Remember all those people from back in the day who used to try to see how long they could "live off of Bitcoin"? You know who I'm talking about. Those diehards that try to buy good/services directly with Bitcoin without using fiat.
I always thought these people were ridiculous. Yes, of course you can live off of Bitcoin. Turn the Bitcoin into fiat and spend the fiat wherever you want. Why would you hamstring yourself on purpose just to prove a point? No one ever said turning Bitcoin into USD was against the rules. Bitcoin's liquidity and interchangeability is one of its primary functions and attributes.
This is especially true today considering the obscene fees associated with the Bitcoin network. At this point if you try to "live off Bitcoin" with direct transactions that appear on chain you're just a fool wasting money for no reason.
Catch Me If You Can is an oldish movie (true story; proclaimed 80-90% accurate) from 2002 about Frank Abagnale, a master of identity and check fraud. His most notable achievements include posing as a Pan American World Airways pilot, a doctor, and even a lawyer (might have even legitimately passed the bar after faking a degree from Harvard).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch_Me_If_You_Can
The film is based on the life of Frank Abagnale, who, before his 19th birthday, successfully performed cons worth millions of dollars by posing as a Pan American World Airways pilot, a Georgia doctor and a Louisiana parish prosecutor. His foremost crime was check fraud; he became so highly skilled that the FBI later turned to him for help catching other check forgers.
Starts 1:15
You know you're at the top of your field when the cops cut you a deal to work for them in order to catch your lessers.
Apparently the real Frank Abagnale told his story on this TED Talk thing.
Bitcoin is already a privacy coin
So why bring up Frank Abagnale? Well I see some hard times on the horizon, and I think the scamming has just begun, with crypto being the easiest way to scam people going forward.
Dropping off the grid
But I don't want to talk about all that scamming that goes on and continues going on. Rather what happens when it no longer even makes sense to be a citizen of the country one resides in? What happens when people realize they don't really need a bank account or even an identity issued by their government captors?
And this thought experiment probably doesn't even apply to me personally, as I've already done the research and determined that I can likely pay 0% capital gains tax as long as I cash out less than $39,000 a year. However, that still leaves all the other weird tax situations hanging out there. Like airdrops and blog rewards counting as income, and micro-cap coins that you can't actually sell without affecting the price. How could the IRS possibly tax someone in USD if the asset in question isn't connected to USD? So many weird situations are going to be popping up.
Thought experiment.
So say the IRS is after you for whatever reason. You've secured your crypto correctly so they can't even freeze or confiscate your accounts. You're out on bail because it's a white collar victimless crime. You say "fuck this noise" and decide the roll those dice and skip town. Now there's a bail bonds bounty hunter named Marcus after you! Good luck, Marcus!
Can you pull it off?
It would be pretty hard to pull it off in the old legacy economy. How are you going to open a bank account, buy a car, or pay rent without some kind of fake identity? However, given a crypto economy everything changes.
We're already being pushed into a "work from home" era. Crypto is going to be a big part of that I imagine. Even with Bitcoin, you could buy mining equipment and have your mining pool send the money to any address you choose. At best, this income is traced to an IP address which is then traced to a real address.
Is it really that hard to access WiFi anonymously or using a connection in someone else's name? Not really. On top of that, how would the IRS even know these funds should be traced in the first place? They are entering random Bitcoin addresses and being kicked out to wherever when they get spent. How does that connect to you?
In this situation you're already a Bitcoin millionaire. How hard would it be to find some random person willing to give you cash for a discount on Bitcoin? This person knows you by a fake first name. Can that connection come back to haunt you? Not likely.
IRS
As stated earlier this week, the IRS is already known to be underfunded and incompetent by design. Rich people would not accept a scenario where the powerful three-letter agencies were after them for low-level crime. Yeah, the NSA and the CIA probably have access to the microphone in your pocket. The IRS does not. Big difference. Don't piss off the wrong people. Easy as that.
FBI
FBI will only go after you if the white collar crime is very serious.
