Fight For Your Right To Use Bitcoin As It Was Intended To Be Used
We may have won the battle, but the war for financial freedom is not over, here's how you can help.
By thoughtcrimeboss
This article is about the state's war on bitcoin, financial surveillance, and six ways that you can easily help fight back to help preserve the essential freedom to exchange value peer to peer without permission from anyone. As a group we have more power than you may realize.
*The original version of this article was published on Hackernoon, but I wasn't satisfied with it and rewrote it entirely. I was targeting Bitcoiners in particular because I entered it into the Rootstock Bitcoin content contest, but I would just like to point out that many of the things in this article apply to Monero as well. Buying and spending XMR peer to peer rather than on centralized exchanges is just as important as doing so with BTC, if not more so because of the recent delistings. Because of it's privacy, fungibility, and scalability Monero is a very important tool in the fight against oppression and financial surveillance. I may write a future article about how to use Monero as a tool to privately spend your Bitcoin or any cryptocurrency.
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With Bitcoin having made impressive new all time highs recently and a pro-Bitcoin administration in power in Washington, I see many Bitcoiners understandably breathing a sigh of relief and celebrating. It may feel like we as a community have finally won the war and that Bitcoin is poised to take over the entire world and replace fiat currency with a Bitcoin standard. However, I believe that we have not won the war, only a major battle. Now is not the time to become complacent and stop fighting. Even with Donald Trump in the White House, you cannot forget that the state is bigger than Donald Trump, and the world is bigger than just the United States. Bitcoin's number one adversary is still what it has always been, the nation-state. It is a direct threat to state power, which is largely derived from the state's control of the money supply and a massive financial surveillance apparatus. In four years, Americans may very well elect an entirely anti-Bitcoin administration, and if we spend this entire time sitting on our asses mesmerized by the "number go up", then we will have wasted a valuable opportunity to strengthen the Bitcoin community. We must use this reprieve to prepare for when the state inevitably decides that it wants to fight us again. You may think you have no power to make a difference as just one person, but there is so much you can do to help the fight for freedom. In this article, I go over why financial surveillance is so dangerous, why Bitcoin is "freedom tech", and the different ways you can fight back to help protect this valuable tool from those who want to neutralize it.
The state's war against Bitcoin is not over until every person who is currently locked in prison or facing prison for victimless Bitcoin or cryptocurrency related "crimes" is released. A victimless crime is one in which there is no victim because no one was harmed. There is no moral basis behind the prosecution of these crimes, they are solely a result of governments trying to control you and control what you do in your private life. We can not afford to ignore that there are people in prison or facing prison for these so-called "crimes". Ian Freeman, Roman Storm, Roman Semenov, and the developers of Samourai Wallet are just some examples. Alexey Pertsev was sentenced to five years in a cage (thankfully, he was granted bail onto house arrest while he appeals) in the Netherlands for deploying some immutable code in the form of a smart contract that can and was used for legitimate purposes. The illicit activity that went through Tornado Cash was a very small proportion of its overall volume. This didn't matter to the prosecutors though, if you follow their flawed logic it would also dictate a prison sentence for the manufacturer of a hammer that was then used for a murder. Ian Freeman is doing an 8-year prison sentence right now for simply selling bitcoin to consenting adults. The Samourai developers are also facing serious prison time for the "crime" of developing a Bitcoin wallet with built in privacy tools. Why did the state go after these individuals? The answer is simple, if you control the money you control the people.
Cryptocurrency, which allows people to create and use money outside of centralized financial systems, is a direct threat to this control. The state has spent decades building a vast dystopian financial surveillance and control apparatus and simultaneously normalizing it. Now, the average person doesn't think twice about things like the fact that you can't even withdraw or deposit too much of your own money without triggering a "Suspicious Activity Report". There was a time, not that long ago, when you could open a bank account without even showing government-issued identification. By slowly introducing a myriad of laws and regulations over time, the State has made it so that you need their permission to use your own money. Bitcoin fixes this. Anyone can set up a Bitcoin wallet without needing any permission from any entity. You can use Bitcoin to send millions of dollars in value anywhere across the planet without permission, and store your wealth outside of the state's control. This technology is an incredibly powerful countermeasure to the state's attacks on your freedom.
But what if you have nothing to hide? Why should financial surveillance concern someone who follows the rules? The Government currently holds the power to arbitrarily restrict your access to the financial system at any time. You might be thinking, ‘That could never happen to me—those laws exist to target criminals, right?’"
Wrong, sadly even someone who makes a legitimate effort to follow the rules should still be wary of this. For one, there are simply so many laws and regulations that following them all perfectly is impossible. If they want to get you, they can always find something to go after you with. On top of that, even if the original intention of these laws was only to fight crime, they can be weaponized against anyone the Government doesn't like. Regardless of your politics, the debanking of the Canadian trucker protesters in 2022 was an important reminder that a state can easily target anyone for any reason, including simply having the wrong opinion. One of the most important parts of a free society is the right to transact freely, to be able to transfer value without the need to inform anyone or get permission. In a society in which the government has control over your transactions, they have de facto control of your entire life. Imagine if you post something on the internet one night, and the next morning you wake up to discover that your bank account has been frozen. Your rent is due tomorrow, but you can't pay it. You can't buy food, pay for internet access, or put gas in your car. You don't even know if you will ever get the money you had in the bank back. Maybe you have your entire life savings put away in the bank. All of a sudden you are shut out from society because of having the wrong opinion. This is why having a decentralized permission-less currency and store of value like Bitcoin is absolutely essential and must be protected at all costs.
