Cryptocurrency: Govts Attack Due To Comprehension Problem

[grarpamp]

The EU's Attack On Bitcoin Is An English And Math Comprehension Problem

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/the-eu-attacks-bitcoin-due-to-a-comprehension-problem
https://medium.com/swlh/why-america-cant-regulate-bitcoin-8c77cee8d794
https://medium.com/@beautyon_/bitcoin-is-not-money-if-you-seek-compliance-you-are-asking-for-trouble-cbe9107e5298

The nomenclature used to help the layman understand Bitcoin makes
lawmakers confuse it as money instead of entries in a database. We
must change the terms.

    1/Deal! After months of negotiations with the Council, we agreed
the most ambitious travel rule for transfers of crypto-assets in the
world. We are putting an end to the wild west of unregulated crypto,
closing major loopholes in the European anti-money laundering rules.
Thread👇 pic.twitter.com/Jr9IAspsb8
    — Ernest Urtasun (@ernesturtasun) June 29, 2022

A group of bitter, twisted computer illiterates in the beleaguered
European Union have managed to convince the European Council that
bitcoin is money, that Bitcoin wallets are actual wallets that hold
actual balances of money and that they should be regulated. This is of
course totally insane and an idea borne out of profound ignorance.

Since it is not possible to have a rational argument with people like
this, another, better strategy of dealing with these violent types
must be formulated and implemented. They’re fixated on the idea that
bitcoin is money and, from the seed of this mistaken idea, a monstrous
Pandora’s Box of evil has been opened.

    “Bitcoin is not money. If you seek “compliance” you are asking for
trouble. People who want to see the widespread and rapid adoption of
Bitcoin should not seek tight regulation and the blessing.” \

    - Beautyon

In order to avoid the unethical attacks of the dribbling geriatrics in
the United States and the delusional EU socialists, Bitcoin wallet
software developers must devise a strategy to stay out of the
crosshairs of the very misguided apparatchiks hell-bent on damaging
Bitcoin businesses.

Every law that touches Bitcoin uses deceptive language as definition
and pretext. These definitions come from ambulance chasers and not
computer scientists or software developers. By re-contextualizing
Bitcoin wallets, it will be possible to totally escape the onslaught
of destruction being planned by the EU and U.S. legislators.

This is how you do it.

Bitcoin wallet developers, quite naturally, have centered on using the
conventions of money to translate what is happening under the hood
into something ordinary people can understand. There is no “coin
management” or UTXO information displayed to users in the consumer
grade Bitcoin wallets: BlueWallet, Wallet of Satoshi, Samourai, Pine,
Phoenix, Muun; all of that is hidden away because it is of no use to
consumers.

No normal person can deal with coin control, UTXOs or anything like that.

Instead, a set of familiar, easy to understand and simple conventions
has been borrowed from the world of banking to make everything in
Bitcoin understandable to normal people.

This is why Bitcoin wallets have taken on the appearance, nomenclature
and styling of banking apps, which normally look something like these
apps from Halifax and Lloyds respectively.

Bank apps from Lloyds and Halifax. Obviously bought off the shelf from
the same developer.

Below is a picture of Coinbase’s phone app, which looks exactly like a bank app.

Coinbase phone app

Now Airbitz:

Airbitz dashboard

When a normal, ignorant, computer-illiterate person from the EU
government looks at any Bitcoin app, they recognize it as a financial
tool because it looks exactly like the financial apps they’re familiar
with. As for what is going on under the hoods of these very different
classes of tools, they have absolutely no clue.

They only see the surface and make all their judgements based on that alone.

This is why they reflexively conflate Bitcoin with money and think
that the balance in a Bitcoin wallet is analogous to the fiat balance
in a banking app.

    “There is a lot of talk about using “Blockchains” to improve data
integrity, but what all these solutions fail to address is what I call
“The Flat Screen Dilemma”. Just because something is displayed on a
screen, it does not follow that it is true.”

