10 sats \ 12 replies \ @TonyGiorgio OP 10 Jan \ parent \ on: What is fedimint to you? ecash
Are you aware that ecash has some of the best privacy guarantees you can get such that no federation can be aware of who you are or what transactions you were apart of?
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no federation can be aware of who you are
That isn't true though because they can do shotgun KYC
We've been informed by a European court that they suspect a terrorist is using our fedimint service. Accordingly, all user funds have been confiscated by the government, and withdrawals on this website are henceforth permanenty disabled. If you are a legitimate user, you may visit amlcommittee.com.eu to request your funds. Requests must include identifying information and an explanation about why you were using a known money laundering tool. Requests will be reviewed by the court's appointed committee and further investigation may be performed on a case by case basis. Innocent users will have their funds restored pending the committee's approval. Investigations may take up to 90 days and will be very thorough, prepare your anus.
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That isn't true though because they can do shotgun KYC
And miners can request KYC information to be submitted alongside their transaction too, but you don't see that happening.
Hell, even on ethereum they can't even enforce all of the permissioned validators to comply with US sanctions law to block transactions. Why? Because it is a distributed network that requires majority consensus to process transactions. It is not a custodial system and neither is fedimint.
Your satire humor is funny and all but look at it from a technical perspective about how it operates compared to other networks.
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And miners can request KYC information to be submitted alongside their transaction too, but you don't see that happening
Not yet
I imagined what that would be like, so if you like some speculative fiction here it is
It's 2026. The feds decree that bitcoin miners and fedimint operators are both money transmitters whose customers are "anyone sending bitcoin using that fedimint or in that miner's block." Therefore, they cannot lawfully mine bitcoin or run fedimints without obtaining kyc data from senders. When the law takes effect, alas, 10% of bitcoin users, including fedimint users, have not adopted wallets that submit kyc data to miners and fedimint operators alongside transactions.
Mining pool operators in the USA therefore begin excluding such transactions from their blocks, and fedimint operators transfer full control of all user funds to new multisigs where none of the keyholders are known/public residents of the USA (because very few operators are willing to get arrested, and the few who are, are ejected from the multisig by the other multisig keyholders on the grounds that it would be disruptive to their operations for a critical team member and keyholder to get arrested and not be able to sign transactions anymore). Mining pools in other jurisdictions show a marked increase in profitability since they are mining more transactions than those in the USA, and individual miners begin pointing their hashrate at the more profitable pools.
Fedimint usage also continues unabated, with the sole tradeoff being, multisig keyholders are only people who (1) don't plan to travel to the USA, where they are criminals, or (2) think they can keep their keyholder status secret from the USA government.
The percentage of hashrate owned by USA mining pools drops, and bitcoin continues operating as usual, with no KYC requirements. Basically, mining pools and fedimint operators all effectively left the USA or went underground, but regular users of both systems are unaffected.
Does that sound like a plausible scenario to you?
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No
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Such speculation is reasonable, however it fails the litmus test: Regulators only agree to regulate they actually can affect.
Its similar to the old lawyer trope of: Never ask a question in court that you don't already know the answer to...
The point being, is that Regulators may in fact love to enact such rules, but they won't simply because the outcome of having vast amounts of non-compliance with no effective method to enforce the rules are of greater damage to the regulatory regime than finding another approach to extract their rents.
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that's a big "if"
Also...
This week in global cybercrime: twin takedowns by Interpol and FBI ...[The] takedown happened on Tuesday and arrested three individuals: two in Indonesia and one in Japan. ... source
A geographically distributed multisig can be taken down by geographically cooperative police operations
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stackers have outlawed this. turn on wild west mode in your /settings to see outlawed content.