We all need to be very aware that what Snowden is describing here is not some distant dystopian future. It's our dystopian reality.
In May, Elliptic, together with researchers from MIT and IBM, developed a dataset to identify "the shape of money laundering" on the blockchain.
This dataset attempts to predict money laundering activity that has "not yet been labeled" by distinguishing between what the dataset defines as "anomalous signatures" and Bitcoin transfers between "licit services".
Falling out of these clusters deemed normal by intelligence financed corporations already leaves you penalized. Avoid KYC services? Flagged. Can't tie your transactions to a bank account? Flagged. Frequent user of coinjoins? Flagged.
You are already being debanked because a computer program has decided that you are laundering money – not because you did something illegal, but because your transactions are deemed abnormal – and you have no legal recourse as suspicious activity reports swear financial institutions to absolute secrecy.
It's the full on criminalization of privacy in finance. The future is here, and it's Orwellian.
Bitcoin is here to stay!
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Maybe Bitcoin should join the fight with Monero, can't they add ring signatures?
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The answer is simple. Keep your transactions off chain.
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What's our response to this? We need everyone using Bitcoin to understand all the problems with consolidating UTXO's, using sovereign LN channels, coin joining and noKYC. Does a covenant soft fork give us all the privacy improvements we all need?
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We need to collaborate on doing and supporting more open hardware and avoid being in that situation he mentioned about having to click accept the terms or cannot use the device.
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Circular economies solve many of these problems.
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You can do all that, but will be worthless and useless if in the end you go and vote and still obeying govs... Only using Bitcoin IS NOT ENOUGH.Bitcoin is just a part of your liberation...
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