Fight For Your Right To Use Bitcoin As It Was Intended To Be Used

With Bitcoin making at all-time highs and a pro-Bitcoin administration about to take over the White House in America, I see many Bitcoiners understandably breathing a sigh of relief and celebrating. It may feel like we as a community have finally won the war and that Bitcoin is poised to take over the entire world and replace fiat currency with a Bitcoin standard. I propose, however, that we have not won the war, only a major battle. Now is not the time to become complacent and stop fighting for Bitcoin. Even with Donald Trump in the White House, you cannot forget that the state is bigger than Donald Trump, and the world is bigger than just the United States. Bitcoin's number one adversary is still what it has always been, the nation-state. Bitcoin is a direct threat to state power, which is largely derived from the state's control of the money supply. In four years, Americans may very well elect an entirely anti-Bitcoin administration, and if we spend this entire time sitting on our asses mesmerized by the "number go up", then we will have wasted a valuable opportunity to strengthen the Bitcoin community. We must use this reprieve to prepare for when the state inevitably decides that it wants to fight us again. Editor’s note: This story represents the views of the author of the story. The author is not affiliated with HackerNoon staff and wrote this story on their own. The HackerNoon editorial team has only verified the story for grammatical accuracy and does not condone/condemn any of the claims contained herein. #DYOR The war is not over until every person who is currently locked in prison or facing prison for victimless bitcoin or cryptocurrency "crimes" is released. Don't forget that they have already thrown several people in prison for so-called "crimes" related to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Ian Freeman, Roman Storm, Roman Semenov, Keonne Rodriguez, and William Hill are just some examples. Alexey Pertsev just got sentenced to five years in a cage in the Netherlands for deploying some immutable code in the form of a smart contract that can and was used for legitimate purposes. The illicit activity that went through Tornado Cash was a very small proportion of its overall volume. This didn't matter to the prosecutors though, in what amounts to the same kind of logic that would dictate a prison sentence for the manufacturer of a hammer that was then used for a murder. Ian Freeman is doing an 8-year prison sentence right now for simply selling Bitcoin to consenting adults. The Samourai developers are still facing prison time. Why did the state go after these individuals? The answer is simple, if you control the money you control the population, nobody can do anything without some form of money. Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and the tools to use them are all threats to this control. The state has spent decades both building a vast dystopian financial surveillance and control apparatus and simultaneously normalizing it so that the average person doesn't think twice about such things as the fact that you can't even withdraw or deposit too much of your own money without triggering a "Suspicious Activity Report". There was a time not that long ago when you could open a bank account without even showing government-issued identification. By slowly introducing a myriad of laws and regulations over time, the State made it so that you need their permission to use your own money. Bitcoin fixes this. Anyone can set up a Bitcoin wallet without permission, send millions of dollars in value across the planet without permission, and build wealth outside of the state's control. This technology is an incredibly powerful countermeasure to the state's attacks on your freedom. Well, what if you have nothing to hide? Does it matter that you have to follow all the rules and regulations and that the Government can lock you out of the financial system at any time for any reason? I mean that wouldn't happen to you, right? All those laws are just designed to stop the bad guys right? Regardless of your politics, the debanking of the Canadian trucker protesters in 2022 was an important reminder that the state could use these tools to go after anyone for any reason, including simply having the wrong opinion. One of the most important parts of a free society is the right to transact freely, to be able to transfer value without the need to inform anyone or get permission. In a society in which the Government has control over your transactions, they have de facto control of your entire life. This is why having a decentralized permission-less currency and store of value like Bitcoin is absolutely essential and must be protected at all costs. In the United States and many other countries, the government wants to know exactly how much money you have, where every cent came from, and the details of every single transaction you make. There is a reason why it's considered rude to ask a stranger how much money they make or have. People like to maintain their financial privacy because this kind of information can reveal all sorts of personal details about you. It can put your life in danger if it falls into the wrong hands, (look up “5 dollar wrench attack” if you don’t understand why) which is almost guaranteed to happen if the government is in charge of protecting it. This worldwide attack on our financial privacy and freedom has been going on for decades but has recently accelerated dramatically with the recent actions taken against Bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies, and the individuals and companies that are in the crypto space. So how did we get here? How did we get to the point in the supposed "land of the free" where people are sitting in prison for selling Bitcoin or facing prison for coding software? Well before bitcoin was even an idea, the first major blow against America's financial privacy was struck in 1970 with the passage of the Bank Secrecy Act. With the passage of this law, banks were required to file a SAR (suspicious activity report) with the government anytime a transaction over 10,000 dollars occurred. At that time, most average people probably weren't too concerned with this law because, in 1970, $10,000 was the equivalent of $80,000 of today's money in terms of purchasing power. Imagine if the law was being passed today, and the limit for filing a SAR was announced to be 80,000. It would seem more reasonable to the average person, because they might think, "Oh well nobody ever needs that much cash anyways, unless they are doing something wrong." There was a country-wide increase in crime right before the passage of this bill, and the government, which never lets a good crisis go to waste, presented the Bank Secrecy Act as an important tool for fighting crime. This decades-long war on our financial privacy is a perfect example of what people mean when they say something is a slippery slope. Once they get away with passing one law that violates your privacy, it normalizes such violations and opens the door for worse violations in the future which is exactly what has happened in the years since 1970. They inflated the money but didn't ever raise the SAR limit. Now we are at a point where you can't make any kind of large transaction, legitimate or not, without having a report filed on you. One of the main ways the financial surveillance apparatus affects Bitcoin is through what are called KYC/AML regulations which stands for “Know your customer” and “Anti Money Laundering”. KYC/AML regulations are why you can’t use Binance any more if you live in the United States, they are why if you want to sign up for Coinbase or another exchange, you have to submit a selfie of you holding a photo ID. They basically make everything very complicated and ensure that any bitcoin you buy through these KYC exchanges is tied to your name until the end of time itself. They also started using civil asset forfeiture laws so that you can no longer safely travel with a large amount of cash, regardless of whether it's been procured through completely legal means or not, without the very possible risk of having every cent seized from you by predatory police officers. They steal your money to pad their pensions or buy fancy new assault rifles and body armor for their small-town police force that hasn't even had to use their SWAT team in 10 years. If that wasn't bad enough, it was recently revealed that the IRS has total access to every American citizen's bank account records without a warrant and has been using AI to sift through the data in a flagrant violation of the 4th amendment. Covid accelerated the widespread adoption of payment processors such as Paypal and Venmo instead of cash. Many people don't use cash at all anymore which is a dream come true for the government, which once again didn't let a good crisis, like Covid ,go to waste. In 2021, President Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act into law which included a ridiculous provision that requires payment processors to start snitching on any American who does more than a cumulative $600 worth of transactions in a year, allowing such dystopian nonsense as taxing you three times on the same thing. You make some money, pay more than a third of it in taxes, spend the rest on a computer, get taxed with sales tax, and then when it's old and you replace it, you will now get taxed again when you sell it if the purchaser pays you via a digital payment application unless you can prove that the payment wasn't actually income. This automatic reporting switches the burden of proof from the government to you, the IRS is going to just assume every payment you get on Venmo or Paypal is income whether it is or not. For example, if you were to split a bill at a restaurant and then have your friend repay you via Venmo, their repayment will look like income to the IRS and you will be taxed on that unless you provide proof otherwise. So if you pay your taxes, you probably should start saving every single receipt you ever get. Not only does the government want to squeeze every single dollar they can out of people who are already struggling through income taxes, but they don't stop there. They tax them again with the "secret tax" of inflation, destroying the purchasing power of their dollars over time. Then they want to use the money they steal from you to fund more theft and violence, meaning some of your precious time that you could be spending with your loved ones is instead spent working to fund this massive extortion racket. So what do people do when the current system is screwing them over? After a while, they usually get fed up enough to build a new system, which is exactly what Bitcoin is, the basis for an entirely new financial system that is not controlled by any centralized power. If you control the money, you control everything, which is exactly why no one should have that power. By using decentralized money such as Bitcoin, you take the immense