Slowly but surely, Lummis & Co. are starting to get it, but they’re not anywhere near close enough to fulfilling their oaths.
First of all, there is no such thing as a “Crypto Asset” this is a portmanteau a made up phrase borne of backward analogies computer illiterates have constructed to give their arguments form.
As soon as anyone says the phrase "Crypto Assets", you know you’re dealing with an ignoramus, in the strict Latin sense of that word: “Know Nothing”.
Users who have control over private keys do not have “custody” of Bitcoin. The word “custody” is another analogy used to encapsulate the idea that these users don’t have to ask another person to sign a message on their behalf.
No one “custodies” Bitcoin at all; there are no “Bitcoins”.
You can blame the idea that Bitcoins are like actual coins from the retarded use of the gold coin images that have polluted the minds of politicians and many others. This money imagery is the cause of the widespread confusion over what Bitcoin actually is, which is not money, but a messaging and database system.
It is simply not true that “transactions are processed on the user’s local device”. Bitcoin signatures do not require a device at all, and can be made with a pencil an piece of graph paper.
Lummis & Co. do not know this, because they are computer illiterates. Most people are, and that's OK. What is NOT OK is telling American citizens what they can do with their writing of math. That's unacceptable at any time and anti-American by default.
If they knew this fact about what Bitcoin actually is, that it is a form of writing (math), they would understand that the devices people use are mere conveniences and not prerequisites to signing messages before being sent to the Bitcoin network for addition to the chain of blocks, which does require a computer.
The fact that a computer is required to send messages is also protected speech under the Constitution, lest anyone believe that the use of a computer changes the nature of the basic act.
For Lummis & Co. because Bitcoin wallets look just like their Bank of America apps, they cannot conceive of what is actually going on under the hood of a Bitcoin “wallet” app, and how radically different these apps are from banking apps.
They see the conventions used by Bitcoin “wallets” including a chronological list of “transactions” and a “balance”, without any understanding of of what is happening in the background. They think the analogies are the reality. That is not so.
For all her many faults, Lummis is trying her best to get to grips with Bitcoin. She has not doubled down on some of her more outrageous and insulting ideas (
https://medium.com/@beautyon_/unpacking-the-lummis-gillibrand-responsible-financial-innovation-act-6128e6db6a68), has abandoned them in a timely manner of her own accord (apparently), and so she should be applauded and helped correct her thinking, since this appears to be possible, so that she can transform herself into an ally of American citizens from being a leader in the ranks of the bitter enemies of, "We the People".
It is not true that Bitcoin’s rebellious, DIY, mid-seventies-like, Cypherpunk era is over.
The exact opposite is true.
Bitcoin was written after the mid-seventies Home Computer revolution took place and “ended”, putting the power of software development in everyone’s hands at a cost of essentially zero. Before that, to develop and run software, you had to book time on a large UNIX machine at a University, and that was only possible if you were enrolled as a student at an institution with a computer. Computer illiterates don’t know any of this important context and history.
Bitcoin was written on widely available, ubiquitous commodity computer equipment available from Walmart to Radio Shack. It was written in programming languages that were free and on operating systems that came for free with the machines they ran on. None of this was true previously; the cost of a commercial software license for AT&T UNIX was $30,000, out of reach for all but companies and educational institutions. Even the single user license of $150, whilst not an impediment for the die hard, was eliminated when Bitcoin was written by GNU. Universal availability of computing made the software development revolution possible. It meant that anyone anywhere could write software without permission, admission to University or supervision of any kind, and then they could distribute to anyone anywhere it without permission at a cost of near zero.
In the early days, software was distributed by mail order on floppy discs. Then it was distributed by BBS systems over telephone calls modem to modem. Now it is distributed over the Internet, for free. The commodification of computers and elimination of the cost of tooling to write software, remote connecting and expanded access to every form of intellectual pursuit in software from game development to book writing and research.
Can you see what’s coming next?
Universal access to programmable synthetic money in the form of Bitcoin will mean that anyone anywhere will be using Bitcoin. Nation States, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds’ are irrelevant to this, and will continue to be downstream of the innovators from the public, just as they were and are with the Internet, email and Bitcoin. Nation states, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds did not develop Bitcoin (or email or the web), and could not have developed it. They could not have imagined any of them, nor had they the skill to implement it. (See Paul Krugman’s predictions about the Internet being no more important than the Fax machine, or his most recent predictions about Bitcoin. What a joke!) The members of their impotent class will be, at best, peers on the network, like everyone else is. They are no longer special, privileged or required. At all.