In the United States and many other countries, the government wants to know exactly how much money you have, where every cent came from, and the details of every single transaction you make. There is a reason why it's considered rude to ask a stranger how much money they make or have. People like to maintain their financial privacy because this kind of information can reveal all sorts of personal details about you. It can even put your life in danger if it falls into the wrong hands and you become a target for criminals. Do you think you can trust some incompetent bureaucrats to safeguard every detail about your finances and protect you from this? It's even worse when these laws force third parties such as cryptocurrency exchanges to collect and store sensitive information about their customers and their transactions. If you have any significant amount of bitcoin, you become more vulnerable to potential attack with every party that stores data on you, making compliance with KYC/AML(see below) regulations a legitimate threat to you and your family's safety.
Attempted kidnapping of a "crypto" billionaire's daughter 
Her father owns a major crapto exchange in Europe
Her father owns a major crapto exchange in Europe
4
This problem was highlighted recently when an armed gang attempted to kidnap a crypto exchange CEO's daughter and grandson in France, during the middle of the day. Armed teenagers also kidnapped a Las Vegas man and robbed him for 4 million dollars worth of crypto as he was returning home from a crypto conference. These kinds of attacks are becoming more common. Not long after both of these high profile crimes, Coinbase announced that it had leaked sensitive personal information about some of it's users, including home addresses. Criminals are looking for crypto holders to target, and the easiest way to get this information is from a KYC exchange. All that data makes these exchanges an attractive target for criminals. These leaks are going to keep happening, the best way to protect yourself is to not use KYC exchanges in the first place. Even if you don't care about any of the other reasons to not KYC, protecting yourself and your family should be motivation enough.
Cyber criminals bribed and recruited rogue overseas support agents to pull personal data on <1% of Coinbase MTUs. No passwords, private keys, or funds were exposed. Prime accounts are untouched. We will reimburse impacted customers. More here: coinbase.com/blog/protectin…
This worldwide attack on our financial privacy, freedom, and safety has been going on for decades but has recently accelerated dramatically with the legal actions taken against Bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies, and the individuals and companies that are in the crypto space. So how did we get here? How did we get to the point in the supposed "land of the free" where people are being prosecuted and imprisoned for selling Bitcoin or coding legitimate software?
Well, before Bitcoin was even an idea, the first major blow against American's financial privacy was struck in 1970 with the Bank Secrecy Act. With the passage of this law, banks were now required to file a SAR (suspicious activity report) with the government anytime a transaction over $10,000 occurred. At that time, most average people probably weren't too concerned with this law because $10,000 in 1970 was the equivalent of $80,000 of today's money in terms of purchasing power. Imagine if the law was being passed today, and the limit for filing a SAR was announced to be $80,000. It would seem more reasonable to the average person who might think that nobody ever needs that much cash anyways, unless they are doing something sketchy. There was a significant increase in crime in the United States right before the passage of this bill, and the government, which never lets a good crisis go to waste, framed the Bank Secrecy Act as a tool for fighting crime.
This is a perfect example of what people mean when they say something is a "slippery-slope". Once they get away with passing one law that violates your privacy, it normalizes such violations and opens the door for worse ones in the future. This is exactly what has happened in the years since 1970. They inflated the currency but didn't ever raise the SAR limit to match inflation. Now we are at a point where you can't make any kind of large transaction, legitimate or not, without having a report filed on you. One of the main ways the financial surveillance apparatus affects Bitcoin is through what are called know your customer and anti-money laundering regulations (KYC/AML). These regulations are why you can’t use many custodial lighting wallets any more if you live in the United States, they are why if you want to sign up for Coinbase or many centralized crypto exchanges, you have to submit a selfie of yourself holding a photo ID. They are why many crypto exchanges and applications have completely stopped serving United States customers. They basically make everything very complicated and ensure that any bitcoin you buy through these KYC exchanges is tied to your name until the end of time. The Bitcoin blockchain is pseudonymous, meaning there are no names attached to bitcoins on the blockchain itself. Identifying the owner of a Bitcoin wallet requires offchain data, and the main method of identification is when someone sends bitcoin from their wallet to a regulated exchange account in their name to sell for fiat. The second you do that, the address you sent the bitcoin from is linked to your name forever. Because the Bitcoin network is fully transparent, anyone can look at that wallet's history and see every transaction you have ever done. Can you imagine if any business you swipe your debit card at could just pull up your entire transaction history? This transparency is present on most blockchains (not on Monero!) and is exactly why people like the Samourai wallet developers created tools to protect your privacy when using Bitcoin. Privacy is the missing link that would make Bitcoin much more capable of subverting state control.
Even before there were #Bitcoin exchanges, Satoshi saw that the only way to preserve privacy on Bitcoin was to avoid linking identity to on-chain activity.
KYC is *the single worst* thing for Bitcoin's long-term success as money we can spend freely.
How did we get here?
KYC is *the single worst* thing for Bitcoin's long-term success as money we can spend freely.
How did we get here?
