has expanded to a large array of multinational English speakers, I'd rather country-specific posts like these were tagged such, in a international context: e.g. "The US treasury is expanding.."
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.
The government doesn't want to actually stop these things. They just want to make everything that people do normally illegal. Enforcement will only happen if you rock the boat.
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.
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.
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.
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" :)
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).
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.
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.
This author is being disingenuous. All of those actions are indeed suspicious. I am not a fan of the Patriot Act, but these new guidelines actually seem pretty reasonable to me.
This is not terribly surprising. Control of the monetary system is a key responsibility of the US federal government; it was always going to be the case that if Bitcoin became a meaningfully-sized part of the financial system the government would impose regulation.
Now we get to see how enforceable it is (and I suspect it's more enforceable than people wanted to assume... They can jail you indefinitely for refusing to divulge a password if the court finds it is not a violation of your Fifth Amendment rights to divulge it. https://xkcd.com/538/).
Bitcoin is a perfect microcosm for the tech sector in what happens when people who don't know how something works and refuse to understand it, try to replace it.
Every aspect of the modern financial system exists for a reason. It evolved over time to deal with problems. Things like reversible transactions are a feature not a bug.
Bitcoin is where all the gold bugs went who lamented the end of the gold standard. Most of these people didn't understand that at no point in history was the US dollar 100% backed by gold (or silver, originally). Never.
What backs the US dollar isn't gold or oil or anythihng else we dig up out of the ground. It's long schlong of the US military.
I've also said that crypt currency exists only because the government hasn't shut it down. All it would take is a policy change from the US government to say banks who have access to the US financial system cannot trade in Bitcoin and it would be over. Yes you could still have wallets (at least until the government starts going after Bitcoin farms, which again it could do) but what would you do with those coins?
Bitcoin is not, never has been and never will be an escape from the perils (some real, many imagined) of fiat currencies.
It 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 changes nothing. And you can use it as a currency. Declaring it an asset is irrelevant. You can call Bitcoin a cryptocurrency, an asset, a currency, a scam, it doesn't effect Bitcoin in any way. Bitcoin doesn't care. Its sole purpose is as an incorruptible, debasement and censorship resistant ledger native to the public internet.
Of course this all redefines exactly what a currency or an asset IS.
Is Gold a currency? Is it an asset? is it both? Its semantics.
Both gold and bitcoin can be exchanged for goods and services.
Most assets will not keep going up forever in Bitcoin terms.
Maybe no asset will, on long enough time scales.
Most assets are plummeting in price considerably in Bitcoin terms.
Today it takes 6-figure units of dollars to buy one unit of Bitcoin. On to 7 and 8, and more.
Eventually, you will not be able to exchange ANY amount of fiat for Bitcoin.
You are free to ignore Bitcoin for then next 10 years, like most folks on HN have done for the past 10.
It will be interesting to see how the pro-Trump crypto bros react to this. Likely by now the whole group has had a chance to invest heavily in various altcoins or whatever will be the beneficiary of government largesse, so these proposed (and difficult to enforce) restrictions are likely intended just to pump those for quick profits.
I'd argue that Bitcoin has been effectively immune to attacks like this by governments for nearly a decade.
That the blockchain bros are surprised that Trump is not acting in their interest is itself surprising, even though it shouldn't. 3-level meta-surprising, so to say.
Does no one else find it weird seeing anything from this administration "anti-Bitcoin" at all? I wouldn't be surprised by this headline during a previous administration, but generally speaking, this administration has been very Bitcoin-friendly (and Bitcoin institutions friendly right back). To be clear, the simplest answer is "sure but that doesn't mean they have to agree on everything". But I would like to propose that if you ask the simple question of "who does this benefit?" it may suggest we are witnessing a different phenomenon here.
I think this might be the first indication that what we currently call "institutional Bitcoin supporters" are not "Bitcoin supporters" at all, or rather, what they call "Bitcoin" is not what you and I call "Bitcoin". Services like Coinbase and BTC ETFs don't really suffer from this development at all. In fact, I think it's quite obvious that obviously benefit from something like this (at least from the first-order effects). What's the alternative to self custody? Well... third-party custody. Especially since they are already bound up by KYC rules, right? Their is a cynical reading that there's nothing inconsistent with this development if you consider "institutional Bitcoin's" goals to primarily be replacing existing financial power structures with themselves. "Bitcoin" is just a means to an end. Their goals were only incidentally aligned with individual BTC holders since they were previously in similar circumstances as the "out group". Previous administrations were as suspicious of "Bitcoin companies" as any individual Bitcoin holder, perhaps even more so. But that's not the case anymore. Bitcoin companies have successfully been brought into the fold, so it's not even that they're necessarily "betraying" the values of Bitcoin true believers, you might argue that interpretation of shared values was entirely inferred to begin with.
Critically though, I think an important consequence of this is that Bitcoin purists and skeptics should realize that they arguably now have more in common than not, at least in the immediate term, and may be each other's best allies. In my experience, for most the existence of Bitcoin, its skeptics haven't really seen Bitcoin as a "threat." Instead, to admittedly generalize, their critiques have been mostly about Bitcoin being "broken" or "silly" or "misunderstanding the point of centralized systems", etc. These aren't really "oppositional" positions in the traditional "adversarial sense," more dismissive. In fact, the closest thing to an "active moral opposition" to Bitcoin that I've seen is an environmental one. IOW, Bitcoin true believers think about Bitcoin way more than Bitcoin skeptics do. Similarly, Bitcoin true believers really have nothing against skeptics other than... the fact that they occasionally talk shit about Bitcoin? IOW, Bitcoin skeptics are not "the natural enemy Bitcoin was designed to defeat".
But if you think about it, "institutional Bitcoin" sort of embodies something both these camps generally have hated since before Bitcoin. Whether you believe Bitcoin to be a viable answer or not, it is undeniable that the "idea" of Bitcoin is rooted in the distrust of these elitist financial institutions, that evade accountability, benefit from special treatment, and largely get to rig the larger system in their favor. Similarly, I don't think Bitcoin skeptics like these institutions or are "on their side". In fact, perhaps they'd argue that they predicted that Bitcoin wouldn't solve any of this and would just be another means of creating them. But IMO what they should both realize is that the most important threat right now is these institutional players. They are in fact, only "nominally" Bitcoin in a deep sense. From the perspective of true believers, their interests are actually in now way "essentially" aligned with any "original Bitcoin values," and from the perspective of skeptics, the threat they pose has very little to do with their use of "the Bitcoin blockchain".
They are arguably just another instantiation of the "late stage capitalist" playbook of displacing an existing government service in order to privatize its rewards. Coinbase could be argued to have more in common with Uber than Ledger wallets. Instead of consolidating and squeezing all the value from taxis though, the play is to do the same with currency itself. It is incidental that Uber happened to be so seemingly "government averse". In this context, it's actually helpful to cozy up to the government and provide the things government departments want that make no difference to fintech's bottom line (such as KYP). In fact, that might be their true value proposition. Bitcoin only enters the conversation because in order to replace a currency, you do... need a currency. Bitcoin was convenient. It was already there, it had a built-in (fervent) user base that was happy to do your proselytizing for you, and even saw you as a good "first step" for normies that couldn't figure out to manage their own wallet. The Bitcoin bubble was already there, why fight it when you can ride it?
Again, I think this is highly likely to be against the values of Bitcoin true believers and skeptics alike, and I also think that if the above is true, it represents an actual danger to us all. Recent events with credit card processors have already demonstrated that payment systems have proven to be incredibly efficient tools at stifling speech. In other words, this is arguably an "S-tier threat", on par with or perhaps worse than any sort of internet censorship or net neutrality. If so, we should treat it as such and work together.
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?
> 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.
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.
It's really not. 100% of the time the nation state is winning that battle, as evidence by literally all of human history. Crypto-bros make up a fraction of a fraction of the population and most people don't have sympathy for any of them when the primary use cases of crypto today are extortion and black markets in the western world.
I don't think there's any shortage of history of people fighting the impossible, mostly getting crucified, and occasionally winning, and occasionally just existing as someone that would take the state more money than it's worth to go after.
You're expecting crypt-bros to act rationally based on utility of outcome. If they're acting ideologically there's no guarantee that will be the case.
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.
They supported both candidates, and Harris kept talking about crypto in the face of everybody screaming at her that it was losing her votes. She thought being able to afford Beyoncé concerts with crypto bro cash would offset that.
Sure but now you need a $5 wrench to essentially force a guy to tell you where he buried the gold, rather than just walking to the bank and taking it. I don't see that as some kind of win for the guy with a wrench, especially when you realize the bank manager is way less likely to be a violent nutter sov-cit.
The solution is to store your money on a wallet where you do not have the private key. This way if you cannot access your funds nobody will be able to coerce you.
Demonstrating that if you wait long enough (14 years in that case), you can get away without loosing the funds, even from the state?
> On July 10, 2009, Chadwick was ordered released from prison by Delaware County Judge Joseph Cronin, who determined his continued incarceration had lost its coercive effect and would not result in him surrendering the money.
2.5 million was a lot in 1992, and who knows what that amount is today, if they've offloaded it to somewhere it earns interest. I know plenty of people who day-by-day sacrifice their time for way less than ~500 per day which that ends up being if we assume the money been still since they were arrested.
But none of that matters if it's fundamentally inaccessible. The instant he spends outside of his known means, they have evidence he's accessed the funds and can jail him for contempt again. Travel is probably barred.
Yeah, of course, but since he didn't wanna give it up, and was willing to take 14 years of prison, I feel pretty confident he has some way of being able to use it, otherwise why not give it up?
Of course, this is also assuming he was lying when he said all the money been spent and he had no money when he was arrested.
In that case the obvious move from the 5$ 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.
For very similar reasons why the US has the 5th amendment, why blanket surveillance is not considered a good thing by functioning democracies, and why most people want their porn-viewing habits to remain private.
There are plenty of bad things that need to be prevented, but a functioning democracy requires the ability to act outside the surveillance of both your peers, and the currently sitting government.
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.
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.
> [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.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act
> In 2020, efforts to extend the provisions were not passed by the House of Representatives, and as such, the law has expired.
The wording is confusing. Two provisions expired, not the entire Patriot Act.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250306093943/https://www.nytim...
The Wikipedia article is quite confusing, and seems to imply that those two provisions expired because they were the only two provisions not sunsetted already. The table indicates that most of the law sunsetted on March of 2006:
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.
I looked into this a little more, and these were the final two provisions of the Patriot Act, so the did law expire.
Unfortunately, that doesn't mean a whole lot, as many of the provisions live on in the USA Freedom Act.
Was not aware of the USA Freedom Act
details on it:
Reauthorization of Other Patriot Act Provisions: The USA FREEDOM Act extended two other provisions from the Patriot Act that were set to expire: "Lone Wolf" Provision: Allows for surveillance on individual terrorists who may not be directly linked to a foreign power. "Roving Wiretap" Provision: Enables surveillance to follow a suspect even if they change their communication methods or devices.
Everyone should be super clued in whenever the government chooses to classify something as 'terrorism' because of these provisions.
There appeared to be a lot of "good things" associated with this Act but also... as things go. Not great things such as above.
It is no accident that the current admin is classifying suspected drug runners as ‘terrorists’, for example. Namely, the precedent of the Obama era droning of even US citizens under the same label.
If they are going to go to war at least go to war over something that immensely benefits Americans (such as decrease of deaths due to overdosing and consequences of addiction). Definitely better than acting as the enforcers for other nations who are too pussy to do their warring on their own.
If we’re going to war over anything it should be authorized by Congress and not just a disinterested president carrying out extrajudicial drone strikes with absolutely no legal authority in US or international law.
Oh, wait, did I miss it? Did we declare war in the ME all these last twenty years without me knowing?
If we’re going to do shit like this at least let it be something we get direct benefits from and not some sheiks and others in the ME or Caucasus.
Perhaps you did miss the AUMF, but it was pretty prominent. While Obviously falling short of a declaration of war, it provided a legal basis to be held against. Regardless, we’d finally stopped basically all drone activity in Afghanistan and the ME before the current warmongering admin showed back up with unrestrained drones, bluster about Jihadists in Africa, drone strikes in the Caribbean, F35s over Mexico and B2s flying around the world to drop bombs in Iran. This is the Department of War you know.
Ignoring that all the existing ‘wars’ are still ongoing and pretending like this is some more narrow focus is just silly.
https://archive.is/3ZNCO
The wording is confusing.
Being confusing, I'm almost certain, was the entire point.
"USA Freedom Act"
We're truly living in Orwell's world.
For nearly quarter of a century.
Longer than that. I feel like people have completely forgotten things like Iran-Contra, or the Gulf of Tonkin.
Or, for that matter, that Orwell based 1984 off his experience writing propaganda for the British Ministry of Information during WW2.
or that the CIA literally killed a sitting president
Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ensuring Effective Discipline Over Monitoring Act.
It's just an acronym bro, don't get all worked up about it, now let's go down, the Two Minutes' Hate is about to start.
We're incredibly lucky the 'just an acronym' ended that way then. Had they named it the 'Joining and Reinforcing the Nation by Satisfying Liberties and Guaranteeing Efficient Control Over Surveillance' we would have ended with the JRN SLGECOS Act.
Apparently I forgot to close my sarcasm tag.
Stuff is so Orwellian that it really looks like a joke for those who do not know what USA Freedom Act means.
I chuckled, at least.
Seeing the rise in the amount of bots on YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, basically all the major and a lot of minor social networks over the last ~decade has really been something, too. Tons and tons of people with account names that all follow similar regex's saying the same things around the same time.
I suppose it feels closer to Brave New World than 1984 but it's eerie, and those are just the accounts that stand out. I imagine the "premium propaganda" option from the companies and agencies providing the bot services are even harder to discern.
Really, it’s right out of Ender’s Game IMO.
You can forget about liberties until you come up with a better acronym
Would you settle for a catchy motto, mayhap?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Free_or_Die
> "Live Free or Die" is the official motto of the U.S. state of New Hampshire, adopted by the state in 1945. It is possibly the best-known of all state mottos, partly because it conveys an assertive independence historically found in American political philosophy and partly because of its contrast to the milder sentiments found in other state mottos.
I suppose one must die, since living free is not an option.
Note to self: stay out of New Hampshire.
Note from New Hampshire: We don't want you anyway.
there's dozens of us!
It's a deception, something that should have no place in law coding.
If the law has expired, how do they "expand" the law? I am confused. Did they refer to the wrong one?
The patriot act is not really “a law” in the sense of being a concrete series of statements you can point to in today’s US Code. It’s more like a patch to a codebase. At the time it was passed it (like any statutory act of Congress) created and amended dozens of sections of the US code. Some of those provisions had expiration dates which have lapsed, but not all, and (apparently) not the sections this article discusses dealing with financial crimes.
I believe you have misread the comment. In 2015, it was expanded and extended until 2019. After that, it was allowed to expire and was not extended or expanded further.
My comment refers to the original news article:
> The Treasury Is Expanding The Patriot Act To Attack Bitcoin Self Custody
"Acts" as they are passed by Congress are usually a huge collection of additions/deletions/modifications to existing law. And those changes can be unrelated and scattered across hundreds and hundreds of sections of existing statutes, each of which can have their own sunset clauses. So some of the things included in "The Patriot Act" expired, but parts are still active.
Also it dosent matter if it's expired anymore. It was kept on for 20+ Fing years. During that time it was used to permananly shred constitusional rights and human rights.
They got what they wanted from it beyond their wildest dreams.
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> Whenever leftists say that "Trump is a symptom of an illness that has been metastasizing for a long time" this is what we mean.
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.
The system is flawed from its roots. People need a voting system that allows them to specify their conscious, not vote on strategy only. The latter only leads to a race to the bottom. Unfortunately ranked voting systems do not allow for this, and we've seen those predictions come true in places like New York.
What I don't understand is how a lot of people will state both parties are corrupt and then also be party loyal. My parents are some of these types of people, but it is also pretty common. Together we'll happily criticize any member of the left, we'll happily criticize the abstract notion of politicians, but as soon as a name like Donald Trump leaves my mouth there's accusations of communism. I've literally had conversations where we both agree Biden is too old, we both agree that the country shouldn't be run by geriatrics or anyone over 60, but as soon as the next part is mentioned about how this means I don't want Trump then they start talking about how he's a special case and will contradict everything that they said before. They literally cannot understand how I voted Biden but also happily criticize him and state that I think he was unfit to be president.We've turned politics into religion. It's not just the right (though I'd argue it's more common), but so many people love to paint everything as black and white. Anyone who thinks the world isn't full of shades of gray is a fucking zealot and we've let that go on for too long.
