GM Stacker News,
Remember Remember, The 5th of November…
Please forgive the pomp as I step up to this virtual soapbox for a little 5th of November chat.
You’re sitting at home, looking for something to do while you wait for your favorite TV show to come on this evening.
You've got time to kill.
Why not give FINCEN and the Treasury Department a good Yellin-g for their presumptive assertion over your right to transact privately. (You have less than 78 days from the time of this post, to make a comment. Anyone can comment, and comment privately. Current comment count stands at 768.)
Better still, why not use that time to learn Bitcoin privacy best practices?
That’s right anon, today, you’ve been activated, called up for general mobilization in the fight for the sovereign individual.
Some of you may remember the last time we went through this 3 years ago. Trump & Mnuchin tried to pull a fast one on us as they were exiting stage right, but failed.
Well the Biden admin is trying to do the same thing again, spear headed by Yellen and the Treasury Department/FINCEN. Welcome to the eternal struggle.
The powers that be have taken it upon themselves to acquire one more inch of your-selves.
Do not give them your silent consent.
Proposed FINCEN regulations surrounding Bitcoin privacy tools will not have the effect regulators desire. They will only serve to further drive the concerning activities further underground, where they will achieve full actualization beyond their control. Long term, they embolden the very concerns they hope to suppress.
Furthermore, I do not respect their sub-textual assertion of sovereignty over our right to financial privacy.
Without economic freedom you cannot have political freedom. By attempting to capture this economic freedom in a surveillance blackbox at FINCEN, they will only galvanize a force against their public offices.
Treasury Department's General Phone Number: (202) 622-2000
Janet Yellen’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/SecYellen
US Treasury Twitter: https://twitter.com/USTreasury
Take your right to transact, to transact privately, explicitly, without apology and with righteous authority.
You are not consumers or the governed. You are The Citizenry.
Act in good faith, be worthy of your freedoms.
What you can do:
There are four activities that are worthy of your attention today. Choose just one, and then do a second one if you have the time, and comment with which one you did.
The first is less meaningful than the second, third and fourth.
Submit a comment to the treasury department regarding their misguided attempt at regulating/suppressing Bitcoin privacy enhancing transactions. These rules only serve to ban their fiat institutions from participating in this ecosystem. Anyone can comment, and comment anonymously. Some example templates of comments submitted include:
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Or, consider submitting a copy of the Cypherpunk Manifesto for the record. Also, Read It: https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html
The more meaningful act you can do is learn how to use Bitcoin privacy tools. Do a coinjoin and/or payjoin today with joinmarket! Do a payjoin transaction today with a friend! Learn about the benefits and trade offs of privacy enhancing Bitcoin tools like paynym’s, atomic swaps, lightning, and coin selection practices.
Also, lobby Bitcoin wallet developers to fully support payjoins, coin selection, and other privacy tools.
If you want to go a step farther, you could use a combination of these tools and have the coins sent to a SATSCARD or Opendime. This could then be swapped with a friend or group of friends in person for an equivalent amount of Bitcoin for an in person, offchain, ghost coinjoin. There are now countless Bitcoin conferences and local meetups happening all over the world. It would be great if these events coordinated such privacy enhancing activities. Example physical in-person coinjoin event.
The third thing you can do is fund open source developers who work on maintaining and improving privacy enhancing tools today. There will be crowdfunders out there on this issue. But more than likely these will raise money for lawyers and lobbyists, who will only talk to senators and congressmen in Washington.
This is a horrible use of funds.
Rather, Please, directly support developers who are working on the tools we use today for onchain and offchain Bitcoin privacy.
A decent list of Bitcoin developers and their Bitcoin donation addresses can be found at https://bitcoindevlist.com (Be sure to support the ones working on Bitcoin Privacy Tools)
If you want to send sats via the lightning network to a general fund for this purpose, you can use this page that I maintain to donate sats. I will be sending all collected funds to Bitcoin privacy tool maintainers and developers.
But be warned, this platform (geyser) takes a 2% cut, and I could rug pull this donation page at any time. If you don’t want to trust me, then verify by donating directly to developers, not third party middlemen like geyser or myself.
Learn the benefits of running a Bitcoin node. Run one, not just for your privacy, but your overall Bitcoin sovereignty. It’s very easy to run a node. You install a program (usually bitcoin core) and let it run. That’s it. This can be done on windows, linux and mac.
Go a step further by verifying the binaries of the bitcoin node program you download.
Go a step further by building Bitcoin Core from source.
Go a step further by running the node over tor or i2p.
Go a step further by running a BIP324 node (which will be available in the next release of Bitcoin Core).
Thank you for reading and participating in this civil protest. Whether it’s making a comment to FINCEN, phoning your representative, using Bitcoin privacy tools, or just learning about your options to run a Bitcoin node, any of these small steps are ones in the right direction. Any one of these small acts matters. You don't have to do all of them. Just one. Take your pick.
Thank You.
Onward.
Reddit thread for reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/s/Gy7O7scPd6