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18 sats \ 8 replies \ @0xbitcoiner 25 Apr \ on: FBI warns all Americans to stop using KYC-free bitcoin services bitcoin
what are money transmitting services ?
For a while I had the impression that you are only a money transmitting service if you accept currency from person A and give it to person B. But that seems to be changing. In their prosecution of Samourai, they indict Samourai as an unlicensed money transmitter for (among other things) running the Ricochet service, which is just an inbox where people send signed "raw" bitcoin transactions that Samourai broadcasts at random future times (they do this to disrupt timing analysis and to confuse chain analysis software). If merely "sending someone else's signed bitcoin transaction to the network" (!) counts as transmitting money, then every bitcoin node that relays blocks or mempool transactions also counts as a money transmitter. So if you've ever used a wallet that doesn't do KYC on you and does somehow manage to get your bitcoin transactions into bitcoin, it looks like the FBI is warning you to stop.
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This is clearly an attempt to scare people, but it's not working. You can't lump everything together. And if I compile my own wallet, do I have to do KYC on myself? Ahahahah
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This is clearly an attempt to scare people, but it's not working. You can't lump everything together. And if I compile my own wallet, do I have to do KYC on myself? Ahahahah
I think they would go after any node that relays your transactions and charge them with transmitting money sans KYC
Well, I don't think they would do that, but I wonder if they want node operators to worry about a dragnet operation -- "if I keep running this node they're coming after me!"
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This sounds like a major hurdle to implement. It's only a matter of time before miners are forced to comply with KYC regulations. :)
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I’ve been talking this over with my wife the past couple of hours. We’re going to keep doing what we’re doing with our node. We all knew this day would come, albeit not so soon.
Let’s assume they are going to do what they threaten here and every node operator is at risk. My big concern is my family. Let’s just say for fun that a node was being operated out of a house and there was a clear operator, but the other adults in the house knew about it. Would they be implicated? If so, could that person go on an old platform like Facebook or twitter and preemptively implicate their whole friend list in a way that’s documented? Getting ratted out early and debating the fourth amendment seems more appealing than to me than seeing my wife, who doesn’t operate the node at all, in prison with our kids all alone.
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It means IaaS like Hetzner are soon going to follow suit, I fear.
(and actually enforce their ToS)
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The main charge is money laundering via whirlpool
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