> Or any cardinal voting, such ask approval, ends up being a huge win.
I kind of dislike approval voting because it's marginally worse than score/STAR to begin with, and on top of that has an ugly failure mode where the ballot looks like a first past the post ballot and then some non-trivial percentage of people don't realize they can vote for more than one candidate and you're back to being stuck with a two-party system. Whereas score makes it clear something's different but still only takes ten seconds to explain ("rate each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10").
> What I don't understand is how a lot of people will state both parties are corrupt and then also be party loyal.
Tribalism. People convince themselves that both options are bad but one is worse and then fight their own brothers who picked the other one.
But the lesser of evils is still evil and the ability to change your vote to the other team is the only leverage you have against either of them, so what happens if you relinquish it?
Given a decision between the devil you know and the devil you don't, choose the one that you have not tried.
The way I like to explain score vs ranking to people is like measuring things with a normal ruler vs measuring things but your ruler only has inches on it. People seem to get it and the importance of specifying how much more you like one candidate over another or how little your indifference is between some.
But I think we both understand these systems sufficiently and probably shouldn't derail. I just want to make sure we don't fall into doing the same thing I'm complaining about over here[0]
But that's kinda my point. With the example of my parents we can agree that it is a choice between two evils but then they cannot understand how I say I hold my nose while begrudgingly choosing one rather than vote with full devotion. In reality that means one of us doesn't actually believe in a choice between the lesser of two evils[1]. They claim this, but don't act on it. I think this is strikingly common.That is a far worse form of tribalism because they lie to themselves. They've convinced themselves they believe something that they don't actually believe in. What I'm worried about is how common this is. Even down to the mundane cliche, where I jokingly define as "something everyone can recite, but no one can put into practice." Road to hell I guess...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45225341
[1] Give me the choice between the lesser of many evils! I joke, but as much as I love cardinal voting I won't make the claim that it is a cure all. But given a choice between two evils or many evils (and no other information), I'll take many evils. My chances are better in being able to pick a lesser one.
Duverger’s law: first past the post results in two party system.
Any vote that is not proactively for the major party that is the closest to your political beliefs is effectively a vote for the major party least aligned.
> What I don't understand is how a lot of people will state both parties are corrupt and then also be party loyal.
Both teams are corrupt, but in different ways.
On my team it’s rules being bent but not broken, a few bad apples, everyone was doing it, parents wanting to give their children the best start in life, the inevitable results of the need to raise campaign funds to continue their great work, and/or they’ve already rightly been suitably punished.
On the other team it’s a problem that runs through all of them, reflecting their poor character, the lack of basic decency resulting from their hollow look-out-for-number-1 political beliefs, and is undoubtedly representative of a much wider problem that’s being covered up.
I think you missed my entire point, so much that I thank you for demonstrating it. Rather than some abstract "my parents", I can say "like this."
Who has denied this? Is this not such an obvious assumption that it need not be explicitly stated? Need I make clear that you and I are not in fact the same person?This is a given.
And what? We obviously have decided who we believe the lesser of evils is. That was never the point. The point is that by showing strong devotion to the lesser of two evils is still showing devotion to evil! There's a big difference between begrudgingly choosing between two evils in a rigged game and aligning with that evil.One does not need always compare. We can both evaluate a single political party by its merits, absent of everything else, while also being able to evaluate how they stand comparatively. In fact, you can't even do the latter without doing the former first!
All you've accomplished is perpetuating the two evils. You perpetuate the evil you vote for my allowing them to excuse their actions in justification of fighting the greater. You have no power to change what you've chosen as greater and you've abdicated the power to make your lesser even less evil, instead choosing to gave it power to become more evil!
Think carefully about what you say. It's not only Siths who speak in absolutes, but evil does thrive on over-simplification.
Jesus. They were literally answering your question of “how can anyone be committed to someone they describe as a lesser evil”, very clearly not even using a specific side as the lesser evil, and you’re mad that anyone is able to elucidate or understand the reasoning used? You didn’t want to know how people do that, you just wanted to mention that they are terrible people and it’s a bad choice?
The problem is that the GP forgot the /s
We're at a point where if that is parody then it is indistinguishable from reality. I hope you're right and that it is parody. But hell, just the other week I saw someone pull out the "bUt YoU dIdN't UsE a SoTa MoDeL" card in reference to a GPT-5 output and I mistakenly assumed this was a joke.
Sarcasm doesn't seem to translate well over the internet. Fewer clues and people conflate the ability to read with literacy. I love sarcasm, but it appears Descartes was right
I hope it was sarcasm, because I didn't want to offend anyone. Perhaps I'm reading too much in the details, but highlighting my team and the other team made me think that. (Anyway, I agree that it's better to avoid sarcasm online.)
I hope you're right. I used to default to assuming sarcasm but that changed. I hope I'm wrong though, because you are right, there are enough elements where I did take a second to consider if it was
My big ask is, was it always this stupid? Like, all these huge historical events and figures, did it all go down as stupidly and clownishly as the modern USA? Was there an early 20th century fascist Europe equivalent to a man named Big Balls being beat up by children and a fascist police action being triggered as a result? Was there a Napeolonic era equivalent to a media figure known for making light of school shootings, getting killed in a school shooting, a second after again making light of school shootings? Was George III as publicly and flagrantly fellated by the court as Trump is by the media still allowed into the White House?
I feel like I can't possibly live in the stupidest era in world history so it makes me try to see other historical eras in a similar light - how can I reinterpret the past such that it also experienced a bunch of clownish nonsense?
To know the answers to all of these questions, you should really check out the Behind the Bastards podcast because that is the whole premise. Covering the lead-up to horrible situations and the inevitable slide in fascism. It's insanely detailed about covering many, many stupid fascist bastards and a few smart ones.
That's a good podcast that gets across that most of the Nazis really were just dense thugs.
One thing that it doesn't really cover is the rest of German society and how those thugs managed to get power. Weimer Germany was run by the social democrats. These people were basically 'center left.' They ended up in control after the 1919 revolution that got rid of the Kaiser, and ruled via coalition government with other centrist and center-right parties as junior members.
In general people's complaints were 1) land reform because especially in Prussia most of the land was still owned by massive landowners (Junkers) and most peasants were tenant farmers and 2) better working conditions in industry for the working poor 3) some way to get out of the economic crisis that was bad even before the depression in Germany.
The social democrats failed to deliver any of this. And mostly they spend their entire time in power battling with the Communists. This included hiring freekorps, which were paramility groups that roamed the German countryside after the war and eventually turned into brownshirts, to work with the police to attack communists. There was already a ton of state sponsored terror in the 1920s directed almost entirely at the left.
Support for the social democrats and other center parties collapsed and in the 1932 election, the nazis and communists were the big winners almost entirely at the expense of the social democrats. The center parties decided that working with the communists was absolutely beyond the pale and thought that the nazis would be more easy to manipulate, so they decided to work with Hitler and made him chancellor. Once the nazis had their foot in the door, as it were, and given that they had contempt for democracy and the rule of law, they used every dirty trick they could after that to consolidate power.
> One thing that it doesn't really cover is the rest of German society and how those thugs managed to get power.
Just to clarify for other folks, there are many episodes re: Nazis, but it also covers everything from Khmer Rouge to more modern coverage that's truly the more banal kind of evil, covering the worst and most destructive grifters. So while it's definitely kinda preoccupied with fascism, there's another through-line with dis/misinformation, etc etc.
I do agree with your basic criticism though, fair to say the general show format for dictators is 1st part bio which is frequently unremarkable, then the 2nd part is appalling crimes. How society was complicit/tolerant enough to allow the decline to happen is usually sidelined. On the other hand though, it's kind of always the same and pretty simple. To the extent it's not simply hidden or covered up, it works like this. After things are definitely very shitty, whatever misguided optimism folks can muster is usually all about "harming the out-group will help somehow!". (It doesn't.)
But the astute dictator (or their advisors) can rely on and exploit that kind of tribalism. Common sense, static value-systems, or any sensitivity to blatantly hypocritical statements/behaviour etc just are not things that the common person can really hang on to once they are angry/impoverished/aggrieved/hungry
To know the answers to all of these questions, you should really check out the Bbehind the Bastards podcast because that is the whole premise. Covering the lead-up to horrible situations and the inevitable slide in fascism. It's insanely detailed about covering many, many stupid fascist bastards and a few smart ones.
Well, I at least know that teenagers were considered adults, not children, in the past and were expected to be responsible. Maybe that change is a big part of the problem.
> was it always this stupid?
Excellent question. There are two easily readable sources I know of covering historical events of the sort you're asking about. The first is Barbara W. Tuchman's The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, where the entire premise is that stupid people did stupid things and then doubled down on stupidity as they went along. The second is Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, in which Hannah Arendt details just how dull and unimaginative Eichmann was. She writes, "it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown", and suggests that Eichmann was not especially different from anyone he worked for, right up to the top.
History doesn't seem clownish because of the way it is recorded and taught. Even Arendt's writing is cool and formal compared to the histrionics we see on social media and many news outlets.
> Was there a Napeolonic era equivalent to a media figure known for making light of school shootings, getting killed in a school shooting, a second after again making light of school shootings?
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and subsequent events leading to the start of the First World War, were filled with errors and stupidity, so much that history mostly lumps them all under the term "July Crisis", and rarely goes into detail. If you're familiar with the Abilene paradox, you have a framework for how the Great War started as the result of collective actions by soldiers, diplomats, and national leaders.
> stupid people did stupid things and then doubled down on stupidity as they went along.
You might like this review of the movie Civil War. Very well thought out review.
Alex Garland's CIVIL WAR has a clear and simple meaning
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWBzZJxhQtY
What an excellent video essay, thanks for sharing. On the second watch, after removing the expectation of an alternative history, Civil War hit me really hard that a future civil war would be absurd and horrific.
That contrasts well with how most of the media present events as somehow well thought out and considered. Many stories somehow manage to make even the most unhinged, word salad rants into thoughtful position statements, followed up with a bland bit of "other side" objection.
Surely there was a lot of stupidity in Nazi Germany and hence the appalling results, but I think that during the second half of the 20th century most actors in western history were much less stupid than now, although maybe I'm just being naive.
Apparently (can't be bothered to fact check this) the nazis liked having parades in the dark because it was easier to propagate the idea of the nazi ubermensch when you couldn't see that the dedicated members of the nazi party were generally on the uglier side of average. As you'd expect of dissatisfied radicals, really. Probably same reason there's a stereotype of right-wing people on social media having a profile picture of themselves in a car with sunglasses on.
Anyway, as stupid as this is, Americans are generally literate, with access to unadulterated messages from the other side of the world. Imagine how stupid things were when 95% were illiterate and all information passed through a giant game of telephone before it arrived to you.
> Anyway, as stupid as this is, Americans are generally literate, with access to unadulterated messages from the other side of the world. Imagine how stupid things were when 95% were illiterate and all information passed through a giant game of telephone before it arrived to you.
I agree, but the other side of this is that we're open to manipulation coming from anyone around the world, and sometimes that game of telephone can act as an effective bullshit filter.
> how can I reinterpret the past such that it also experienced a bunch of clownish nonsense?
The thing is, you don't know what happened in the past - you weren't there. What you have is a lot of stories and films that bring that to life for you.
Personally, I'm pretty sure nothing in the implementation has changed, but that the goals being sought have changed, as has the technology and therefore the implementation.
This rings poignant now that I finally got around to reading The Three-Body Problem. It starts off depicting struggle sessions during the cultural revolution in China in the 60s, in which they're beating a physicist to death for teaching relativity because Einstein gave imperialists the bomb. It's so stupid, that if it was fiction, I wouldn't find it realistic that people would be this stupid.
To be clear, the book is fiction, but struggle sessions and beating physicists to death is not.
Do you have a citation for an actual physicist being beaten to death because of their views on physics or was the book exaggerating for the sake of the plot and promoted widely in the west because it promoted anticommunism?
For what it’s worth I like the show just not that part.
What didn't you like about that part, just the depiction of violence while everyone watched and did nothing?
I'll preface with, I am a communist so I have no anti communist tendencies.
But, that is what struggle sessions were like, and their most frequent locations were in classrooms, and their most frequent targets were teachers and professors. And they'd often drag in random peasants to watch. I remember one quote that was like, feeling bad for these peasants who have no idea wtf is going on or why they're watching some professor get beat half to death.
The CPC's reasons for the struggle sessions were cynically open-eyed: they wanted people to participate so that people were involved and culpable with the state violence against "counter revolutionaries."
This is why the PRC's communist revolution was flawed from the start and doomed to slide into deep authoritarianism, which holds out as a historical fact now.
Btw for what it's worth the book really isn't all that anti communist, or anti CPC at least. Criticism of the cultural revolution is allowed in the PRC now, or the author never would have been allowed to publish.
Details vary but from time-to-time, yes, things do go this wildly off the rails.
You could argue that the entirety of Europe declaring war on itself over the death of one royal (and not even a reigning monarch; an heir-apparent) is such an example; tens of millions dead over something as transient as birthright rulership. Others that come to mind are much of the reign of Henry VIII (everyone knew he was dangerously paranoid, nobody with the potential to do so mounted an overthrow of his power, and his son was shaping up to be worse and England was narrowly spared his reign by the luck of his own bad health). Then there's the French overthrow of a monarchy to replace it with a bloody civil war that liquidated, among others, most of the people who overthrew the monarchy (and replaced it with an empire).
Power consolidation begets perverse effects.
You could also just go with the details of that assassination, which are Baby’s Day Out levels of comic blundering.
>>You could argue that the entirety of Europe declaring war on itself over the death of one royal (and not even a reigning monarch; an heir-apparent) is such an example
I mean that was just an excuse, in hindsight it's completely obvious that Europe was gearing up for war for years prior to the event. Just like now it seems completely possible that we might end up in a war or even civil war in some countries over a (seemingly) minor event - it's just going to be a spark that sets off the powder keg.
>I feel like I can't possibly live in the stupidest era in world history.
Your statistical intuition is sound, and while there are many historical sources describing very stupid events (VSE) dating as far back as recorded history, it is difficult to appreciate the outer bounds of the stupidity range because what has been written is a small fraction of the history that people have lived for at least 100,000 years.
So while I feel we are living in the stupidest era in history (the SEIH), I must conclude that we don't.
I think the speed at which the impact of stupidity can spread in current times is unrivaled throughout history, though.
I think what's more important, is that you have a device that will broadcast you a personalized feed of whatever the most engaging stupidity in the world is, at that very moment, 24/7. The magnitude of this passive exposure is far greater than even the rate of spread.
I generally agree, but if we assume that the amount of history scales proportional to the number of humans, then it's not so clear cut, as there's never been more humans alive than now. In other words, there's just more history to be dumb in, nowadays, than before.
You would have to define what stupid is. We have some definition of crazy, which is, doing something that doesn’t work over and over.
Recurring racism is either crazy (as in, it doesn’t work but people keep doing it), or, it … works for some people. It makes them feel better, builds camaraderie and unity amongst a group. So in practical terms, I don’t know if we can call this stupid or crazy.
The word we might be looking for is “rotten”. To watch the evil of the past and continue to harbor any adjacent attitudes absolutely does qualify as “one of the the most rotten eras”, especially because our era was educated on the past and given so much comfort and luxury.
——
I wanna expand why I am honing in on racism. I can only define the American Right as something that has battery pack that is powered by hate. I can’t find the source of the hate. There’s no foreign occupier in America, there’s no evil army here locking people up. The hatred is rooted somewhere, and the core emotion of hatred is the fertile ground for all the obstinance (why nothing good seems to take initiative in this country).
It doesn’t take a genius to say “hey, I think this multi century issue of white racism is still here guys”, like discovering that a alien monster was on the ship all along, lingering, a horror movie.
Edit:
Get the audiobook for this. You can hear just how crazy things have always been:
https://www.amazon.com/Abuse-of-Power-Stanley-I-Kutler-audio...
I listen to this on nice walks, and I’ve literally had to stop in the middle of walking to laugh at the absurdity of it all. It’s surreal and relevant to what’s going on today, as usual.