Another attack on freedom in the US that became widespread in the 1970's and 80's was Civil Asset Forfeiture which basically allows law enforcement agencies across the country to rob people with no due process. Civil Asset Forfeiture means a law enforcement officer can take your money or property (including bitcoin) if they say they suspect it of being used in crime or being the proceeds of a crime. Taking criminals money away from them might sound good on paper, but the problem is they don't have to convict you of a crime, charge you with a crime, or have any actual evidence of a crime to do this. Getting your property back requires obtaining a lawyer at your own expense and fighting a long legal battle so that in many cases it is cheaper to not fight back. Because of this legalized robbery, you can no longer safely travel with a large amount of cash, regardless of whether it's been procured through completely legal means or not, without the very possible risk of having every cent seized from you by predatory police officers. There are countless examples of this happening to normal hard working Americans, such as the former marine who had his entire life savings stolen for no reason and was left on the side of the road without even enough money to get home. They steal your money to pad their pensions or buy fancy new assault rifles and body armor for their small-town police force that hasn't even had to use their SWAT team in 10 years. Bitcoin can help with this, instead of traveling with cash you can instead travel with the 12 words that unlock a Bitcoin wallet. If you memorize the seed phrase, don't KYC, and keep your mouth shut then nobody will even know you have any bitcoin. Then you can safely travel with your wealth without the risk of having it stolen by road pirates. Make sure you keep your devices locked and encrypted when traveling, there have been instances of authorities seizing bitcoin because they noticed someone had bitcoin wallet software on their computer which led to the discovery of their stash.
But wait, there's more! It was recently revealed that the IRS has total access to every American citizen's bank account records without a warrant and has been using AI to sift through the data in a flagrant violation of the 4th amendment. Financial surveillance has previously been somewhat limited by how much resources the Government was willing to use on it. It takes manpower to sift through all those suspicious activity reports and pick individuals to target. It is possible to "slip through the cracks" so to speak and avoid much of this surveillance. However, with the recent advancement of AI technology, the government can now use AI to do blanket surveillance on everyone for a fraction of what it would of cost before.
Also the IRS is now trying to go after every online transaction that they possibly can. Covid accelerated the widespread adoption of payment processors such as Paypal and Venmo instead of cash. Many people don't use cash at all anymore. A cashless society is a dream come true for the government, which once again didn't let a good crisis, like Covid, go to waste. In 2021, President Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act into law which included a draconian provision that requires payment processors to start snitching on any American who does more than a cumulative $600 worth of "business" transactions in a year, allowing such dystopian nonsense as getting taxed three times on the same money.
Imagine this, first you make some money and the IRS takes more than a third of it as income tax. Then let's say you spend the rest on a computer and get taxed again with sales tax. Finally, when it's old and you sell it, you will now get taxed again if the purchaser pays you via a digital payment application unless you can prove that the payment wasn't actually business income. This automatic reporting switches the burden of proof from the government to you.
Not only does the government want to steal every dollar they can from people through income taxes, but they don't stop there. They tax them again with the "secret tax" of inflation, by destroying the purchasing power of their dollars over time. Then they want to use that stolen value to fund more theft and violence. Way too much of your precious time that you could be spending with your loved ones is instead spent working to fund this massive extortion racket.
So what do people do when the current system is screwing them over? After a while, they usually get fed up enough to build a new system, which is exactly what Bitcoin is, the basis for an entirely new financial system that is not controlled by any centralized power. If you control the money, you control everything, which is exactly why no single group should have that power. By instead using decentralized permission-less money, you take the immense power of money itself and spread it around so that no one group or individual has too much power. Instead of a central bank controlling the creation of bitcoin, anyone can buy a miner and start producing bitcoin on their own.
Unfortunately, while governments may have mostly ignored Bitcoin in the early days, they certainly view it as a threat now. They continue to view it as a threat even with a "Bitcoin president" in the United States. The Government is much larger than just Trump and there will still be elements within it that are determined to stop Bitcoin, not to mention all the other governments around the world. The State's main objective is controlling the population so that it can continue to extract wealth from it. It knows that if it has control over money itself through central banking and potentially a CBDC, then it has control over everyone that uses that money. Trump has said that there will be no CBDC created during his administration, but I think they may just co-opt an existing stablecoin such as USDC and use it as a de facto CBDC. USDC is already trackable, freezable, and highly liquid so it would serve the same functions as a CBDC. If you have been paying attention, you may have noticed that stablecoin regulation legislation is currently making its way through Congress with bipartisan support. This legislation would legitimize certain dollar based stablecoins that bend the knee to the US Government. One reason why stablecoin legislation has so much support is that widespread adoption of dollar based stablecoins would help maintain the dollar's status as a global reserve currency. Stablecoin issuers serve as a significant buyer of US debt in the form of treasury bonds in order to back their stablecoins. In a time in which countries such as China are no longer purchasing US bonds, this new source of demand is important to ensure dollar dominance and the power that comes with it.
These are the current KYC/AML implications of the GENIUS Act and STABLE Act. Note, it will likely get worse as the bills move towards reconciliation and final passage (they never become more freedom oriented). If you read this and the bills, and still think this is pro-freedom
Many people are hopeful that some kind of comprehensive cryptocurrency legislation besides just stablecoin regulations gets passed during the Trump presidency. It is entirely likely that they will try to put some "common sense" provisions in any bills that address so-called money laundering by "criminals and terrorists" to appease the holdouts and get the bill through Congress. It doesn't matter to politicians that a very small percentage of money laundering actually happens through crypto and instead typically goes through traditional financial institutions. When a bank gets in trouble for helping criminals launder billions of dollars it barely makes the headlines, if some North Korean sends $10 in tether to their mother or something there will probably be congressional hearings about the dangers of cryptocurrency. The Bitcoin and crypto communities need to scrutinize every word of any bills that are put forth, you can't just assume that they will be in our best interest because of all the promises the Trump administration has made.
