BitcoinPuritan on Nostr: The following is the comment I have just submitted on FinCEN’s proposed Bitcoin ...

The following is the comment I have just submitted on FinCEN’s proposed Bitcoin anti-mixing rules:

To whom it may concern,

I agree with Preston Pysh’s comments (https://egodeath.capital/blog/fincen-may-be-violating-your-rights-bitcoin) which respond to this proposal in a more line-by-line manner than I will attempt here. I will simply share my own feelings about these proposed rules as someone who loves my country and does not wish to see it go further down a bad path.

These proposed rules are a blatant violation of Americans’ God-given, constitutionally enumerated rights, and there is no reason to believe they will have any substantial effect in protecting Americans from crime or terror. To the contrary, these rules will endanger anyone who complies with them by putting their private information on lists that will inevitably be hacked into and leaked. Any such leaks will expose them to physical harm, what bitcoiners call the “five-dollar wrench attack.” The tools these proposed rules seek to ban are tools honest bitcoiners use to protect themselves from the very sorts of crimes FinCEN is purportedly tasked with protecting Americans from. The more honest bitcoiners use these tools, the less reason FinCEN has to worry about bitcoiners being the victims of financial crime. The fact that criminals and terrorists can also use these tools does not invalidate legitimate uses of them but only exposes the strengths and weaknesses of the tools as criminals and terrorists are caught despite their use of the tools. Please do go after criminals and terrorists, but do it in a way that conforms to your mandate to protect the God-given, constitutionally enumerated rights of American citizens who for legitimate reasons want to use the best tools available to protect their privacy from hackers, scammers, and even from the prying eyes of their own friends.

Far from being designed to protect Americans, these rules almost seem instead designed to protect the fiat financial system, a system that many bitcoiners have peacefully chosen to at least partially opt out of. But unless I missed the constitutional amendment removing the gold standard from the dollar, fiat money itself is unconstitutional as well as designed to steal from people who store their value in it. Bitcoiners have found technological solutions to many such problems and these proposed rules seek to remove our ability to use those technological solutions. They almost seem to have as an unstated purpose to make self-custody of Bitcoin a less attractive option to those who wish to possess money that cannot be debased or easily confiscated or censored. But there is no crime in peacefully walking away from one monetary system and to another. If my concerns in this paragraph have any basis in fact, and I hope they do not, these proposed rules would be an illegitimate use of power to protect an illegitimate system.

I believe such a use of power would also prove impotent—convulsions of a dying system. These proposed rules not only overstep the bounds of the Constitution and violate the God-given rights of Americans, but also overstep the capacity of the government to enforce them. Law enforcement can only use force to stop so many people from running software on their computers. It’s been said that you can’t ban Bitcoin, you can only ban yourself from Bitcoin. This saying will prove true if these proposed rules are put into effect. People of both the criminal and honest classes will continue to use the software that these rules seek to ban, and those who comply with the rules will be forced to watch as the rest of the world benefits from an alternative system. If law enforcement attempts to go after people who despite the rules continue to use these tools for legitimate reasons, law enforcement will have less of time and resources to go after actual criminals and terrorists, thus exposing their own dwindling legitimacy to an increasingly unhappy public.

But if these rules are rejected and sensible rules are adopted instead, rules that would protect Americans’ God-given and constitutionally enumerated rights, rules that would respect the appropriate limits of government’s authority, rules that would take into account how Bitcoin works without attempting harm to Bitcoin and bitcoiner citizens, rules that would be narrowly tailored to the legitimate ends of law enforcement and for the targeting of criminals and terrorists specifically, then law enforcement would be better equipped to focus on the task they have been entrusted by the public to do—to bring criminals to justice and to protect the public from terror all while also protecting the rights of all citizens. The sooner this proposal is abandoned in place of something that makes actual sense, the better for us all, bitcoiners, law enforcement, and the public at large alike.

Signed,
@BitcoinPuritan
x.com/bitcoinpuritan