power of money itself and spread it around so that no one group or individual has too much power. Instead of a central bank controlling the creation of bitcoin, anyone can buy a miner and start producing bitcoin on their own. Unfortunately, while governments may have mostly ignored Bitcoin in the early days, they certainly view it as a threat now. They will continue to view it as a threat even with a "Bitcoin president" in the United States. The Government is much larger than just Trump and there will still be elements within it that are determined to stop bitcoin, not to mention all the other governments around the world. The State's main objective is controlling the population so that it can continue to extract wealth from it, the State knows that if you have control over money itself through central banking and potentially a CBDC, then you have control over everyone that uses that money. Bitcoin is a threat to that power, the United States Government knows that if the dollar loses its status as a global reserve currency then they will lose a significant amount of power. That is why they want to throw you in jail if you dare to sell people bitcoin without a money transmitting license, but even though they can treat bitcoin as money when prosecuting you, they treat it as property when taxing you. So if you buy some bitcoin, it goes up in value, and you then buy a cup of coffee or anything with that same bitcoin, you are usually required by law to pay a ridiculous amount of capital gains taxes on that purchase because by buying the coffee you are realizing your gains on your "investment". If you have money, like the US dollar, and it goes up in purchasing power, and then you spend those dollars, you aren't expected to pay taxes on the gains you made by holding dollars. You also don't get to claim the losses in your dollar's purchasing power from inflation as a loss on your taxes, even though it technically is a loss. How can Bitcoin be simultaneously money and an investment in the eyes of the law depending on the situation? Well, it is based on the classic "because we say so" doctrine. Unfortunately, most people are so brainwashed that they will just accept whatever new law they force upon us regardless of whether it violates their natural rights or not. The government knows they can get away with it, so they will continue to do so until there is nothing left to take from us, and until anybody with any remaining wealth and common sense has left the country leaving behind hordes of starving people pushing wheelbarrows of US dollars around to buy moldy bread with. Many people are hopeful that some kind of comprehensive cryptocurrency legislation gets passed during the Trump presidency. It is also entirely likely that they will try to put some "common sense" provisions in the bill that address so-called money laundering by "criminals and terrorists" to appease the holdouts and get the thing through Congress. It doesn't matter to politicians that a very small percentage of money laundering actually happens through crypto and instead uses traditional financial institutions. When a bank gets in trouble for helping criminals launder billions of dollars it barely makes the headlines, if some North Korean sends $10 in tether to their mother or something there will probably be congressional hearings about the dangers of cryptocurrency. The Bitcoin and crypto communities need to scrutinize every word of any bills that are put forth, you can't just assume that they will be in our best interest because of all the promises Trump has made. One of the biggest problems with passing laws that take away your freedoms in the name of fighting criminals is that who constitutes a criminal often changes on a whim in a tyrannical society. You might be okay with the law today because you believe you have nothing to worry about, that you are not one of those "criminal" folks, so it doesn't affect you. Unfortunately, I think I know what many Bitcoiners may be thinking when they see things like the Samourai devs getting arrested. That is, "Well I don't mind KYC because I don't have anything to hide and the number will still go up, that's all I care about." However, what if you become a criminal in the future due to the passage of yet another "law"? For example, drug users were just normal people, such as housewives and old soldiers, who bought drugs such as cannabis extracts over the counter in the 19th and early 20th centuries, fast forward a few decades, and cannabis users were criminals and outcasts because what was once not illegal became illegal. There are countless other examples of this throughout history and one must always be prepared for potential criminalization by the State. Another potent example of this is how gold was perfectly legal to own for the entire history of our country until one day the Government decided it was going to outlaw it and seize your gold. If you owned some gold, one day you were just someone with nothing to hide and the next day you were a criminal with something to hide. Eventually, this was reversed, and many people today aren't even aware that it happened but it did. The same thing that happened with gold can happen with Bitcoin in the future, using Bitcoin is legal right now and will likely remain so at least for the entirety of a Trump presidency, but if in the future the state feels threatened enough by it they might decide to ban it just as they banned gold in the past. If you have any KYCed bitcoin, you may very well have to surrender it or face imprisonment. This may feel far-fetched and dystopian, but it is definitely within the realm of possibility especially if you consider the fact that there are already people in prison right now for simply selling bitcoin to consenting adults. Bitcoin is a threat to the State because it is freedom tech, a tool that enables freedom by being a permission-less censorship-resistant store of value. This is empowering for the individual and dis-empowering for the State because no matter who you are, where you live, or what documents you possess, you can use Bitcoin to store value and transact value. It can be sent across the globe in minutes for a small fee without any friction. Fiat currency in cash form is also permission-less and censorship-resistant but it is not an ideal store of value because the State can manipulate its value as it sees fit through money printing. The State can get away with taxing the people through inflation as long as people continue to use their fiat currency, so it considers any alternatives such as Bitcoin to be a threat to its power and its’ monopoly on violence that is funded by the ability to create money out of thin air. If you don't take steps to protect yourself and your bitcoin and use KYC services to buy your bitcoin, then one day you might get a knock on your door from the Government telling you to give up your private keys or go to prison. You can try to claim you lost your keys in a boating accident all day long, but I have to wonder if they will give a shit. "Fine, you lost your keys? No problem, just pay us an equivalent amount in fiat to what you lost and you won't go to prison." Store and acquire your bitcoin outside of the financial system, where it belongs. Buying KYCed bitcoin, or bitcoin in an ETF means you lose one of the most important advantages of owning this asset in the first place, the ability to store wealth outside of the state-controlled financial system. Different governments have taken different approaches to dealing with the threat of Bitcoin, for example, the Chinese government simply banned trading bitcoin outright. The United States is taking a different approach entirely. The US Government tries to keep up the appearance of being a so-called free democratic society, so it can't just ban Bitcoin outright like China because the optics would be horrible. Instead, they are trying to do everything they can to mitigate the permission-less aspect of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies by cutting off all ways to use Bitcoin and crypto without first giving up your privacy and complying with KYC/AML regulations. First, they targeted the on and off ramps into crypto (such as localbitcoins and bitcoin ATMs), so it became very hard to turn US dollars into bitcoin or sell bitcoin for US dollars without first KYCing. The Bitcoin community pushed back somewhat on this but not hard enough and it became the norm that on and off ramps in the United States became KYC only. Now they are going after self-hosted wallets and crypto to crypto exchanges and are trying to force any entities that deal with crypto or bitcoin to register with FinCen and require users to KYC/AML. The results of the US election will ensure some of the pressure is relieved temporarily but, we are most definitely not out of the woods. Personally, I doubt that Donald Trump even understands why Bitcoin is important, and I think he just decided it would win him some votes to support it. One of the most significant recent state attacks on Bitcoin was the arrest of the Samourai Wallet developers in April. Samourai Wallet was a Bitcoin wallet app that had some great privacy features. Privacy is not easy to achieve with Bitcoin because it is a fully transparent ledger, and if you buy bitcoin through an exchange or service linked to your real name in any way, anybody can track exactly what you do with that bitcoin and how much you have. One of Samourai's main features, the one that got them arrested, was a non-custodial mixing service called Whirlpool that allowed users to mix their bitcoin with other users' bitcoin and then receive different bitcoin that wasn't linked to their original bitcoin. The government has gone after cryptocurrency mixing services before, but the main difference between Whirlpool and a mixer like Bitcoin Fog was that Whirlpool is non-custodial. Samourai Wallet never actually took possession of your bitcoin, although they did run a centralized coordinator that matched people who wanted to mix bitcoin. That wasn't illegal and still isn't regardless of what the prosecutors argue. The US Government is alleging that just because a handful of criminals used the service the developers are guilty of conspiracy to commit money laundering which is ridiculous. For one, the percentage of illicit funds that went through Whirlpool was minuscule, most people were legitimate users who just wanted to improve their privacy. This is as absurd as arresting the manager of a bank just because a few criminals managed to use the bank to launder money, or arresting a knife manufacturer because some people used their knives to commit crimes. Samourai wallet was one of the very few options people had if they wanted to use Bitcoin privately, and now that it's gone it has left a giant hole in the privacy toolkit for Bitcoiners. Now that a couple of coders are facing serious prison time for developing Bitcoin software, it has created a chilling effect throughout the industry. There are plenty of people who want to develop