That’s the whole point of Bitcoin, in case you didn’t know.
Jeremy Alaire famously said many years ago of the Bitcoin ecosystem, “It’s time for the grown ups now”. He was 100% wrong, and ended up peddling altcoins and unethical stablecoins because the immovable and immutable object “Bitcoin”, resists partially informed incomers with their clever plans to improve it. This feature of Bitcoin (and it is a feature, not a flaw) is what is currently being missed by FinTech bros, WallStreet Wonks, tenacious tangentials and other people who have just come to the ideas that spawned Bitcoin; reality no longer operates by proclamation of the self anointed.
It is a good thing that a small number of Americans are finally capitulating to Bitcoin, however in addition to capitulation, their parochial “Policeman of the World”, “my way or the highway”, “our institutions and governance models are the only possible way forward” mindset is best abandoned by them; no one on Earth wants to hear it, everyone is fed up with them, Bitcoin can’t hear it, and all real Bitcoiners ignore it.
The subconscious urge to control everything is strong in many characters; this is why rebellion is cast in a negative light by Statists. Change is not rebellion. Change is the essential process of all existence. Change is coming to what money is and how it is mediated, and in this change, the old players are removed from management, oversight, design or input of any kind. They are excluded. They are exsanguinated.
Yesterday’s men can’t conceive of any power outside of the familiar structures from their past; “the big boys” will always be the great powers. They don’t seem to realize (why should they?) that Bitcoin is sitting on top of something that has already completely eroded the power of many venerated “staple of modern life” institutions to great effect and universal benefit
Journalism: Junked
Music Distribution: Marginalized, Decimated
Publishing: Pulverized
Dictionaries: Destroyed
Telephone Companies: Trashed, Castrated
Censorship: Cauterized and Circumvented
Government Postal Services: Gutted, Piked, Slaughtered
Only the most naïve of people thinks the entry of Nation states, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds as peers on the network abolishes Bitcoin’s rebellious, DIY, mid-seventies-like, cypherpunk era. On the contrary; the spread of Bitcoin makes Cypherpunk and the culture of rebellion the norm. It is Cypherpunks that are the innovators, and they’re continuing to prove it. Look at how one software company, Blockstream, run by a Cypherpunk, is providing financialization services to a nation state that were unimaginable before Bitcoin. All of this is obvious to anyone who can think.
The Cypherpunks and their direct descendants are building the new companies, software and services that cannot be revoked or “supervised” by outsiders, cowards, Statists, carpetbaggers, thieves, Socialists, and other human moths attracted to the bright flame of Bitcoin.
Look at Nostr for another example. While everyone downstream of Twitter as consumers complained bitterly about it, one man decided to offer a possible solution to it. No one saw it coming, or even thought it possible. Now, like it or not, an ecosystem has the very real potential (because it is real) of emerging on it, where the people using it cannot be told what to do or say.
This is exactly analogous with what happened with Bitcoin. Wall Street Wonks complaining bitterly about “the corrupt system” could not imagine Bitcoin, and then Bitcoin…existed, and now it cannot be stopped, like it or not, and its nature will not be changed because Bitcoin’s rebellious, DIY, mid-seventies-like, Cypherpunk era is not only not over but will never end. This is a safe prediction to make; look at how features of the web are developed, through the IETF process. The people at the coal face are doing the hard work of fundamental design, and corporations have nothing to do with it beyond paying the salaries of the designers; the “big players” don’t have a say in how things actually work.
Apple learned this the hard way by trying to introduce a new protocol called “AppleTalk.” Launched in the mid-1980s, AppleTalk was designed to facilitate networking in Apple environments, allowing Macintosh computers to connect and share resources seamlessly. Despite its initial success within Apple’s ecosystem, AppleTalk struggled to gain broader acceptance due to the dominance of other networking protocols like Ethernet and TCP/IP. Over time, as the industry standard shifted towards TCP/IP, Apple gradually phased out AppleTalk, officially discontinuing support for it in 2009. “2009”...a special year, wasn't it? This is exactly like Wall Street trying to “take over” Bitcoin and change it. It cannot happen, and there will be no “The Grownups are Here Now” moment in Bitcoin. History indicates this strongly, but you have to know your history in order to understand this.
