From this article:If you hold your coins with Coinbase, you will no longer be able to send or receive crypto to or from just any old bitcoin address if it has been through a KYC process. Once you move your funds into a non-custodial account, you'll be free to send them to any self-custody address, but if you've never formally associated your identity with that address via a regulated entity, you won't be able to transact with a Coinbase address or one administered by any other regulated custody provider.I've posted here a few times, warning of (obvious) developments like this.You don't understand these people. They will stop at nothing but total control over who transacts with whom, how much and how often.They reason that only by putting everyone under surveillance can they protect us from crime.This is totalitarian thinking at its finest. With this reasoning, you must put everyone under surveillance to see who is talking to whom (could be a terrorist or a pedo), you must boobytrap the entire legacy banking system to see who is transacting with whom (they could be funding terrorists or - gasp - buying vegetation to smoke online), you must lobby against end-to-end encryption which "keeps you in the dark" (they feel entitled to know everything about everyone, so in that light this sentiment makes sense) and prevents you from finding terrorists and pedos - nevermind that in the process you get to know every intimate, banal, subversive, conversation that everyone has with everyone else.Those of you less into computers don't get it. And your ignorance is costing the world greatly. They are not looking for anyone in particular most of the time (so the "I have nothing to hide" argument is just stupid), the important thing to understand is that without massive amounts of data siphoned off from as many people in as many situations as possible, their artificial intelligence won't work.It needs your data to work.Stop giving it your data. Unless we are to become digital cattle, this must be resisted with all our might.If you don't care about this, you don't understand the grave danger in having the government and its friendly big corporations knowing everything about everyone. You should come to care about this, and you should come to understand this, before it's too late.These new FATF recommendations are nothing unexpected if you understand how they think.This regulation will give them the ability to know who everyone is transacting with, which allows the artificial intelligence to start doing its thing and labeling / cataloging social connections in yet another dimension.It also sets the stage - just you wait for it - to pressure merchants, not just exchanges, to stop accepting orders from non-KYC'd addresses at a global scale, if they are feeling kind only above certain amounts.In the mean time, the artificial intelligence will be busy linking all of your addresses with your purchases too, and someone will be making a fat profit off your data, a la Google/Facebook. And you'll be powerless to stop it, because while the beast was still a baby we failed to slay it.I legitimately believe that this threat is unlike anything we've faced before in human history. We've had mass-surveillance before, but never at anything even remotely approaching this level. We've had tyrants before, but never at a global level. We've had repression, but never with the cold, precise calculations of computers making connections in a split second that would take human operators YEARS.For the sake of all that's good, this massive abuse of human rights has to be stopped. Or we're fucked. Your children are fucked. Their children are fucked.The technology will only get better. The regulations will only get tighter. These people understand very well what they're doing, they see you and your data as their property, and they would very much like to know where you are at all times, who you speak to, what about, what you enjoy reading, how you like spending your time, what your hobbies are, and most relevant to /r/cryptocurrency, where do you spend your money and who you transact with.The surveillance state would simply crumble without its many tentacles sucking the information out of the digital realm.Resistance has to start somewhere: I suggest Tor, getting rid of facebook, using another search engine besides google (and through Tor), using ad-blockers, encrypting your email, choosing Signal over WhatsApp.And let's not forget getting rid of built-in spyware on your phone - choose LineageOS (arguably our best bet on Android) and f-droid - choose apps that respect your privacy.Turn the damn phone off too, do you really need to be online and reachable 24/7? Trust me, it's pretty liberating not to. Time slows down without all the interruptions and impulses to check this or that online - and that's a good thing.And in the domain of cryptocurrency, I suggest you look into Monero.To quote from the article linked in the beginning:Anyone stuck on these exchanges will not be allowed to send BTC to certain addresses deemed not in compliance. Let me be clear, this will not be enforced at the protocol level, but at the exchange and services level. Business owners will be forced to censor their users, hopefully driving a significant portion of their user bases away as they wise up and learn how to use the protocol as designed.Look, I love this guy, he hosts a podcast which is usually very deep and entertaining and which I highly recommend - a great recent episode to listen to if you are not familiar with it is episode 76 with Alex Gladstein, for instance.But like all bitcoin maximalists he fails to notice, because of purely ideological reasons, that it is the inherent obvious flaws in bitcoin that allow for this emerging nightmare to manifest.Bitcoin has no built-in privacy. It was only a matter of time until the usual suspects would leverage this for max impact - this process is now well underway, and as I wrote before, expect the same logic to be applied to merchants; and don't you even think about mixing your coins with something like wasabi wallet, because they will automatically be assumed dirty.The Monero community has been saying for years, and the wider brothers and sisters in the crypto community are still reluctant to comprehend: if a cryptocurrency has no privacy built-in, it cannot be fungible; if it is not fungible, it can and will be censored - and it will (has) be repurposed as a mass-surveillance tool.Look, am I saying dump all your BTC and buy Monero yesterday? Not really. Bitcoin has by far the largest network effect, the largest developer community, and the largest brand recognition. We need Bitcoin to succeed if crypto is to succeed, at least for the foreseeable future.And plenty of innovation comes out of Bitcoin.What I am trying to call your attention to is the orwellian intentions of those who would propose to get as much data about as many aspects of our lives in order to "protect" us.Listen, wake up. You're more likely to die from a bizarre accident with a lightning strike than a terrorist attack. The mass-media distorts everything, we react emotionally to things without considering the odds of it actually happening - repeating the same images over and over usually does the trick.Certain things are being used as leverage (excuses) to strip away our civil liberties and build a global surveillance state. Your government and my government come up with this sort of regulation, behind my back and your back, without having been requested by the people of their countries to do so.Is it for my own good? Is it for your own good? Cui bono ?Who benefits from a global surveillance net that continuously builds profiles about everyone and discerns ever more precise patterns in behavior?Could it be those who would very much like the status quo to remain the status quo? If you know exactly who to target in order to silence opposition..Could it be those companies that get to make billions from predicting human behavior and selling stuff to people - precisely the right kind of stuff for that kind of person - at precisely the right time for precisely the right reasons? (Whether they actually need the stuff or not)It's time to wake up to these very important issues folks. The governments that claim to represent us have cast the dice already, and our best interests are not on the table.It is up to us to change the tide, demand privacy, and say that enough is enough.What are they going to do? Put everyone in jail?Wake up, before it's too late.TL;DR (by popular demand): Why surveillance is not OK.
Submitted June 02, 2019 at 01:41PM
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