By offering an alternative to the state controlled dollar based financial system, Bitcoin is a threat to their power and the United States Government knows it. Even the potential that Bitcoin could become a viable alternative global reserve asset is dangerous to them. That is one of the reasons why they want to throw you in jail if you dare to sell people bitcoin without a money transmitting license, but even though they can treat bitcoin as money when prosecuting you, they treat it as property when taxing you. So if you buy some bitcoin, it goes up in value, and you then buy a cup of coffee or anything with that same bitcoin, you are usually required by law to pay a ridiculous amount of capital gains taxes because by buying the coffee you are technically realizing the gains on your "investment". If you have money, like the US dollar, and it goes up in purchasing power, and then you spend those dollars, you aren't expected to pay taxes on the gains you made by holding dollars. You also don't get to claim the losses in your dollar's purchasing power from inflation as a loss on your taxes, even though it technically is a loss. How can bitcoin be simultaneously money and an investment in the eyes of the law depending on the situation? Well, it is based on the classic "because we say so" doctrine. Unfortunately, most people are so brainwashed that they will just accept whatever new law the state forces upon them regardless of whether it violates their natural rights or not. If we don't start to stand up for ourselves and our rights, they will continue to rob us through taxation and inflation until there is nothing left to take. Anybody with any remaining wealth and common sense will probably leave the country and those who are left behind will be starving and pushing around wheelbarrows full of nearly worthless US dollars to buy moldy bread and bugs with.
One of the biggest problems with laws that take away your freedoms in the name of fighting criminals is that the definition of who constitutes a criminal often changes on a whim in a tyrannical society. Unfortunately, I think I know what many Bitcoiners may be thinking when they see things like the Samourai devs getting arrested. That is, "Well I don't mind KYC because I don't have anything to hide, I'm not a criminal, and the number will still go up." However, what if you become a criminal in the future due to the passage of yet another "law"? For example in the 19th and early 20th century anyone could buy cannabis extracts over the counter without a prescription. Fast forward a few decades, and cannabis users were suddenly criminals and outcasts because what was once not illegal became illegal. There are countless other examples of this throughout history and one must always be prepared for potential criminalization by the State.
Another potent example of this is how gold was perfectly legal to own for the entire history of our country until one day the Government outlawed it and seized people's gold. If you owned too much gold, one day you were just someone with nothing to hide and the next day you were a criminal. Eventually, this was reversed, and many people today aren't even aware that it happened, but it did and something similar can happen again with Bitcoin in the future. Using Bitcoin is legal right now and will likely remain so for the entirety of the Trump presidency, but if in the future the state feels threatened enough by it, then they might decide to ban it just as they banned gold in the past. If you have any KYCed bitcoin, you may very well have to surrender it or face imprisonment. This may feel far-fetched and dystopian, but it is definitely within the realm of possibility especially if you consider the fact that there are already people in prison right now for simply selling bitcoin to consenting adults.
Bitcoin is a threat to the State because it is freedom tech, a tool that enables freedom by being a permission-less censorship-resistant store of value. This is empowering for the individual and dis-empowering for the State because no matter who you are, where you live, or what documents you possess, you can use Bitcoin to store and transact value. It can be sent across the globe in minutes for a small fee without any friction. Fiat currency in cash form is also permission-less and censorship-resistant but it is not an ideal store of value because the State can manipulate its value as it sees fit through money printing. The State can get away with taxing the people through inflation as long as people continue to use their fiat currency, so any alternatives such as Bitcoin are a threat to its power and its monopoly on violence that is funded by the ability to create money out of thin air. If you don't take steps to protect yourself and your bitcoin and you continue to use KYC services to buy your bitcoin, then one day you might get a knock on your door from a Government thug telling you to give up your private keys or go to prison. You can try to claim you lost your keys in a boating accident all day long, but I have to wonder if they will give a shit. "Fine, you lost your keys? No problem, just pay us an equivalent amount in fiat to what you lost and you won't go to prison." Store and acquire your bitcoin outside of the financial system, where it belongs. Buying KYCed bitcoin, or bitcoin in an ETF means you lose one of the most important advantages of owning this asset in the first place, the ability to store wealth outside of the state-controlled financial system.
Different governments have various approaches to dealing with the threat of Bitcoin. For instance, the Chinese government simply banned trading it outright. The US Government on the other hand at least tries to keep up the appearance of being a so-called free democratic society, so instead of a ban they are trying to mitigate the permission-less aspect of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies by systematically cutting off ways to use them without first complying with KYC/AML regulations and giving up your privacy. First, they targeted the on and off ramps into crypto (such as localbitcoins and bitcoin ATMs), so it became very hard to turn US dollars into bitcoin or sell bitcoin for US dollars without first KYCing. The Bitcoin community pushed back somewhat on this but not hard enough and it became the norm that on and off ramps in the United States became KYC only. It is only a matter of time until they go after self-hosted wallets and crypto to crypto exchanges and try to force any entities that deal with crypto or bitcoin to register with FinCen and require users to KYC. The results of the US election relieved some of this pressure temporarily but, we are most definitely not out of the woods yet. Personally, I don't know if Donald Trump truly understands or cares why Bitcoin is so important, and I think he just decided it would win him some votes to support it. To him, Bitcoin is probably just another investment.