The FBI focuses its financial crimes investigations on such criminal activities as corporate fraud, health care fraud, mortgage fraud, identity theft, insurance fraud, and money laundering. These are the identified priority crime problem areas of the Financial Crimes Section (FCS) of the FBI.
So what about money laundering?
Federal law enforcement agencies will investigate a crime only if there is reason to believe that the crime violated federal law. ... For example, the Secret Service is responsible for investigating counterfeiting of currency, and the FBI is the lead federal agency for terrorism cases.
So even though cases like Frank Abagnale get prosecuted by the FBI this is because money is being stolen from others. Simple tax evasion is not going to set off any alarms.
https://www.aclu.org/other/more-about-fbi-spying
Data Mining. The FBI is sweeping up incredible amounts of information about innocent Americans through unchecked data collection and data mining programs. According to documents obtained by Wired magazine in 2009, an arm of the FBI called the National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) has collected 1.5 billion records from public and private sources in a massive data mining operation. The records collected by the FBI include financial records from corporate databases, such as hotel and rental car company transactions; millions of "suspicious activity reports" from financial institutions; millions of records from commercial data aggregators; a multitude of law enforcement and non-law enforcement government databases; and public information gleaned from telephone books and news articles. The NSAC records include data from the FBI's Investigative Data Warehouse, which was identified in a Department of Justice Inspector General reports as the depository for information collected by the FBI through National Security Letters (NSLs) and illegal exigent letters.
The FBI has also established a new database called eGuardian to collect and share suspicious activity reports with the federal intelligence agencies, the Department of Homeland Security, fusion centers, the military and state and local law enforcement.
Are we seeing a pattern here?
Can we see why KYC is so important? Because spying on the public depends on it. Profiting on the public depends on it as well. If you can't identify who is doing what all of this information is TOTALLY USELESS. The pseudo-anonymity of crypto is going to start messing with a lot of these data-collection tactics, especially when crypto actually starts being used as currency and the connections between transfers becomes less and less obvious.
Monopoly scam
This was actually a pretty interesting documentary about the FBI cracking a case regarding low level mafia rigging the McDonald's monopoly game. Watching stuff like this really puts the real world into perspective. Collecting evidence is not easy. Most murders go unsolved. The world is chaos hanging on by a tiny thread of order that can unravel in an instant.
When the crime becomes dropping off the grid because you don't want to deal with all this archaic bullshit, guess who's on the case? No one. It's assumed that people are fully reliant on the grid. That's how they maintain control. Crypto stands to disrupt that reality greatly.
Conclusion
Bitcoin is already anonymous. It's simply on us to build a future were people can live without having to provide a government issued ID for the basic necessities of life. Cash makes this a lot easier, and we can see that there may be a push to eliminate it eventually. I imagine privacy coins will have there day when that time arrives.
Of course this kind of privacy issued to citizens will breed many scams and other crimes, but that doesn't matter. The gains created by this explosive technology will far outweigh the negatives.
Hard times are coming. Technology is moving so quickly and government is so outdated & slow that it will likely soon be impossible to even comply with the law if we wanted to. Explosive disruption and hardship is on the horizon. Life is only going to get weirder, I guarantee it.
I am glad you foresee difficult times coming. You are surely correct.
Your rent is coming from random addresses. Your power bill, phone bill, cable, water/sewer, car insurance/bus pass, etc..., are all not being paid by you from your personal bank account which they can obviously see, but from random BTC addresses or by other persons.
I know this may present difficulties to successful prosecution for money laundering, but connecting you to potential crimes is absolutely facile, and it is unlikely that people whose personal finances reveal this pattern aren't going to be investigated. Faced with the difficulty of proving criminal fraud otherwise, what are brutally violent cops going to do in such an investigation but kick down your door and waterboard you until you die or confess?
https://peakd.com/hive-196037/@rt-international/69qtd081m9h
Belarus shut down the internet during their election. How are Belorussians using their BTC addresses without the internet? How is any privacy coin benefiting Belorussians during internet closure?