Problem could be economical. The rich want to get richer and more powerful, the poor and rest of the 99% have issues. Solving a lot of these issues would mean less wealth and power for the rich. So they need to create scapegoats. And racist stereotypes are probably the easiest way to do that. Close second are the people who think differently than [your_group].
helps that the same rich people have lots of influence over what the rest sees, hears and thinks.
They say money is the root of all evil, and I think that is the core issue. It's unchecked greed and blind nationalism. Political and racial polarization is profitable. Selling guns and ammo is profitable. Being a corrupt politician who helps their rich friends make more money is profitable.
> there’s no evil army here locking people up.
Not what you meant, but that evil army is called ICE.
Which assuming the recent funding bill that funds its expansion it will be the 4th largest military in the world, effectively.
ICE is gateway to something far more sinister in my opinion, and that will be persistent fascism enforced by a quasi military entity
The more I study 20th century fascism - and by "study" I mean "listen to podcasts like Behind the Bastards" - the more I learn that, yes, they were just as goofy and cringe in their time as their modern equivalents. Hitler was seen as a bit of a comic buffoon with his over-the-top rhetoric, he had an Austrian accent which made him come off as a country bumpkin, and many people were unimpressed by him. Trump in 2016 was a joke, a C-list celebrity game show host only known for being rich and sleazy and playing himself on television.
The core elements are usually similar. Fetishism of militarism often by people who never see a day of combat, occult and antiscientific beliefs, grifts, purges and nepotism, brutish mocking cruelty. The Nazi Totenkopf was the shiba inu of its day.
History doesn't repeat but it does rhyme. I think the lesson here is people tend to understimate what they can't respect. Thinking "no one would be stupid enough to take this guy seriously" is often a mistake.
There's a lot of stupid people out there waiting for someone who knows how to speak to them. Sounding like a country bumpkin and being unimpressive to the elites is probably good qualities if you want to be that sort of person.
>a lot of stupid people
I mean not being condescending to them would go a long way.
They're generally not on HN. And since they're not here, we might as well speak about the problem using plain language.
There are plenty of Trump voters on HN, though.
Do you mean republicans? That’s different. I have some sympathy for the whole small government thing. I even kinda vote that way myself. But there’s a certain kind of person who will instantly vote for a “man of the people” who “tells it like it is” and promises that he’ll fix everything and says the foreigners took your jobs. And we have a term for those people.
Honestly I'm realizing they're right, I've seen multiple comments here promoting the great replacement conspiracy. Personally I don't mind calling such people stupid, but, they are on HN.
How else do you describe people who didn't know what a tariff was, didn't care to check how it works, blindly believes that other countries will pay for it (especially after Mexico didn't really pay for the wall the first time around?), and will likely still believe whatever misinformation they're fed next time?
[dead]
Every generation gets the stupidest politics the world has ever seen... So far.
I have deep disagreements with my father on this subject. He worked as a federal agent for 30 years, mostly in digital forensics. He does not believe in the right to privacy in any of the same ways I do. Whereas I believe a right to privacy in your tools and communication is essential, he believes they infringe on the government's ability to catch criminals. Classic justification of "if you're not a bad guy, what do you have to hide?"
I just thought this was worth sharing, my dad was a tech guy (though not much of a programmer), the folks on HackerNews and related sites mostly have a privacy-first worldview. But not everyone shares this view, especially those who work in or around law enforcement. Civilians who believe in the right to privacy must stand their ground in the face of this.
> the folks on HackerNews and related sites mostly have a privacy-first worldview
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.
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?
> there is never an alternative offered which my grandma could use
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.
That was supposed to be the whole point of the Free (Libre) Software movement, not about cost/price and not about features/functionality... it was about being in control of your destiny and not being chained to the whims of a corporation!
You're right that privacy and freedom should never be sacrificed for convenience or aesthetics!
Not to mention just the practicality of it all. Like good god, how much time do we waste on rewriting the same little subprograms? But then again, I don't understand how people make a few hundred thousand a year and can't kick back some beer money for software we use every day. A solvable problem, needing only a minority to contribute, but nearly none do.
You should ask him if he's ever worked with someone who's pulled information on someone else for personal matters. Or if he'd be okay with personal information being pulled about himself. I'm usually surprised when people believe in the political process so much they can't fathom a government who will abuse their powers to undermine democracy.
> If you're not a bad guy, what do you have to hide?
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.
Maybe ask if he has ever exceeded the speed limit, or run a red light, or failed to signal a turn. All things that could be monitored by a smartphone and reported to the police automatically.
Have him publish his full name, date of birth, social security number, mother's maiden name, bank checking and routing numbers, credit card numbers + expiration dates + cvv numbers, nude photos of his wife, nude photos of himself, all of the search history from all of his browsers online, all visible to the public.
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.
I think the crucial bit you're missing is that the fundamental disagreement boils down to whether a properly-signed-and-executed warrant ought to be sufficient for the government to get its hands on evidence or otherwise do what it needs to do to deliver justice.
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.
No, historically the vast majority of communication was not recorded, and so a warrant could not be used to access the communication. The fact of the modern world is that for the first time in history almost everything we do is recorded, and so subject to those warrants.
I'm not sure what you're saying "no" to. Nothing you wrote contradicts what I wrote. Anything that was recorded was fair game. The whole point here is that you're arguing reality has changed and thus so should the legal rights people are granted, whereas this person's father is simply saying that our current legal rights imply a different conclusion. These two sides are not contradictory; they're just talking past each other.
the problem is that technology has changed so much that it's legitimately hard to apply 18th-century laws to 21st-century life:
- does the plain view doctrine allow TSA to look under your clothes with mmWave sensors? or to peek through your walls with IR cameras? to use laser microphones to listen in on a conversation? to use EM emissions from your computer to conduct a side-channel attack?
- does the third-party doctrine allow police to read your emails (unlike actual letters) without a warrant? or your papers on Google Docs? to access streaming cloud backups from your home security cameras? to buy your location data from data brokers?
- does your fifth amendment right against self-incrimination protect you from confessing your passwords? from taking a polygraph? from measuring your P300 signal as you look at a lineup? from using fMRI to reconstruct images from your visual cortex?
- does the right to bear arms include AR-15s? machine guns? loitering munitions? tactical nukes? ICBMs?
there's a scale from textual pedantry to handwavy analogies. courts are increasingly going on vibes and hacking together post-hoc justifications because the source material is too abstract and too dated to allow any straightforward reading.
If we're sticking to current legal rights when reality changes, then the state can live with their current tools when the math protecting my communication changes. Wiretap my encrypted communication streams all you want, don't suddenly compel me to decrypt them for you - the law has no provisions for that, and in fact, that violates the fifth amendment right against self-incrimination.
No offense to your father but I've always felt like the "innocent until proven guilty" philosophy is expansive and fundamental privacy rights are part of that principle. That is, the underlying principle isn't "innocent until proven guilty" but something more akin to "your complete autonomy should be assumed by default, and the government should have to clear an extremely high threshold to constrain it".
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.
This is the crux of my belief system on the topic too. Along with the associated “burden of proof” and how making it less burdensome should not be anyone citizens goal or responsibility.
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.
Sadly, Percisely. Digital Forensics (the evidence of nothing by the way, a great book), is approaching little more than gluing together datasets from various completely fungible entities. I too could be a master investigator if I could simply compel various busnisses to gift me the tables needed!
Pretty soon they will be able to run all our information through a language model.
Models could identify "suspicious" behavior and generate plausible theories to fit the desired witch hunt, based on what they read. Scary.
The eventuality is of course a dystopian thought police situation, where simply thinking or even Googling something suggesting you were even contemplating something illegal will be grounds to charge you with the crime.
What does he think if "government's ability to catch criminals" becomes "government's ability to attack political opponents"? I suppose he has a privileged position, as part of the incorruptible rule-of-law democratic land of the free, but people in other countries may not be so well off.
"if you're not a bad guy, what do you have to hide?"
Your father is subject to a simple but pervasive error: Not every justification who is a good or a bad guy is ethical right in every aspect of life.
Notably, many of those dudes are fanatical about their OWN digital security, however.
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.
>"if you're not a bad guy, what do you have to hide?"
everybody is a bad guy in the eyes of their political opponents.
> Whereas I believe a right to privacy in your tools and communication is essential, he believes they infringe on the government's ability to catch criminals.
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.
No one ever answers the “what do you have to hide” question, which is a little sus.
> No one ever answers the “what do you have to hide” question, which is a little sus.
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
This is a great list. I would add:
- Megacorporations cozying up to government in exchange for access to this information, for a competitive advantage, targeted advertising, etc. Lawmakers will bend over backward for corporations if they are promised "job creation" in their districts, or it could be lobbying or even straight-up bribery. We have a sitting supreme court member who openly takes bribes and he's suffered no consequences for it. It's not hard to imagine data the government collected in a giant dragnet being shared with generous campaign contributors.
- Laws changing to target an out-group. Remember how the government was keenly interested in people's period-tracking apps so they could imprison people who they suspected had an abortion? It doesn't matter whether your private data could incriminate you now, it's dangerous if it could incriminate you from any future government that is hostile to you.
That's all as may be, and I agree those are relevant points, but the overarching principle, IMNSHO, is that "my business is my business and not anyone else's." Full stop.
Okay, so reply with your credit card numbers, links to all your cell phone photos, your DNA test results, your passwords, and your medical history. What do you have to hide?
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.
No need to even use police corruption. A brief look at the current US government, and how it suddenly came to be in the freeest and most democratic of countries, ought to suffice to show why not any government should ever get a free pass.
If I told you, I wouldn't be hiding it then, would I? You can hardly blame me for for Russell's paradox, it's been around far longer than I have been
Not sure if you're being sarcastic but imo the lack of answers is because the phrasing begs the question. If you change "hide" to "protect" it suddenly becomes a bit more of a different proposition.
Boomers were raised in a high trust society, they think that the powers-that-be are fundamentally good. They don't see how easily it could be corrupted.
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.
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The typical HN person works as a software engineer, and the typical software company makes money, either directly or indirectly, via targeted ads. And these ads are served via a surveillance infrastructure that would not be out of place in a dystopian science fiction novel.
Even the companies that don't make money from ads have no qualms just letting Google or Facebook collect data about their website visitors.
Actually that's a problem for a lot of libertarian minded tech, it starts being thought of as enabling freedom from oppressive governments and ends up being adopted by criminals - Bitcoin, Tor, etc.
In the tech industry you also find a bend of very economically self interested version of privacy, which is that giving privacy to your users is a great way to claim you didn't know anything bad was happening. I'm pretty sure that, not high minded ideals, is why Meta invests so much in e2e encryption and privacy for WhatsApp, and publicizing it - when the next horrible thing is planned using Whatsapp, it lets them disclaim all responsibility for moderating what's happening on their platform
> Actually that's a problem for a lot of libertarian minded tech, it starts being thought of as enabling freedom from oppressive governments and ends up being adopted by criminals - Bitcoin, Tor, etc.
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.
I'm not disagreeing with your general point but in the specific case of Bitcoin I can't think of any laws that have been passed which make it highly inconvenient to use relative to other financial assets. If anything, it seems like legislators (at least in the US) have taken something of a laissez faire attitude toward the technology. Regulators have been more aggressive (e.g. the Treasury) but they're largely just enforcing existing laws which, again, apply to other financial assets.
> I'm not disagreeing with your general point but in the specific case of Bitcoin I can't think of any laws that have been passed which make it highly inconvenient to use relative to other financial assets.
The issue is that it's treated as a "financial asset" to begin with, which de facto inhibits its use as a currency. You want to pay for a sandwich with cash? Hand them bills, get sandwich. You want to pay with cryptocurrency? File securities paperwork. Who is going to do that?
By comparison, things like foreign currencies that float against the dollar aren't reported when the transaction amount is below a threshold.
Criminals use privacy protection that is not illegal too.
Indeed, criminals use things like HTTPS and ad blockers and lock the doors to their cars and homes. But so does everybody else?
Yes. I am disagreeing with your assumption that all "libertarian minded tech" must be illegal and only used by criminals. VPNs, Signal, ...
Using HTTPS to check Gmail and send messages isn't what I'd call libertarian tech. You're still communicating everything in cleartext to Google, whoever you're emailing with, and whoever subpoenas Google or the other provider.
> starts being thought of as enabling freedom from oppressive governments and ends up being adopted by criminals - Bitcoin, Tor, etc
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.
Donating in public associates you with that charity. If that charity happens to be politically different from people in power it can use it against you.
We have to decide what kind of society we want. One with locks on doors or a world where that is illegal. Bad guys use locks and so do regular people. Taking away everyone's freedom and safety because it makes it easier to catch "bad guys" is not worth the tradeoffs in terms of safety / privacy or creating a society worth living in.
> 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.
Yet. They want to execute people for being trans in Florida, by separately passing laws that child abusers get executed, and that being trans == child abuse. It's not hyperbolic to worry that donating to a trans rights organization could make you a governmental target. Scammers might steal some of my money, but they're not going to abduct me off the street into unmarked vans in front of my kids.
> 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.
This is archaic thinking, today all it takes is the president tweeting about your donations for your family to have to go into hiding forever.
A few years ago, I tried to open a bank account, and was turned away because my visa stamp expired (despite having valid immigration status). The clueless clerk and her advisor were going through The Patriot Act to find justification.
Fortunately, other banks weren't staffed with idiots, and I was able to open an account elsewhere after providing my documents.
I say you dodged a bullet, then. They are probably just as clueless handling everything else.
Possibly, but this not unreasonable for regular employees. They are not paid enough to deal with the consequences of making a mistake in a low volume situation.
If they go off-piste, even when that is a valid action, then they are likely going to be penalized by their employer's compliance department. That's because that piece of bureaucracy is still required at the next stage of bureaucracy. Now level 2's life is harder. It's best just to ignore and move on. There will always be some non-zero failure rate like this as long as bureaucracies exist.
I think the case for why strong encryption is important is much clearer than why untraceable financial instruments are important and I don't think it's super compelling to argue that these things are actually the same, even if your opposition to government control is the same.
I think it's actually pretty clear that almost all people are not capable of secure and reliable self-custody and would be better off with an intermediary. We're not keeping our fiat currency in a safe under our bed after all.
I think it makes sense to start from the idea that you should be able to transfer funds to someone, like $100 to your mother, without needing the government or a megacorp to facilitate it. The same way I can gift my TV to my mom.
Whether that's cash or cryptocurrency doesn't seem to matter since your argument would also apply to cash.
If you start from an assumption that there should be no regulation, then your conclusion will be that there should be no regulation.
That's not actually an argument for anyone who doesn't share your assumptions though and is largely just lazy thinking.
Cash also has physical limitations that make large cross-border transactions hard, which crypto does not.
Start from the assumption of liberty and the freedom of association. Unfortunately, most people don't believe in human liberty and prefer varying degrees of slavery.
> If you start from an assumption that there should be no regulation, then your conclusion will be that there should be no regulation
To be fair, they argued against intermediation. Not regulation. Requiring a filing for every $100 cash transfer to one's mother would satisfy their requirement.
How about this:
Regulation is a controlling mechanism that puts constraints on what people can and can't do. Some constraints will enable more things to happen because it reduces certain risks (e.g. property rights and laws against stealing enable investment and development of property).
But when there is too much regulation it has the opposite effect, and instead of enabling progress it stifles it. It acts as a calcification that slows change and makes society less adaptable.
So it's not that regulation is bad, it's that too much regulation can be bad.
Now in terms of regulating people's abilities to transact specifically: in a health democracy putting some regulations on transactions will probably have a positive effect because it can limit abuse and risk, and therefore increase freedom for honest people to make transactions. However when a civilization reaches the point in its life cycle when it is transitioning from a healthy plurality into authoritarianism, the risk of over-regulation of transactions skyrockets and the elimination of privacy when transacting is extremely likely to lead to tyranny.
When someone acts like regulating transactions is inherently bad, they're either repeating something they heard and didn't question, or they're assuming the people they are speaking to are educated in history and have a healthy fear of tyranny.
If you start with the assumption there should be regulation, even then IDK how you get there.
You're regulating an "untraceable" utterance of a string of data.
Pragmatically it's worse than trying to stop fentanyl, which is already impossible, and even trying to stop it has just made the gangs that much more powerful because they now control whole small nation-state tier light-infantry militias funded by black-market profits induced from trying to ban it.
