The Treasury Is Expanding the Patriot Act to Attack Bitcoin Self Custody

Summary

Marty's Bentvia The RageWe warned a couple of months ago when the Trump administration's "Crypto Brief" was released that there was some language in the brief that advised the government to expand the Patriot Act to account for digital assets. Well, it looks like FinCen and the Treasury have been working on guidelines and a rough outline is shared above courtesy of The Rage, and they are absolutely horrid.It seems that FinCen and the Treasury are preparing to outlaw the use of CoinJoin, atomic swaps, single address use, and transaction broadcast timing delays. All of which are common best use practices that I would recommend any bitcoiner leveraging self-custody practice. This is an all out attack on financial privacy within bitcoin. If enacted, any user who leverages these tools will be flagged as a suspicious, any attempts to send a UTXO that has touched any of these tools will be rejected by regulated services, and could potentially be sent to prison.This is an absurd affront to common sensibilities and freedom in the digital age. The fact that they want to prevent people from using single addresses for individual UTXOs is patently absurd. Not only is it a massive infringement on privacy, but it makes bitcoin usage less economically efficient and degrades the security of every bitcoiner. Loading up a single address with too many UTXOs degrades the entropy of a public-private key pair and makes it easier to brute force a user's private key.Instead of expanding the Patriot Act, it should be abolished. Instead of trying to eliminate financial privacy for the 99.9% of law abiding citizens in this country, the government should be actively trying to foster an environment in which it can be improved. The proposed solutions will do nothing but put good Americans in harm's way and degrade the security of their savings.We shouldn't have to live in a world where standards cater to the lowest common denominator, in this case criminals, and make things worse off for the over...