Comment by crazygringo

Comment by crazygringo 15 hours ago

16 replies

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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".

decimalenough 14 hours ago

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.

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  • lukeschlather 13 hours ago

    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.

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    • Karrot_Kream 11 hours ago

      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.

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    • joe_the_user 10 hours ago

      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.

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      • Barbing 6 hours ago

        >the article...apparently [features] a tweet from the author of the article

        Ah, our favorite - a Journalism

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  • koolala 2 hours ago

    Isn't the Act still active, just some provisions have expired?

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observationist 13 hours ago

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!

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  • JumpCrisscross 13 hours ago

    > 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.

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    • chaostheory 12 hours ago

      Observationist forgot to add a /s to the end of their comment

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      • JumpCrisscross 12 hours ago

        It wasn't missed. Dodging the slippery-slope surfers is practically table stakes for discussing surveillance.

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roenxi 14 hours ago

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.

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  • JumpCrisscross 13 hours ago

    > 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.

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    • roenxi 4 hours ago

      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.

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  • zerkten 13 hours ago

    >> 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.

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pessimizer 14 hours ago

> 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.

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