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".

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.

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.

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.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act

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.

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...

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.

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?

it's not the developers of bitcoin's fault your entire reg compliance apparatus was constructed on requiring intermediaries

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

It was forbidden to have more than 5 ounces of gold.

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.

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.

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.

Well that's not true... The key doesn't change because you added more bitcoin

The state will never allow large scale financial privacy because it poses an existential threat to the state.

--- 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.

Satoshi's whitepaper expanded BTC as time-stamp server for preventing DDOS on fax lines.

does bitcoin or UTXO's somehow for some reason generate multiple PUBLIC keys for the same private key?

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

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.

But more importantly it doesn’t seem like the government is trying to ban anything, they’re just extending the anti-fraud / anti-money laundering measures enjoyed by the ‘traditional’ financial institutions to the world of cryptocurrency.

Those measures don’t prevent people from doing ‘suspicious’ things, they just treat certain transaction types with more care because of the increased likelihood that they are evidence of a crime.

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/).

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.

I'd argue that Bitcoin has been effectively immune to attacks like this by governments for nearly a decade.

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.

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