privacy software, but not many of them are willing to risk going to prison to do so and can you blame them? If the Samourai devs don't beat this case it will have far-reaching implications, so you might want to donate to their legal defense if you care about bitcoin, privacy, and freedom in general. There is a way to ensure privacy for Bitcoin without anyone risking prison time, and that is if changes were made at the protocol level to improve privacy. Unfortunately, there is a significant portion of the community that is against making any major changes to the Bitcoin protocol, they believe ossification is the best route. I think those who believe this are probably more concerned with the price of Bitcoin than whether it succeeds or fails in offering a viable alternative to the state-controlled financial system. We are at a crossroads with Bitcoin, there are multiple paths before us. One path is the one in which crypto and bitcoin become absorbed into the traditional financial system as heavily regulated investments accessible only to those privileged enough to have the proper paperwork, and taxed to the point where their price appreciation and wealth preservation effects are heavily mitigated. You will be able to buy bitcoin only from licensed AML/KYC-compliant custodians and self-custody will likely be illegal. Perhaps USDC and USDT are co-opted as a de facto CBDC, after all, it makes sense for the US government to allow stablecoins as long as they follow all their rules because the use of those stablecoins will help prevent the dollar from losing its reserve currency status. Another more unlikely path is a total ban on cryptocurrency and bitcoin use in the United States and the European Union. If you are unlucky enough in this scenario to have any KYCed BTC that the government knows about, it will be seized from you. If you have custody and you refuse to give up your keys, they will just throw you in prison for disobeying. The third path is the one I hope we take, in which we successfully fight back against government regulations and preserve Bitcoin's ability to be a permission-less system outside of the traditional financial system. The division in the space between bitcoin maximalists and users of other cryptocurrencies needs to be put aside, no longer should BTC maxis cheer when the SEC takes down another "shitcoin" company, but instead all lovers of freedom and users of cryptocurrency need to band together and use our influence and wealth to do everything we can to stop the government from destroying our freedom to transact and our right to privacy. As a group, united, we have the power to make a difference. It is important to remember that the Government is not some all-powerful eye of Sauron, they are just people who think they have some divine right to tell other people what they can and can't do because of some words on a piece of paper. We can peacefully fight back in a myriad of ways and stop this madness in its tracks. I know a lot of people in the community would prefer to just pretend like nothing is happening as long as the number goes up, but even if Bitcoin gets to a million dollars, if we are not free to use it in whatever way we wish, then that would be a phallic victory. Regardless of any regulation that does or does not pass, we must fulfill the mission of Bitcoin and create and participate in a massive circular Bitcoin and crypto economy outside of the blood money fiat system. It needs to be relatively easy for someone to live off of Bitcoin alone without any need for KYCed offramps. We need landlords who will rent to plebs for bitcoin, we need plumbers who will fix your toilet for bitcoin, and we need a network of people all over the world who will readily accept and spend bitcoin for products and services. With localbitcoins getting shut down, private word-of-mouth networks using encrypted communications and mesh networking need to develop and grow rapidly. Many people are working on this but we need more and we need it now. If you believe in the promise of Bitcoin, in the power of money that is separated from the state, and in freedom tech; then it's time to support your local circular Bitcoin economy. The main reason I am writing this is as a call to action for all those who consider themselves aligned with Bitcoin's values, maxis or not. If you buy Bitcoin, for whatever purpose, then I implore you to stop only buying KYCed bitcoin! There are those of us, myself included, who have taken the plunge and dropped out of the traditional financial system. We earn and save in Bitcoin instead of fiat. Some of us don't even have a bank account, let alone a Coinbase account or any account that requires KYC. I have never KYCed and will never KYC. At first, this wasn't because I understood why KYC and Bitcoin were antithetical, but because I was so broke I didn't even have an ID in 2017 when I first got into the space. I had to learn how to acquire BTC without using Coinbase or other KYC exchanges. Eventually, as I learned more about Bitcoin, I realized that my inability to KYC onto Coinbase was a positive thing. Sticking to my principles and trying to live outside of the traditional system does present some challenges from time to time. For now, I do still need access to Fiat to pay my rent and other expenses. I can buy gift cards for food and other products, and virtual prepaid debit cards work for my utility bills. Unfortunately, I can not pay my rent with a virtual prepaid debit card. Also, to preserve my privacy, I have to first convert the bitcoin into monero, a cryptocurrency with built in privacy, to buy the prepaid debit card. Otherwise, if I pay my power bill or something under my name with it, I am doxxing my Bitcoin wallet. The options for converting Bitcoin or other crypto to fiat without KYCing are decreasing every single day. Hell, the options for simply converting stablecoins to Bitcoin without KYCing are also decreasing rapidly as more and more exchanges require KYC. My local Bitcoin meet-up has been a lifeline, I can go there and sometimes find someone willing to buy Bitcoin with cash. If I'm really lucky I will find someone who will buy Bitcoin from me regularly. This is never 100% reliable, and there are times when I desperately need fiat and can't find any buyers. It is incredibly frustrating to have plenty of bitcoin and still not be able to pay my bills. I heard someone talking at a meetup recently, they were asking questions about non-KYC versus KYC bitcoin. They mentioned how fond they were of using Swan to make regular purchases of bitcoin with the classic dollar cost-averaging investing strategy. I get it, it's simple, it's easy. It is way easier to just click a button on your phone to acquire sats than to have to buy it from someone in person with cash. It's important to realize though, that every single time you "smash buy" on your KYCed app, not only are you compromising on your privacy, you are wasting another chance to help a fellow bitcoiner and strengthen your local circular economy. If even half of the people who attend my local meeting choose to buy KYC-free bitcoin for cash every time or even every other time they make a purchase instead of using some app, I would never again have to worry about whether or not there would be a buyer if that was the case. This is the easiest way you can fight back against government overreach, just as the Bitcoin network itself gets stronger and more secure as more people use it, so does the Bitcoin circular economy. If you are in Bitcoin for more than just a "number go up" investment, I feel that you are doing a disservice to the Bitcoin community every time you have the means and ability to purchase bitcoin from a pleb and instead choose to take the easy route and click buy on some app that's probably reporting everything you do to the government. The Bitcoin community has a lot of combined economic power, there is no reason why we shouldn't be directing some of that purchasing power inward to strengthen our community. By buying our bitcoin from within our community, the power and reach of our circular economy would increase drastically and be much harder to stop. They can't blacklist your Bitcoin wallet address if they don't know what it is! They can't freeze your bank account if you don't have to use one! Imagine a world in which one could easily live outside of their system, and opt out of their game. I'm not telling you not to pay your taxes, because that can end with you in a prison cell and then you are out of the fight. But you don't have to dox your Bitcoin wallet just to pay taxes on your gains. Yes, I'm sure it's nice to just set up an automatic dollar cost average weekly or monthly buy on Swan or on any of the many other options for this. Just set it and forget it they tell you, it's so easy when you don't even have to think about it! Watch your stack grow and grow over time on your little app. Well, you know what? Screw that! Freedom isn't "easy", freedom isn't "convenient", freedom is hard work, freedom is blood, sweat, and tears, and freedom is sacrifice. The State loves every time you pick what's easy and convenient over what is best for your freedom. If Bitcoin is ever going to succeed as an alternative financial system, then it does need to be easier to do more with it than buying some maple syrup or paying your VPN subscription. Since the state is trying to close all the non-kyc on/off ramps, it is imperative that our community provides our own on/off ramps for those who need some dirty, dirty fiat, to survive. Buying your bitcoin from a Bitcoiner in need is a way to advocate for freedom with your purchasing power. Please for the love of god, it's up to us. If we don't fight back with our collective purchasing power, Bitcoin will become just another speculative investment and nothing more. So how do we use the next four years to make the Bitcoin community and network more resilient to potential future attacks from the state? We have to create a massive grassroots movement to create new and strengthen existing circular economies outside of state control using Bitcoin. We have to strengthen Bitcoin's privacy and create new tools to enable people to use Bitcoin as privately as possible. We have to support and use non-kyc services, and support the people developing and maintaining non-kyc services and Bitcoin privacy tech. You may not feel that you, as just one individual, have much power to change things. This is not true at all, if everyone in Bitcoin does some or all of the things I am about to list, then collectively we have the power to regain our freedom and protect it. Five ways you can fight back against the Government's war on Bitcoin Buy your bitcoin without KYC from plebs, not KYC/AML exchanges. Every time you buy bitcoin from Coinbase or something, it is a wasted opportunity. If you are actively stacking sats, whether you are dollar cost averaging regularly, or just buying now and then when you can, then you need to be viewing every purchase as an opportunity to help support the Bitcoin