I honestly don't see any way to effectively ban cryptocurrency that has net positive utility. "Yay we caught some criminals, all it cost us was a dystopia!"
Nobody here is actually even arguing about the proposal here, just repeating platitudes and analogies.
I don't actually care about this topic at all, but people should do a better job of defending their positions.
I don't see how I made any less fortified, less relevant of a claim than you did.
You added that most people would be better off with intermediated financial transactions which is probably true for most day to day transactions, but the TFA proposal brings up the question of whether everyone should be forced to use an intermediary.
For example, just using single-use addresses would be considered suspicious, probably just because it complicates basic taint analysis. Yet that's a fundamental component of privacy, and to do otherwise is akin to how Venmo lets people see your own transaction history (a very odd feature btw).
>Nobody here is actually even arguing about the proposal here, just repeating platitudes and analogies.
Well, given that they're responding to this:
>I think it's actually pretty clear that almost all people are not capable of secure and reliable self-custody and would be better off with an intermediary. We're not keeping our fiat currency in a safe under our bed after all.
Why would you not expect people to argue in the style you presented them?
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.
Cash and crypto do share similar properties that way... but with cash, you can't deposit say, $1,000,000 in cash into a bank, where you can use it for a lot more types of transactions, without forms being filed with the government, in order to both instill fear into the hearts of drug dealers and gangsters (etc) and to help catch them if they're dumb enough.
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.
The far left doesn't believe in the idea of property ownership in the traditional sense. So no, I think the premise that you can transfer property to anyone without the government tracking it is incorrect. Taxes could theoretically be imposed, registration might be required to comply with a social "program" they are implementing, etc.
Yes, it might be true that most people aren't willing to keep their money under their beds for security reasons.
But it shouldn't be illegal or somehow indicative of criminality.
Same thing with self custody of crypto.
It's not illegal. They're talking about flagging it as "suspicious". Lots of legal things are flagged as suspicious by law enforcement.
Would that make it a probable cause for searches and seizures?
If so, that would be pretty bad right?
Yeah, with the appalling civil forfeiture concept that I hope everyone is aware of, I also feel uncomfortable with this word "suspicious."
In brief summary: If the police search your car (let's just assume probable cause exists) in a routine traffic stop and find say, $50,000 in cash in a bag, they can charge the cash with a crime and arrest it, and unlike a person, it's guilty until definitively proven innocent. I don't think that's fair. And it's a big reason that holding more than a little cash is financially risky.
On the other hand, up till now I'd argue it's more risky (just specifically in terms of potential for loss of the money) to have your BTC in Coinbase or say, FTX where mine was, than in self-custody. These notions may reverse if your crypto private keys can be seized automatically as "suspicious," and the civil forfeiture thing has proven that the police will do that.
I think you are conflating 2 things: - ability to privately give money to someone (mechanism is irrelevant, by hand or by way of a blockchain) - self-custody risks for uninformed users
The first one is the privacy argument.
Would you be comfortable if you’re not allowed to give the cash in your pocket to someone without someone watching over? If the answer is no, you are pro privacy for financial transactions.
Cash has the privacy feature as a default. You can argue that 3rd parties that help you send cash don’t have to offer any privacy, but BTC isn’t that, and forcing it to be that way is an attack on privacy.
I don't have a predetermined opinion on whether it is good or bad for cash to be untraceable.
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.
The main argument for privacy is that a lack of privacy is the primary vehicle of crimes against humanity.
When you do not have privacy, you must then have trust. You are trusting, typically blindly, that your governments and other organizations will not use knowledge against you.
Before the Holocaust, Germany built a registry of known Jews by census. Obviously at the time, nobody knew what it could be used for, the latent evil within just plain information. It was done innocently, naively.
The same applies to all privacy violations. Yes, we could monitor, record, and analyze all text messages. Sure.
What are the consequences of that? What if you live somewhere where being gay is punishable by execution? What if you out yourself?
What if you're not even gay, but it seems as though you might be?
Or what if you live in an authoritarian state, and dissent is punished with death? Your government has cornered you. They can do whatever they like, and you cannot so much as vocalize complaints.
You may say, "oh well this isn't the case for me, so who cares?"
Yes, now, in this particular point in time, in your very specific place. What garantees do you have that things stay that way? None. You are blindly trusting that those who hold your information will not weaponize it.
You have given your enemies a gun, loaded it for them, held it up to your forehead, and said "please don't pull the trigger"
As a thought experiment, imagine how differently the underground railroad would look if everyone had smartphones that were tracked and communications surveilled.
This seems like an argument against the state in every form, you could say the same thing about the government collecting taxes, having a police department, courts etc.
Unless you are a committed anarchist though, you likely see a limit to the use of the precautionary principle as applied to state capacity in general.
Why is this argument sufficient to stop the state from monitoring financial transactions, but not sufficient to prevent the existence of a justice system?
> This seems like an argument against the state in every form, you could say the same thing about the government collecting taxes, having a police department, courts etc.
Yes and no.
Yes in that: all of those tools can be abused.
We need to take steps to ensure they are not, and we need to actively deprive the government of tools they can use for evil. The US has fought wars over this, which we why we created the constitution as we did.
No in that: information is both everlasting and fundamental. Privacy does not address bits or paper, those are proxies. Privacy addresses the human mind. This is the key people miss when they try to make an analogy.
The police and justice system only address actions by their nature. They are fundamentally restricted.
Private violations go to a deeper, lower, level. They attack the precursor to actions - thoughts and identity. Who you are, and what you believe.
What does this mean in practice?
Suppose I am a terrorist. If I want to avoid the justice system, it's simple. I will not commit acts of terror. I am untouchable, no amount of police activity can compromise my life or liberty.
Suppose we, instead, don't look at actions, and attack privacy. Suppose you deduce I am a terrorist. Maybe from the color of my house, from the jokes in my messages, from my patterns of movement, from the length of my hair, from the activities at my job.
Now, I can no longer avoid the attack, because it is intrinsic to my character. Like a stain, or a marker.
In theory this sounds like a good thing: we caught terrorists before they could commit terror.
But notice something: we cannot know someone's identity or beliefs. Mind reading is currently impossible. We are trying to implement thought crimes, without the ability to know thoughts.
This is compounded with the fact that surveillance is forever. Every data point collected on you, we should assume, will outlive you.
It does not matter if you're not actually a terrorist and you're just a brown person, and then you spend the next 10 years donating to children's hospitals. The damage is done.
This is all, of course, the happy path: we're trying to get terrorists. I'm assuming the government is not evil.
But, that's a bad assumption, isn't it? Time passes whether you want it to or not. What is good tomorrow is not what is good today.
This doesn't mean privacy should be absolute. But it does mean that a complete lack of privacy is disasterous.
Up until right about now, that has simply not been possible. We are limited by the physical world and technology.
What we have right now is a fatal combination of unprecedented surveillance tools and a complete disdain for privacy.
Make no mistake: such a combination will result in casualties never before seen to mankind. This allows a type of warfare and destruction that operates at a more fundamental level than primitive guns and tanks. Even nuclear weaponry is nothing in the face of the absolute dissolution of privacy.
If you don't agree with me, I don't need to kill you or your family. I don't need to invade your country. I know what everyone is thinking, so I will change their thoughts, and now you do not disagree with me. Think supercharged propaganda and complete silence of dissent.
> 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.
Now imagine that "someone" hates people like you, has the power to hurt you with impunity and is actively looking for any excuse to do so.
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.
I have a grad school professor that owes me $1M dollars on a bet that the Patriot Act would never end. I told him he was painfully naive and not suitable to each graduate school economics with such thinking.
Unless you used different language for the bet, you lost it the moment it was made.
"Never" may be falsified by "at least once", but affirmed only by "never". So I'm afraid only you could have ever been on the hook for the $1M, and may still be!
Your prof made a good bet.
The wording was that the Patriot Act would not be temporary, and it will not be receded, and in fact would be strengthened.
Still though, bad bet. The other guy can easily keep arguing that it's still just a few more years from being repealed, until one of you dies of old age.
Unless your bet was that "it will be strengthened before it is repealed" and then his position was that "it would be repealed without ever being strengthened." Still possible for neither to happen indefinitely though, leaving the bet pending.
Was there concrete term limits to 'never'. Otherwise I fear you were the naive one.
Snarky comment meant in good humor.
He can pick up his million dollars at the end of eternity
If the United States ends, I win. It's looking pretty probable today, with this inescapable cascading of everything traditionally considered American Values, and the POTUS openly defying the US Constitution with zero repercussions beyond wimpy whispered protests. Then there is the media doing EVERYTHING in it's power to accelerate this destruction...
He's the smart one, you haven't won yet and he knows it.
Professor response after ignoring rambling student. Ok. Walks away.
It’s worse than that. Roe v. Wade associated privacy with abortion in the US, so the Supreme Court eliminated the right to privacy as part of the decision to overturn Roe v Wade.
Mere criminality wouldn’t put privacy in such an indefensible position. Look at who’s president.
Agamben wrote some interesting analysis of this [1], expanding on the concept of the "state of exception", which was a older concept introduced by a much more odious man who employed it very effectively in the early 20th century. Agamben argued that modern governments now try to create permanent states of exception, of which I would argue the Patriot Act is a perfect example.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Agamben#State_of_Excep...
Really hope they ban it in the US so it can flourish in countries that actually need and respect it
Thank you for writing this. You are absolutely correct and made me step back to realize that the dollar is a global reserve currency and the US will do everything it takes to keep it that way.
I still have the 2600 issues before and after 9/11.
At the time it was pretty clear that the federal government was going make a large and permanent power grab.
No one willingly gives up power and if it’s the U.S. government there is a large ecosystem worth hundreds of billions around the patriot act, it’s never going to be sunset, and it not going to grow
War on Terror AUMF is still in force and is why the President can just decide to bomb whatever country they want without asking for permission, now.
All that shit after 9/11 was crazy and dangerous, and some of us said that at the time, and go figure, the fucking obviously true things we were saying have turned out to be... true. What a surprise.
> War on Terror AUMF is still in force and is why the President can just decide to bomb whatever country they want without asking for permission, now.
The War on Terror AUMF relies on a Presidential determinatiom that the targets “planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or person”.
But the President has had implicit blanket permission to bomb whoever he wants with a time limit ever since the War Powers Act was passed.
People who protested this horse shit were called unamerican for christs sake. Bush Jr said the literal words "you are either with us, or against us". The right went into utter hysterics about France not wanting to help our BS invasion.
The right loves to say that violent rhetoric is the left's fault, while they wished us harm for not wanting to invade a random country in the middle east that wasn't even related to the terrorist attack.
Meanwhile, all that horseshit with the TSA only ever enriched a couple people connected to the admin.
> 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.
> The right loves to say that violent rhetoric is the left's fault
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.
Generally, accounted instances of credible calls for political violence originate far more often from the right side of the political spectrum[0], in fact it’s nearly their entire domain at this juncture (remember that both attempts on Trump’s life were carried out by registered Republicans, for example)
Additionally, it’s disingenuous to say allegory statements to the behaviors of a person is inciting violence. Calling someone Hitler, describing them as “like Hitler” etc are not credible calls to violence. They aren’t even inherently violent in so far as they suggest nothing as to what to do with that information
[0]: https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-rise-of-poli...
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Trump's the guy who suggested when he ran against Hillary that the "second amendment people" would be the only ones who could "do anything about it" if she won. Like, holy fucking shit, and then Republicans elected him president after he said that! TWICE!
The right's been laughing it up for decades when liberals get attacked, and calling for aid for their attackers (Kirk did this exact thing with Paul Pelosi, and was, I kid you not, in the middle of trying to blame trans people for the prevalence of mass shootings in the US when he got shot). Calling families of shooting victims crisis actors. Working people up over invented child abuse conspiracies to the point that folks get violent over it. The left aren't the ones doing most of the actually killing people over politics for the last couple decades, at least. There hasn't been significant rates of political violence from the left since like the '70s.
AI Apocalypse Now image of scene in which a large assault featuring napalm takes place, with Trump inserted, re: invading Chicago, and shit like "Chicago's going to learn why we're calling it the Department of War"? This isn't coming from fringe randos, this shit's from republicans holding positions of power and their immediate advisors. These are just examples, there's a constant stream of this stochastic terrorism and actual threats of violence from leaders on the right. It's a huge part of their messaging. Where's Obama talking about West Virginia like it's a foreign country that's wronged us and we're getting ready to Shock and Awe their asses? Doesn't happen.
The left isn't pulling these comparisons out of nowhere, you know? They're comparing them to fascists because they target minorities and promote political violence fucking constantly (plus commit it! Rather often!) while publicly describing and then following through on plans to centralize power to the executive. I know there's a set of somewhat politically-disconnected folks who are super dedicated to the "both sides are equally, but differently, bad, and this doesn't vary over time" thing as if it's a law of nature, but it's extremely not true, in fact.
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It’s impossible — impossible! — for anyone to attend a mass gathering with the pure intention of causing trouble.
You sure did choose to respond to something, but it wasn’t my post.
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.
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.
There needs to be something like the federal equivalent of a referendum. I think with that, it would be possible to get rid of the patriot act and legalize weed, both of which seem to have popular support but zero chance of majority of representatives backing because they don't want to be liable for the worst-case corner-cases in the aftermath.
We are constantly voting in primaries and general elections. We vote in federal elections every two years, state elections generally at least as frequently, though often not in federal election year. We vote for mayor and city council and insurance commissioner and Secretary of State and county commission.
We don't need a referendum, we just need to choose representation that wants the same things we want. (Alternate formation: Americans do not want these things as much as some of us think they do.)
By referendum I meant to be able to vote directly on a specific law.
If you look at how weed was legalized, it required a referendum in many (most?) states because no representative wants to be the guy that has his face plastered everywhere when some kid dies after he smokes some legal weed and smashes into a pole, even if most his constituents wanted the policy.
Representatives generally have to be risk averse to get to the point they can even represent people on issues. This means they are extremely reluctant to vote for anything that might come back to bite them somehow, even if it is popular.
>Alternate formation: Americans do not want these things as much as some of us think they do
There is extremely overwhelming evidence that a supermajority of americans have wanted medical marijuana to be federally legal for many years. And overwhelming evidence the representatives have not been successfully bringing that forward.
Absolutely.
The catch is that when voters vote at all levels, they express by their choices that e.g. marijuana legalization is not a high priority. So voters might well vote to legalize if given that standalone choice, but it's not obvious to me that it's a good idea to insulate representatives from their inaction.
> no representative wants to be the guy
So on this, a number of states arrived at some level of legalization exactly this way. Legalization laws were signed by governors as diverse politically as Kay Ivey in Alabama and Tim Walz in Minnesota.
There's no statutory reason that voters in e.g. South Carolina cannot choose representation as amenable to legalization as Beshear in Kentucky or Reeves in Mississippi. Referenda also are subject to faithful implementation by representatives, so attempting to side-step the choice of representatives is not necessarily going to be fruitful.
>If you look at how weed was legalized, it required a referendum
It only required a referendum in some states because most US states are controlled by Republican governors and legislatures who openly defy what their own constituents want without fear of being voted out, because republicans vote republican no matter what. Republican voters will say "I want to legalize weed", their elected representative spouts literal DARE propaganda about weed that republican voters KNOW is false since they literally smoke weed (illegally, how about that), but they STILL re-elect those politicians, because it's more important to not have a democrat in office than to actually get what you democratically voted for.
Here in Maine, we passed a referendum to legalize weed. It passed. Lepage spent the next 4 years of his Governor term refusing to implement it, entirely. Like he just criminally defied the will of the public. As soon as Mills took office, the state built up a framework for recreational weed and IMO it's pretty good compared to other states, which is probably why we have literal Chinese gangs growing illegal weed all over the state :/
You see the same thing in every Republican state that allows citizen referendums. The public passes a referendum, and the republican politicians of the state just utterly defy it, and they do not get voted out
Democrat politicians respect citizen referendums, even when they are stupid and against democrat policies, like in California where Uber is not an employer because that's how the people voted.
The federal government is currently controlled by Republicans, so it seems relevant regardless of whether you think they should be in power or not, no?
> Democrat politicians respect citizen referendums, even when they are stupid and against democrat policies, like in California where Uber is not an employer because that's how the people voted.
LOL what, apparently you forgot about Proposition 187, which California voters voted "yes" on, got tied up in the courts, and then when a Democrat governor came into power he let the appeals die.
