> [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

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

And it happens exactly as predicted. Surprise!

Democrawhat?

> 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.

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!

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.

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.

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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.

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!

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If Monero ever came close to Bitcoin's popularity, it would be outlawed. Plain as that. You can't get freedom through technology.

> 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.

>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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

On the other hand you get to vote who is in the gang. So choose wisely.

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.

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).

Good for Bitcoin, then ? Is it becoming a form of Gold, for real ?

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.

> 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.

Sounds like the cryptobros are about to have their turn with the Trump leopard eating their face...

negative 10 years

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.

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.

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.

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.

Isn't Coinbase an exchange? Or do they offer a wallet as well? (Is the private key in your control?)

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.

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" :)

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.

https://coinpaper.com/10812/qubic-vs-monero-pr-stunt-or-proo...

Sounds like capital flight is anticipated to become a thing. Why might that be?

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.

Only section 215 related to FISA surveillance expired.

Your comment is nonsense.

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?

Ahem those are #2 and #3 behind "talking to disinterested people about it".

Yep, the belief that governments would just give up control of money always seemed incredibly naive to me too.

> 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 would also be delusional to think crypto-bros will give up their self-determination to the nation-state.

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.

it's another $5 wrench situation

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I'm surprised because I thought the Trump administration was hot on crypto.

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.