circular economy. If you are buying your bitcoin on a KYC exchange or service, then you are wasting an opportunity and helping the bad guys win. Yes, it can be more inconvenient to buy Bitcoin without KYC instead of just pressing a button on a KYCed app, but if you truly believe in the freedom that Bitcoin represents, that's what you should be doing. I can understand if you want to have a KYC stack and non-KYC stack, especially if you are public about your involvement with Bitcoin, but at least make some of your purchases off the books. This is not legal or tax advice, but as far as I know, it is not illegal to simply buy bitcoin and not report the purchase. It's only when you sell it that you are required to report any capital gains. If you already have any KYCed bitcoin that you have an unrealized loss on, you might want to consider selling it immediately for cash, realizing the loss for your taxes, and then take that cash and buy non-kyced bitcoin from a fellow pleb at a meetup. You don't want to wait until you're sitting on a huge gain and it would require a large tax bill to do this, also this wash trading loophole for crypto might not be around forever. You can't do that with stocks, if you sell a stock at a loss and then buy it back within a certain amount of time, it is considered "wash trading", and you are unable to write the loss off your taxes. This is not currently the case for cryptocurrencies, so you might want to take advantage of it. Spread the word. Normies need to know about the assault on their freedoms, it goes beyond bitcoin or crypto. You may think you are just one voice, and maybe you don't have thousands of followers on social media, so can you make a difference in this battle? It's important that we all use what reach we do have to spread the word about the assault on our rights by governments around the world. I doubt the average person, even if they might own a little bitcoin, even knows what's going on. If they do have an idea, they probably don't realize the full extent of it. You need to tell everyone who will listen to you that governments are attacking our rights and that we are so close to living in a completely dystopian nightmare if we don't do something to stop it now. Explain to your friends and family the truth about what inflation is and what causes it. We must find a way to inform the average person how the state's assault on financial privacy and freedom affects them personally whether they use Bitcoin or not. We need the support of the average Joe who doesn't necessarily care about Bitcoin but still doesn't like the idea of the Government tracking everything they do with their money. It should creep people out when they are told about how the government now watches everything you do financially and is even examining bank account transactions with AI and without a warrant. Education is important because currently many people aren't even aware of what fiat currency means, that the gold standard is gone, or that price inflation isn't a result of corporate greed. The Federal Reserve means nothing to average people and neither does the advantages of having a decentralized permission-less store of value. This has to change, the Government is getting away with acts of tyranny, like locking up people for writing code, partly because many people outside of our community have no idea it's going on or its implications. We have to get the public angry about this! It might be uncomfortable talking about these kinds of issues with normie friends and family (if you still have any normie friends), and many hesitate because they don't want to come across as some kind of radical anti-government conspiracy theorist type. Get over that hesitation though, because this is that important and they need to know the truth. Use your wealth and purchasing power. Use services and products that accept Bitcoin/crypto payments, and offer your own services and products in return for Bitcoin. Donate to pro-crypto candidates and Bitcoin/privacy developers. Every time you can spend bitcoin on products and services. Offer your own products and services in exchange for bitcoin. List items on bitcoin marketplaces. Donate to organizations and campaigns that are fighting for Bitcoin, or developers that are working on it. Bitcoin has generated a lot of wealth for a lot of people, and if it has benefited you, now is the time to give some back to support this fight. If a dev gets arrested, they should know the community is going to rally around them and they are going to have good lawyers. We need to play the game in Washington as well with lobbyists and the whole nine yards, yes it is disgusting to participate in this system to any degree but until a new system takes its place we may have to. Many anarcho-capitalists consider the very act of voting to be immoral, which I get because you are trying to impose your will on others by voting. But they are playing dirty my friends, so we might have to get dirty ourselves. Help normalize privacy by using tools to protect your privacy and encourage family and friends to do the same, the bigger the herd the better otherwise the very act of using a privacy tool makes you stand out, negating some of the benefits. If only a few people are using tools and services to protect their privacy, the very act of using that tool or service makes you stand out. We need the protection of the crowd, if everyone is using privacy tools, then it no longer is a weird thing to be doing. Just because you may have nothing to hide doesn't mean you shouldn't protect your privacy regardless. For example, a lot of services and websites are blocking VPN users these days, but if the majority of people were all using VPNs, they would be committing suicide as a business by blocking VPNS. It's also important to support open-source software developers who are working on privacy tools. Many people who bought KYCed bitcoin on centralized platforms and then wanted to gain some forward privacy relied on tools such as Samourai Wallet, but if the Government isn't going to allow such tools to operate, it's more important than ever to protect your privacy in other ways. The easiest way to ensure BTC privacy is to stop buying Bitcoin on centralized exchanges and services, if you buy bitcoin directly from other plebs and especially home miners, and that Bitcoin is never deposited into a KYCed account, you don't even have to worry about trying to use mixers. Another way is to use Monero to break the link between your bitcoin and you. Monero as a tool for spending bitcoin is more valuable than ever before, I believe that Monero can become the de facto privacy layer of Bitcoin. Until major changes are made to the Bitcoin protocol to improve privacy, then it will remain a good strategy to save in bitcoin and spend in monero. Work together and join forces, bitcoiners and shitcoiners have to work together against the assualt on our freedoms. Crypto is a very tribal community, you got your Bitcoin maxis, you got your ETH maxis, and you got random shitcoin communities who think their coin is the best coin or whatever. That's all fine and good, but it is past time to work together to stop attacks on crypto, what's bad for crypto in general is bad for Bitcoin. For a long time, many bitcoin maximalists espoused the opinion that what was bad for shitcoins was good for bitcoin. They would cheer on the SEC when it went after shitcoin projects because they thought bitcoin wasn't considered a security so it was "safe" and money would just flow out of targeted shitcoins into Bitcoin. Cheering on tyrannical government intervention because it might have the side effect of making your bags go up is antithetical to everything Bitcoin stands for. Many people tried to warn them, that bitcoin wasn't by any means "safe" just because it wasn't a security, and that the government would find other ways to attack bitcoin outside of securities laws. Now that scenario is playing out and it's time for maximalists to hold their nose and ally themselves with the rest of crypto against the government's war on crypto. This is taking some time to sink in apparently for some people like the host of a Bitcoin maxi podcast I won't name. They were saying that they would rather elect Elizabeth Warren over John Deaton because he is a "shitcoiner". When I heard this, I was flabbergasted. This person was willing to put Bitcoin in more danger from an avowed anti-crypto politician like Warren just so they didn't have to support a shitcoiner who is also going to be pro bitcoin. I mean come on, can you get over your hatred of shitcoiners for five minutes please! If we don't work together then we are going to be destroyed eventually. There is no more time for infighting and pseudo-religious maximalism. If you hate shitcoins, repeat after me, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend". I don't care if you are the worst ponzi-shilling, ugly NFT bag-holding, grifter, scumbag, and pump and dumper, if you are going to help stop this madness then I will work with you all day long (well maybe not someone like Sam Bankman Fried). Working together includes voting for pro-crypto candidates regardless of your views on shitcoins or voting. Although as they say, democracy is just two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner(attribute quote), we might as well cast self-defense votes on candidates that are pro-crypto. When I first started writing this article, things were looking a lot more dire for Bitcoin than they are today. We have a pro-Bitcoin president for the first time in history and our Congress will be much more pro-Bitcoin than it was as well. Politicians will say anything to get elected though, and it's important to remember that. At the end of the day, Trump and other pro-crypto candidates are still politicians and statists who probably don't give a shit about your freedom beyond winning your votes. Even if Trump follows through on the promises he's making regarding cryptocurrency, it will only be a temporary reprieve in the overall war. The state knows Bitcoin is a threat to it, and whatever administration comes after Trump might not be nearly as friendly to the industry. So if the assault on crypto does cool off with a Trump presidency, it will be an opportunity to strengthen our community, shore up our defenses, and ensure that a strong circular economy is up and running outside of the traditional financial system. This way when the state inevitably attacks us again, whether it be in 4 years or 10 years, we will be ready for them. I know it can be tempting to just sit back, watch your bags grow in value, and let other people worry about fighting for freedom. However, we need your help, we need every single person's help that we can get or we will lose. You don't have to be fighting all day every day, but do something! Many of the things on the list above are very simple for anyone to do and don't require much effort, but if enough people do them it can make a significant impact. We have the power, we just have to