A nice, long article about wrench attacks and little old ladies getting attacked in their homes by savage wannabe gangsters. If you've been following Lopp's catalog of wrench attacks, it won't have much new in it.
They do a brief acknowledgement that kyc is the problem, though:
Crypto companies such as Coinbase are also lobbying to reform government-mandated KYC policies. They contend this will actually improve security through enhanced user privacy, though it will arguably boost their bottom lines, too, by reducing compliance overhead and the friction that comes with signing up for an account. The Coinbase spokesperson says the firm has lobbied to ensure existing compliance rules are applied evenly to all crypto exchanges, “especially those who, unlike Coinbase, operate offshore in an attempt to evade US anti-money laundering and KYC requirements.” The spokesperson adds that its lobbying to modernize the federal law governing these issues is intended to allow for more secure identification tools while reducing unnecessary data exposure.
Lopp, the security consultant who’s considered one of the earliest IRL targets of a Bitcoin extortion scheme (in 2017), is in the camp that believes such anti-money-laundering regulations do more harm than good. “KYC is one of the biggest problems in the space that results in data leaks and people getting targeted in the first place,” Lopp says.
And then ggeh end the piece by walking it back:
But some policymakers and scholars argue that rolling back these international mandates would dramatically increase illicit flows of money. Coinbase’s KYC compliance, after all, helped the FBI trace the North Carolina robbery back to Remy, who used his Florida driver’s license to open a new account the day he attacked Walter.
Marit Rødevand, founder of tech startup Strise AS, which develops software to combat money laundering, worries that the crypto industry could use the rise in consumer attacks as an excuse for “dismantling transparency” at scale. Rødevand says she fears that internet kids will only engage in more of what’s now labeled “vibe frauding” if they’re shrouded in even darker anonymity. “We’re pushing ourselves down a society where we’re becoming like, ‘Don’t trust your neighbor, don’t trust anyone,’” she says. “And with online attacks moving into the physical world with kidnappings, it’s suddenly like, shit, are you just going to go around being scared all the time?”
I''ve said multiple times: The whole point of avoiding KYC is NOT because a possible gov will look over your stash bought from an exchange, but because of your data sold/leaked to data brokers. Govs don't give a shit about your BTC as long if you still believe in their authority... and pay taxes like an obedient sheep.
And this is very well explained in this amazing episode of "Darknet diaries" podcast:
https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/162/
I will strongly advise to listen this episode.
This is actually something that bothers me a lot. I recently got seriously interested in "entering BTC" while my daily life is overwhelmed by little, marvelous, pestiferous humans, and a work life seasoned with ever increasing flamboyant stress.
Consequently, I did not act at best of my capacities. I subscribed to a KYC exchange and bought a cold wallet using my personal name/address/card. Then, I connected the dots with the xkcd's 5 dollar wrench strip, and paranoia was free to grow inside me, with all these stories as particularly efficient nutrients.
Quite interestingly, avoiding KYC and tax reports while saving/using BTC where I live is extremely difficult, and becomes every month worse, so that I honestly still don't know how I would have had to act if I had the chance to start from scratch (except buying the cold wallet using Amazon gift cards and send it to a post office).
Moreover, this situation led me to think that using passphrase is potentially dangerous because, even if you finally give up and are ready to give everything to the attackers, if they know you're using a passphrase, you'll never be able to convince them you have nothing left, thus making your situation quite uncomfortable.
I believe this phenomenon will either die on its own because it "loses appeal" to the bad guys (only once a non trivial number of such episodes realized, unfortunately), or it creates a new behavioural paradigm for the vast majority of BTC (and other cryptos/DeFi) users that is very likely leave everything on even more centralised and controlled exchanges offering a sort of "customer protection" more in line with traditional finance. Either way, a little bit of a shit show is unavoidable, I fear.
Luckily (??) for me, I can only save very little given how respected is academia nowadays, and how expensive things grow everyday because of our well-thought monetary/economical/financial system, so I hope bad guys do their own due diligence and simply opt to buy a lottery ticket instead because it's going to have better success rate.
Sorry for the wall of text. I genuinely ignore why I needed to write so much right now.
Just read my guides and your life will be much easier.
Let me start saying that, whenever time permits, I do read your guides, I do enjoy your guides (even though I do not agree with everything you say), I do appreciate deeply and strongly applaud your commitment to sharing your knowledge for free to help people understand BTC's universe, and I am sincerely thankful for the time you allocate for us in doing so.
Having said that, given the complexity of the argument, I have to admit your simplistic answer kind of misses the point.
