Bitcoin used to be libertarian money.
Now it appears to be rapidly becoming authoritarian money.
Both major coinjoins are gone in a week?
I don’t think many of us were aware that the US government could arrest 2 men and intimidate a 3rd and the entire privacy infrastructure is gone.
It needs to be re-built for an adversarial environment with real decentralization
All privacy tools are going to have to be developed by anonymous nyms from here on out.
The US government has shown it is ready to start kicking down doors both foreign and domestic to crush financial privacy.
Developers all need to become invisible ghosts like Satoshi.
The DOJ Samourai seizure isn’t about money transmitting. They knew Samourai never held money. Samourai never broke a law.
This is outlawing privacy.
This a new law—a tyrannical law.
It turns out a paper bitcoin market manipulated by Blackrock and friends won’t make bitcoin moon…
Good.
Bitcoin isn’t for them anyway.
The ensuing bull market is looking more and more dystopian…
KYC mining that only mines compliant blocks. Banning coin joins. Pushing everyone towards custodial and financialized paths.
Bitcoin is coming up against the final boss of the US financial system and Government. A lot bitcoiners will claim bitcoin has “won” because they are richer, while bitcoin is being slowly morphed into a totally captured CBDC.
I’d rather my Sats not go up in value rather than be captured and regulated!
They are going to try and slip the anti-coinjoin regulations in quietly as the bull market heats up…
They hope all the number-go-up bros will be so excited about price that they will let bitcoin lose the freedom and privacy tools that made it valuable.
We can’t let bitcoin become worth a lot of fiat and worthless for what matters.
FinCin is trying to break Bitcoin into regulated and black market realms…
Lightning has bugs…
I still love hodling bitcoin, but I’m glad I’ve got some Monero squirreled away.
It is so hard to get my friends to use freedom technology. I set up bitcoin and monero wallets for them and send them satoshis and monero. Even with free gifts of the hardest and most private currencies on earth they kind of shrug and go lose their keys…
I stay optimistic. I’ve started keeping a copy of each of their keys for them in a secret strongbox.
Someday, just like all of us they will remember they laughed the first time they heard of bitcoin and monero, but in the future they will realize they need it. They will likely come to me and say “I’m so sad I lost my keys!” and I will give them their keys back and they will realize they have been HODLing for years…
Why does no one care about doing things right?
“Most fast and break things” suddenly became the ethos of the whole culture just because it made a few people in Silicon Valley rich…
Nostr Relay Privacy Question:
If as an anon I were to set up a relay and let friends and family use it would I accidentally dox myself?
Is it always obvious to outside observers which profiles are using a relay? I seems probable that a small relay with only a few accounts is run by someone who has some connection to all those people.
If some accounts are anon and some are open about their real world identities, it might make it very easy to guess the identity of anon accounts based on what small personal relays they are on with those who are open about their identity.
Am I understanding this correctly?
If so, anon accounts wanting to use Nostr as privacy freedom tech should avoid creating a relay they share with anyone else or using a friend’s personal relay, but should stick with large public relays for safety in numbers, right?
This seems a little concerning becuase it makes the anons dependent on the large, corporate relays who might care less about freedom in the future and the “spin up your own node for more privacy” ethos of bitcoin might end up not working as well here, because the moment you share your relay with a friend you run the risk of blowing your anonymity.
Might nostr:npub1qny3tkh0acurzla8x3zy4nhrjz5zd8l9sy9jys09umwng00manysew95gx or nostr:npub1tr4dstaptd2sp98h7hlysp8qle6mw7wmauhfkgz3rmxdd8ndprusnw2y5g be able to offer some insight on this?
Thanks!
Question: Are there any privacy foot guns we should be aware of with anon accounts using custodial lightning like Wallet of Satoshi?
I’ve got a pretty decent understanding of bitcoin privacy on the base chain, but lightning privacy has alway been a bit vague to me. If someone buys sats from a KYC dealer who knows their real world name like Strike and sends them to a custodial wallet like Muun or Wallet of Satoshi which they use for Zaps is it pretty trivial for 3rd parties like Strike to trace these sats back to the real person and dox the account?
I know we should all be more hardcore, but the average Nostrich who makes an anon account just isn’t going to start by buying sats on Bisq and then spin up a lightning node and handle chanel management just to zap an account they like. Most people are too busy for the time and learning curve involved in that.
It’s great if the Nostr protocol itself allows for Anon accounts, but if most accounts permenantly dox themselves the first time they send or receive Zaps then this place becomes and unintentionally honeypot that’s almost as bad as Twitter.
Freedom tech predictions should always be most bullish!
Excellent points!
I liked your post on democratizing relays, so we have lots of “escape hatches” if the big relays start censoring. If my grandmother can download and run a relay, and a person in a third-world village with and old phone can run a relay then Nostr wins as freedom tech.
Also paid relays sound like a solution to keep small free relays in business. The tech giants will always give stuff to us for free, because they want our data, like Google and Microsoft give away “free” email that they can read and censor. Most people will use free, but if some relays charge a few sats they could turn running relays in to a small business.
They could even charge to run “blinded” relays in which there is some encryption which doesn’t allow the relay runner to see who is using their service. This protects them from the very human desire not to help those we think are bad people, and also gives them plausible deniability to governments. “I would love to censor for you, but you see my system can’t even see who is using my relay so I have no means to censor.”