use it. With Bitcoin making at all-time highs and a pro-Bitcoin administration about to take over the White House in America, I see many Bitcoiners understandably breathing a sigh of relief and celebrating. It may feel like we as a community have finally won the war and that Bitcoin is poised to take over the entire world and replace fiat currency with a Bitcoin standard. I propose, however, that we have not won the war, only a major battle. Now is not the time to become complacent and stop fighting for Bitcoin. Even with Donald Trump in the White House, you cannot forget that the state is bigger than Donald Trump, and the world is bigger than just the United States. Bitcoin's number one adversary is still what it has always been, the nation-state. Bitcoin is a direct threat to state power, which is largely derived from the state's control of the money supply. In four years, Americans may very well elect an entirely anti-Bitcoin administration, and if we spend this entire time sitting on our asses mesmerized by the "number go up", then we will have wasted a valuable opportunity to strengthen the Bitcoin community. We must use this reprieve to prepare for when the state inevitably decides that it wants to fight us again. Editor’s note: This story represents the views of the author of the story. The author is not affiliated with HackerNoon staff and wrote this story on their own. The HackerNoon editorial team has only verified the story for grammatical accuracy and does not condone/condemn any of the claims contained herein. #DYOR Editor’s note: This story represents the views of the author of the story. The author is not affiliated with HackerNoon staff and wrote this story on their own. The HackerNoon editorial team has only verified the story for grammatical accuracy and does not condone/condemn any of the claims contained herein. #DYOR The war is not over until every person who is currently locked in prison or facing prison for victimless bitcoin or cryptocurrency "crimes" is released. Don't forget that they have already thrown several people in prison for so-called "crimes" related to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Ian Freeman, Roman Storm, Roman Semenov, Keonne Rodriguez, and William Hill are just some examples. Alexey Pertsev just got sentenced to five years in a cage in the Netherlands for deploying some immutable code in the form of a smart contract that can and was used for legitimate purposes. The illicit activity that went through Tornado Cash was a very small proportion of its overall volume. This didn't matter to the prosecutors though, in what amounts to the same kind of logic that would dictate a prison sentence for the manufacturer of a hammer that was then used for a murder. Ian Freeman is doing an 8-year prison sentence right now for simply selling Bitcoin to consenting adults. The Samourai developers are still facing prison time. Why did the state go after these individuals? The answer is simple, if you control the money you control the population, nobody can do anything without some form of money. Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and the tools to use them are all threats to this control. The state has spent decades both building a vast dystopian financial surveillance and control apparatus and simultaneously normalizing it so that the average person doesn't think twice about such things as the fact that you can't even withdraw or deposit too much of your own money without triggering a "Suspicious Activity Report". There was a time not that long ago when you could open a bank account without even showing government-issued identification. By slowly introducing a myriad of laws and regulations over time, the State made it so that you need their permission to use your own money. Bitcoin fixes this. Anyone can set up a Bitcoin wallet without permission, send millions of dollars in value across the planet without permission, and build wealth outside of the state's control. This technology is an incredibly powerful countermeasure to the state's attacks on your freedom. Well, what if you have nothing to hide? Does it matter that you have to follow all the rules and regulations and that the Government can lock you out of the financial system at any time for any reason? I mean that wouldn't happen to you, right? All those laws are just designed to stop the bad guys right? Regardless of your politics, the debanking of the Canadian trucker protesters in 2022 was an important reminder that the state could use these tools to go after anyone for any reason, including simply having the wrong opinion. One of the most important parts of a free society is the right to transact freely, to be able to transfer value without the need to inform anyone or get permission. In a society in which the Government has control over your transactions, they have de facto control of your entire life. This is why having a decentralized permission-less currency and store of value like Bitcoin is absolutely essential and must be protected at all costs. In the United States and many other countries, the government wants to know exactly how much money you have, where every cent came from, and the details of every single transaction you make. There is a reason why it's considered rude to ask a stranger how much money they make or have. People like to maintain their financial privacy because this kind of information can reveal all sorts of personal details about you. It can put your life in danger if it falls into the wrong hands, (look up “5 dollar wrench attack” if you don’t understand why) which is almost guaranteed to happen if the government is in charge of protecting it. This worldwide attack on our financial privacy and freedom has been going on for decades but has recently accelerated dramatically with the recent actions taken against Bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies, and the individuals and companies that are in the crypto space. So how did we get here? How did we get to the point in the supposed "land of the free" where people are sitting in prison for selling Bitcoin or facing prison for coding software? Well before bitcoin was even an idea, the first major blow against America's financial privacy was struck in 1970 with the passage of the Bank Secrecy Act. With the passage of this law, banks were required to file a SAR (suspicious activity report) with the government anytime a transaction over 10,000 dollars occurred. At that time, most average people probably weren't too concerned with this law because, in 1970, $10,000 was the equivalent of $80,000 of today's money in terms of purchasing power. Imagine if the law was being passed today, and the limit for filing a SAR was announced to be 80,000. It would seem more reasonable to the average person, because they might think, "Oh well nobody ever needs that much cash anyways, unless they are doing something wrong." There was a country-wide increase in crime right before the passage of this bill, and the government, which never lets a good crisis go to waste, presented the Bank Secrecy Act as an important tool for fighting crime. This decades-long war on our financial privacy is a perfect example of what people mean when they say something is a slippery slope. Once they get away with passing one law that violates your privacy, it normalizes such violations and opens the door for worse violations in the future which is exactly what has happened in the years since 1970. They inflated the money but didn't ever raise the SAR limit. Now we are at a point where you can't make any kind of large transaction, legitimate or not, without having a report filed on you. One of the main ways the financial surveillance apparatus affects Bitcoin is through what are called KYC/AML regulations which stands for “Know your customer” and “Anti Money Laundering”. KYC/AML regulations are why you can’t use Binance any more if you live in the United States, they are why if you want to sign up for Coinbase or another exchange, you have to submit a selfie of you holding a photo ID. They basically make everything very complicated and ensure that any bitcoin you buy through these KYC exchanges is tied to your name until the end of time itself. They also started using civil asset forfeiture laws so that you can no longer safely travel with a large amount of cash, regardless of whether it's been procured through completely legal means or not, without the very possible risk of having every cent seized from you by predatory police officers. They steal your money to pad their pensions or buy fancy new assault rifles and body armor for their small-town police force that hasn't even had to use their SWAT team in 10 years. If that wasn't bad enough, it was recently revealed that the IRS has total access to every American citizen's bank account records without a warrant and has been using AI to sift through the data in a flagrant violation of the 4th amendment. Covid accelerated the widespread adoption of payment processors such as Paypal and Venmo instead of cash. Many people don't use cash at all anymore which is a dream come true for the government, which once again didn't let a good crisis, like Covid ,go to waste. In 2021, President Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act into law which included a ridiculous provision that requires payment processors to start snitching on any American who does more than a cumulative $600 worth of transactions in a year, allowing such dystopian nonsense as taxing you three times on the same thing. You make some money, pay more than a third of it in taxes, spend the rest on a computer, get taxed with sales tax, and then when it's old and you replace it, you will now get taxed again when you sell it if the purchaser pays you via a digital payment application unless you can prove that the payment wasn't actually income. This automatic reporting switches the burden of proof from the government to you, the IRS is going to just assume every payment you get on Venmo or Paypal is income whether it is or not. For example, if you were to split a bill at a restaurant and then have your friend repay you via Venmo, their repayment will look like income to the IRS and you will be taxed on that unless you provide proof otherwise. So if you pay your taxes, you probably should start saving every single receipt you ever get. Not only does the government want to squeeze every single dollar they can out of people who are already struggling through income taxes, but they don't stop there. They tax them again with the "secret tax" of inflation, destroying the purchasing power of their dollars over time. Then they want to use the money they steal from you to fund more theft and violence, meaning some of your precious time that you could be spending with your loved ones is instead spent working to fund this massive extortion racket. So what do people do when the current system is screwing them over? After a while, they usually get fed up enough to build a new system, which is exactly what Bitcoin is, the basis