    - “The Flat Screen Dilemma”

The fact of the matter is very different, however. Bitcoin apps show
you the total of the UTXOs that you have control over by virtue of you
being in possession of the private key. That is a sum of UTXOs; it is
not a single balance. Furthermore, that “money” is not on the device.
What is on the user’s device is an app that stores a cryptographic key
(a string of text) that allows you to sign messages for broadcast to
the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin wallets do not contain or receive
bitcoin. They simply tell you what your private key can sign for on
the block chain.

By saying this, I am obviously simplifying the process. But the
simplification I am presenting here is more accurate than saying a
Bitcoin wallet “receives and stores bitcoin,” which never, ever
happens and never has happened. It is also wrong to characterize a
Bitcoin wallet as “unhosted” if it can sign a message on command of a
user without reference to anyone else. There are no “wallets” in
Bitcoin at all. It’s just another analogy.

Bitcoin is a database. It is not a “payment network” nor is value
“sent” over it at all. There are no “wallets” either. Signed messages
are what are sent to the network for inclusion in the public database.
It is a database used to keep a record of who controls which outputs.
It is not — and never has been — money in the conventional sense. Just
because people use this database as money doesn’t mean that bitcoin is
money. Just because people use the word “wallet” does not mean that
there are actual “Bitcoin wallets” that hold bitcoin the way a leather
wallet holds cash.

Using the word “wallet” for the sake of user experience is a
convention to help make the primary function of tools understandable
for users. Those conventions are a choice, not a rule and they are not
a universal truth, either. That means that anyone can choose any
convention or any analogy they want to compare what happens in their
Bitcoin app. It is entirely possible that oil traders could use the
block chain to denominate barrels of oil using barrels as measurement.
Today, one barrel of oil is 0.0048 bitcoin/barrel. In an oil trader’s
wallet this would be represented as “100” if the trader had one
hundred barrels showing on his device as allocated to his private key
in a UTXO.

In this scenario, which is totally plausible, no one would claim that
“bitcoin is oil” — but maybe they would? Apparatchiks are completely
insane and insane thinking is what you’d expect from them.

BlueWallet does nothing more than present the user with conventions
users can understand. It is not an “unhosted wallet;” it is a block
chain viewer and signing device. In no way, shape or form is a Bitcoin
wallet on a mobile phone a “financial tool” of any kind. If very
stupid people were to classify a signing device as a financial tool,
then many other software tools would be captured by that insanity
immediately. BlueWallet could pivot to the oil industry tomorrow and
start calling itself “OilWallet.” The fact that people use bitcoin as
money is irrelevant to bitcoin’s nature. They exchange it for goods
and services and money while “OilWallet” is used to manage the
exchange of barrels of oil. Common to all of this is Bitcoin is only a
database; what you impute to it is up to you and has nothing to do
with its fundamental nature.

WhatsApp uses exactly the same encryption techniques as Bitcoin does
to authenticate users to each other. You have a pair of cryptographic
keys that you use to encrypt, decrypt and sign messages so that the
other person receiving your call or texts or pictures knows it came
from you and could have only come from you. Users of WhatsApp are not
exposed to how all of this works, in the same way that users of
Bitcoin wallets are not shown the text of their private keys. The
software takes care of all of that for the user and simply gives them
information that is useful to them. In the case of WhatsApp, that
useful information is text messages. In Bitcoin it is the sum of UTXOs
that are associated with your private key that are written into the
public database of the chain of blocks.

“So what is the answer?” I hear you bleating.

The answer is to call Bitcoin wallets “viewers” and “signers.”

If wallets were to rebrand as “bitcoin viewers,” to better reflect
their function and distance themselves from the language of the
financial industry, no one could argue that they are “financial tools”
or “unhosted wallets.”

That is literally what all Bitcoin wallets do: they act as viewers or,
to analogize, “Windows on the block chain,” showing you which outputs
are controllable by you.

