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“If you have this way to move money with absolutely zero checks on it, you’re facilitating an unlimited amount of crime,”
This is insane. Should the same logic not apply to speech or movement or food or any kind of technology?
I witnessed more than $130,000 in transactions with these operators, who rarely asked for identification and, on one occasion, openly discussed handling dirty money.
Guy spent how much time researching this? Spent just an hour online and you can find put about much much larger sums of illegal money being used I'm the traditional financial system.
“We don’t know who’s using them or why they’re using them.”
This is the problem: there is no reason that any government should always know what you are doing. They act like their lack of insight into your affairs means you are a criminal. This attitude should never be the basis of financial regulation. It's insane that we've gotten to this stage.
In an increasingly common scenario, investigators trace illicit asset flows to secretive crypto wallets whose owners they cannot identify and whose assets they cannot seize.
Secretive crypto wallets = a normal address they don't know anything about.
102 sats \ 5 replies \ @optimism 1h
Why does their law apply? Is any bitcoin physically in any country? What is a bitcoin physically?
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My impression of people like the author of the linked article is that they have some blind belief in an "order" or the "system" (maybe they think of it as democracy or human institution), and they can't really imagine that anything should exist outside it's scope.
I'm probably putting words in their mouths, but I don't understand how else they could hold such assumptions as come through in this article.
It's as untenable belief as thinking that there is only one natural human language and all others are somehow unnatural or artificial.
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102 sats \ 3 replies \ @optimism 1h
I don't understand how else they could hold such assumptions as come through in this article.
Mayhaps, they are so young that they don't know what the world looked like before 2001 normalized state surveillance.
there is only one natural human language and all others are somehow unnatural or artificial.
Love is universal. Unfortunately, so is hate. The hippie in me prescribes a large dose of the former.
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I suspect hate is not what motivates people like this. It's a misplaced concept of love.
What's that C S Lewis quote:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
Maybe this means that people like the author of this piece don't understand what love is, but that's a tall order anyway: I don't understand what love is -- just get overwhelmed by it sometimes.
Better, I think, to say that they don't have an idea that love must always be a little dangerous and come at the risk of something. People like this seem to value safety over love, thinking that safety is somehow a laudable goal.
I haven't suffered very much in life, so it's easy for me to say that safety is no worthy goal at all, but it is what I believe, nonetheless.
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102 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 31m
Agreed. I didn't mean the love that a boa constrictor gives to your neck before it eats you. Letting go requires the greatest love.
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I haven't suffered very much in life, so it's easy for me to say that safety is no worthy goal at all, but it is what I believe, nonetheless.
It's the opposite. It's those that have not experienced any real danger in their life that focus so much on the micro-harms they experience through speech aggressions.
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102 sats \ 2 replies \ @siggy47 2h
The only genuine crimes this clown may uncover is likely being carried out by the CIA.
102 sats \ 1 reply \ @SatAttack 1h
Jeez man! In that first quote, you can also replace the word crime with freedom. They don't consider that? don't care? It's so frustrating.
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I agree! I don't understand where such a viewpoint comes from. Anything can be used to do bad things. This doesn't mean we need some system of controlling all things all the time.
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102 sats \ 1 reply \ @0xbitcoiner 3h
Anyone who thinks they’re anonymous on the blockchain is seriously tripping. Only a few people can actually pull that off!
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They do make it sound like you can't follow one transaction to another. There's enough woo-woo magical language in the piece that I suspect the author didn't really take any time to learn about what he was researching.
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