for an entirely new financial system that is not controlled by any centralized power. If you control the money, you control everything, which is exactly why no one should have that power. By using decentralized money such as Bitcoin, you take the immense power of money itself and spread it around so that no one group or individual has too much power. Instead of a central bank controlling the creation of bitcoin, anyone can buy a miner and start producing bitcoin on their own. Unfortunately, while governments may have mostly ignored Bitcoin in the early days, they certainly view it as a threat now. They will continue to view it as a threat even with a "Bitcoin president" in the United States. The Government is much larger than just Trump and there will still be elements within it that are determined to stop bitcoin, not to mention all the other governments around the world. The State's main objective is controlling the population so that it can continue to extract wealth from it, the State knows that if you have control over money itself through central banking and potentially a CBDC, then you have control over everyone that uses that money. Bitcoin is a threat to that power, the United States Government knows that if the dollar loses its status as a global reserve currency then they will lose a significant amount of power. That is why they want to throw you in jail if you dare to sell people bitcoin without a money transmitting license, but even though they can treat bitcoin as money when prosecuting you, they treat it as property when taxing you. So if you buy some bitcoin, it goes up in value, and you then buy a cup of coffee or anything with that same bitcoin, you are usually required by law to pay a ridiculous amount of capital gains taxes on that purchase because by buying the coffee you are realizing your gains on your "investment". If you have money, like the US dollar, and it goes up in purchasing power, and then you spend those dollars, you aren't expected to pay taxes on the gains you made by holding dollars. You also don't get to claim the losses in your dollar's purchasing power from inflation as a loss on your taxes, even though it technically is a loss. How can Bitcoin be simultaneously money and an investment in the eyes of the law depending on the situation? Well, it is based on the classic "because we say so" doctrine. Unfortunately, most people are so brainwashed that they will just accept whatever new law they force upon us regardless of whether it violates their natural rights or not. The government knows they can get away with it, so they will continue to do so until there is nothing left to take from us, and until anybody with any remaining wealth and common sense has left the country leaving behind hordes of starving people pushing wheelbarrows of US dollars around to buy moldy bread with. Many people are hopeful that some kind of comprehensive cryptocurrency legislation gets passed during the Trump presidency. It is also entirely likely that they will try to put some "common sense" provisions in the bill that address so-called money laundering by "criminals and terrorists" to appease the holdouts and get the thing through Congress. It doesn't matter to politicians that a very small percentage of money laundering actually happens through crypto and instead uses traditional financial institutions. When a bank gets in trouble for helping criminals launder billions of dollars it barely makes the headlines, if some North Korean sends $10 in tether to their mother or something there will probably be congressional hearings about the dangers of cryptocurrency. The Bitcoin and crypto communities need to scrutinize every word of any bills that are put forth, you can't just assume that they will be in our best interest because of all the promises Trump has made. One of the biggest problems with passing laws that take away your freedoms in the name of fighting criminals is that who constitutes a criminal often changes on a whim in a tyrannical society. You might be okay with the law today because you believe you have nothing to worry about, that you are not one of those "criminal" folks, so it doesn't affect you. Unfortunately, I think I know what many Bitcoiners may be thinking when they see things like the Samourai devs getting arrested. That is, "Well I don't mind KYC because I don't have anything to hide and the number will still go up, that's all I care about." However, what if you become a criminal in the future due to the passage of yet another "law"? For example, drug users were just normal people, such as housewives and old soldiers, who bought drugs such as cannabis extracts over the counter in the 19th and early 20th centuries, fast forward a few decades, and cannabis users were criminals and outcasts because what was once not illegal became illegal. There are countless other examples of this throughout history and one must always be prepared for potential criminalization by the State. Another potent example of this is how gold was perfectly legal to own for the entire history of our country until one day the Government decided it was going to outlaw it and seize your gold. If you owned some gold, one day you were just someone with nothing to hide and the next day you were a criminal with something to hide. Eventually, this was reversed, and many people today aren't even aware that it happened but it did. The same thing that happened with gold can happen with Bitcoin in the future, using Bitcoin is legal right now and will likely remain so at least for the entirety of a Trump presidency, but if in the future the state feels threatened enough by it they might decide to ban it just as they banned gold in the past. If you have any KYCed bitcoin, you may very well have to surrender it or face imprisonment. This may feel far-fetched and dystopian, but it is definitely within the realm of possibility especially if you consider the fact that there are already people in prison right now for simply selling bitcoin to consenting adults. Bitcoin is a threat to the State because it is freedom tech, a tool that enables freedom by being a permission-less censorship-resistant store of value. This is empowering for the individual and dis-empowering for the State because no matter who you are, where you live, or what documents you possess, you can use Bitcoin to store value and transact value. It can be sent across the globe in minutes for a small fee without any friction. Fiat currency in cash form is also permission-less and censorship-resistant but it is not an ideal store of value because the State can manipulate its value as it sees fit through money printing. The State can get away with taxing the people through inflation as long as people continue to use their fiat currency, so it considers any alternatives such as Bitcoin to be a threat to its power and its’ monopoly on violence that is funded by the ability to create money out of thin air. If you don't take steps to protect yourself and your bitcoin and use KYC services to buy your bitcoin, then one day you might get a knock on your door from the Government telling you to give up your private keys or go to prison. You can try to claim you lost your keys in a boating accident all day long, but I have to wonder if they will give a shit. "Fine, you lost your keys? No problem, just pay us an equivalent amount in fiat to what you lost and you won't go to prison." Store and acquire your bitcoin outside of the financial system, where it belongs. Buying KYCed bitcoin, or bitcoin in an ETF means you lose one of the most important advantages of owning this asset in the first place, the ability to store wealth outside of the state-controlled financial system. Different governments have taken different approaches to dealing with the threat of Bitcoin, for example, the Chinese government simply banned trading bitcoin outright. The United States is taking a different approach entirely. The US Government tries to keep up the appearance of being a so-called free democratic society, so it can't just ban Bitcoin outright like China because the optics would be horrible. Instead, they are trying to do everything they can to mitigate the permission-less aspect of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies by cutting off all ways to use Bitcoin and crypto without first giving up your privacy and complying with KYC/AML regulations. First, they targeted the on and off ramps into crypto (such as localbitcoins and bitcoin ATMs), so it became very hard to turn US dollars into bitcoin or sell bitcoin for US dollars without first KYCing. The Bitcoin community pushed back somewhat on this but not hard enough and it became the norm that on and off ramps in the United States became KYC only. Now they are going after self-hosted wallets and crypto to crypto exchanges and are trying to force any entities that deal with crypto or bitcoin to register with FinCen and require users to KYC/AML. The results of the US election will ensure some of the pressure is relieved temporarily but, we are most definitely not out of the woods. Personally, I doubt that Donald Trump even understands why Bitcoin is important, and I think he just decided it would win him some votes to support it. One of the most significant recent state attacks on Bitcoin was the arrest of the Samourai Wallet developers in April. Samourai Wallet was a Bitcoin wallet app that had some great privacy features. Privacy is not easy to achieve with Bitcoin because it is a fully transparent ledger, and if you buy bitcoin through an exchange or service linked to your real name in any way, anybody can track exactly what you do with that bitcoin and how much you have. One of Samourai's main features, the one that got them arrested, was a non-custodial mixing service called Whirlpool that allowed users to mix their bitcoin with other users' bitcoin and then receive different bitcoin that wasn't linked to their original bitcoin. The government has gone after cryptocurrency mixing services before, but the main difference between Whirlpool and a mixer like Bitcoin Fog was that Whirlpool is non-custodial. Samourai Wallet never actually took possession of your bitcoin, although they did run a centralized coordinator that matched people who wanted to mix bitcoin. That wasn't illegal and still isn't regardless of what the prosecutors argue. The US Government is alleging that just because a handful of criminals used the service the developers are guilty of conspiracy to commit money laundering which is ridiculous. For one, the percentage of illicit funds that went through Whirlpool was minuscule, most people were legitimate users who just wanted to improve their privacy. This is as absurd as arresting the manager of a bank just because a few criminals managed to use the bank to launder money, or arresting a knife manufacturer because some people used their knives to commit crimes. Samourai wallet was one of the very few options people had if they wanted to use Bitcoin privately, and now that it's gone it has