While the recent shift towards less regulation of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies has been positive, I think an important thing to watch is whether or not the Department of Justice drops the case against the Samourai Wallet developers. One of the most significant recent state attacks on Bitcoin was the arrest of these developers in April 2024. Samourai Wallet was simply a Bitcoin wallet app that had some great privacy features. Privacy is not easy to achieve with Bitcoin because it is a fully transparent ledger. This means that if you buy bitcoin through an exchange or service linked to your real name in any way, anybody can then track exactly what you do with that bitcoin and how much you have. One of Samourai's main features, the one that got them arrested, was a non-custodial mixing service called Whirlpool that allowed users to mix their bitcoin with other users' bitcoin and then receive different bitcoin that wasn't linked to their original bitcoin. The government has gone after cryptocurrency mixing services before, but the main difference between Whirlpool and a mixer like Bitcoin Fog was that Whirlpool is non-custodial. Samourai Wallet never actually took possession of your coins, although they did run a centralized coordinator that matched people together who wanted to mix bitcoin. That wasn't illegal and still isn't regardless of what the prosecutors argue. The US Government is alleging that just because a handful of criminals used the service, that means the developers are guilty of conspiracy to commit money laundering. This is ridiculous. For one, the percentage of illicit funds that went through Whirlpool was minuscule, most people were legitimate users who just wanted to improve their privacy. This is as absurd as arresting the manager of a bank just because a few criminals managed to use the bank to launder money, or arresting a knife manufacturer because some people used their knives to commit crimes.
In fact, recent news has made the prosecution of the Samourai wallet developers look even more absurd. In May 2025, it was revealed that six months prior to the charges being filed, the prosecutors were told by FinCEN employees that the Samourai wallet wouldn't qualify as a money services business requiring a FinCEN license under FinCEN guidance. Despite this knowledge they still decided to move forward with the prosecution. The only reason I can think of for that is the prosecutors cared more about advancing their career than actual justice. They probably wanted to win a big case with media attention to put on their resume, it didn't matter if the defendants were actually guilty or not. The kind of people that go work as prosecutors for the state don't care about little things like morality. Samourai Wallet was one of the very few options people had if they wanted to use Bitcoin privately, and now that it's gone it has left a giant hole in the privacy toolkit for Bitcoiners and created a chilling effect throughout open source software development. There are plenty of people who want to develop privacy software, but not many of them are willing to risk going to prison to do so and can you blame them? If the Samourai devs don't beat this case it will have far-reaching implications, so you might want to donate to their legal defense fund if you care about Bitcoin, privacy, and freedom in general. I would like to mention that a few gigabased devs have forked the Samourai Wallet code to create an alternative called Ashigaru,(always verify wallet software links are legitimate before downloading) but the CoinJoin whirlpool feature that got Samourai in trouble is not included.
There is a way to ensure privacy for Bitcoin without anyone risking prison time, and that is if changes were made at the protocol level to improve privacy. Unfortunately, there is a significant portion of the community that is against making any major changes to the Bitcoin protocol, they believe ossification is the best route. There are some good reasons for this, with any update to the protocol there are risks of unforseen bugs. Some bugs could potentially be catastrophic for the network. The current codebase has been battle-tested and we know it works. However, I think if implemented carefully and slowly, some improvements to the protocol are necessary. We need privacy improvements and we need to try to scale Bitcoin and use it as a more viable medium of exchange rather than just a store of value. The risks of losing an opportunity to truly create a viable alternative to state controlled money outweigh the risks of bugs. Our freedom is at stake.
I've been warning Bitcoin developers for ten years that privacy needs to be provided for at the protocol level. This is the final warning. The clock is ticking.
After years of relentless dedication to improve Bitcoin’s privacy, zkSNACKs, the company pioneering the development of Wasabi Wallet, is shutting down its coinjoin coordination service, effective June 1st, 2024.
Blog post announcement link:
blog.wasabiwallet.io/zksnacks-is-di…
Blog post announcement link:
blog.wasabiwallet.io/zksnacks-is-di…
We are at a crossroads with Bitcoin, there are multiple paths before us. One path is the one in which Bitcoin becomes totally absorbed into the traditional financial system as a heavily regulated investment accessible only to those privileged enough to have the proper paperwork, and taxed to the point where the price appreciation and wealth preservation benefits are neutered. You will be able to buy bitcoin only from licensed AML/KYC-compliant custodians and self-custody will likely be illegal. Perhaps USDC or USDT is co-opted as a de facto CBDC. Another more unlikely path is a total ban on cryptocurrency and bitcoin in the United States and the European Union. If you are unlucky enough in this scenario to have any KYCed bitcoin that the Government knows about, it may be seized from you. If you have custody and you refuse to give up your keys, they could just throw you in prison for disobeying. A third path is the one I hope we take, in which we successfully fight back against government regulations and preserve Bitcoin's ability to be a permission-less store of value and medium of exchange outside of the traditional financial system. The divisions in the space between Bitcoin maximalists and users of other cryptocurrencies needs to be put aside, all lovers of freedom and users of cryptocurrency need to band together and use our influence and wealth to do everything we can to stop the government from destroying our freedom to transact and our right to privacy.
As a group, united, we have the power to make a difference. It is important to remember that the Government is not some all-powerful eye of Sauron, they are just people who think they have some divine right to tell other people what they can and can't do because of some words on a piece of paper. We can peacefully fight back in a myriad of ways and stop this madness in its tracks. I know a lot of people in the community would prefer to just pretend like nothing is happening as long as the number goes up, but even if Bitcoin gets to a million dollars, if we are not free to use it in whatever way we wish, then that would be a phallic victory. Regardless of any regulation that does or does not pass, we must fulfill the mission of Bitcoin and create and participate in a massive circular Bitcoin and crypto economy outside of the fiat system. It needs to be relatively easy for someone to live off of bitcoin alone without any need for KYCed offramps. We need landlords who will rent to plebs for bitcoin, we need plumbers who will fix your toilet for bitcoin, and we need a network of people all over the world who will readily accept and spend bitcoin for products and services. With localbitcoins getting shut down, private word-of-mouth networks using encrypted communications and mesh networking need to develop and grow rapidly. Many people are working on this but we need more and we need it now.
