Let's take a look at the section of Congress who appears to be totally against Bitcoin privacy of any kind.

Late yesterday afternoon news broke of the House Financial Services Committee Democrats' new crypto legislation. First things first I want to acknowledge the monster in the room concerning this and don't worry this legislation is already dead on arrival. Moves like this are sadly to be expected in the coming months as these bills are introduced with the Members knowing it doesn't have the slightest chance to get a vote but instead is done as a messaging thing that they can point at.

Who is Behind This Legislation

Another HUGE thing to highlight is Rep. Sean Casten and his ties to the crypto industry. Guess whose brother was on his staff and served as a Legislative assistant?

None other than SBF's brother Gabe! While Rep. Casten says that Gabe played no role in his crypto views or did anything in that realm Gabe was able to use his relationship with Casten to help his brother out whether anyone wants to admit to it or not. I would bet that the contacts that Gabe had were a huge boost for his brother.

Looking at who else has already come out and been in support of this legislation we have the expected actors, Reps. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), and Bill Foster (D-Ill.). Having worked or currently work on the other side of the aisle of these people it's to be expected. In particular, Rep. Sherman is someone who truly I do not understand how he got his job and more importantly what technology did to him to hurt him. The guy is consistently against cutting-edge innovation and made what I find to be the funniest comment about crypto years ago.

> He asked a witness testifying before a Committee why we don't "just flip the switch and turn off crypto".

I wish I had made up that quote but sadly.... nope.

What Would This Do

While the full text has not been released as far as I can tell, I also cant even find a circulating draft so it is clear they left this on the Dem side exclusively, the bill is rather straightforward. The legislation would place a 2-year "prohibition" on financial services (CEXs) from dealing with crypto that has been funneled through mixer.

During the two year "prohibition" the SEC, CFTC, and Justice Department are required to study the use of mixers and what role they play in helping to facilitate illicit finance. Below is Casten's comment.

> "The presumption should be that these are money laundering channels," Casten said, unless sufficient audit work shows otherwise. "Let's go through and get that cleaned up and fixed."

Why This is a Stupid Waste of Time

Within the released text this bill is only going to affect entities that the US government is already monitoring/controlling. This legislation further fails to address what if some of your BTC had previously been through a mixer? Would Coinbase or whoever else was in possession of it have to divest it and then buy "new" BTC that wasn't touched by a mixer? We also already have the Justice Department working with numerous blockchain analysis companies that are able to track BTC that has passed through mixers. We literally have these answers yet this group of Congressman either A) are not being kept in the loop by their staff or B) just ignoring what we know to push an agenda that is knownly NOT POPULAR with people.

The executive summary here is three parts.

Number one: The bill they are trying to pass is dead in the water (at least as long as there is a republican-controlled House, although it goes on to show that if Democrats take control of it, they will use it to completely destroy crypto privacy).

Number two: This bill was co-authored by SBF's brother. Let that sink into you for a second. It underscores why SBF deserves to rot in jail for an eternity. He does not care about crypto, but he is for "Big Government".

The third and most important thing is that the lawmakers is just going to automatically assume that mixing == money laundering and not change their opinion about it, as if a bunch of stuborn 10-year olds are writing the laws! It doesn't matter what sort of explanation or analysis you give them, it's "guilty unless proven innocenent" and it fits into their sinister plan to strip every crypto user of financial privacy worldwide.

Look at this Google Groups discussion on the bitcoin-dev mailing list: https://groups.google.com/g/bitcoindev/c/9bL00vRj7OU

It was started by Jameson Lopp (there are reports about him executing a proof of concept flaw on the testnet that has apparently called what people are describing "havoc"? But it's testnet so it's not supposed to have any value attached to it.)

Hi all,

I'd like to open a discussion about testnet3 to put out some feelers on potential changes to it. First, a few facts:

1. Testnet3 has been running for 13 years. It's on block 2.5 million something and the block reward is down to ~0.014 TBTC, so mining is not doing a great job at distributing testnet coins any more.

2. The reason the block height is insanely high is due to a rather amusing edge case bug that causes the difficulty to regularly get reset to 1, which causes a bit of havoc. If you want a deep dive into the quirk: https://blog.lopp.net/the-block-storms-of-bitcoins-testnet/

3. Testnet3 is being actively used for scammy airdrops; those of us who tend to be generous with our testnet coins are getting hounded by non-developers chasing cheap gains.

4. As a result, TBTC is being actively bought and sold; one could argue that the fundamental principle of testnet coins having no value has been broken.

This leads me to ponder the following questions, for which I'm soliciting feedback.

1. Should we plan for a reset of testnet? If so, given how long it has been since the last reset and how many production systems will need to be updated, would a reset need to be done with a great deal of notice?

2. Is there interest in fixing the difficulty reset bug? It should be a one liner fix, and I'd argue it could be done sooner rather than later, and orthogonal to the network reset question. Would such a change, which would technically be a hard fork (but also arguably a self resolving fork due to the difficulty dynamics) necessitate a BIP or could we just YOLO it?

3. Is all of the above a waste of time and we should instead deprecate testnet in favor of signet?

- Jameson

Consensus seems to be in favor of doing something about testnet. What exactly, nobody has agreed on yet. I have also made my opinions in there that testnet should be reset.

So apparently Block, the payments company launched by Jack Dorsey among others and owns Cash App, is in big trouble with regulators because they did not follow compliance practices which ultimately resulted in funds from Cash App and its payment processor ending up into criminal hands.