left a giant hole in the privacy toolkit for Bitcoiners. Now that a couple of coders are facing serious prison time for developing Bitcoin software, it has created a chilling effect throughout the industry. There are plenty of people who want to develop privacy software, but not many of them are willing to risk going to prison to do so and can you blame them? If the Samourai devs don't beat this case it will have far-reaching implications, so you might want to donate to their legal defense if you care about bitcoin, privacy, and freedom in general. There is a way to ensure privacy for Bitcoin without anyone risking prison time, and that is if changes were made at the protocol level to improve privacy. Unfortunately, there is a significant portion of the community that is against making any major changes to the Bitcoin protocol, they believe ossification is the best route. I think those who believe this are probably more concerned with the price of Bitcoin than whether it succeeds or fails in offering a viable alternative to the state-controlled financial system. We are at a crossroads with Bitcoin, there are multiple paths before us. One path is the one in which crypto and bitcoin become absorbed into the traditional financial system as heavily regulated investments accessible only to those privileged enough to have the proper paperwork, and taxed to the point where their price appreciation and wealth preservation effects are heavily mitigated. You will be able to buy bitcoin only from licensed AML/KYC-compliant custodians and self-custody will likely be illegal. Perhaps USDC and USDT are co-opted as a de facto CBDC, after all, it makes sense for the US government to allow stablecoins as long as they follow all their rules because the use of those stablecoins will help prevent the dollar from losing its reserve currency status. Another more unlikely path is a total ban on cryptocurrency and bitcoin use in the United States and the European Union. If you are unlucky enough in this scenario to have any KYCed BTC that the government knows about, it will be seized from you. If you have custody and you refuse to give up your keys, they will just throw you in prison for disobeying. The third path is the one I hope we take, in which we successfully fight back against government regulations and preserve Bitcoin's ability to be a permission-less system outside of the traditional financial system. The division in the space between bitcoin maximalists and users of other cryptocurrencies needs to be put aside, no longer should BTC maxis cheer when the SEC takes down another "shitcoin" company, but instead all lovers of freedom and users of cryptocurrency need to band together and use our influence and wealth to do everything we can to stop the government from destroying our freedom to transact and our right to privacy. As a group, united, we have the power to make a difference. It is important to remember that the Government is not some all-powerful eye of Sauron, they are just people who think they have some divine right to tell other people what they can and can't do because of some words on a piece of paper. We can peacefully fight back in a myriad of ways and stop this madness in its tracks. I know a lot of people in the community would prefer to just pretend like nothing is happening as long as the number goes up, but even if Bitcoin gets to a million dollars, if we are not free to use it in whatever way we wish, then that would be a phallic victory. Regardless of any regulation that does or does not pass, we must fulfill the mission of Bitcoin and create and participate in a massive circular Bitcoin and crypto economy outside of the blood money fiat system. It needs to be relatively easy for someone to live off of Bitcoin alone without any need for KYCed offramps. We need landlords who will rent to plebs for bitcoin, we need plumbers who will fix your toilet for bitcoin, and we need a network of people all over the world who will readily accept and spend bitcoin for products and services. With localbitcoins getting shut down, private word-of-mouth networks using encrypted communications and mesh networking need to develop and grow rapidly. Many people are working on this but we need more and we need it now. If you believe in the promise of Bitcoin, in the power of money that is separated from the state, and in freedom tech; then it's time to support your local circular Bitcoin economy. The main reason I am writing this is as a call to action for all those who consider themselves aligned with Bitcoin's values, maxis or not. If you buy Bitcoin, for whatever purpose, then I implore you to stop only buying KYCed bitcoin! There are those of us, myself included, who have taken the plunge and dropped out of the traditional financial system. We earn and save in Bitcoin instead of fiat. Some of us don't even have a bank account, let alone a Coinbase account or any account that requires KYC. I have never KYCed and will never KYC. At first, this wasn't because I understood why KYC and Bitcoin were antithetical, but because I was so broke I didn't even have an ID in 2017 when I first got into the space. I had to learn how to acquire BTC without using Coinbase or other KYC exchanges. Eventually, as I learned more about Bitcoin, I realized that my inability to KYC onto Coinbase was a positive thing. Sticking to my principles and trying to live outside of the traditional system does present some challenges from time to time. For now, I do still need access to Fiat to pay my rent and other expenses. I can buy gift cards for food and other products, and virtual prepaid debit cards work for my utility bills. Unfortunately, I can not pay my rent with a virtual prepaid debit card. Also, to preserve my privacy, I have to first convert the bitcoin into monero, a cryptocurrency with built in privacy, to buy the prepaid debit card. Otherwise, if I pay my power bill or something under my name with it, I am doxxing my Bitcoin wallet. The options for converting Bitcoin or other crypto to fiat without KYCing are decreasing every single day. Hell, the options for simply converting stablecoins to Bitcoin without KYCing are also decreasing rapidly as more and more exchanges require KYC. My local Bitcoin meet-up has been a lifeline, I can go there and sometimes find someone willing to buy Bitcoin with cash. If I'm really lucky I will find someone who will buy Bitcoin from me regularly. This is never 100% reliable, and there are times when I desperately need fiat and can't find any buyers. It is incredibly frustrating to have plenty of bitcoin and still not be able to pay my bills. I heard someone talking at a meetup recently, they were asking questions about non-KYC versus KYC bitcoin. They mentioned how fond they were of using Swan to make regular purchases of bitcoin with the classic dollar cost-averaging investing strategy. I get it, it's simple, it's easy. It is way easier to just click a button on your phone to acquire sats than to have to buy it from someone in person with cash. It's important to realize though, that every single time you "smash buy" on your KYCed app, not only are you compromising on your privacy, you are wasting another chance to help a fellow bitcoiner and strengthen your local circular economy. If even half of the people who attend my local meeting choose to buy KYC-free bitcoin for cash every time or even every other time they make a purchase instead of using some app, I would never again have to worry about whether or not there would be a buyer if that was the case. This is the easiest way you can fight back against government overreach, just as the Bitcoin network itself gets stronger and more secure as more people use it, so does the Bitcoin circular economy. If you are in Bitcoin for more than just a "number go up" investment, I feel that you are doing a disservice to the Bitcoin community every time you have the means and ability to purchase bitcoin from a pleb and instead choose to take the easy route and click buy on some app that's probably reporting everything you do to the government. The Bitcoin community has a lot of combined economic power, there is no reason why we shouldn't be directing some of that purchasing power inward to strengthen our community. By buying our bitcoin from within our community, the power and reach of our circular economy would increase drastically and be much harder to stop. They can't blacklist your Bitcoin wallet address if they don't know what it is! They can't freeze your bank account if you don't have to use one! Imagine a world in which one could easily live outside of their system, and opt out of their game. I'm not telling you not to pay your taxes, because that can end with you in a prison cell and then you are out of the fight. But you don't have to dox your Bitcoin wallet just to pay taxes on your gains. Yes, I'm sure it's nice to just set up an automatic dollar cost average weekly or monthly buy on Swan or on any of the many other options for this. Just set it and forget it they tell you, it's so easy when you don't even have to think about it! Watch your stack grow and grow over time on your little app. Well, you know what? Screw that! Freedom isn't "easy", freedom isn't "convenient", freedom is hard work, freedom is blood, sweat, and tears, and freedom is sacrifice. The State loves every time you pick what's easy and convenient over what is best for your freedom. If Bitcoin is ever going to succeed as an alternative financial system, then it does need to be easier to do more with it than buying some maple syrup or paying your VPN subscription. Since the state is trying to close all the non-kyc on/off ramps, it is imperative that our community provides our own on/off ramps for those who need some dirty, dirty fiat, to survive. Buying your bitcoin from a Bitcoiner in need is a way to advocate for freedom with your purchasing power. Please for the love of god, it's up to us. If we don't fight back with our collective purchasing power, Bitcoin will become just another speculative investment and nothing more. So how do we use the next four years to make the Bitcoin community and network more resilient to potential future attacks from the state? We have to create a massive grassroots movement to create new and strengthen existing circular economies outside of state control using Bitcoin. We have to strengthen Bitcoin's privacy and create new tools to enable people to use Bitcoin as privately as possible. We have to support and use non-kyc services, and support the people developing and maintaining non-kyc services and Bitcoin privacy tech. You may not feel that you, as just one individual, have much power to change things. This is not true at all, if everyone in Bitcoin does some or all of the things I am about to list, then collectively we have the power to regain our freedom and protect it. Five ways you can fight back against the Government's war on Bitcoin Buy your bitcoin without KYC from plebs, not KYC/AML exchanges. Every time you buy bitcoin from Coinbase