If you believe in the promise of Bitcoin, in the power of money that is separated from the state, and in freedom tech; then it's time to support your local circular Bitcoin economy. The main reason I am writing this is as a call to action for all those who consider themselves aligned with Bitcoin's values, maxis or not. If you buy bitcoin, for whatever purpose, then I implore you to stop buying KYCed bitcoin! There are those of us, myself included, who have taken the plunge and dropped out of the traditional financial system. We earn and save in bitcoin instead of fiat. Some of us don't even have a bank account, let alone a Coinbase account or any account that requires KYC. I have never KYCed and will never KYC. At first, this wasn't because I understood why KYC and Bitcoin were antithetical, but because I was so broke I didn't even have an ID in 2017 when I first got into the space. I had to learn how to acquire BTC without using Coinbase or other KYC exchanges. Eventually, as I learned more about Bitcoin, I realized that my inability to KYC onto Coinbase was actually a positive thing.
Sticking to my principles and trying to live outside of the traditional system does present some challenges from time to time. For now, I do still need access to fiat to pay my rent and other expenses. I can buy gift cards for food and other products, and virtual prepaid debit cards work for my utility bills, but some things still require fiat. Also, to preserve my privacy, I have to first convert the bitcoin into monero, a cryptocurrency with built in privacy, to buy the prepaid debit card. Otherwise, if I pay my power bill or something under my name with it, I am doxxing my Bitcoin wallet. The options for converting bitcoin or other crypto to fiat without KYCing are decreasing every single day. Even the options for simply converting stablecoins to bitcoin without KYCing are also decreasing as more and more exchanges require KYC.
1. Opt Out of the Financial System
• Cryptocurrency: Use decentralized currencies like Bitcoin or Monero to operate outside the traditional banking system. These currencies cut out the middleman and prevent government oversight of your transactions. There are harder to track,
• Cryptocurrency: Use decentralized currencies like Bitcoin or Monero to operate outside the traditional banking system. These currencies cut out the middleman and prevent government oversight of your transactions. There are harder to track,
My local Bitcoin meet-up has been a lifeline, I can go there and often find someone willing to buy bitcoin with cash. If I'm really lucky I will find someone who will buy bitcoin from me regularly. This is never 100% reliable though. There are times, especially during bear markets, when I desperately need fiat and can't find any buyers. It is incredibly frustrating to have bitcoin and still not be able to pay my bills. I heard someone talking at a meetup recently, they were asking questions about non-KYCed versus KYCed bitcoin. They mentioned how fond they were of using Swan to make regular purchases of bitcoin with the classic dollar cost-averaging investing strategy. I get it, it's simple, it's easy. It is way easier to just click a button on your phone to acquire sats than to have to buy it from someone in person with cash. It's important to realize though, that every single time you "smash buy" on your KYCed app, not only are you compromising on your privacy and safety, you are wasting another chance to help a fellow Bitcoiner and strengthen your local circular economy. Also, buying bitcoin on centralized exchanges doesn't create transactions on the blockchain, so it doesn't generate any fees to help sustain the miners who keep the network secure. We have to use the network or it will die.
Imagine if even half of the people who attend my local meeting choose to buy KYC-free bitcoin for cash every time or some of the times they make a purchase instead of using some app, then no one would ever again have to worry about whether or not there would be a buyer when they need to sell. This is the easiest way you can fight back against government overreach, just as the Bitcoin network itself gets stronger and more secure the more people use it, so does the Bitcoin circular economy. If you are in Bitcoin for more than just another investment, and you have the means and ability to purchase bitcoin from a pleb, please do that instead of taking the easy route and clicking buy on some app. Those apps are probably reporting everything you do straight to the government and are another vector for attack from criminals just like traditional CEXs.
The Bitcoin community has a lot of combined economic power, there is no reason why we shouldn't be directing some of that purchasing power inward to strengthen our community. By buying our bitcoin from within our community, the power and reach of our circular economy would increase drastically and be much harder to stop. They can't blacklist your Bitcoin wallet address if they don't know what it is! They can't freeze your bank account if you don't have to use one! Imagine a world in which one could easily live outside of their system, and opt out of their game. I'm not telling you not to pay your taxes, because that can end with you in a prison cell and then you are out of the fight. But you don't have to dox your Bitcoin wallet just to pay taxes on your gains.
Yes, I'm sure it's nice to just set up an automatic dollar cost average weekly or monthly buy on an app or centralized exchange. Just set it and forget it they tell you, it's so easy when you don't even have to think about it! Watch your stack grow and grow over time on your little app. Well, you know what? Screw that! Freedom isn't "easy" or "convenient". Freedom is hard work and often requires some sacrifices. The State loves every time that you pick what's easy and convenient over what is best for your freedom. If Bitcoin is ever going to succeed as an alternative financial system, then it does need to be easier to do more with it than buying some maple syrup or paying your VPN subscription. Since the state is trying to close all the non-kyc on/off ramps, it is imperative that our community provides our own on/off ramps for those who need some of that dirty fiat to survive. Buying your bitcoin from a Bitcoiner in need is a way to advocate for freedom with your purchasing power. It is up to us, if we don't fight back with our collective power, Bitcoin may very well become just another speculative investment and nothing more.