When you “send” bitcoin to someone (note how I put “send” in quotes,
because bitcoin is never sent anywhere; it is not like money) you take
their public key (what is called a “Bitcoin address”) and use your
private key to sign a message granting control of those bitcoin to the
recipient’s address. Had the money convention been taken to the
logical conclusion, Bitcoin addresses might have been called “Bitcoin
account numbers.” This signing of a message has more in common with
contracts than it does with money handling. This further breaks the
absurd “Swiss bank account in your pocket” imagery. Sent, received,
deposit, payment, account — all of these words must be abolished from
Bitcoin wallet interfaces, the Bitcoin Lexicon and the overall
nomenclature or the reckless, dangerous and very harmful conflation of
bitcoin with money will continue.

When these messages are broadcast to be added to the public chain of
blocks, either from your own full node, which is a copy of all the
messages ever incorporated into the block chain, they are incorporated
once the network of database administrators decide the addition should
be made. “Database administrators” not “miners.” Are you starting to
understand? Mining is what companies do to extract precious metals
from the earth. Precious metals like gold, which actually is money,
unlike bitcoin. All of these analogies and the language from the
financial world must be abolished from the lexicon of Bitcoin
companies.

Once the message is accepted as legitimate by the network, your block
chain viewer will be able to see that the signature you made has been
added to the public record and the sum of your UTXOs will be smaller
than they were before the message was sent. In the current wallet
convention, this is expressed as a single number, sometimes juxtaposed
with a conversion into fiat with the “approximately equal to” sign
(≈). All of this is to help you understand but is not a reflection of
what is really happening, or an absolute prerequisite or necessity.

Is “Liquid bitcoin” money?

There are already “watch-only” tools from Bitcoin companies like the
great Samourai Wallet. Sentinel allows you to scan your keys and then
whenever the chain of blocks is updated, it will show you the status
of the UTXOs you control on the block chain.

By the bizarre, irrational and stupid thinking of the EU, Sentinel is
an “unhosted financial services application” because it shows you a
balance in bitcoin as a single number. If it is not a financial
services application, why not? Are they going to claim that a tool
that watches a database is a “wallet?” No one is asking these
questions because they don’t understand how Bitcoin works at any level
other than analogies.

Samourai Wallet Sentinel app

And don’t get me started on metal storage devices.

Is this an “unhosted Bitcoin wallet?” (Photo/Cryptosteel)

In the end, there is going to have to be a U.S. Supreme Court case to
force the venal and stupid legislators to obey their oaths and stop
interfering with the free speech of American software developers.
Bitcoin is not money — it is speech — and no lawmaker can interfere
with the speech of U.S. citizens. I explain more about this in “Why
America Can’t Regulate Bitcoin”

Once this is settled by case law, the benefits for the U.S. will be
enormous. All software developers working in Bitcoin will run to
incorporate in the country and base their operations in Florida. No
one anywhere in the EU will dare to start a Bitcoin wallet company
because the ignorant apparatchiks there can’t tell the difference
between a chat app and a Bitcoin app (pro tip: there is no
difference).

When this happens, hundreds of billions of dollars from all over the
world will flow through Bitcoin wallet companies being run from
America, and those companies will be paying taxes in the U.S. The
entire world’s financial infrastructure and tooling will come from
America and flow through America for Uncle Sam to get his slice.
America wins again.

Upon reading this, there will be many stupid people out there who will
cry, “This is just semantics!” Those people don’t use Bitcoin wallets,
don’t have any bitcoin, don’t run Bitcoin businesses of any kind and
are as ignorant as the EU idiots and U.S. geriatrics who want to
cripple Bitcoin.

When this goes to the U.S. Supreme Court, it will not be them paying
the legal bill, though they will reap the world-changing benefits of
software developers working with the Bitcoin database free of
arbitrary, unethical and unconstitutional restrictions hampering their
ability to display the UTXOs you can assign with your block chain
viewer and signer.