I don’t even know if this is possible with a social network-like protocol, but it would be cool if some censorship protection like this could be built in.
I consider myself a “Bitcoin maximalist” but I’ll admit that I play with Monero sometimes for that very reason. The entire Monero chain is giant question mark. There is no way for someone running a Monero miner or node to ever know if the transactions they are processing are funding terrorism or funding worthwhile charities. In bitcoin we must be constantly vigilant that the nodes and miners aren’t vulnerable to regulatory capture because the whole blockchain is visible to them. Of course every design choice has trade offs…
I’m not technically knowledgeable enough to answer these questions, but we do need to be asking them while Nostr is still young and flying under the radar.
I’m still not sure I understand how relay nodes are incentivized on Nostr.
I’m sure some people will run them just because they love the protocol and want to enable it (I would try if I was more technical).
But it seems that as Nostr grows the data and processing needs of relays will increase, right? This seems like it will push out the “Uncle Joe” who runs a relay out of altruism, and leave relays in the hands of the companies and apps making enough money off Nostr usage to make running a relay worthwhile.
Big corporations owning the relay structure seems like an easy target for regulatory capture…
Which would make the “decentralization” of Nostr a lot more like the etherium network than bitcoin network. Sure it’s decentralized, but the deciders are few and their interests alight more with the government than with users.
Do any technically more knowledgeable people who are reading know of a solution that protects relays from corporate capture and keeps them in the hands of end users?
The data on this thing is going to be a lot more than the bitcoin blockchain will ever hold... How do we keep cypherpunks with raspberry pies in charge?
I’m on Nostr now. I’m mostly going to use this profile to talk about freedom tech, but who knows?
Let’s see where this goes…
This is why all the Number-Go-Up people who want bitcoin adoption without freedom tech are suspect.
I know its taboo to trust 3rd parties, but without nostr:npub1qny3tkh0acurzla8x3zy4nhrjz5zd8l9sy9jys09umwng00manysew95gx out here leading the charge for bitcoin freedom tech I’m not sure I’d be confident in bitcoin’s future.
A steel man for a government capture:
The government doesn’t even need to aggressively ban Bitcoin. Gentle, well-meaning regulatory clarity can accomplish the same thing just fine... Financial regulators can just give “guidelines” that bitcoin addresses need to be tied to identities to distinguish “legitimate bitcoin” from “black market bitcoin.” They already know from KYC who owns a lot of the addresses.
They could require all wallets approved on platforms like iOS and Google Play build in a function with ID that signs a message from each address regularly. They will have a long, generous leniency for people to come forward and ID their addresses and they will be allowed to cash in on bitcion’s rising value and spend freely, while a few high profile cases of people who use black market bitcoin that has been “laundered” in coin-joins are prosecuted and their transactions will be linked to awful stuff like human trafficking and terrorism.
Most people want to live, peaceful law-abiding lives, and a vast majority of bitcoin holders will comply and get wealthy rather than risk jail and social stigma.
All the big energy companies that run the mining sector will eventually be required to only mine blocks from legal ID-verified addresses. Sure, there will still be a few anonymous pirate miners that will occasionally mine blocks with transactions from unverified addresses, but that will be rare so it will become increasingly difficult to even use the chain with “black market bitcoin.”
While there are cypherpunk work-arounds that can keep an underground circular black market economy going with the coins minority that haven’t been captured that economy will be tiny and suspect, while the rest of world will hyper-bitcionize the “safe and legal” way.
The governments of the world will be clear that bitcoin is an asset and not a currency, so they will regulate away the ability earn it directly or use it to buy things directly. Legally you save in bitcoin and then trade it for fiat when you need it. While the legal bitcoiners are getting rich and the increasingly few cypherpunk bitcoiners are being ostracized and demonized, the governments of the world will HODL.
Increasingly the bitcoin reserves will back the fiat currency, so that no one will doubt that fiat has value. Just like they did on the gold standard they will create more fiat than the asset backing it so that the “satoshi value” of each CBDC dollar will slip over time, but at first they will be careful with this so the CBDC feels like it has real solid value.
Then an emergency like a war or an economic crisis hits after Bitcoin is already neutered, so when major governments of the world issue a 6102-like order demanding that all bitcoin be turned over to the treasury for “safe keeping” everyone will comply. They will get lots of valuable fiat in return and all the freedom tech power of bitcoin gradually eroded so long ago they might not even remember that bitcoin once had these properties.
After that the main chain becomes the property of central banks, and we are all back on fiat because the bitcoin standard failed the same way the gold standard did. Sure there will still be a few criminals and bitcoin bugs that have a couple hundred thousand BTC outside the system, but they will be irrelevant.
This seems like a possible steel man for how they could “ban” bitcoin very gradually over a generation or so.
Maybe the bitcoin underground would win in the end after the central banks ruin the bitcoin standard like they ruined the gold standard, or maybe cypherpunks would just spin up another currency because the bitcoin chain as as freedom tech was dead. Either way in this scenario freedom money “winning” would take so long that it won’t happen in my lifetime and likely not even my grandchildren’s lifetime.