So how do we use the next four years to make the Bitcoin community and network more resilient to potential future attacks from the state? We have to join together to create new and strengthen existing circular economies outside of state control. We need to strengthen Bitcoin's privacy and create new tools to enable people to use Bitcoin as privately as possible. We should support non-kyc services and privacy tools and the people developing and maintaining them. Laws that attack privacy and freedom need to be opposed. Also, we all should be actively participating in the network by running nodes and mining. You may not feel that you, as just one individual, have much power to change things. This is not true at all, if even half of the people in Bitcoin did some or all of the things I am listing, then collectively we have the power to both regain our freedom and protect it.
Six ways you can fight back against the Government's war on Bitcoin and freedom
Buy your bitcoin without KYC from plebs, not exchanges. Every time you buy BTC from an exchange, it is a wasted opportunity. If you are actively stacking sats, whether you are dollar cost averaging regularly, or just buying now and then when you can, then you need to be viewing every purchase as an opportunity to help support the Bitcoin circular economy. If you are buying your bitcoin on a KYCed exchange or service, then you are basically helping the bad guys win. Yes, it can be more inconvenient to buy BTC without KYC, but if you truly believe in the freedom that Bitcoin represents, that's what you should be doing. I can understand if you want to have a KYC stack and a non-KYC stack, especially if you are public about your involvement with Bitcoin, but at least make some of your purchases off the books. This is not legal or tax advice, but as far as I know, it is not illegal to simply buy bitcoin and not report the purchase. It's only when you sell it that you are required to report any capital gains. If you already have any KYCed bitcoin that you have an unrealized loss on, you might want to consider selling it immediately for cash, realizing the loss for your taxes, and then taking that cash and buying non-kyced bitcoin with it. You don't want to wait until you're sitting on a huge gain and it would require a large tax bill to do this, also this wash trading loophole for crypto might not be around forever. You can't do that with stocks, if you sell a stock at a loss and then buy it back within a certain amount of time, it is considered "wash trading", and you are unable to write the loss off your taxes. This is not currently the case for cryptocurrencies, so you might want to take advantage of it.
Spread the word. Normies need to know about the assault on their freedoms, this goes beyond just Bitcoin. You may think you are just one voice, and maybe you don't have thousands of followers on social media, so can you even make a difference in this battle? Absolutely you can, anyone you manage to wake up to this is one more person on our side. It's important that we all use what reach we do have to spread the word about the assault on our rights by governments around the world. I doubt the average person, even if they might own a little bitcoin, even knows what's going on. If they do have an idea, they probably don't realize the full extent of it. You need to tell everyone who will listen to you that governments are attacking our rights and that we are so close to living in a completely dystopian nightmare if we don't do something to stop it now. Explain to your friends and family the truth about what inflation is and what causes it. We must inform people about how the state's assault on financial privacy and freedom affects them personally whether they use Bitcoin or not. We need the support of the average Joe who doesn't necessarily care about Bitcoin but still doesn't like the idea of the Government tracking everything they do. It should creep people out when they are told about these things, because not only is it creepy it just plain wrong. Education is also important because currently many people aren't even aware of what fiat currency is, that the gold standard is gone, or that price inflation isn't just a result of corporate greed. The Federal Reserve means nothing to many people and neither does the advantages of having a decentralized permission-less store of value. This has to change. The Government is getting away with acts of tyranny, like locking up people for writing code, partly because many people outside of our community have no idea this is going on or its implications. We have to try to get the public angry about this! It might be uncomfortable talking about these kinds of issues with normie friends and family (if you still have any normie friends), and many hesitate because they don't want to come across as some kind of radical anti-government conspiracy theorist type. Get over that hesitation though, because this is that important and they need to know the truth. If your community doesn't have a meet up group yet, seriously consider starting one. The more meet up groups we have around the world, the stronger we become. One more thing, if you are onboarding someone to Bitcoin, the time to have a discussion about KYC is before they buy their first bitcoin, not after. The best way to protect them going forward is to convince them not to KYC at all, ever. You can even just sell them their first sats yourself to make it easy for them so they aren't tempted to just buy some on a KYCed exchange for the convenience.
Use your wealth and purchasing power. Use services and products that accept bitcoin payments, and offer your own services and products in return for bitcoin. Donate to pro-bitcoin candidates, open source developers, and legal defense funds. Every time you can, spend bitcoin on products and services. Offer your own products and services in exchange for bitcoin. List items on bitcoin marketplaces. Donate to organizations and campaigns that are fighting for Bitcoin, or developers that are working on it. Bitcoin has generated a lot of wealth for a lot of people, and if it has benefited you, now is the time to give some back to support this fight. If a dev gets arrested, they should know the community is going to rally around them and they are going to have good lawyers. We need to play the game in Washington as well with lobbying and the whole nine yards, yes it is disgusting to participate in this corrupt system to any degree but until a new system takes its place we may have to. Many anarcho-capitalists consider the very act of voting to be immoral, which I get because you are trying to impose your will on others by voting. But they are playing dirty my friends, so we might have to get dirty ourselves.
Donate to Samourai Wallet Developers legal defense fund or p2prights general fund here.
Sign a petition to free Ian Freeman here.
Donate to Tornado Cash Developers legal defense fund here.
