Forget about the $10k disclosure, this clueless antique wants to make you liable for running a node, or contributing to an open source blockchain project.
It doesn't make you liable for contributing to an open source Blockchain project, but as a node, you are not allowed to put transactions from sanctioned individuals in your new block or include new blocks that have auch transactions in your chain, causing a fork. This seems utterly reasonable, and Warren appears to understand cryptocurrencies better than the people holding cryptocurrencies. In practice, if there are more nodes not under this law than that are under this law, nodes under this law would shut down, reducing energy usage in the US.
Nodes don't make new blocks, miners do that. And neither nodes nor miners have any way of knowing whether any given transaction involves a sanctioned entity or not.
Pedantically, mining nodes are a subset of all nodes.
Of course miners will know whether transaction involve a sanctioned entity. These wallets will be listed. Mining nodes in the US will not be allowed to put UTXOs that originate from those wallets in new blocks.
Sorry, blockchains don’t work that way. We ain’t forking for senator Karen. She can fork off.
It does not seem reasonable in the slightest. There is no way to know a transaction is forbidden. Anyway, this technology was invented so tyrants have no power here.
You can believe they don't, but the fact is that they do, and if this law passes, you will suffer the consequences of breaking the law if you run a noncompliant node, just as you would suffer the consequences of running a noncompliant bank. Blockchains don't magically make you above the law.
I bet the CEO of Bitcoin would be real scared if they existed.
It’s not about violating sanctions, it’s about a system being incompatible with enforcement. Of course authorities will try to go after those that attempt to violate sanctions - they should. This is not a call to violate sanctions. It is a cold reality about the nature of enforcement.
But the system itself, the local laws are irrelevant to the software implementation.
Oh, you seem to be missing that right now those laws are up to the banks. When you remove the banks that makes every node liable for those laws. You having bad tech that makes it hard for you to follow the law isn't the laws problem.
There is a difference between being ahead of the law and being above the law. The former just means the law hasn't caught up to regulating a scammer. The latter means the law is incapable of regulating a scammer.
The people duped into the decentralized cryptocurrency scam have mistakenly believed that cryptocurrencies fall into the latter category. First China and now the US are correcting that misconception.
I get it, you think it’s all a scam. You are free to believe that. The thousands of BTC nodes running in china right now beg to differ. I actually expect china to do a 180 degree policy shift mid year 2022.
The law is incapable of regulating a system like Bitcoin. This is by design. I know you don’t like that, but the cypherpunks know their enemy. The only misconception is thinking anyone can law this technology away. Only math and physics matters. The law is just human noise.
I think you have a core misunderstanding on how the "monopoly on violence" works. Ur device touches port 8333 and 18333 you go straight to the gulag. That port changes that rule changes. Tech isn't above the law, ur not a sovereign citizen.
Centralized banks also run on math and physics, yet the law regulates them. This bill clearly explains how it will work, and you have provided no reason for why it wouldn't.
China used to run more than half of all Bitcoin nodes. Now it's already less than 1% and dropping. The only reason it is still that high is that they haven't bothered to start enforcement yet.
China has to deal with financial fraud just as much as any other large country, so there is no reason to expect they will deregulate cryptocurrencies or any other financial instruments.
Literally designed against such things. Nodes are not mining nodes. The entirety of the miners could leave the US (this would not be a good thing for the US economy in the future), and the system would still work.
You think I am crazy. Crazy is not understand the largest separation between money and state in human history.
This bill is fantasy. A) Nobody is going to accept changes to the codebase to enforce any of this. It is an attack and will be routed around. B) You cannot tell apriori a tx is from a sanctioned party, and after the fact it’s way too late. C) you cannot undo transactions D) blocks and rewards can be mined so that they are unattributable.
We are 13 years in here. We never would have gotten past year 2 if States could do anything about this. Anyway. We both know each other’s opinions. I like mine because “honey badger does not give a shit”.