Proposition 8: voters voted to ban gay marriage, courts said "nah we're not going to do that." Judges aren't technically politicians but that line is a little blurry at times.
The first-past-the-post system, combined with our current primary system, is set up such that most Americans do not get the representation they actually want, and Congress is made up of extremists. We don’t have the Congress we have because most Americans actually want it that way.
Can you imagine the world today if Bernie had won?
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.
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.
> Unless the Sanders Administration had a very favorable or majority Democrat Congress aligned with his progressive wing, many proposals would be outright blocked or heavily compromised
This is a feature, and why Trump's second term is so different to his first, or Bidens, or Obamas, or Bush, or Nixon. You'd probably have to go back to FDR for such sweeping changes to the US state.
Trumps first term was overturning norms in behavior, but not overturning the way the entire governing system works, all four estates.
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.
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.
Just because a politician does the most virtue signaling towards the left doesn't mean that they'll produce the most progressive results. Bernie has a very poor track record of coalition building. He was getting into fights with Manchin even though he was needed as the 50th vote for the American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act.
He's never been a champion of financial freedom on an individual basis. He's consistently advocated for deeper and more intrusive regulations on cryptocurrencies.
Probably very similar unfortunately. The current state of US politics is that any policy further than center or maybe slightly left of center has a snowball's chance in hell of making it through Congress. The best case scenarios is probably what Biden accomplished: temporarily pausing the slide into far-right authoritarianism. Maybe he's able to pass some extremely watered down version of health care reform or tax reform but that seems unlikely. Certainly nothing like true progressive platform he ran on is possible in the US right now.
Yes, it would have been 4 years of zero progress because he would have been stonewalled by both parties.
That still sounds like a dream compared to everything else we have seen done.
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.
I'm guessing similar to the Obama administration. E.g. he couldn't get proper healthcare reform passed.
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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.
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.
That has been disproven. He ran again in primaries during 2020 and did horribly there. The progressives are just not popular, and they don't really do much to work with the rest of the Democrats. Unlike Republicans, where the party forerunner basically gets unilateral support from everyone Republican including those he personally insulted or harmed.
Sanders is old enough to remember what appeasement leads to, that's all.
supporting Ukraine has always been in America's interests. How embarassing it must be for Trump to be publicly humiliated by Putin over a cease fire.
Ron Paul already did that. Not very popular.
There are many reasons Ron Paul was not very popular.
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.
It's called the patriot act, anyone fighting it is instantly framed as anti-American.
> a presidential candidate can run with removing the Patriot Act as one of their campaign points
I've worked on privacy regulation. This would not get votes. The unfortunate fact is that the people most passionate about these issues are also tremendously lazy or extremely nihilistic. (Maybe it comes with the territory of not trusting institutions.)
Either way, privacy advocates can rarely muster even a dozen calls to electeds, let alone credibly threaten backing a primary opponent. The reason SOPA/PIPA worked is it animated a group of tech advocates beyond those with ideological opposition to surveillance.
Given how the democracy is attacked, I'm not sure there will be an election in 2028
There will almost certainly be an election in 2028. The degree to which it will be rigged through gerrymandering, voter intimidation, voter suppression and/or blatant cheating is a different question.
The answer is "as much as legal, and maybe a little more" as with all American elections.
you don't make improvements to a house, adorn it with gold all over, make 200m improvements if you have the intention of leaving.
behaviour says more than words
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.
>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.
Every president remodels and redecorates the White House, often to a much greater degree. The consternation over it is an intentional distraction.
It's done as an intentional distraction. The guy is a top class troll after all.
You don't adorn it with gold if you have taste.
Trump is not going to live much longer than 2028 anyway.
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Everyone is talking about it.
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/photos-trumps-drooping-face-9-11-p...
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/trump-sparks-health-fe...
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/glob...
> Biden got taken down by the the "crippling senile dementia" meme because it's only a problem when it's Democrats
Democrats felt both Biden and Trump were far too old and senile to be in charge. And they were right.
The problem is that Republicans only felt it was Biden.
Remember when having a "consensual" blowjob from an intern was almost enough to get a president fired? Remember when presidents resigned when the public found out they were involved in organising a break-in?
That world has long gone, social media saw to that.
> Everyone is talking about it.
And they are talking about it very strongly.
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Just !
Want to bet 10k? You’re literally making claims without any basis. He left last time, he will leave again, if he even makes it to the end of his term
> without any basis
This is his second, ostensibly last, term, meaning he will have an uphill battle at best to convince the public that he should get another term for some bullshit reason. His last term ended with him obviously trying to prevent the next guy from taking over. He obviously wants to be in power. It's disingenuous to say there is no basis. Whether it's likely is another matter but this is intellectually dishonest.
Why not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_1933_German_parliamen...
One less thing to worry about
I might turn out to vote if there was a candidate whose sole platform plank was to repeal as many existing laws as possible.
any democratic candidate?
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/report-cards/2022
I'm not sure that democrats enact/write less laws. If they don't enact (or write) less laws, i cannot see how the aggregate number of laws reduces.
This, apparently, is a "hard" statistical (research) problem, even though i've seen reporting on this exact subject, along the lines of "number of lines in bills written by each party" or similar. but the top 2 are democrats. I think "enacted" is a different metric, but i'm still pretty certain that democrats lead on "enacted" legislation, at least in the last 25 years.
No candidate can do that. The children were raised to be racist and ignorant. That basically means you are going to deal with poorly raised feral racist and entitled children. You aren’t going to rehabilitate that in your lifetime, the childhoods are fucked up. Maybe in 30-40 years these people will have a come to Jesus moment, but we don’t have a malleable national moral character to appeal to helpful sensibilities given how poorly the prior generation failed at raising proper children with good moral character.
Basically, a good portion of White America are gone cases. You won’t be able to explain to gone cases anything. That’s the reality of America.
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
1) If Trump somehow survives till 2028, there aren't gonna be elections in 2028 (or at least fare ones, if Democratic candidate wins Trump is gonna declare national emergency on suspect of voter fraud). TBD if Vance and the other crazies are in the same boat.
2) America started dying way before when we thought things like being anti woke was more important than policy.
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"I will only insert the tip and briefly, I promise" - then proceeds to f*ck the nation unconscious.
> concentrating power
Isn't that the actual point? of laws like this? Keeping those in power in power and further entrenching the moats around them.
And it happens exactly as predicted. Surprise!
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!
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.
At the same time the legislature snuck in turning the US into a police state into the 2012 Defense spending bill. So while SOPA and PIPA was defeated, people did not pay “enough” attention in the end.
If we had that kind of reaction to making your internet worse as we did to making our rights worse we would be better off.
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This has been a growing feeling for me too, seeing many users on various platforms go from mocking the murders of non-white people to claiming that their political opposition is hateful due to recent events. I used to think that being accepted in society was just a matter of integrating culturally (which I thought was fair), but the way people have been emboldened to say the most awful things has been changing my mind.
I mean, we have to be practical in our condemnation. I feel we had that somewhere around the 2010s, where we accepted that you can’t change a racist 80 year old. Fine, I think America accepted that.
But how the living fuck did that prior generation PASS ON the racism (and it’s way more than that, misogyny, economic selfishness, or wholesale disconnect in their economics to the point they don’t even vote for their economic interest).
HOW? How did they take 1 year olds in 1990-2010 and make them like the previous generation? People are not understanding what a huge sin this was. You CANNOT raise the children in an ideology that was nationally condemned and fought over for decades. It was an utter failure, no one was watching the kids.
This shit is so deep rooted that I am at a loss. To put it clearly, this is how anticlimactic America has been the last 20 years:
1) Imagine watching American History X
2) And instead of Ed Norton coming to a rebirth moment of shedding his racism and turning a new leaf, he stays a racist, doubles down, and also raises racist children.
There. Reality.
It's really interesting to me that you seem to assume that non-racism is the default state, and that humans have to be taught to be racist.
Based on what I've seen in the world looking across all the countries I am familiar with, including the US, I have to say I think the opposite is true.
Anyone with experience teaching children could tell you that racism is taught. It's just not baked in for kids.
However it's also not a very interesting question imo. You will never "reset" a generation from any aspect of culture, and now that we're in the global information age it's triply impossible. We don't need to fool around with naturalist fallacy - it's enough to say that racism is bad and we should get rid of it.
I have experience teaching children. They typically don't experience the scarcity that leads to fear and tribalism among adults. Tribalism doesn't have to be taught.
Younger generations are probably more racist than their parents but not their grandparents. There are a lot of reasons this probably happened, and it wasn't something done to infants, but transpired over the last 10-15 years.
I think part of it is being raised on the internet right as the cultural backlash against progressivism, "cancel culture" and Obama started to accelerate across social media, and right-wing grifting became big business after Gamergate.
Yeah, that's the thing. Even if the Trump presidency ends and the next guy somehow actually undoes all the political damage (unlikely), how does the country recover from the social consequences? It won't happen within a generation.
Ideologically we're probably quite aligned. However I disagree with you. Having traveled a lot of the USA, I've found Americans to be surprisingly much less racist than I expected.
Absolutely there are nests of racist snakes, the KKK still continues after all and we have out and out nazis like Nick Fuentes getting page time in the NYTimes, so something is rotten in that country. Even still, compared to my travels throughout Europe, the USA has something unique about its diversity. It does seem like there's something different about the American identity superseding race and religion.
Compare to a country where your statement might be true, insomuch as it's a massive population of practically lost-cause racists: Israel. I've had several conversations with Israelis and my main takeaway is that the government has spent the last couple generations doing its utmost to convince everyone in the country that the planet is a zero-sum ongoing tribal war. The racism there is ingrained not just into the culture but into the law.
Having met people like that, I tempered my aggressively leftist America takes. America has issues but I've encountered way more flagrant and disgusting forms of racism in a year of travels through Europe than I did in decades of travel in the USA. I feel like I didn't know what racism really is until I left the USA.
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Could not have said it better. You put it up beautifully. Thanks.
> concentrating power in a few regulated intermediaries. That’s not healthy for innovation, or democracy.
How are "regulated intermediaries" not democratic? If they're regulated by the democratically elected government, that seems entirely democratic to me.
He said "not healthy for democracy", that doesn't imply the process to create the law wasn't democratic.
Democracy always has the risk of sabotaging itself by naive actors who don't respect fundamental freedoms because they fear the public.
> Democracy always has the risk of sabotaging itself by naive actors who don't respect fundamental freedoms because they fear the public.
That sounds like a very radical statement. How are we to decide on these "fundamental freedoms" without putting them through the same democratic process we usually employ? Are we to ask the king for his opinions on how our democracy must be restricted? Are we to ask you? If the democratically elected officials "feat the public" what are they fearful of? Not getting elected? Are you implying the democratically elected officials shouldn't do what the public want?
Additionally, do these "fundamental freedoms" include the right to transact with any counterpart at any point? I have not found that right in any established human rights framework.
As a quite political teenager (not even from the US, never been there to this day) I argued that this law is going to stay. I wish I would have been wrong. These types of laws are not a good thing to have in the hands of power-hungry narcissists that like to rule not represent.
Democrawhat?
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.
This should surprise literally nobody. Let me briefly explain the US political landscape.
Classic liberalism is a pollitical and moral philosophy that came about in the last 600+ years that (among other things) enshrined individualism and private property. This evolved hand in hand with enclosures (ie private property) and ultimately led to capitalism as an economic system.
Colloquially, "liberal" is used to describe someobody who is socially progressive, typically a Democrat, but that really has nothing to do with the origins.
Neoliberalism is what liberalism evolved into, primarily in the 20th century. The key principles are that capitalism (the "free market") is the solution to basically all problems and deregulation (to increase profits, basically).
Everybody is a (neo)liberal. Democrats and Republicans both. Note that "leftists" are by definition not neoliberals and are anti-capitalist but people often mistakenly use terms like "liberal" and "leftist" interchangeably when they couldn't be more different.
Imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. Fascism is capitalism in crisis. The Democratic Party as it exists in the US today, is controlled opposition.
So we come to the Overton window. This is how it goes:
1. Republicans pass some legislation like the Patriot Act to take away rights, usually under the guise of "security". The Patriot Act of course was passed in the aftermath of 9/11;
2. Ultimately the Democrats get in office and... don't reverse it. It becomes the new normal. They do this by being institutionalists. But defending institutions is merely an excuse for inaction.
3. Come the next election the Patriot Act or the border wall or whatever will the new normal and some even more fascist legislation will be on the table. As an example, try and find the daylight between the immigration plan of the Kamala Harris 2024 campaign and the Trump 2020 immigration plan (that Democrats opposed at the time).
Nobody cares about our individual rights. Things continue to get worse because both parties will always choose the US imperial project and the profits of corporations over your rights. We are six companies in a trenchcoat.
That's a very nice lecture, but I think it's almost entirely digressive.
The "success" of the Patriot Act really has nothing to do with classic liberalism, neoliberalism, leftists, Democrats, Republicans, or Kamala Harris. These are the current background details in which an age-old dynamic plays out: A threat gives those in power a chance to grab more power and they take it. Once they have it they do not give it up easily.
It just boils down to a truism: Those who seek power seek power. There's really nothing more to it than that.
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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".
The draft text explicitly bans single-use addresses, which are used by any self-respecting wallet (Exodus, Ledger, Trezor) these days.
The actual problem with the article/headline is that the "Patriot Act" has expired. Although I'm sure there are plenty of similarly vague laws that could be used to justify this.
What text are you referring to? The article has a screenshot of a tweet with a screenshot of an excerpt that seems fair to paraphrase as "anyone behaved in this sort of activity is suspicious." I don't see anything about a ban and if you're only using single-use addresses that seems probably not suspicious in absence of all the other things which if you're doing all of them, seem objectively like they can only be described as money laundering.
I think single-use address use should not be marked as suspicious on its own but I agree in combination with other things in that screenshot I think it should. That's the "reasonable" line I have. This seems like the right balance for AML laws.
The rest of the discussion in this thread is awful. The article title is clickbait. The comments are mostly generic tangents about "crypto bad" or "muh surveillance". Guess it's par for the course when discussing cryptocurrency on this site.
The article has some references but not to a "draft text". The article makes no claims that a bill or other regulation-with-text is in the works. The image that serves as the topic of the article is apparently a tweet of the author of the article.
>the article...apparently [features] a tweet from the author of the article
Ah, our favorite - a Journalism
Isn't the Act still active, just some provisions have expired?
If you've got nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about! Nobody will ever run afoul of the system or fall through the cracks. We only have the best and brightest bureaucrats who won't make mistakes. Nobody will ever be attacked with this for politicized reasons. This will never be used to debank or isolate or penalize or attack an innocent person. And even if it did, the government would never use its immunity from prosecution to evade accountability!
Don't be paranoid, and don't worry! We're the good guys!
> If you've got nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about!
We curtail commercial speech relative to political speech to protect against fraud. Regulating financial activity is deeply precedented, especially in contexts where whether it's an individual person or group of people is ambiguated.
Observationist forgot to add a /s to the end of their comment
It wasn't missed. Dodging the slippery-slope surfers is practically table stakes for discussing surveillance.
That is an attack on self-custody. If you hold Bitcoin you now have an elevated risk of being picked up in some dragnet and suffering random consequences in unrelated parts of the financial system for reasons that you don't understand. If Bitcoin holders weren't alerted by articles like this, there is actually a pretty reasonable chance that they go in, experiment with Bitcoin and trip off a surveillance system as being "suspicious".
It is unlikely that we know what the penalties for suspicious transactions are in the US legal system. That seems like a matter that should have come before FISA Court at some point so we won't see public records of what the case law is. Even if it hasn't the actual workings of the financial control the US exercises aren't exactly secret but they also aren't exactly easy to follow.
> If you hold Bitcoin you now have an elevated risk of being picked up in some dragnet and suffering random consequences in unrelated parts of the financial system for reasons that you don't understand
This is exxageration. If you operate a cash business, you're under the same heightened supervision.
When they bought that in it was an attack on using cash. People have been pointing out that cash is under attack for a while.
And that's not OK either.
>> That is an attack on self-custody. If you hold Bitcoin you now have an elevated risk of being picked up in some dragnet and suffering random consequences in unrelated parts of the financial system for reasons that you don't understand.
This is based on the idea that there is some exception from previous rules and regulations. Before Bitcoin existed, lots of these rules were formulated. Now Bitcoin is on the scene and has evolved best practices for self-custody that ignore everything that went before. Bitcoin becoming more popular and integrated means that the rules from US financial system will start to be applied.