These are just a few of many examples showing the nature of the change and who is being excluded as a consequence. Everyone who has the power to create software and services is fed up to the back teeth with being told what they are, what they can do, what they can say, how they must implement software tools, and being on the bottom rung of the perverted “Society” where Nation states, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds have control over what money is and how it is allowed to move.
That’s over chaps.
The masses using Bitcoin at every level are together far more powerful than any Nation state, hedge fund or sovereign wealth fund. The masses using Bitcoin as money is an absolutely inevitable outcome, and it will happen on the terms of the Cypherpunks, not Nation states, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds.
INGSOCs fatal conceit is the belief that legislation solves problems. It doesn't all this nonsense means is that manufacturers will leave INGSOC and CALISOC so they can produce their goods in free countries.
It doesn't matter if it is bad practice that bad passwords are shipped with goods; what matters is the principle of the State telling people how they should run their companies, down to the technical details of password strength.
Anyone who calls themselvs a "Bitcoiner" cannot be for this. If they are, they are painfully naïeve, believing that these same computer illiterate geriatrics are not coming to Bitcoin to demand that the 21,000,000 limit be increased, "For the good of Society".
There are not enough hours in the day, days in the year, or years to keep teaching these fundamental principles over and over to stupid, naïeve, ignorant dullards. This is why Bitcoin needed to be written, so that the law is laid down once and forevermore in a way that cannot be undone.
Once the money supply is constrained, the State will not be able to force you to set passwords.
YES, that is the true purpose of Bitcoin, Droogie!
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↓ FROM BRUCE SCHNEIER, BITCOIN DENIER ↓
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The UK Bans Default Passwords
The UK is the first country to ban default passwords on IoT devices.
On Monday, the United Kingdom became the first country in the world to ban default guessable usernames and passwords from these IoT devices.
UK becomes first country to ban default bad passwords on IoT devices
Britain now has IoT hardware standards that ban weak or easily guessable default passwords such as “admin” or “12345." Manufacturers are also...
Unique passwords installed by default are still permitted.
The Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Act 2022 (PSTI)
https://archive.is/wip/vIYbQ
introduces new minimum-security standards for manufacturers, and demands that these companies are open with consumers about how long their products will receive security updates for.
The UK may be the first country, but as far as I know, California is the first jurisdiction. It banned default passwords in 2018, the law taking effect in 2020.
TechCrunch
California passes law that bans default passwords in connected devices | TechCrunch
Good news! California has passed a law banning default passwords like "admin," "123456" and the old classic "password" in all new consumer electronics
This sort of thing benefits all of us everywhere. IoT manufacturers aren’t making two devices, one for California and one for the rest of the US. And they’re not going to make one for the UK and another for the rest of Europe, either. They’ll remove the default passwords and sell those devices everywhere.
Another news article.
EDITED TO ADD (5/14): To clarify, the regulations say that passwords must be either chosen by the user, or else unique to the device. If unique preset passwords are used, they can’t be produced by an algorithm that makes them easily guessable. Here is the actual language of the regulation.
https://archive.is/UtSRe
It would be a good idea to for “Bitcoiners” to buy a map, and study what “Jurisdiction” means.
Whenever you hear an American say, “things are bad in Bitcoin”, several things are inevitably true.
They think America and its “SEC” are the only powers on Earth.
They refuse to name the enemy that causes their fear; “The State”.
People like this can never solve problems because they’re psychologically incapable of imagining a world where their beloved State is smaller.
These people were never truly aligned with Bitcoin’s aims; they think the purpose of Bitcoin is “decentralisation”.
It is not.
The purpose of Bitcoin is replacing fiat, not to act as a perfect expression of a database software problem.
And Bitcoin has no aims; it is not a person.
People have aims, and if your aim is X it’s up to you to make it so. If you refuse to face reality, other people who do, will, and you’ll be drowned out.
And even if Bitcoin was perfect to their standards, it would still be corrosive to the power of the State, and distribution and dissemination of it into the economy would remain a problem (app stores)…or do these delusional people believe the State will throw its hands up and walk away, “because distributed”? You’ll still be an enemy of the State, and a target, even with a perfect Bitcoin, silly little boy.
The level of delusion, infantilism, brainwashing and just plain silliness on constant display is shocking and perplexing. If it were not for the bright future coming it would be depressing.
You the observers can choose to listen to the negative Bitcoin Cult members, and wallow in the pool of misery they sit and stew in that they want to drag you all down into.
Or you can go boldly into the future with real Bitcoiners and step into the bright future with them.
Easy choice Droogies!