It may not be sexy, or intellectually intriguing, but plain old police brutality, starvation, and censorship is damned effective. I strongly recommend taking actions that secure against those threats, and not just count on digits on the internet for your financial security. In fact, I don't put any assets of consequence in such risk.
Those threats aren't imaginary, improbable, or unpredictable.
They're ongoing existential harms that make crypto worthless as a store of value.
Absent mesh networks that prevent censorship and personal security from armed torturers, crypto does not secure your financial assets in the events you predict.
I hope you sustain financial viability going forward. As you can see, it will require abilities to surmount obvious threats, that crypto currently does not.
Thanks!
In the scenario I described these bills do not exist.
There is no "my" whatever bill.
They see nothing. Flying blind. The name of the accused drops off the grid entirely. The people in charge of catching this person do not even get access to things like facial recognition or traffic cams that track license plates. They don't even know what city they should be looking in.
As long as cash exists the accused can approach anyone with a fake name and offer them $10k worth of Bitcoin for $9000 cash. Centralized exchanges do not report to the IRS until $20k has been moved. Even if the IRS questions a person for withdrawing a large sum they can tell their story:
The IRS doesn't know 'Bob' only received $9k. There is nothing to tax and no paper trail to suggest otherwise. The IRS doesn't know who 'Bob' is even though they have his Bitcoin address (now empty and never to be used again).
If you walk under the sky, you're facially recognizable. If you suspect you can access your BTC from a place physically in the USA and avoid data linking your person to it, you have not well considered the extent of the surveillance currently undertaken.
Algorithms link your face to your residence, vehicle, and etc. The data privacy you seek does not exist, and it is clear that soon food will be used to compel compliance. Being forced to wear a mask to enter a store is only the first step in the deployment of that weapon, and the real purpose of mask mandates.
Going forward, the need to prevent people from acquiring food in order to prevent them from dissenting from vaccine mandates will require the use of simple algorithms to track food purchases, caloric equations, and location data. Tens of millions of people were starved to death in the 20th Century, and not one of them thought they'd be prevented from eating enough food to live.
Invest in real wealth, my friend.
I guess I need a new face.
For the NSA and CIA. Not the IRS. Not for local law enforcement.
I get the feeling that even the FBI are kinda toolbags.
This clusterfuck of agencies is not some harmonious system where everyone shares information. Everyone keeps their data to themselves until they leverage or sell it for more power. Including corporations.
Fusion centers do exactly that.
I can point to the one in my town, I'd bet they have more in the state.
So then it's impossible to get away with breaking the law?
Because in my experience it's almost hard to get caught if you play it right.
Or perhaps we have to be on the nice list and when it flips to naughty we get caught for everything?
So now the IRS has access to facial recognition? Get real. That doesn't even fall under the definition of 'threat'. The information shared at these centers is clearly extremely deliberate and precise. Willing to bet it's racially biased as well and involves casting out wide data nets that scoop the bottom of the pyramid. Just like always.
Way before Abagnale was this guy:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Waldo_Demara
And then your girlfriend uses your bitcoin wallet to buy some stuff from Amazon
... and now they have your physical address.
50% of murders aren't even investigated.
What i have found is that the govern-cement doesn't care if you break the law. Its all there, for when they want "you", they can just come and collect you.
My biggest problem has been thinking about how to get this information before the PoPo show up on your door. Because, after that point, no proof is good enough.
There is one court case where the person is in jail under contempt of court charges because he won't turn over the password for a bitcoin wallet that he says isn't his.
lol, in contempt for not remembering a crypto key?
That will be ruled unconstitutional soon enough.
It just needs to happen to someone who actually matters and has a good legal team.
You see, it doesn't matter.
The judge is ultimate judge.
If they say you have something and will not produce it, then you are in contempt and they can do anything they want to you. They can even have you killed right there in the court room.
Of course you can't prove that that is not your bitcoin address.
And so, the judge demanding it is asking for something that can't logically be done.
But that hasn't stopped them.
There are many people that are in jail, being held for crimes that should never exist.