There is no surprise in this. If more effort was put into mitigating the concerns of the US financial system (or others) then things like this wouldn't happen. However, the truth is that the philosophies are incompatible so it's just a war of attrition that will unsurprisingly result in conformance to US financial regulation.
> The author makes the imaginary leap because they say they personally recommend doing all those things with self-custody.
It is because if you can't do those things, bitcoin has no use. Its only functions are to dodge laws and transfer money, and it's bad at transferring money.
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.
That assumes Bitcoin maximalists ultimately see it as a means of transaction. The ones I come across in the wild are purely maximalists for speculative purposes and couldn’t care less about the “practical” use cases for it.
Being able to transact is the point of it all. If practical use is not possible that makes it useless and that makes it worthless.
This has never been the main use outside an unrealistic dream world. Its main purposes are speculation and ponzi-like scams.
There are two components to price: what the thing is worth, and what you might be willing to convince someone else to buy it from you in the future for. The latter is the speculative component. The former must be related to some intrinsic property of the thing. For example, an orange has some minimum price, because if nothing else it's composed of matter and so can weight things down. If bitcoin is useless to transact, then its intrinsic worth is zero, so its price is 100% speculative. That's not so much a bubble as just air being pressurized by no container.
> what the thing is worth
This is subjective. Value is subjective. This is taught in many introductory economics classes.
> an orange has some minimum price, because if nothing else it's composed of matter and so can weight things down
You talk as if "minimum price" is objective. The "minimum price" you're referring to here is the most useless, but valued, property of the object for you. For other people, having weight can be a burden.
> If bitcoin is useless to transact, then its intrinsic worth is zero, so its price is 100% speculative
Again you speak as if as if everyone assumes the same value system as you, but differ only in a penchant for gambling in the form of price speculation.
>You talk as if "minimum price" is objective. The "minimum price" you're referring to here is the most useless, but valued, property of the object for you. For other people, having weight can be a burden.
It doesn't matter. The things oranges are good for are known, even if they're not applicable to you personally. Those applications are objective. It is objectively true that oranges are edible, even if you subjectively don't like them. It is objectively true that an orange can weight paper down, even if you can't carry even a single orange more right now.
Of course, sometimes there's an asymmetry of information where someone might price something incorrectly (e.g. someone doesn't know that oranges can now be used as fusion fuel, so he sells it for less). But the fact that we can say that the price is "incorrect" means there is a correct price.
>Again you speak as if as if everyone assumes the same value system as you, but differ only in a penchant for gambling in the form of price speculation.
I don't see you giving any examples of what Bitcoin is good for.
Store of Value. Digital gold, with the added utility of being able to teleport across jurisdictions and being able to plug directly into the next wave of smart contracts and decentralized securitization. It's no more complicated than that.
(No, gold does not primarily derive its value from practical applications).
These tools have practical application within the financial system. Speaking as a portfolio manager, gold has drawbacks. For example there was turmoil in the gold market from the recent Trump tariffs because of Swiss refining. It's a physical product that has to be stored, which means it has negative carry/costs money to hold, and if you get it through futures you have to deal with the futures term structure. Crypto also has rich volatility to work with (useful for many classes of trader), and it can even be relative value traded against peers. With Gold you end up going to industrial metals or to Silver (which is frankly an awful asset to manage in a portfolio or trade, outright worse than some of these alt-coins).
Simply put, it's a new asset with many highly unique characteristics, that has a good mix of store-of-value and speculative elements. It's also highly liquidity sensitive (vs Gold which has a much slower impulse, because it is heavily influenced by Central Bank Reserve activity, which isn't great to have to deal as the driving factor in an asset price because it's so opaque), and cleanly embeds risk-off/risk-on animal spirits.
Let's see you are a fund manager and are looking to add persistent alphas like Trend and Volatility Risk Premium to a portfolio. Crypto can be a good addition to these systematic trading programs because it's uncorrelated with other asset classes.
Granted, I'm no "Bitcoin Maxi" (despite living offshore with the tax-dodging crypto crowd for a year, I only did my first crypto trade this year), and will be the first to admit that the majority of the space is rank speculation and wretched excess, to quote Munger, but I'm begrudgingly admitting that it's a neat asset, although I think some of the ones like ethereum that are built more around the utility aspects of distributed computing and smart contracts have more use cases. BTC is primarily the gold equivalent in the crypto universe.
Step back one more level and I'd argue there's some deeper evolution going on as well in regards to money as technology. This isn't a process that anyone totally controls. The modern Eurodollar system (Eurodollars as in offshore dollars and derivatives, 20 trillion in size, not the currency Euro) that underpins the global financial system spawned out of the ether of many would argue petrodollars, and we didn't fully get a practical or theoretical handle on it until things like the Asian financial Crisis decades later. I'll immediately say that in no way am I saying "Bitcoin is the future of money", but the recent securitization wave in the crypto space does smell to me like the system pushing into new meaningful directions. Stablecoins that can be re-hypothecated across borders without regulation and frictionlessly lever up seems like the next obvious step that will naturally take hold. Right now the Eurodollar system and thus the global financial system is tied together with a huge hedge-fund driven basis trade which propagates out fed policy via an arbitrage. It's pretty obvious that this isn't always going to be the case and eventually that link is going to be severed. Likewise with the repo market and Tbills which is where systemic leverage originates - this is another pretty arbitrary thing that has been concocted, and don't be surprised if new strange things develop.
>Store of Value.
LOL. You're about seven years behind on the narrative. Nobody "stores value" in Bitcoin by deliberate choice. Anyone who does either doesn't know what they're doing or can't sell off their holdings. Volatility is an awful property for a store of value.
>being able to plug directly into the next wave of smart contracts and decentralized securitization
That's just meaningless drivel.
Edit:
Just to button up that bottom part, since it sounds a bit wonky. It looks like there's a new sort of Eurodollar system developing, which is more accessible and more democratized. That's pretty cool.
Ex: Tether was a 7th largest purchaser of US debt in 2024, ahead of South Korea and Germany.
Instead of EuroDollars (offshore dollar denominated deposits in non-us regulated institutions - say two non-us countries denominate alone in US dollars, they have spawned additions to the global dollar liquidity system without US involvement) you have stablecoins. Some of these stable coins are backed by hard US assets (just like foreign banks May hold hard dollars or TBills to cover their exposure), but some will inevitably not be and there will be a spectrum of risk and creditworthiness that will naturally arise. Likewise, these stable coins are passed around, lent and re-lent, which originates leverage in the crypto space, much like how we use Repo markets in the "real" financial system.
To dig into the history a bit more, after the GFC things like Repo and bank reserve requirements were tightened up quite a bit. No more sending off your dubious credit default swaps to repo to originate leverage every day if you are Bear Sterns, for example. Within developed was what we know as Shadow banking (which really isn't a descriptive term for it), and to me all of this crypto stuff is really just part of that offshoot Shadow banking narrative since the GFC.
History also has a tendency to repeat itself which crypto seems to be rapidly doing. Let's look back a few years ago with the banking crisis in the US, that was really a repeat of the savings and loan crisis from 40 to 50 years ago. So in a sense we're sort of on track for the new crop of humans to repeat some of the narratives that came after that are we not? Let's take that hard data point that tether, a stable coin, is now a huge holder of US debt. There's a reason why we have entities like the FED that step in to backstop these markets (like in 2020). Let's see the crypto market keeps developing, and is highly automated and mechanized as expected. Let's say something like a security flaw in one of the major backbones with regards to quantum computing starts a bank run in the space, and these stable coins start having to liquidate their treasury holdings aggressively and mechanistically. Well there's a classic reflexive loop that in the regulated financial system regulators would step into stop. Now because it's US debt to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars in real supply, this could be an actual, perhaps even mid-sized financial crisis! At the end of the day this sort of thing is exactly what I expect us to keep doing occasionally, after all humanity needs to relearn its lessons within new frameworks!
As for Bitcoin, it's the gold equivalent in this parallel shadow liquidity complex.
So yes, wonkish, but imo all of this stuff is pretty interesting and maybe even under discussed. Probably more useful to think about than stock price going up or stock price going down...
And then a note on why traditional financial participants seem to be getting on board with crypto, even people who may have initially been against it. I think it has something to do with how liquidity sensitive this stuff is. We live in a world where liquidity is ever more dominant a factor in financial markets, yet a bit paradoxically it's harder than ever to measure it. Let's take something like levels of reserves in the banking system, that thing which if it gets too low spikes repo rates and can cause an overnight crisis. Even the FED doesn't exactly know how to measure this and is largely guessing. There was an interesting research paper a little while back that proposes a new measuring system where they hook into bank transactions and measure if payments are a little late, like "did this bank pay their bill at 10am or 11:30". Believe it or not, that sounded like a large improvement over the higher frequency stuff we have! LIBOR was also replaced with SOFR, so the embedded overnight lending risk between financial institutions is not as viewable as it once was (granted LIBOR was manipulated, so at least that's better...) I've increasingly seen crypto used as a liquidity monitor. Ex: if Bitcoin explodes higher and diverges from the S&P, people will take that data point with sometimes even medium seriousness. That alone may be adding a chunk of legitimacy to the thing, and it may be self-reinforcing. Compared to the current insights we have the true nature of liquidity, maybe it isn't even that crazy an idea.
Much like baseball cards and beanie babies.
Companies can make more baseball cards and beanie babies. Enforced scarcity gives bitcoin value.
No they can’t. Collectors value certain production runs. It is enforced scarcity.
This is an interesting thing to try out:
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.
Not saying anything new here, but at the core there are only a few key reasons for using bitcoin: investment, hiding your finances, and the idealism of de-centralization.
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.
But with Monero, you see that it is effectively shut off from the Fiat ecosystem entirely. The proposal here clearly lays out how bad Bitcoin is for privacy. But it's not like the more private alternatives are actually allowed to be viable alternatives.
ironically, the inconvenience of exchanging Monero for fiat helps Monero be used as an actual currency. rather than exchanging Monero for cash and then buying things with cash, Monero is exchanged for the things itself.
Is this true? Kraken and Bitfinex both seem to support XMR <-> USD
They don't support it for EU customers since 2024 due to new EU regulations. It sucks.
Yeah. I understand the excitement over the past two decades about the possibility of cryptocurrencies, but it came with a lot of naivete. After the fight to create sovereign central banks, did anyone seriously think that they were just going to give it up? Sure, maybe they can't stop you technologically, but it's very easy to simply make it unlawful, and then the men (and robots) with guns call.
Very true. In my opinion, and strictly from an American-centric view, privacy should only extend to transactions within borders between citizens. As soon as it involves transactions from outside our borders, then it is a national security concern. We know, right now, that both Russia and China are fueling internal political tension via massive and sophisticated disinformation/influence campaigns, a certain part of which involves paying influencers, extremists, shady media outlets, maybe a Representative or three in America to push their agendas, foment discontent aiming to destabilize and control the United States. Monero is definitely being used in this information warfare. I am pro-privacy, pro- individual rights, but we have to resolve this central tension of these things and the very real hyper connected world we live in which very real nation-state enemies. I am at the point where I think restricting the internet to allied countries might actually be a good idea, as currently we are leaving citizens unprotected from every nation-state actor who wishes to manipulate us with targeted, data-analytic, bot- and ai-empowered campaign against us. It is out of control, and as long as a monetary instrument like crypto enables that attack surface, it will be hard for me to support crypto-maxamialism.
> a certain part of which involves paying influencers, extremists, shady media outlets, maybe a Representative or three in America to push their agendas, foment discontent aiming to destabilize and control the United States.
Doesn't this describe every political party and megacorp in the US too...?
If you don’t like those guys, you really won’t like the guys who will be in charge when the nation actually does descend into chaos.
Political parties and mega corps don’t strive to undermine the fabric of democracy itself though.
"Do you know how naive you sound, Michael? Political parties and mega corps don’t strive to undermine the fabric of democracy itself."
"Oh? who's being naïve, Kay?"
Are you sure about that?
So edgy.
One of the biggest platforms this happens through is Reddit, and they intentionally leave it wide open. You don’t even have to have an email address to register and start posting. Bots make these platforms a fortune, and they’re happy to sell out their country to foreign influence for a dime.
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.
I used to be against the real ID moves of early social media platforms, and now I wonder. How would information spread if social media users on X, for example, were clearly identified as 1 to 1 associated with a named person? Sore they might spread something, but unless that guy in Russia has an American ID, then he's not posting.
The current, put as many bots as you want on, approach is pure war.
Exactly. The basis of the problem is an unlinking of actions and real world consequences. People wil do whatever they want when consequences no longer exist.
[dead]
If Monero ever came close to Bitcoin's popularity, it would be outlawed. Plain as that. You can't get freedom through technology.
Monero has already been delisted from relevant exchanges last year because "reasons".
The main website that matched people to trade fiat for monero (localmonero) got closed recently because "reasons".
It is pretty popular and outlawed since a while. Basically the only relevant crypto currency used for purchases on the street since several years now. You can look up the number of daily on-chain transactions and tends to be on top every day.
You likely would only notice this if you need to donate money for someone with the wrong opinions or live at a non-aligned country.
Freedom here means transacting without:
--
anti-money laundering safeguards
sanctions enforcement
consumer protection
tax enforcement
fraud prevention systems
--
It is very true that technology won't get you this freedom from sensible legal requirements we impose on financial transactions.
That's obviously a good thing, but I guess people who are in crypto would disagree.
Freedom with crypto means I can pay bills without unjust barriers, and no individual and especially no "financial institution" (ultimately the governments) decides if my transaction goes through or can confiscate the money without confiscating me.
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.
Conversely, property rights are also a good thing. I don't agree that it is as simple as you present it. Even if you believe that the state has a right to confiscate, regulate or inflate away value for a "greater collective good", reasonable people might also recognize the potential for abuse.
So no, it isn't obviously a "good thing", unless you reject these nuances in favor of an all powerful state.
Talk about rejecting nuance, but now the state is "all powerful" because you can't transact privately.
Yes, the state has control of finance and transactions. It always does.
Democracies are build on principles like Popular sovereignty, political equality, or the rule of law.
Private transactions or tax-free property isn't a democratic feature. Yes, it's that obvious.
Even if you accept those premises, reasonable people would expect limits on the power of the state to infringe upon property rights, even when backed by a popular majority. Furthermore, the principle of individual self-ownership is a key starting point for modern, liberal ideas of law. Of course you are free to reject those premises, but I would characterize that as authoritarian rather than obvious.
Property rights exist within a legal framework defined by the people, through law.
What you're talking about here with self-ownership and the state "infringing" upon property rights when you're taxed and can't transact privately, it seems less than "reasonable".
It seems like you're trying to paint routine and widely accepted functions of democratic governments as if they were unreasonable, authoritarian overreach.
Authoritarian overreach is itself a routine and widely accepted aspect of democratic governments. Authoritarians get 1 vote/person, same as everyone else. They're allowed to advocate for policies and score the occasional outrageous political win, just like everyone else. There are a lot of them out there and they are a significant political force.
Something being routine and done democratically is no defence at all of it being liberal or in line with the principle of property rights. Or even of it being legal in a lot of instances, democratic governments lose legal challenges quite regularly.
And in this case, attacks on private transactions are absolutely unreasonable authoritarian overreach. The government doesn't need to surveil people when they have no reason to suspect those people of wrongdoing.
Voters generally seem willing to embrace authoritarian solutions when it is applied to the things they dislike. The political classes have multiple incentives to appeal to those voters. Outside of a few outliers, neither group generally concerns themselves with the underlying principles of civil liberties until their favored causes are attacked. Hypocrisy abounds. Reasoning from first principles is dismissed as ideological extremism.
From here it is easy to see how the incentives of a democratic-regulatory-state work against property rights, free speech, privacy rights and other civil liberties.
Absolute financial privacy is not a liberal principle.
It's a fantasy cooked up by crypto enthusiasts and anti-government ideologues. You cannot enforce sanctions, prevent money laundering, protect consumers, or collect taxes if transactions are private.
It's just not going to work.
It may come as a surprise, but there were periods where taxes were contributed voluntarily or sworn under oath that they were accurate tabulations. Early Hamburg is a strong example here. There was an honor associated with paying taxes for wealthy merchants.