Let me start with my situation first. Since I discovered your guides after I entered the KYC hyperspace and bought a cold wallet like I would order a pizza, I do not think I can go back in time retaining the knowledge I gained from your guides and apply it when I needed (or will need ??) it. Therefore, your guides can not make my life easier in this respect. If you are referring to your guides only for what I should do next owning the mistakes I already made and their consequences, I fear my paranoia can not feel better because of how the past influences the future.
Of course, if you have some guides explicitly explaining how to ameliorate past mistakes, then I take my hat off to you, I thank you again, and I'll try to find the time to read, understand, and digest them as soon as possible. However, if this were the case, for the sake of addressing the issues in the original post and my comment, it would have been better to add some details pointing to specific guides.
Then, let's pretend I did not make the mistakes I made, and let's pretend I found your guides at the right time. The most important bottleneck your simplistic comment is completely ignoring (perhaps willingly, who knows), is the issue of "available time". Most people live lives with very little time available to deeply study BTC and plan in advance. However, I would argue these people still ideally deserve the benefits of BTC (you may not agree with this because you think a sort of proof of work is needed to "deserve" these benefits, in which case, my arguments are completely vacuous). In this case, having the time to understand and fully implement a non-KYC DCA strategy is basically impossible (I would be glad to be proven wrong, though), or, at best, not something that is for everyone.
From this, it is clear that common people are either driven to KYC solutions, or to abandon BTC (both non-ideal outcomes). Then, all the consequences of the 5-dollar-wrench-attack for them can not be ignored, and can not be mitigated by simply reading your guides.
If somebody do not have enough time to read and learn about Bitcoin, then I could say that the guy is wasting his entire life with crap things.
My guides are not the "ultimate guides", but are giving the right direction into where to look, are just like a door, no more no less. I am only opening you the door to the knowledge, I cannot make you step into it.
This is a very privileged take on other people's available time. Life's full of unpredictable things, and it is wise not to assume too much about other people's lives/possibilities/capabilities.
Yes, and I both really like them and am grateful to you for writing and updating them. However, I fail to see how your original comment address the issues I mentioned.
Knowing about Bitcoin in 2011 but do not paying attention to it until 2024... say a lot about somebody's interest in freedom. These are 13 years not 13 days.
I've said before, if in 13 years you not even dedicate just 1 h per day to learn more about Bitcoin, just one fucking hour per day not more, then not sure what you will learn from now on.
Do not tell me you didn't had 1h/day available.
If I would know about a thing that will improve my life very much, I will not leave it from my hands, not just 1h/day but I will not sleep until I will know more about it. I will not wait 13 years to hit me a revelation...
Next time I will write a guide about how to use my guides :)
I don't think I understand your point.
Are you claiming that having different interests and priorities during 13 years of your life is either impossible or a type of original sin?
There are other things you can be more interested in even knowing BTC. But, just to be more precise, I learned about BTC because of the mathematical aspects there were in it, which were interesting, but definitely less interesting than the mathematics I was exposed to 13 years ago. Since I knew about BTC because of math, and since the sovereign angle was not immediately clear/powerful as it would have been years later, I simply did not pay attention to it. From there, I basically lost contact with the BTC world because I was not in cryptography mailing lists, I was not on socials or other digital places where BTC was discussed, and my physical social circle was made by people who would start a computer screaming very loud at it intimating it to start. In 2020 I had personal situations that really prevented me to have 1h per day of "free time" that I could spend actively focused and functioning to learn BTC, and to some extent this is still something ongoing today. To be clear, wanting to reply to your judgmental assumptions about my choices is costing me time that I'll have to take off from something else later (but I'm not complaining, I'm just explaining).
Believe it or not, having 1h per day of free time in which you are focused and energetic enough to understand BTC is not something a lot of people can have.
On the other hand, let's play your game. Let's say that I indeed am a total and utter failure who knew better but willingly decided not to learn because of whatever ignominious reason. What about those who learned about BTC 3 years ago and acted as I acted? How is your original comment useful to them?
Please, understand that I am in no way trying to attack you (even if I have the feeling you tried to attack me with your last replies). I am simply failing to understand how your comment and your guides are useful to my situation as your original comment seemed to imply they are.
That means you are living on another planet. Sincerely.
I am not worried about that. I sincerely don't give a shit if somebody wants to "attack me". I am not a snowflake. Very few things can hurt me... because I learned to be fearless. Only people living in fear are getting hurt by words.
I live under Natural Law, that is very simple: do not do harm to others, do not steal from them, do not kill them.
Words do not do harm. I mean physical harm.
Yet many people nowadays are ignoring this important law. But they obey all other so called "laws"... (that are not laws, just rules imposed by others).
Check this out, what kind of "offers" I received on a throw away email account.
This is an example of where is going your KYC data