Donate to the Human Rights Foundation's Bitcoin Development Fund here
Help normalize privacy by using tools to protect it and encourage family and friends to do the same, a larger herd is a safer herd for everyone. Otherwise the very act of using a privacy tool makes you stand out, negating some of the benefits. We need the protection of the crowd, if everyone is using privacy tools, then it won't be a weird thing to be doing. Just because you may have nothing to hide doesn't mean you shouldn't protect your privacy regardless. For example, a lot of services and websites are blocking VPN users these days, but if the majority of people were all using VPNs, they would be losing a lot of potential users by blocking VPNs and might change their policy. It's also crucial to support open-source software developers who are working on privacy tools. Many people who bought KYCed bitcoin on centralized platforms and then wanted to gain some forward privacy relied on tools such as Samourai Wallet, but if the Government isn't going to allow such tools to operate, it's more important than ever to protect your privacy in other ways. The easiest way to ensure BTC privacy is to stop buying bitcoin on centralized exchanges and services, if you buy bitcoin directly from other plebs and especially home miners, and that bitcoin is never deposited into a KYCed account, you don't even have to worry about trying to use mixers. Another way is to use Monero to break the link between your bitcoin and you. Monero as a tool for spending bitcoin is more valuable than ever before, I believe that Monero has become the de facto privacy layer of Bitcoin. It may be a good strategy to save in bitcoin but also swap some regularly into monero that just sits in a wallet ready to go when you do want to spend, like a private checking account. Having monero ready to go when you do need it protects your privacy more than swapping into it right before you want to spend it.
Work together and join forces, bitcoiners and altcoiners have to work together against the assault on our freedoms. As I mentioned in the beginning, almost everything I have said in this article also applies to Monero (not a shitcoin, thank you) and without default privacy on the Bitcoin layer one, developing Monero's circular economy is equally important. Crypto is a very tribal community, you got your Bitcoin maxis, you got your ETH maxis, and you've got random communities who think their coin is the best coin or whatever. That's all fine and good, but it is past time to work together to stop attacks on crypto, what's bad for crypto overall is usually also bad for Bitcoin. For a long time, many Bitcoin maximalists espoused the opinion that what was bad for altcoins was good for Bitcoin. They would cheer on the SEC when it went after altcoin projects. Some of them thought that because bitcoin wasn't considered a security it was "safe" and money would just flow out of targeted altcoins into bitcoin. Cheering on tyrannical government intervention because it might have the side effect of making your bags go up is antithetical to everything Bitcoin stands for. Many people tried to warn them, that Bitcoin wasn't by any means "safe" just because it wasn't a security, and that the government would find other ways to attack Bitcoin outside of securities laws. Now that scenario has played out with Samourai Wallet and it's time for maximalists to hold their nose and ally themselves with the rest of crypto against the government's war on crypto. Apparently this is taking some time to sink in for some people, like the host of a Bitcoin maxi podcast I won't name. They were saying that they would rather elect Elizabeth Warren over John Deaton because he is a "shitcoiner". When I heard this, I was flabbergasted. This person was willing to put Bitcoin in more danger from an avowed anti-crypto politician like Warren just so they didn't have to support a shitcoiner who was also pro-Bitcoin. I mean come on, can you get over your hatred of shitcoiners for five minutes please! If we don't all work together then we are going to be destroyed eventually. There is no more time for infighting and pseudo-religious maximalism. If you hate shitcoins, repeat after me, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend". I don't care if you are a complete ponzi-shilling ugly NFT bag-holding pump and dumper, if you are going to actually help stop this madness then I will work with you all day long. Working together includes voting for pro-crypto candidates regardless of your views on shitcoins or voting. Although like Benjamin Franklin said, democracy is just two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner, we still might as well cast self-defense votes on candidates that are pro-crypto.
Mine bitcoin and run your own node. You don't have to have a bunch of fancy hardware to start helping secure and decentralize the network by mining and running a node. Anyone can start mining with a $200 investment and you can run a node on most computers as long as you have a 24/7 internet connection. The importance of plebs mining cannot be understated, mining centralization is a huge problem in Bitcoin, with most of the hashpower located in huge corporate mining farms that can easily be co opted or shut down by governments. It's much harder to stop tens of thousands of small miners than one big mining farm. You can solo mine and it is like having a machine that prints lotto tickets for you every 10 minutes, except the lotto tickets have decent odds. If you win a block you will earn more than 3 bitcoin from the block reward and transaction fees. Or if you prefer you can mine in a pool and split the rewards with every other miner in the pool if the pool wins a block. By running your own node and connecting to it whenever you use Bitcoin, you can verify your own transactions and ensure your IP address isn't captured whenever you send a transaction. Every node that people start up also helps make the Bitcoin network more decentralized and harder to stop. It's not enough to just "hodl", we need everyone who cares to actively participate in securing the network.
Start Mining!
When I first started writing this article, things were looking a lot more dire for Bitcoin than they are today. We have a pro-Bitcoin president for the first time in history and our Congress is much more pro-Bitcoin than it was as well. Politicians will say anything to get elected though, and it's important to remember that. At the end of the day, Trump and other pro-Bitcoin candidates are still politicians and statists who probably don't give a shit about your freedom beyond winning your votes. Even if Trump follows through on all of the promises he's making regarding Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, it will only be a temporary reprieve in the overall war. The state knows Bitcoin is a threat to it, and whatever administration comes after Trump might not be nearly as friendly to the industry. So if the assault on our financial freedoms does cool off with a Trump presidency, it will be an opportunity to strengthen our community, shore up our defenses, and ensure that a strong circular economy is up and running outside of the traditional financial system. This way when the state inevitably attacks us again, whether it be in 4 years or 10 years, we will be ready for them. I know it can be tempting to just sit back, watch your bags grow in value, and let other people worry about fighting for freedom. However, we need your help, we need every single person's help that we can get or we will lose. You don't have to be fighting all day every day, but do something! Many of the things on the list above are very simple for anyone to do and don't require much effort, but if enough people do them it can make a significant impact. We have the power, we just have to use it. Will you join the fight for freedom?
