> 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.
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?
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.
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.
So what is called "guidelines" one day becomes legally binding later with no act of congress.
Unfortunately there's a massive swath of mere guidelines and regulation that end up having legal binding. For instance, a Navy sailor was recently sent to jail for 20 years for having gun parts that were cut up the wrong way, the "wrong way" being the right way with previous mere guidance and the wrong way apparently being the fact that some time since then the guidance changed but not the law.
And even if the government doesn't look like it's disposed to do that in your situation you're still sticking your neck out by deviating from the herd because then you can't screech "standard business practice" when some contrived chain of facts results in you fending off a civil suit for whatever reason.
This isn't just a banking thing or a guns thing, you see examples in every industry once you know the pattern.
See Knife Rights V Garland. []
No one had been convicted in the past 10 years for violating the switchblade act, so the state ruled the law couldn't be challenged ("no standing"), even though it was actively being used to ruin people's businesses and raid their homes (the government would just give everything back a few years after doing so and not go through with charges).
[] https://kniferights.org/legislative-update/court-opines-feds...
One could argue that's how normal Bitcoin wallets work. The addresses are deterministic based on your passphrase (or derived private key). The addresses don't need to get reused because there's no real value in doing so, and no real cost of just using a new address each time.
Though yes--even if that's the exact meaning and design, presumably one could still use the simpler wallets that DO just reuse the same address over and over. And obviously that'd reduce privacy quite a bit.
Then your wallet software is smart enough to treat all the addresses derived as a single wallet. When you go to make a payment, it makes it from the various addresses owned by the wallet. When you want to accept money, you can generate the next address in the series and give a fresh address to someone new.
The net result is that it's not clear from someone looking at the blockchain which addresses actually belong to YOUR wallet and which transactions are you sending money to someone else or yourself.
AFAIK this is how basically all Bitcoin wallets have worked for years. Electrum and Base (formerly bread wallet) as well as Ledger's wallet are the main ones I've used.
EDIT: Just to address this:
> What is the "normal Bitcoin" use case for funneling money through a chain of throwaway wallets?
It makes it so that someone publicly looking at the blockchain can't provably tell how much Bitcoin you have.
We still have to give addresses to people to receive money, so if we were only allowed to have a few, it wouldn't be hard to trace which people own which wallets. And then now you've got a big physical security risk because the world can see how much money you are able to give if they invade your home, kidnap a family member, etc. It'd be like having to put a sign out in front of your house that says, "$600,000 in cash is in here." And they could see the cash.
Yes, it does result in larger transaction sizes, and transaction sizes are used to calculate fees. In practice, my understanding is that the relative increase in size is not a big deal, but again, this is how pretty much all of them work.
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.
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.
behaviour says more than words
Exactly. It's a social norm among that class of society
When a Koch, or a Scwab, or the CEO of some mega-corp buys a property on Martha's Vineyard, or the Hamptons, or Vail or overlooking Tahoe or whatever, with intent to actually spend even the scantest amount of time there themselves they engage in absurd unnecessary renovations. That's just how they do things. There is an occasional exception for those in that group who have "found meaning" in some other avenue for lighting money on fire.
Edit: You can thank me later for implicitly telling you where the best construction dumpsters are.
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.
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.
But his support of ratcheting up the Ukraine war disappointed profoundly. That’s not the Bernie I would have voted for.
Sometimes you gotta rip that bandaid off.
Now, that might not have worked but anything might have had a pretty large impact on global/US deaths.
It is a extremely convenient act for whoever is in power.
The bad guys will say you only need privacy if you’re guilty and the plebs will lap it up
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.
We're truly living in Orwell's world.
It's just an acronym bro, don't get all worked up about it, now let's go down, the Two Minutes' Hate is about to start.
It’s a disgusting revelation, there’s no point in national politics. The other half of America is literally not worth dealing with.
This type of racism, which is a dark trait, underpins a demographic. You’ll never get compassion and morality out of literally … half of America. So things like “stand up against the patriot act” is basically an impossibility due to this corruption.
