Cryptocurrency: Action - Comment Period, Shut FINCEN Down, Build and Use Privacy Coins
FINCEN Labels All Crypto Users, All Privacy, As Patriot Act Terrorist Criminality, Vows Shutdown and to Arrest Coderpunks https://stacker.news/items/305287/r/BITC0IN https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/FINCEN-2023-0016-0001 https://www.regulations.gov/document/FINCEN-2023-0016-0001 by Fiach_Dubh - announcement /₿egin inspiring cut scene 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. Representatives Who Have Volunteered to be on Our Shit List: 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: https://twitter.com/FractalEncrypt/status/1719440960281575907 https://twitter.com/skwp/status/1719025440663261376 https://gist.github.com/skwp/16c668bbb96e17f9176d6d4d39cc79fd 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. Buy and sell your Bitcoin KYC free, Peer to Peer. 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. https://bitcoinprivacy.me/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/kjr08s/fincen_regulation_megathrea... https://mises.org/library/theres-no-political-freedom-without-economic-freed... https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2023.10.17%20Letter%20to%20Treas... https://twitter.com/SecYellen https://twitter.com/USTreasury https://twitter.com/FractalEncrypt/status/1719440960281575907 https://twitter.com/skwp/status/1719025440663261376 https://gist.github.com/skwp/16c668bbb96e17f9176d6d4d39cc79fd https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbyjG2upGO8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9COdlsh4inY https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/CoinJoin https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/PayJoin https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/PayJoin_adoption https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5433032.0 https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Atomic_swap https://lightningprivacy.com/en/introduction https://bitcoin.design/guide/how-it-works/coin-selection/ https://bitcoiner.guide/nokyconly/ https://twitter.com/BITCOINALLCAPS/status/1720519789452374298 https://medium.com/@Fiach_dubh/off-chain-bitcoin-swaps-with-the-satscard-942... https://bitcoindevlist.com/ https://geyser.fund/project/supportbitcoinprivacydevs https://blog.lopp.net/securing-your-financial-sovereignty/ https://bitcoincore.org/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0I-ImS_r8o https://dev-notes.eu/2020/10/Build-Bitcoin-Core-in-Ubuntu/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goTkOt8Rr1Q https://github.com/bitcoin-core/bitcoin-devwiki/wiki/26.0-Release-Notes-Draf... https://old.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/kjr08s/fincen_regulation_megathrea... https://old.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/17o3v8v/fincen_megathread_do_not_g... https://twitter.com/SenWarren United States Senator 309 Hart Senate Office Building Washington DC 20510 (202) 224-4543 https://twitter.com/RogerMarshallMD United States Senator 479A Russell Senate Office Building Washington DC 20510 (202) 224-4774 https://twitter.com/SenJohnKennedy United States Senator John, Kennedy United States Senator (202) 224-4623 Sherrod Brown United States Senator (202) 224-2315 Jeanne Shaheen United States Senator (202) 224-2841 Chris Van Hollen United States Senator (202) 224-4654 Ben Ray Luján United States Senator (202) 224-6621 Joe Manchin III United States Senator (202) 224-3954 John Fetterman United States Senator (202) 224-4254 Jack Reed United States Senator (202) 224-4642 Michael F. 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We've achieved 791 comments on this terribly conceived FinCEN guidance. We need your help, Bitcoiners. Let's get to 1k comments by tomorrow. 300 more people need to spend less than 5 minutes completing the steps below: Yan | swan.com @skwp Oct 30 🚨Action Required: FinCEN has a proposed rule that tramples our 1st and 4th amendment liberties, continuing the expansion of unwarranted search and seizure on law abiding Americans. You can comment in less than 5 minutes with 3 easy steps: 1. Source a list of objections. Here's a nice list of bullets: x.com/HodlsSherlock/status/1…. Or look at the bottom of this post for my full text, which was generated from my own bullets using OpenAI. 2. Go to chat.openai.com, paste your bullets, alter them as you wish, add the prompt at the top: "Reformat the following in a voice appropriate for submission as a FINCen proposed rule making comment". 3. Go here to comment: federalregister.gov/document… and paste your letter. Example text generated from my own input of issues: -- snip -- I am writing to express concerns regarding the proposed rule that pertains to the reporting of Bitcoin transactions. I believe it's crucial to reconsider certain aspects of this rule to ensure that it aligns with the principles enshrined in the 4th Amendment. Address Reuse in Bitcoin: Bitcoin, by design, promotes the use of unique addresses for each transaction to maintain user privacy. Repeatedly using the same address exposes one's entire transaction history to any recipient. Such a practice compromises user privacy, a concern that the proposed rule might inadvertently encourage. Mixing and Privacy: Mixing is an essential privacy-enhancing technique in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Without it, users would inadvertently reveal their entire Bitcoin balance every time they transact. It's akin to sharing one's bank balance each time they make a purchase, a scenario that's clearly problematic. The proposed rule might deter users from using mixers, leading to unintentional privacy breaches. The Programmability of Bitcoin: Bitcoin's architecture allows for various transaction structures, such as joint wallets or lightning channels for small-value exchanges. The current draft of the rule may inadvertently categorize these standard practices as reportable events, leading to an overwhelming number of reports that might be challenging to process effectively. Concerns about Terrorism Financing: While the intent behind the rule is understandable, it's essential to note that there's limited evidence to suggest that Bitcoin plays a significant role in financing terrorism. Most illicit financing activities still occur through traditional fiat channels. Implementing rules that might be perceived as infringing on the 4th Amendment could unintentionally diminish FINCEN's standing as an institution grounded in democratic principles. Geographical Implications: It's vital to recognize that while these rules might be applicable within the U.S., a significant portion of cryptocurrency activities occurs outside our borders. Implementing stringent rules might inadvertently push more users to platforms that are less transparent and harder to oversee. I kindly urge the commission to evaluate the potential unintended consequences of the proposed rule, especially concerning the preservation of civil liberties and effective oversight. It's essential to strike a balance between national security and individual rights. Thank you for your time and consideration.
We are over 1100 comments! Keep going! A more complete list of bullets / instructions is here: gist.github.com/skwp/16c668b… Please review the bullets, make your edits, and submit according to the instructions. The link above has everything you need. The post below will give you historical context.
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grarpamp