Reporters in jail for reporting, even thought that is directly violating the constitution.
So...
Soon enough for Austin Steinbart, Ross Ulbrecht, or Schaeffer Cox? Do you think prosecutors just take random cases, and set themselves up for some legal trouncing?
I dunno. Ask Julian Assange about constitutional protection. See how it's working out for him.
Good thing most people aren't famous, eh?
I know that you know how this works.
Examples need to be made to keep the rest in line.
Ross Ulbrecht the Darkweb druglord?
Is this really an appropriate example?
Find me someone who gets railroaded like that from income tax evasion.
They don't care.
They care more about Julian Assange exposing crimes of the elite than they do about serial killers. Wanna be a serial killer? You'll get away with it! Look at the ones who get caught. They'll all deeply disturbed thrill seekers with hubris & unmatched god-complexes. When is the last time a cold calculating zero-mistakes serial killer got caught? Never. That's when. Does that mean they don't exist? Hardly. I hear there are an estimated 50 active serial killers at any time.
In fact, the CIA is looking to hire these people. Being able to kill without emotion or psychological trauma is an EXTREMELY valuable resource as long as the subject can be controlled. I personally know people who've had first-hand experience of this kind of recruitment going down. The biggest psychos in the military often get rewarded.
Again, to quote myself:
Neither Ross Ulbricht or Schaeffer Cox were celebrities until they were prosecuted, although Cox was a local political activist.
Is murder some reduction in the ability of banksters to acquire? I submit that avoiding predatory financial manipulation is, and will attract their attention. There are mechanisms that enable free people to secure wealth, but there is no mechanism without risk.
Specifying risk and mitigation is the core essence of due diligence incumbent on investors. I seek but to point out risks that may be advisable to mitigate to the extent possible in the expected conditions going forward.
Ignoring the differences in incentives to apply law enforcement to different situations isn't very useful in performing that due diligence. There's not much point in discussing murder when considering financial security, unless you consider that a risk you face.
Given that murderous thugs are mowing people down with cars and kicking them in the head - and I'm talking about Australian police enforcing public health policies today - that is a reasonable risk. You will mitigate those risks you see as reasonable going forward. Cops aren't mowing people down with cars and kicking them in the head to question them regarding murders, but they are people failing to comply with health policies.
Compare those potential risks accordingly.
It's hard to fake being in compliance with a mask mandate.
Dare I say impossible?
It's pretty easy to pay for things in cash... so far.
Police brutality will never target the wealthy by design.
The system we live in incentivizes the strong to attack the weak, in all aspects.
Fair fights are rarely profitable.
Yes it will, does, and always has. However, it does not apply to them as are secure from it because of the nature of their wealth. It was done to Al Capone, Julian Assange, and various others whose wealth was susceptible specifically to the use of government.
Given the nature of Capone's wealth, which particularly was invested in local government, it is obvious he did undertake to mitigate risk, but ultimately presented too large a prize for the mitigation effort he was able to deploy.
Food for thought.
Stuff like your address leakage example is exactly why technology needs privacy by default, in a coin such as Monero such a situation wouldn't matter because you can't see where received coins are from.
Bitcoin doesn't scale well and has a wide array of technical issues, not even sidechains can completely fix the issues.
I see Bitcoin eventually failing, though that'll ultimately be a good thing for cryptocurrency. Being first does not automatically mean you're the best, and at this point it seems that Bitcoin is more of a detriment than a benefit to cryptocurrency's future.
This would be true except that not all coins need to be all things.
The future use cases of bitcoin will be
And so, bitcoin being slow will actually be a good thing.
Like the administrations of all those using it.
Being a public record will also be good thing. Transparency will be demanded.
Right now bitcoin fills this roll perfectly.
And, if it really needed to change, then it is just code. It could change in between any two blocks.
I would advice people that when bitcoin goes moonshot to cash out into coins and tokens that do what you want. Because being locked into bitcoin will leave you locked into only buying houses or other big ticket items. (pretty much for the reasons you stated)
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