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42 sats \ 6 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic OP 18h \ parent \ on: Privacy and Fungibility: The Forgotten Virtues of Sound Money econ
Ok, but this sounds to me like any other weapons race with both sides going all out on research to overcome what the other side has done! THEY have a lot of money to do their research, don’t they?
I have also read that BTC may have come out of the DARPA research. If so, has anybody found backdoors, yet?
Our side is going all out on privacy, but they are not because we aren't a big enough fish yet. It wouldn't make sense to invest a ton of effort in tracking down what is mostly a savings vehicle. Far more tax evasion and whatnot occur through other channels.
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Ah…. Yes, but they are notably harsh in the area of tax avoidance and evasion than on almost anything else but counterfeiting! THEY just don’t like competition!
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We'll see, but I don't think self-custody bitcoiners who care about opsec are a good target. So much of the volume of bitcoin use is with KYC custodians that the feds can just go after those folks.
Think about the marginal difficulty of trying to claw back some bitcoin from a DarthCoin disciple compared to just asking some corporate stooge to sell out a customer.
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Yes, I can see that the state enforcers would go after the low-hanging fruit before they even start on the more difficult cases. I think that they would go for the bigger cases before trying to untangle the difficult cases. In that case, the people that took the time to get opsec correctly done may just get overlooked.
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I wish I could remember whose post it was, but someone made a pretty thoughtful post about how everyone's becoming so dependent on popular tech tools.
One of the implications was that the state is also dependent on those tools for finding people and anyone who opts out of the mainstream apps becomes almost invisible.
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I cannot remember, either. However, I am very happy not to use a smartphone, let alone apps on one. Some things I have to borrow a phone to do, but I will not carry one or use it if I can avoid it. I like neither the dependency nor the surveillance aspects of that tool.