> The entirety of the miners could leave the US (this would not be a good thing for the US economy in the future)
This is the outcome I expect, and the US will have less energy waste, which is a nice benefit.
> Crazy is not understand the largest separation between money and state in human history.
Bitcoin is not more separate from the state than gold and silver, and it suffers many of the same problems.
> You cannot tell apriori a tx is from a sanctioned party
As soon as a wallet is identified as belonging to a sanctioned individual, no further transactions from that wallet will be accepted.
> and after the fact it’s way too late... you cannot undo transactions
This is not necessary. The value of the transferred coins drops because all downstream UTXOs are blacklisted from regulated exchanges. Nobody in the US or any other country that regulates cryptocurrencies will accept the tainted coins.
> blocks and rewards can be mined so that they are unattributable.
This has the same problem as currently unknown wallets that I listed above. As soon as the owner of a wallet is identified, all its contents become tainted. In practice, this means that people will be less likely to accept payment from unknown wallets, which results in market forces that will push for every transacting wallet to be identified.
> We are 13 years in here.
Because the state has ignored the harms of decentralized cryptocurrencies until this point. This is simply about being ahead of the law instead of being above the law.
Imagine thinking a car, a physical object that exists in a single space under one legal jurisdiction compares to a free and open source software protocol that has been running for 13 years in 100 countries.
That protocol runs on computers owned by people who live in a legal jurisdiction. The protocol doesn't run in some parallel dimension. The people who run nodes are subject to laws, and the people who interact with nodes are subject to laws.
You've been confused into thinking that laws can't apply to them merely because laws haven't yet been written to apply to them. Now that governments feel they have a reason to write these laws, the laws are being written. In the early years of the Internet, purchases on the Internet were not taxed. That does not mean they couldn't be taxed, despite what many people thought.
I don't think you understand how the law works ir how Bitcoin works. I clearly understand how Bitcoin works, having studied the protocol 10 years ago. Warren also clearly understands how Bitcoin works, having written the bill with Levien's help.
Somehow I'm not convinced that a technology that makes the global transaction log public and immutable for eternity makes government oversight "irrelevant".
This is not about making laws or government irrelevant. Of course a global transparent ledger of all transactions is beneficial to enforce sanctions, track criminals, etc. it is for this reason alone that playing with ideas like “we going to make it illegal to use Bitcoin unless you use this special module that enforces rule xyz” is just absurd.
Senator Warren can no more make it illegal to run Bitcoin Core then force you to run BitcoinEW with new denylists daily. It is irrelevant that any politician or government doesn’t want bad guys to use it. They will. Of course the politicians and government will use this evidence trail to bring the bad guys to Justice. What is irrelevant is the wishes of one politician, one government. The software is. They can ignore it, they can use it for investigations, they can use it. The idea of rounding people up for using one version of software in a democracy is tyrannical!
What this entire thread mess of madness was about was the idea that it would be illegal — if you touch 8333 or run the naughty international version that Senator Warren does not approve of, or run an unregistered node, or any other such insane fantasies is just dreams cos you don’t get what Satoshi was all about yet.
>if you touch 8333 or run the naughty international version that Senator Warren does not approve of, or run an unregistered node, or any other such insane fantasies is just dreams cos you don’t get what Satoshi was all about yet.
I would say this is the wrong framing. If the law forbids transacting with Russia, it doesn't matter if you do those transactions by meeting up with a Russian agent in a dark alley, or by running a complex computer algorithm. If you choose to execute an algorithm which makes it difficult or impossible for you to tell if you are in violation of the law, you had better be certain that it also makes it impossible for the government to tell. If it does not, you're going to find yourself in trouble. It doesn't matter if you frame your activity as merely running open source code.
This was about running nodes. Or just interacting with a peer-to-peer network. Getting blocks. Maybe receiving and paying legitimate other users of that network in non sanction places. Not actively transacting with Russia.
There are real parallels here with the crypto wars of the 90s. Or Tor. Or BitTorrent.
Why suddenly we have folks wanting to go back to the 90s is quite troubling.