Alternatively, without those positive incentives towards payment, we might consider the comparative value of evading taxes and taking upon risk vs. paying a less onerous tax. From these exclusively negative consequences, the taxpayer compares the burden of compliance with the effort required and the risks of non-compliance. This is well known in the modern era as The Laffer Curve.
So I have to disagree once again. Empirically, we can see that is possible to collect taxes when there the perceived value of the services provided by the state is a net win for the tax payer. Taxes can also be collected when the burden of payment is less than the cost of evasion.
When states fail to deliver value taxpayers understandably become dissatisfied. When compliance is onerous and rates high, authoritarian enforcement measures become necessary. From this point it is easy to see how cryptocurrencies provide the kind of utility you disparage.
"The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks", this is Satoshi's inscription on the BTC genesis block. It may suggest that mismanagement by (arguably authoritarian) central planners gave rise to the popularity of cryptocurrencies. Perhaps the reason cryptocurrencies exist is because of the incompetence or authoritarian means of the state.
There's room in the middle to disagree, but the extreme case you've made here reads as authoritarian. Especially in the context of the article.
Ah, I've made an "extreme case" now? That's rich. I essentially argued for the necessity of basic financial enforcement that every functioning democracy relies on.
I guess you consider it authoritarian when you don't get to bypass those controls by using crypto.
The honors-based tax system that worked in a small oligarchic city-state of 25k is hardly going to scale to modern democracies with millions of taxpayers.
Both should be limited. Almost everything should be limited. Deciding the limits is called politics.
Political solutions are often messy and complex. Pragmatic fixes are rarely obvious and overreaches are common. Reforms are ongoing. Conversely, absolutists have no use for nuance.
The war on cash is a good example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
https://ij.org/federal-court-rules-in-favor-of-convenience-s...
Something being imperfect doesn't mean that getting rid of it is an improvement.
Should civil forfeiture be heavily reformed, and is it being obviously abused? Yes. Is the ability to use cryptocurrency to bypass sanctions, fund oppressive regimes, drive criminal empires, and power a new generation of scams a much worse problem? Absolutely.
Proponents of a system explicitly designed to enable financial fraud shocked when governments apply fraud rules to them, news at 11.
The ability of money to deice criminal empires is a problem. Abolish money.
In an organized society there is no absolute right to personal property, there never has been and there never will be.
Which, I believe, would make it even more prevalent. It would be the confession that they cannot control it, and while most people would be deterred by this, I can see a shadow economy growing because (or thanks ?) to this.
It's not so black and white. Obviously social and political change is the goal. But in the meantime technology can help if you're living under repression.
Take VPNs and Tor helping people jump the Great Firewall of China for example. Obviously, yes, this is a political problem; the GFW shouldn't exist. But it would be foolish to dismiss the technology as a vital part of fighting back against the state.
You are being downvoted, but you are correct. I am east european and I know how hard the fist of the State hits. Sometimes I think westerners see technology like some special moves that you can quickly combo so you can defeat the evil boss at the end. No, there are no special moves, just a boot stamping on a human face -- forever.
> You can't get freedom through technology
I'd argue the opposite - if Bitcoin had been created with secure private transactions (untraceability) it would be in the same popular position it is today, but the attacks on it (chain analysis etc) would be failing instead of inevitably marching forward.
Your argument seems to rely on an assumption that the insecurity of Bitcoin has been legible and apparent to the [greater] government for most of Bitcoin's life, and so the government allowed it to gain popularity knowing those insecurities would eventually make it succumb to government control. But in general government sees any lack of identification/data as a problem to be rectified, and the popular wisdom for quite some time has been that Bitcoin is "anonymous". so I'd say the government acted as quick as it would have regardless of the actual security properties. It feels like any holding off had more to do with financial lucrativeness rather than an understanding of its long term security flaws.
Now that we're here though, Bitcoin does seem like a very strong inoculation against financial privacy technology. Government is now well aware that software/cryptography can be used for money, and the first question asked is why isn't your new niche system grokkable to chain analysis?
Monero is outlawed in the EU. It's not illegal to possess, but no business is allowed to touch it.
Which proves that it does what it says. (Much like when the police suspect someone of being a drug dealer for using GrapheneOS)
> Monero is outlawed in the EU.
Source:
A lot of people keep looking for technology solutions to political problems. The fact is that privacy, especially of financial transactions, is becoming illegal. Any technology that allows you to send or spend money anonymously will be attacked by our governments. They won't be allowed.
You can argue about whether you can get away with it due to difficulty of enforcement, but all that does is turn us all into criminals. They won't put ALL of in jail, but they can put ANY of us in jail - the ones they don't like.
> The fact is that privacy, especially of financial transactions, is becoming illegal. Any technology that allows you to send or spend money anonymously will be attacked by our governments. They won't be allowed.
It's probably a bit worse than that. It's not specific to transactions or spending.
Eventually any IP talking to another IP without the mandatory metadata to link it to a physical identity will be illegal.
Right now there is a hodge-podge of solutions that piggy-back on the phone networks, wires, etc. that used to give LEO enough actionable information to track some criminals. But most of that has been obsoleted by modern cryptography.
Don’t understand this pessimism. There are a large number of countries in the world. You can migrate out of a country if they start doing insane things like this.
I would consider leaving UK very seriously if I was building a life there now, as an example.
>Don’t understand this pessimism. There are a large number of countries in the world. You can migrate out of a country if they start doing insane things like this.
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.
> 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.
Spot on.
Some think we need financial freedom, but in reality it's the freedom to fund scams and malware, launder money, dodge taxes, and buy stuff that’s illegal.
That won't become legal just because you use "Monero" or whatever. Obviously we can't have privacy for financial transactions.
You forgot a few things on that list that people would like freedom for:
advocating for (or against) trans rights, protesting against the deportation of migrants, advocate against gun-control, and donating to (anti) palestinian causes
Are just a few things that people would like the freedom to do.
The point being, financial privacy is an important part of having a functioning democracy. But at the same time, financial control and limits are also an important part of a functioning democracy, for e.g. the 'freedoms' you mention. In the end, neither perfect privacy, not perfect surveilance are what we need. The best solution will be somewhere in the middle, with nuance.
> financial privacy is an important part of having a functioning democracy
No, I don't think it is. Perhaps privacy for speech and voting are.
Heinous speech is allowed in the USA but is totally illegal in Canada.
I live in Canada. Anonymous heinous speech? No thank you. Go away.
How is privacy for voting different than privacy for funding the candidate?
One man one vote is a little different from one dollar one word, or one dollar one vote.
In most civilized countries you have privacy in the voting booth (because without it, buying votes becomes trivial), but no privacy in financing campaigns.
Some of those countries even have rules about when campaigns can and cannot run, because there are benefits to living in a society that's not actively bombarded by polarizing political screeching 24/7. It does some to cut down the influence of dollars in politics.
I guess it makes people in the advertising business, and people looking to buy political influence very unhappy.
>> financial privacy is an important part of having a functioning democracy
>No, I don't think it is. Perhaps privacy for speech and voting are.
Cash works for financial privacy, and functioning democracies.
This is a very narrow way to see it. Technological advancements can and did massively affect politics and other parts of life.
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.
Except, you know, the dollar bills the government itself prints.
To some extent. Not dragnettable but certainly not perfectly anonymous.
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.
> There's a conflict between Bitcoin as a public ledger, privacy, and money laundering
There is, to be fair, a legitimate debate to be had about dismantling our anti-money laundering infrastructure.
No, there really isn't. Money laundering has been a huge problem enabling all sorts of crimes and issues. There is no debate to be had on the benefits of prohibiting it, and you have to be very deep in the Silicon Valley rabbit hole to think even 5% of the population of any nation would support doing away with those rules.
> there really isn't. Money laundering has been a huge problem enabling all sorts of crimes and issues
To be clear, I think there should be limits. I also think a lot of AML is theatrical.
Where it’s not is where large volumes can be moved. Less emphasis on cash. More on offshore accounts, tumblers and high-volume wallets.
Except that money laundering is allowable for some, but not all.
Don't pretend the AML rules are enforced fairly and evenly.
Again: something being imperfect doesn't make it bad. Fix the imperfect enforcement, don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
>If you want privacy on Bitcoin
its like html being using for full blown applications.... its the wrong application of the tech. If you dont want people to see where you send stuff why would you pick a technology designed to do that?
Essentially decentralisation sounds nice, but doesnt work in practice.
Most governments aren't decentralized in their structure, which causes the "problem". If you have private entities that coordinate with each other it works quite well, but the world is very used to big centralized governments that "solve" all their problems.
And, so what? You've posted a whole load of nothing.
It's a pretty direct response to your claim that "decentralisation sounds nice, but doesn't work in practice". Decentralization has worked in practice many times in many ways.
Also, you can have reputability AND decentralization, that's actually a fundamental component of how any Blockchain system works. When you mine a block you sign it to ensure nobody else can resubmit your work and take credit.
Did you hear about the Internet?
Crime is pretty heavily regulated on the Internet, has been for years. If that regulation had been impossible, it would not have been allowed to grow, and would have been shut down / banned.
You should check out I2P.
The internet for the average person has converged to a handful of products and services.
Your point being?
People prefer centralised stuff since it takes care a lot of stuff for them. They dont actually care all that much about technology that yield decentralised outcomes. I know that may be difficult for many here to comperehend.
People prefer centralized services until they enshittify, after which people move to the next thing, thanks to the decentralization.
> people move to the next thing, thanks to the decentralization
This does not quite follow. Care to explain more? What I observe in practice is that people move from one centralized service to the next centralized service (e.g., X->BlueSky) but rarely from centralized to decentralized.
Most services aren't decentralized, but the Internet itself is decentralized, which allows to set up these independent services that can compete with each other.
Google, Meta and so on are not dying.
So whats your point fella?
It might be slow for the megacorps, which don't even try to follow laws, but
> Google
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719
> Meta
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30186326
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44210689
> Apple
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11034071
And
Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA (ostechnix.com)
1021 points by marcodiego 58 days ago | 620 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44580682
Bitcoin, tor, bittorrent are all perfect examples of decentralization simply not working in practice
It's been terrible that BitTorrent doesn't work anymore. I can only download 10TB of all the movies and TV shows our family has ever wanted spanning 60 years. It has to run off this massive server in the closest as big as our cat! Sucks our grandma can't access it from across the country via Tailscale and a bit of DNS abuse.
I can't tell if you are being sarcastic. Obviously Bitcoin doesn't "work" for any purpose. But in contrast, Tor obviously works. Here are constantly updating HTTP response dumps from the Tor hidden service ecosystem: https://rnsaffn.com/zg4/ (NSFW) There is a lot happening inside the Tor network.
I'm confused how the connection was made between "here are our guidelines for suspicious activity" and "self custody is outlawed"
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.
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.
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).
[] https://kniferights.org/legislative-update/court-opines-feds...
Yeah, the .gov does that all the time. See every "basically Bruen v NYC" type case prior to Bruen.
See this very nice blog-post: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/kyc-and-aml-beyond-th...
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.
De facto vs. de justo
De jure.
> 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.
Yes. Single-use addresses protect me. If you store your entire balance under a single address then anybody you transact with can see your entire balance by lookup up the transaction. Single-use addresses protects you from people snooping around looking for worth while $5 wrench attacks.
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?
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.
Doesn't that result in multiple transactions/transaction fees if you ever need to spend more than a single wallet contains?
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.
People are interpreting the ‘and’ here as meaning ‘either of these things’ rather than ‘these things in sequence’ as you (and I) do.
this is just standard practice
optionality
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.
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.
Wait until you find out about the TRUST program and all the exchanges reporting PII to another.
This is pure click bait that relies on a deliberate misreading of a 2023 notice [1] that tries to imply that "self custody" is being attacked in any form.
All that this is saying is that the government will try to track money movement to pursue criminal activity, including, unfortunately the criminal activity of moving money in a way that looks sketchy. This is something that we have decided we have to live with.
[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/10/23/2023-23...
It's not "pure click bait" for anyone that has followed along with the crypto community since the early days. This is basically an official stake in the heart for anyone that even loosely held on to the original ideals behind crypto.
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".
It's a two year old note talking about mixers and money laundering and it's being misrepresented as a new government stance against self-custody. That's why it's click bait.
I feel like growing up is realizing that the government is just a big gang. They do what they want and will enforce with menace what they want. They can change the rules, take your stuff and it ain't stealing because they said so. Sigh.
On the other hand you get to vote who is in the gang. So choose wisely.
You used to get to vote. It doesn't work like that anymore.
You only get two options for each vote, and there is no reason that one or both of the options would need to be aware of or be in favor of an acceptable solution to the given problem. In fact, the chance of that happening is vanishingly small.
Most of the people on the planet don't get to vote.
Unfortunately. It looks like even 25 years ago over 50% lived in democracies, but the rise of autocracy recently is certainly depressing.
I recognized it in the opposite direction, after observing that gangs inevitably end up being quasi-states within their turf. They demonstrate almost everything I associate with statehood except for issuing their own currency. From there, the reverse (that governments are just big gangs) also flows naturally.
To your point: gangs of various stripes pay blood money to the families of fallen members; they also fund or support community programs to curry good favor.
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.
sometimes you wonder if people have become so thoroughly captured by the status quo they can no longer even conceive of a monetary system existing that is not entirely dependent on custodians acting on someone's behalf
it's not the developers of bitcoin's fault your entire reg compliance apparatus was constructed on requiring intermediaries
It's fundamentally unsurprising that the custodians of the existing system don't like a system built on the premise of circumventing it
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
i understand their motivation, but none of the existing controls have done much to prevent those bad things from occurring either
>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?
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.
so the risk to the wallet holder is the exact same risk that exists for every single HTTPS connection right now?
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
Yes, TLS encryption has similar potential risks, quantum and other elliptic curve vulnerabilities.
Quantum resistant algorithms are under heavy discussion in bitcoin dev mailing list, and have been for awhile. I think the signature sizes for leading algorithms are still too large to be practical within existing block size limits, but of course lots of things would probably have to change in a quantum emergency. Bitcoin devs tend to be extremely conservative with making new changes (in part because it attracts a lot of contrarians) so it's going to take a long time for people to agree on the right architecture for a quantum resistant scheme in bitcoin, but it will happen, BIPs are in the works like BIP-360 which outlines some potential structure for it.
If you break asymmetric crypto, will you be able to immediately steal billions of dollars from TLS? You will be able to from bitcoin.
To attack TLS, you need a network MITM. To attack bitcoin you don't.
Inevitable. Remember Roosevelt's gold confiscation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
It was forbidden to have more than 5 ounces of gold.
Good for Bitcoin, then ? Is it becoming a form of Gold, for real ?
Bitcoin is more a rug pull then ever, it's just that the "right" people are in charge of when and how the rug is pulled so it's becoming legitimized in all the ways that benefit those people and de-legitimized in all ways that benefit the individual.
Anything which threatens to rock the financial boat too much will be banned.
M question was on what legal/Constitutional basis does the Treasury have for expanding the Patriot Act? Is it because the law provides powers to the Treasury department to define areas that the law should apply? Or is it a case where the administration (once again) is assuming it can do something, the Constitution be damned?
Single use wallets? Wallet is not a concept. Address is the concept. Addresses should be used once for security.
> "pooling or aggregating [cryptocurrency] from multiple persons, wallets, addresses, or accounts
Satoshi's whitepaper expanded BTC as time-stamp server for preventing DDOS on fax lines.
Statist government is fundamentally incompatible with financial privacy. Such governments consider it inherently criminal.
The screenshot-of-a-screenshot seems to be talking about mixers (e.g. TornadoCash). But ultimately, what did you expect?
I always wonder why monero isn’t more popular?
On- and off- ramps suck. And there isn't much speculative value. So it misses the main 'use case' of crypto.
Its by far the best crypto-currency for making payments. But people care very little about making payments with crypto, and exchanging between Fiat and Monero is very difficult, so its not an easy payment system either.
Overton window. There is a lot of funding for youtube influencers to play with casino coins that are transparent and traceable. Those are basically looking for "money goes up" and don't really care about the crypto part.
Monero is only on the news for negative reasons when someone tries to bring it down or delists from yet another exchange. There isn't funding to make it popular, which I guess in the end it is really up to Monero users from pushing it up.
That's a long-winded explanation of the fact that most people don't care about Monero's privacy benefits, so the only way Monero will be more popular is if someone funds a marketing campaign for it.
