KYC World is becoming more inevitable each day. The only silver lining is the counter movement these actions accelerate.

They're not safe, they're leaked all the time. KYC/AML isn't about safety, it's about control.

All by design.

Haha they even can't lie hard enough with the political propaganda tool known as the CPI. Dark days ahead.

Now once retarded capital gains tax laws on purchases and oppressive KYC/AML regulations on both consumers and businesses are lifted we can actually see this real organic adoption go mainstream instantly. Until then I'm afraid this fight will be tough with small, scarce victories like this sprinkled throughout.

I wish I could downzap custodial nonsense like this.

Yeah next to nobody on that post are talking about crypto, most peoples solution is "steam should become a payment processor" which is insane. It goes to show how terribly the narrative around bitcoin has been coopted from digital cash to useless number go up stock.

Haha yeah I'm so skeptical at any news that seems to be good on the surface.

Co-opting of FOSS is becoming a major threat. If (((THEY))) effectively control major FOSS packages there won't be much Freedom in Open Source left.

Choking on and off ramps and taxing spending are the main ways the state has neutered Bitcoin. Since these will worsen with this act, it looks quite dystopic for the Bitcoin standard.

Great article. Quite dystopic, unfortunately.

KYC is a major contributor to this issue. It creates a laundry list of targets with enough info to basically be a "how to get free crypto" sign for the criminally inclined. People aren't safe without major privacy advocation.

Its happening. No state solution to a state problem. All we can do is engage in parallel economies and refuse to comply.

Yeah that's cool and all but they have a monopoly on violence

You just haven't thought the logic through the end conclusion. PoW mining only works as decentralized consensus insofar as a majority of miners are normal honest people. When specific hardware has an advantage, the mining pool centralizes there creating a situation where whoever controls that hardware controls the consensus.

What you've done in your argument is extrapolate the egalitarian principles of RandomX mining into being equivalent to communism. Then you used the specific real-world instance of communist society, Cuba, to conclude that RandomX is bad. This logic is a non-sequitur, it doesn't follow.

At least it's not an AI thing or another cloud based crypto wallet.

Wow this administration is unbelievable.

Genius idea! You make a great case for how a conservative, minimalist people maximize the human elements of life for all, instead of just in their personal lives.

In these matters I always like to think about the power we have as individuals to affect this change. If all of us spontaneously decided to take steps to reduce consumption, the world would be fundamentally changed. Of course, this is not practical, but just one person's choice to avoid consumption has a knock-on social and financial affect that can very likely spread. This pursuit in all of us is far from fruitless.

In terms of cashflow (ignoring ridiculous U.S. tax laws), it's identical to spend x amount of usd in btc in one transaction vs x amount in plain usd since you create an equal value opportunity cost. Thinking that sats are only earmarked for savings, and fiat is only earmarked for spending is illogical when both are extremely easy to trade for each other.

This thinking drastically reduces bitcoin adoption and contributes to a HODL culture that ensures bitcoin is not a threat.

In short, if you buy a car for $5k it doesn't matter if you spend sats or dollars, you still spent $5k on a car. In both cases you lose out on the opportunity cost of $5k worth of bitcoin at time of purchase.

If and only if we can fight back against ossification and the co-opted narrative of bitcoin as only a SoV, not a MoE. With current trajectory I'd argue we're heading toward a paper bitcoin standard.