America is a bonafide, fucking certified, racist country. Take that shit to the bank.
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 I am at a loss.
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.
Fortunately, other banks weren't staffed with idiots, and I was able to open an account elsewhere after providing my documents.
How are "regulated intermediaries" not democratic? If they're regulated by the democratically elected government, that seems entirely democratic to me.
> creating and using single-use wallets, addresses, or accounts, and sending [cryptocurrency] through such wallets, addresses, or accounts through a series of independent transactions
That's the default way Bitcoin wallets work, and it helps a ton to improve privacy. If we were limited to always reusing the same few addresses, it'll be very easy for not just law enforcement but ANYONE to see just how much Bitcoin you have.
If that's a small amount, it's not a risk. If it's a big amount, now you've got a target on your back. For me to accept Bitcoin payments, I need to publish my address, and from that address, you'll be able to see how much Bitcoin I have (and trace other transactions) over time.
Imagine everyone in town knowing that you've got six figures (or more) of money that can undoubtedly be extracted from you by invading your home, taking family members hostage, etc. At that point, you may think it's safer to keep it in an exchange, and you may be right.
If you have your wallet on a Cell Phone, you might as well post a sign outside of your house stating "I am a bitcoin user and trying to keep that use secret" :)
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.
Is there a realistic risk there? If I use an address a million times, how much weaker is it? And how feasible would it be for an attacker to brute for it?
The security concerns start happening after an address spends a UTXO. Before a P2WPKH (segwit) address is used, only the public key hash is known. In order to spend from it, the full public key needs to be revealed. That's why it's recommended to use single-use addresses, because a quantum computing attack or elliptic curve vulnerability could be used against an address where the attacker knows the public key, but would not work against an address where the pubkey has not yet been revealed.
So, the main security change happens after you spend from an address the first time. Subsequently, there are theoretical vulnerabilities that could occur after an address is spent from many times, but really only if the signer is malicious like dark skippy, or faulty and doesn't properly follow RFC 6979 deterministic signatures, leaking some signature entropy which could be used to crack the private key. The latter has happened with some bad custom wallet implementations, but these attacks are even further in the realm of theoretical, not super realistic, require faulty software/firmware to be implanted into signing devices.
The actual list of "suspicious activities" in the article is about pooling, structuring, delaying transactions -- the stuff you do to hide activity, whether for good or bad.
It says nothing whatsoever about self-custody. The author makes the imaginary leap because they say they personally recommend doing all those things with self-custody. But they're totally separate things.
So as far as I can tell, the headline is just false clickbait.
They also claim:
> If enacted, any user who leverages these tools will be flagged as a suspicious... and could potentially be sent to prison.
I don't think that's the case? Having a transaction considered suspicious doesn't send you to prison. At best it seems like traditional banks might not permit a transaction, or it could be used as supporting evidence for separate actual illegal activities like money laundering? But going to prison requires being convicted of an actual crime. Not just activity that is "suspicious".
The actual problem with the article/headline is that the "Patriot Act" has expired. Although I'm sure there are plenty of similarly vague laws that could be used to justify this.
--- 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.
Well that's not true... The key doesn't change because you added more bitcoin
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.
All the things the Treasury is considering to be "suspicious activity" simply can't be tracked with something that's non-fungible and untracable like Monero. This suspicious activity - aka privacy - is just how all monero transactions are done.
The state will never allow large scale financial privacy because it poses an existential threat to the state.
I do not see how it is an existential threat.
Nation states existed for centuries in which money was frequently held as cash and even large transactions were often done in cash. its still common (or was until very recently) in a lot of (mostly poor) countries
> With financial privacy and real freedom, you can hire a competing army.
Having the money to pay an army is a long way from hiring one. Recruitment and buying military equipment at any scale would be obvious.
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
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.
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.
I'd argue that Bitcoin has been effectively immune to attacks like this by governments for nearly a decade.
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