This is inaccurate and in a hilarious way. Treasury is not coming after Bitcoin. There's an update in an ongoing rulemaking process that got reported here[0] as banning mixing and privacy tools. It may have been blown out of proportion[1], but I am not a lawyer, and certainly banning these tools would be bad. The thing is, Bitcoin's not private—every transaction is public for everyone to download. It's Twitter for your bank account. And that comes with serious privacy, safety, and boring commercial counterparty risks that should be addressed. These kinds of tools exist to mitigate that problem. The irony is that Bitcoin has largely refused to address this obvious issue, so no, Treasury isn't coming for Bitcoin. Indeed, there been years of people arguing Bitcoin would be just fine with no privacy protections. [0] https://www.therage.co/us-government-to-bring-patriot-act-to... [1] https://x.com/valkenburgh/status/1966174324701778071"
Sounds like Anti-Money Laundering - pretty standard stuff.
Find a way that is costs trump money or prevents him from making money, and this stuff will vanish instantly.
Small potatoes. Once he controls the Federal reserve they can print money and give it to him (in the guise of a sovereign wealth fund).
If there would have been better policing of digital currency by its users against criminal actors, perhaps digital assets would be spared the attention and now regulation. Sadly, increasing adoption and privacy guarantees lure criminals same as legitimate users.
The US is being run by a convicted felon and is in the process of converting to a totalitarian state.
Any upcoming changes to privacy regulations are going to be to further that goal, not to crack down on crime.
Loading up a single address with too many UTXOs degrades the entropy of a public-private key pair
does bitcoin or UTXO's somehow for some reason generate multiple PUBLIC keys for the same private key?
On a long enough timeline, having anything stored in local hardware is going to be suspicious. Not surprised to see government embrace of crypto lead to increased scrutiny.
like cash?
The statement goes beyond currency. In a connected world with infinite storage, why do you need that usb stick? What are you hiding on there?
Considering how they're clamping down on anonymity wherever they can, crypto wasnt going to escape their clutches for very long. How long before its seperated from it original aim and just turned into a gambling token.
Original aim was that people don't deposit Bitcoins into a bank, Coinbase etc, but use it to freely transact between themselves, outside of gov control.
> How long before its seperated from it original aim and just turned into a gambling token
Always has been.
I mean it was useful for online gaming related transactions, like 15 years ago.
Ever since it has become a more obvious scam with every passing year.
Today you can barely post about it on most major platforms without immediately spawning multiple spam comments trying to part you from your money.
Real value crypto adds to the economy: ~0.
Once this scam inevitable comes crashing down, it will probably take the stock market with it. And all for nothing but the enrichment of early crypto adopters.
negative 10 years
Sounds like the cryptobros are about to have their turn with the Trump leopard eating their face...
They didn't care when he personally rugpulled them for billions, why would this disrupt their sycophancy?
> 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
The quote does not say that the key changes. It says that each transaction makes it (a bit) easier to perform a brute force attack.
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.
What crime needs to be identified based on transactions? Tax evasion? I can't think of any others that don't leave behind a real world mark that would be the thing that initiates investigation.
Following the money is important to investigating all sorts of crimes, as most crimes are done for money.
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.
Money laundering is the obvious one—and the primary reason crypto’s value is as high as it is.
Can anyone ballpark a dollar figure for data center time to decrypt the ledger? No rubber hoses allowed.
To decrypt the public ledger to show the already publicly visible transactions?
$0
Am I misunderstanding you?
> We shouldn't have to live in a world where standards cater to the lowest common denominator, in this case criminals, and make things worse off for the overwhelming majority of the population.
LOL, the BTC people who thought "Digital Gold" was a good slogan are going to learn what happened to self custody of gold and the gold standard.
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
Despite the origin of HN being in the US, given that the current community has expanded to a large array of multinational English speakers, I'd rather country-specific posts like these were tagged such, in a international context: e.g. "The US treasury is expanding.."
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.
You CANT. It's impossible, the people that operate their own computers running the network will NOT allow a government operated coin.
The Bitcoin lobby are definitely getting their money's worth.
Monero fixes that.
The government doesn't want to actually stop these things. They just want to make everything that people do normally illegal. Enforcement will only happen if you rock the boat.
Maybe it solves one problem, but it has many other: https://coinpaper.com/10812/qubic-vs-monero-pr-stunt-or-proo...
Also, always remember native coinjoin.
That was fake news, please update your knowledge on the topic: https://riat.at/qubic-attack-on-xmr-monero-no-51-attack-prov...
Also, what is that problem you mention with coinjoin? Please provide details.
To the slaughter house ...
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.
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.
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.
Use a hardware wallet like Trezor.
Yes, and for even higher security, use a bitcoin-only airgapped hardware wallet like Coinkite's Coldcard or Foundation's Passport Core.
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" :)
[dead]
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).
No it's not in my control but I use it because it is convenient to buy and sell.
thats ma boi trump, back at it again with the absolute opposite of what he said hed do!
I'm convinced the the capital-c Crypto industry hates crypto. Don't use it as a currency! Give us interest free loans (stablecoins) and gamble!
This article is nonsense.
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.
Only section 215 related to FISA surveillance expired.
Your comment is nonsense.
Assuming this is true, how would this be enforced and tracked?
Lobbyists, Assemble!
The article has no references, but even so, it's no wonder that Monero has gone up in the past day.
https://coinpaper.com/10812/qubic-vs-monero-pr-stunt-or-proo...
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.
Sounds like capital flight is anticipated to become a thing. Why might that be?
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.
It is a nuisance to the state.
I do not see how it is an existential threat.
Nation states existed for centuries in which money was frequently held as cash and even large transactions were often done in cash. its still common (or was until very recently) in a lot of (mostly poor) countries
> With financial privacy and real freedom, you can hire a competing army.
Having the money to pay an army is a long way from hiring one. Recruitment and buying military equipment at any scale would be obvious.
"Crypto for me, not for thee..."
This author is being disingenuous. All of those actions are indeed suspicious. I am not a fan of the Patriot Act, but these new guidelines actually seem pretty reasonable to me.
"The Patriot Act. Read it."
Hah. Trump is the most corrupt president in US history. Honestly, who didn't think he would corrupt Bitcoin while he was at it?
This is not terribly surprising. Control of the monetary system is a key responsibility of the US federal government; it was always going to be the case that if Bitcoin became a meaningfully-sized part of the financial system the government would impose regulation.
Now we get to see how enforceable it is (and I suspect it's more enforceable than people wanted to assume... They can jail you indefinitely for refusing to divulge a password if the court finds it is not a violation of your Fifth Amendment rights to divulge it. https://xkcd.com/538/).
Bitcoin is a perfect microcosm for the tech sector in what happens when people who don't know how something works and refuse to understand it, try to replace it.
Every aspect of the modern financial system exists for a reason. It evolved over time to deal with problems. Things like reversible transactions are a feature not a bug.
Bitcoin is where all the gold bugs went who lamented the end of the gold standard. Most of these people didn't understand that at no point in history was the US dollar 100% backed by gold (or silver, originally). Never.
What backs the US dollar isn't gold or oil or anythihng else we dig up out of the ground. It's long schlong of the US military.
I've also said that crypt currency exists only because the government hasn't shut it down. All it would take is a policy change from the US government to say banks who have access to the US financial system cannot trade in Bitcoin and it would be over. Yes you could still have wallets (at least until the government starts going after Bitcoin farms, which again it could do) but what would you do with those coins?
Bitcoin is not, never has been and never will be an escape from the perils (some real, many imagined) of fiat currencies.
Wrong. As per the Coinage Act of 1792, the US dollar was to be equal to exactly 371.25 grains of fine silver.
Rethink your ideas, you are very wrong here.
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?).
You've described an asset not a currency and sure, your asset will keep going up forever like so many assets before it, famously.
That changes nothing. And you can use it as a currency. Declaring it an asset is irrelevant. You can call Bitcoin a cryptocurrency, an asset, a currency, a scam, it doesn't effect Bitcoin in any way. Bitcoin doesn't care. Its sole purpose is as an incorruptible, debasement and censorship resistant ledger native to the public internet.
Of course this all redefines exactly what a currency or an asset IS. Is Gold a currency? Is it an asset? is it both? Its semantics. Both gold and bitcoin can be exchanged for goods and services.
Most assets will not keep going up forever in Bitcoin terms. Maybe no asset will, on long enough time scales. Most assets are plummeting in price considerably in Bitcoin terms. Today it takes 6-figure units of dollars to buy one unit of Bitcoin. On to 7 and 8, and more. Eventually, you will not be able to exchange ANY amount of fiat for Bitcoin.
You are free to ignore Bitcoin for then next 10 years, like most folks on HN have done for the past 10.
No one knows what will be in the future. As mentioned in the discussion, the possession of bitcoin can be simply outlawed.
As an extra note, total bitcoin supply is just the chain spec. It can be changed.
It will be interesting to see how the pro-Trump crypto bros react to this. Likely by now the whole group has had a chance to invest heavily in various altcoins or whatever will be the beneficiary of government largesse, so these proposed (and difficult to enforce) restrictions are likely intended just to pump those for quick profits.
I'd argue that Bitcoin has been effectively immune to attacks like this by governments for nearly a decade.
That the blockchain bros are surprised that Trump is not acting in their interest is itself surprising, even though it shouldn't. 3-level meta-surprising, so to say.
Does no one else find it weird seeing anything from this administration "anti-Bitcoin" at all? I wouldn't be surprised by this headline during a previous administration, but generally speaking, this administration has been very Bitcoin-friendly (and Bitcoin institutions friendly right back). To be clear, the simplest answer is "sure but that doesn't mean they have to agree on everything". But I would like to propose that if you ask the simple question of "who does this benefit?" it may suggest we are witnessing a different phenomenon here.
I think this might be the first indication that what we currently call "institutional Bitcoin supporters" are not "Bitcoin supporters" at all, or rather, what they call "Bitcoin" is not what you and I call "Bitcoin". Services like Coinbase and BTC ETFs don't really suffer from this development at all. In fact, I think it's quite obvious that obviously benefit from something like this (at least from the first-order effects). What's the alternative to self custody? Well... third-party custody. Especially since they are already bound up by KYC rules, right? Their is a cynical reading that there's nothing inconsistent with this development if you consider "institutional Bitcoin's" goals to primarily be replacing existing financial power structures with themselves. "Bitcoin" is just a means to an end. Their goals were only incidentally aligned with individual BTC holders since they were previously in similar circumstances as the "out group". Previous administrations were as suspicious of "Bitcoin companies" as any individual Bitcoin holder, perhaps even more so. But that's not the case anymore. Bitcoin companies have successfully been brought into the fold, so it's not even that they're necessarily "betraying" the values of Bitcoin true believers, you might argue that interpretation of shared values was entirely inferred to begin with.
Critically though, I think an important consequence of this is that Bitcoin purists and skeptics should realize that they arguably now have more in common than not, at least in the immediate term, and may be each other's best allies. In my experience, for most the existence of Bitcoin, its skeptics haven't really seen Bitcoin as a "threat." Instead, to admittedly generalize, their critiques have been mostly about Bitcoin being "broken" or "silly" or "misunderstanding the point of centralized systems", etc. These aren't really "oppositional" positions in the traditional "adversarial sense," more dismissive. In fact, the closest thing to an "active moral opposition" to Bitcoin that I've seen is an environmental one. IOW, Bitcoin true believers think about Bitcoin way more than Bitcoin skeptics do. Similarly, Bitcoin true believers really have nothing against skeptics other than... the fact that they occasionally talk shit about Bitcoin? IOW, Bitcoin skeptics are not "the natural enemy Bitcoin was designed to defeat".
But if you think about it, "institutional Bitcoin" sort of embodies something both these camps generally have hated since before Bitcoin. Whether you believe Bitcoin to be a viable answer or not, it is undeniable that the "idea" of Bitcoin is rooted in the distrust of these elitist financial institutions, that evade accountability, benefit from special treatment, and largely get to rig the larger system in their favor. Similarly, I don't think Bitcoin skeptics like these institutions or are "on their side". In fact, perhaps they'd argue that they predicted that Bitcoin wouldn't solve any of this and would just be another means of creating them. But IMO what they should both realize is that the most important threat right now is these institutional players. They are in fact, only "nominally" Bitcoin in a deep sense. From the perspective of true believers, their interests are actually in now way "essentially" aligned with any "original Bitcoin values," and from the perspective of skeptics, the threat they pose has very little to do with their use of "the Bitcoin blockchain".
They are arguably just another instantiation of the "late stage capitalist" playbook of displacing an existing government service in order to privatize its rewards. Coinbase could be argued to have more in common with Uber than Ledger wallets. Instead of consolidating and squeezing all the value from taxis though, the play is to do the same with currency itself. It is incidental that Uber happened to be so seemingly "government averse". In this context, it's actually helpful to cozy up to the government and provide the things government departments want that make no difference to fintech's bottom line (such as KYP). In fact, that might be their true value proposition. Bitcoin only enters the conversation because in order to replace a currency, you do... need a currency. Bitcoin was convenient. It was already there, it had a built-in (fervent) user base that was happy to do your proselytizing for you, and even saw you as a good "first step" for normies that couldn't figure out to manage their own wallet. The Bitcoin bubble was already there, why fight it when you can ride it?
Again, I think this is highly likely to be against the values of Bitcoin true believers and skeptics alike, and I also think that if the above is true, it represents an actual danger to us all. Recent events with credit card processors have already demonstrated that payment systems have proven to be incredibly efficient tools at stifling speech. In other words, this is arguably an "S-tier threat", on par with or perhaps worse than any sort of internet censorship or net neutrality. If so, we should treat it as such and work together.
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Ahem those are #2 and #3 behind "talking to disinterested people about it".
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Yep, the belief that governments would just give up control of money always seemed incredibly naive to me too.
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?
> 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.
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.
I believe you, but do you have any evidence of how the prostitution kick backs work? Interesting articles?
A more egregious case than most [https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/springfield/press-releases...].
Usually it’s as simple as the cops looking the other way in exchange for ‘freebies’.
It would also be delusional to think crypto-bros will give up their self-determination to the nation-state.
It's really not. 100% of the time the nation state is winning that battle, as evidence by literally all of human history. Crypto-bros make up a fraction of a fraction of the population and most people don't have sympathy for any of them when the primary use cases of crypto today are extortion and black markets in the western world.
I don't think there's any shortage of history of people fighting the impossible, mostly getting crucified, and occasionally winning, and occasionally just existing as someone that would take the state more money than it's worth to go after.
You're expecting crypt-bros to act rationally based on utility of outcome. If they're acting ideologically there's no guarantee that will be the case.
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.
They supported both candidates, and Harris kept talking about crypto in the face of everybody screaming at her that it was losing her votes. She thought being able to afford Beyoncé concerts with crypto bro cash would offset that.
it's another $5 wrench situation
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.
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.
Their solution to that is "rot in jail for a long time, then".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Beatty_Chadwick
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.
His finances are gonna be under close inspection for the rest of his life, and fourteen years is a lot to lose.
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.
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.
Yeah, of course, but since he didn't wanna give it up, and was willing to take 14 years of prison, I feel pretty confident he has some way of being able to use it, otherwise why not give it up?
Of course, this is also assuming he was lying when he said all the money been spent and he had no money when he was arrested.
> I feel pretty confident he has some way of being able to use it, otherwise why not give it up?
People go to shocking lengths to spite their exes sometimes.
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.
The key must exist somewhere and the wrench may make you reveal that information instead.
What 5 dollar wrench wielder is going to believe that, even when it's true?
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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
Well, hopefully this will help prevent Bitcoin's biggest use case, which is criminal finance and money laundering. Why wouldn’t we want that?
For very similar reasons why the US has the 5th amendment, why blanket surveillance is not considered a good thing by functioning democracies, and why most people want their porn-viewing habits to remain private.
There are plenty of bad things that need to be prevented, but a functioning democracy requires the ability to act outside the surveillance of both your peers, and the currently sitting government.
What sources do you have that support that claim?
Not a huge surprise, unfortunately.
I'm surprised because I thought the Trump administration was hot on crypto.
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.
The vast majority of (especially less tech-savvy) crypto people are in it for the speculation. They have no interest in self-custody.
Hot on being bribed by political donors to do their bidding. Crypto donors are going to be abroad and so unaffected.
Sure, the approved and controlled kind. Wheels of government turn so slow this idea probably started several administrations ago.