The word on the street:

United States federal prosecutors are reportedly probing Jack Dorsey’s fintech company Block, Inc. after a whistleblower surfaced documents alleging ongoing and widespread compliance violations at the firm’s payment arms Square and Cash App.

A former Block employee provided prosecutors from the Southern District of New York with documents allegedly showing that Square and Cash App processed thousands of transactions for users in countries subject to economic sanctions as well as crypto transactions for terrorist groups, NBC News reported on May 1

Roughly 100 pages of the documents were provided to NBC News, which reported many transactions were in small dollar amounts involving entities in countries subject to United States economic sanctions, including Iran, Russia, Cuba, and Venezuela.

The whistleblower said that most of the transactions discussed with prosecutors — which involved credit card, fiat, and Bitcoin
 transactions — were not reported to the government.

Block did not correct its processes when it was alerted to the alleged breaches of compliance, the former employee alleged.

“From the ground up, everything in the compliance section was flawed,” they said.

“It is led by people who should not be in charge of a regulated compliance program.”
A second anonymous source with “direct knowledge” of Block’s internal systems also confirmed the whistleblowers’ allegations to NBC News.

Edward Siedle — a former Securities and Exchange Commission lawyer who represents the whistleblower — said it was his understanding from the documents that compliance breaches were “known to Block leadership and the board in recent years.”

So as you can see, apparently Block was doing some shady stuff and some employee became tired enough of it to become a whistleblower for the government.

It is unlikely that Block is not going to face any punishments despite their spokesperson rambling about how they are regulatorily compliant.

Once upon a time, Wasabi Wallet was one of the most formidable, if not the most private wallet the Bitcoin community had to offer. It ran your bitcoins through WabiSabi, a CoinJoin protocol, and it "mixed" (if you want to call it that) your coins for you and gave you clean coins. Just like many of these mixers that you see advertised around here.

Unfortunately, Wasabi, like many other mixers and coinjoiners, had one inherent and fatal flaw - It ran a centralized coordinator. It was not decentralized at all.

This means that not only can law enforcement destroy a coordinator, but the coordinator itself can sabotage it's own users.

This is exactly what happened with Wasabi Wallet. While zkSNACKs, the owner of the coordinator, was busy preparing its draft announcing its intent to blacklist UTXOs that it doesn't like, the community was aloof of this news.

Of course, they were very angry when they found out about this, because there were no criteria for blacklisting a UTXO, not to mention the entire concept of blacklisting was unethical in the first place, so that basically meant that zkSNACKs could make up the rules on the fly for what UTXOs they would like to block.

Believe it or not, this is old news. It happened 4 years ago.

Since then, a couple of sockpuppets have taken it upon themselves to defend Wasabi of any wrongdoing, justifying harvesting your UTXO set for this purpose while decrying competing wallets doing the same. You can find these accounts on many platforms, like X and bitcointalk.

Fast forward to today, and now Wasabi announced that no American is allowed to use the Wasabi wallet or access their website.

I am sure you are shaking your head at this point thinking "but I thought only exchanges do that kind of stuff!" Well, that was the case for all KYC-verified services for a long time, but at least they had the excuse of obeying the law. Now though, even anonymous services are hiding from US users, not out of legal obligation, but out of fear. It has never been illegal for Americans to own bitcoin, even though the government wants a tax cut out of all bitcoin transactions at this point, which is not hard to see.

I actually think nopara73 (Wasabi founder) ran away from Wasabi Wallet because he saw this coming. I guess he didn't want his reputation to be further in the mud or something.

Do not use any bitcoin wallet that geoblocks its users. Bitcoin is a global, permissionles, decentralized, P2P electronic cash.

Reddit has incorrectly reported that Stripe is enabling crypto payments for all customers (i.e. people who buy stuff). This is false. The actual news from many outlets including TechCrunch:

Stripe, the fintech giant, continues to inch its way back into the cryptocurrency market. On Thursday the company announced that it would let customers accept cryptocurrency payments, starting with just one currency in particular, USDC stablecoins, initially only on Solana, Ethereum and Polygon. This will be the first time that Stripe has taken crypto payments since 2018, when it dropped support for Bitcoin due to it being too unstable.

Stripe in 2022 tried its first reentry into the crypto market when it announced payouts (but not payments) in USDC, with Twitter as its marquee customer for the service. Thursday’s news has no customer names attached to it.

That's right, this USDC support is only for the Stripe merchants themselves. It is not for the consumers at all. In fact, nothing has changed for them, it is still business as usual.

Although, I won't deny that it would be a coup if you could suddenly start paying for subscriptions via Stripe using crypto.

I mean, who can possibly forget this moment if you have seen it on television.

Clearly the guys on the left and right of the Bitcoin Sign Guy are either smirking or staring disapprovingly at it, which makes it all the more comical.

Well recently, it has been put on auction, and the winning bid was for 16BTC, which is about $1,000,000 in US dollars.

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/04/25/buy-bitcoin-sign-sold-for-over-1m-at-auction/

I hope the buyer enjoys his new ownership of this piece of Bitcoin history.

Never be fooled by the casinos from the 1xbet family. They spend a lot of money advertising underground (money that is stolen from players after they win a betslip) and will let you lose but they won't let you win.

1xbet is the parent company of 1xbit who does the exact same thing except with fiat. There is a reason why they are banned all over England and other countries, and why 1xbit is shadow-banned on Bitcointalk.

Every once in a while we see a complaint about how somebody got scammed on 1xbit. So, you must always show this topic to your friends if they try to use this casino.