The Treasury Is Expanding the Patriot Act to Attack Bitcoin Self Custody

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

Don't pretend the AML rules are enforced fairly and evenly.

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.

To attack TLS, you need a network MITM. To attack bitcoin you don't.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.