or something, it is a wasted opportunity. If you are actively stacking sats, whether you are dollar cost averaging regularly, or just buying now and then when you can, then you need to be viewing every purchase as an opportunity to help support the Bitcoin circular economy. If you are buying your bitcoin on a KYC exchange or service, then you are wasting an opportunity and helping the bad guys win. Yes, it can be more inconvenient to buy Bitcoin without KYC instead of just pressing a button on a KYCed app, but if you truly believe in the freedom that Bitcoin represents, that's what you should be doing. I can understand if you want to have a KYC stack and non-KYC stack, especially if you are public about your involvement with Bitcoin, but at least make some of your purchases off the books. This is not legal or tax advice, but as far as I know, it is not illegal to simply buy bitcoin and not report the purchase. It's only when you sell it that you are required to report any capital gains. If you already have any KYCed bitcoin that you have an unrealized loss on, you might want to consider selling it immediately for cash, realizing the loss for your taxes, and then take that cash and buy non-kyced bitcoin from a fellow pleb at a meetup. You don't want to wait until you're sitting on a huge gain and it would require a large tax bill to do this, also this wash trading loophole for crypto might not be around forever. You can't do that with stocks, if you sell a stock at a loss and then buy it back within a certain amount of time, it is considered "wash trading", and you are unable to write the loss off your taxes. This is not currently the case for cryptocurrencies, so you might want to take advantage of it. Spread the word. Normies need to know about the assault on their freedoms, it goes beyond bitcoin or crypto. You may think you are just one voice, and maybe you don't have thousands of followers on social media, so can you make a difference in this battle? It's important that we all use what reach we do have to spread the word about the assault on our rights by governments around the world. I doubt the average person, even if they might own a little bitcoin, even knows what's going on. If they do have an idea, they probably don't realize the full extent of it. You need to tell everyone who will listen to you that governments are attacking our rights and that we are so close to living in a completely dystopian nightmare if we don't do something to stop it now. Explain to your friends and family the truth about what inflation is and what causes it. We must find a way to inform the average person how the state's assault on financial privacy and freedom affects them personally whether they use Bitcoin or not. We need the support of the average Joe who doesn't necessarily care about Bitcoin but still doesn't like the idea of the Government tracking everything they do with their money. It should creep people out when they are told about how the government now watches everything you do financially and is even examining bank account transactions with AI and without a warrant. Education is important because currently many people aren't even aware of what fiat currency means, that the gold standard is gone, or that price inflation isn't a result of corporate greed. The Federal Reserve means nothing to average people and neither does the advantages of having a decentralized permission-less store of value. This has to change, the Government is getting away with acts of tyranny, like locking up people for writing code, partly because many people outside of our community have no idea it's going on or its implications. We have to get the public angry about this! It might be uncomfortable talking about these kinds of issues with normie friends and family (if you still have any normie friends), and many hesitate because they don't want to come across as some kind of radical anti-government conspiracy theorist type. Get over that hesitation though, because this is that important and they need to know the truth. Use your wealth and purchasing power. Use services and products that accept Bitcoin/crypto payments, and offer your own services and products in return for Bitcoin. Donate to pro-crypto candidates and Bitcoin/privacy developers. Every time you can spend bitcoin on products and services. Offer your own products and services in exchange for bitcoin. List items on bitcoin marketplaces. Donate to organizations and campaigns that are fighting for Bitcoin, or developers that are working on it. Bitcoin has generated a lot of wealth for a lot of people, and if it has benefited you, now is the time to give some back to support this fight. If a dev gets arrested, they should know the community is going to rally around them and they are going to have good lawyers. We need to play the game in Washington as well with lobbyists and the whole nine yards, yes it is disgusting to participate in this system to any degree but until a new system takes its place we may have to. Many anarcho-capitalists consider the very act of voting to be immoral, which I get because you are trying to impose your will on others by voting. But they are playing dirty my friends, so we might have to get dirty ourselves. Help normalize privacy by using tools to protect your privacy and encourage family and friends to do the same, the bigger the herd the better otherwise the very act of using a privacy tool makes you stand out, negating some of the benefits. If only a few people are using tools and services to protect their privacy, the very act of using that tool or service makes you stand out. We need the protection of the crowd, if everyone is using privacy tools, then it no longer is a weird thing to be doing. Just because you may have nothing to hide doesn't mean you shouldn't protect your privacy regardless. For example, a lot of services and websites are blocking VPN users these days, but if the majority of people were all using VPNs, they would be committing suicide as a business by blocking VPNS. It's also important to support open-source software developers who are working on privacy tools. Many people who bought KYCed bitcoin on centralized platforms and then wanted to gain some forward privacy relied on tools such as Samourai Wallet, but if the Government isn't going to allow such tools to operate, it's more important than ever to protect your privacy in other ways. The easiest way to ensure BTC privacy is to stop buying Bitcoin on centralized exchanges and services, if you buy bitcoin directly from other plebs and especially home miners, and that Bitcoin is never deposited into a KYCed account, you don't even have to worry about trying to use mixers. Another way is to use Monero to break the link between your bitcoin and you. Monero as a tool for spending bitcoin is more valuable than ever before, I believe that Monero can become the de facto privacy layer of Bitcoin. Until major changes are made to the Bitcoin protocol to improve privacy, then it will remain a good strategy to save in bitcoin and spend in monero. Work together and join forces, bitcoiners and shitcoiners have to work together against the assualt on our freedoms. Crypto is a very tribal community, you got your Bitcoin maxis, you got your ETH maxis, and you got random shitcoin communities who think their coin is the best coin or whatever. That's all fine and good, but it is past time to work together to stop attacks on crypto, what's bad for crypto in general is bad for Bitcoin. For a long time, many bitcoin maximalists espoused the opinion that what was bad for shitcoins was good for bitcoin. They would cheer on the SEC when it went after shitcoin projects because they thought bitcoin wasn't considered a security so it was "safe" and money would just flow out of targeted shitcoins into Bitcoin. Cheering on tyrannical government intervention because it might have the side effect of making your bags go up is antithetical to everything Bitcoin stands for. Many people tried to warn them, that bitcoin wasn't by any means "safe" just because it wasn't a security, and that the government would find other ways to attack bitcoin outside of securities laws. Now that scenario is playing out and it's time for maximalists to hold their nose and ally themselves with the rest of crypto against the government's war on crypto. This is taking some time to sink in apparently for some people like the host of a Bitcoin maxi podcast I won't name. They were saying that they would rather elect Elizabeth Warren over John Deaton because he is a "shitcoiner". When I heard this, I was flabbergasted. This person was willing to put Bitcoin in more danger from an avowed anti-crypto politician like Warren just so they didn't have to support a shitcoiner who is also going to be pro bitcoin. I mean come on, can you get over your hatred of shitcoiners for five minutes please! If we don't work together then we are going to be destroyed eventually. There is no more time for infighting and pseudo-religious maximalism. If you hate shitcoins, repeat after me, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend". I don't care if you are the worst ponzi-shilling, ugly NFT bag-holding, grifter, scumbag, and pump and dumper, if you are going to help stop this madness then I will work with you all day long (well maybe not someone like Sam Bankman Fried). Working together includes voting for pro-crypto candidates regardless of your views on shitcoins or voting. Although as they say, democracy is just two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner(attribute quote), we might as well cast self-defense votes on candidates that are pro-crypto. Buy your bitcoin without KYC from plebs, not KYC/AML exchanges. Every time you buy bitcoin from Coinbase or something, it is a wasted opportunity. If you are actively stacking sats, whether you are dollar cost averaging regularly, or just buying now and then when you can, then you need to be viewing every purchase as an opportunity to help support the Bitcoin circular economy. If you are buying your bitcoin on a KYC exchange or service, then you are wasting an opportunity and helping the bad guys win. Yes, it can be more inconvenient to buy Bitcoin without KYC instead of just pressing a button on a KYCed app, but if you truly believe in the freedom that Bitcoin represents, that's what you should be doing. I can understand if you want to have a KYC stack and non-KYC stack, especially if you are public about your involvement with Bitcoin, but at least make some of your purchases off the books. This is not legal or tax advice, but as far as I know, it is not illegal to simply buy bitcoin and not report the purchase. It's only when you sell it that you are required to report any capital gains. If you already have any KYCed bitcoin that you have an unrealized loss on, you might want to consider selling it immediately for cash, realizing the loss for your taxes, and then take that cash and buy non-kyced bitcoin from a fellow pleb at a meetup. You don't want to wait until you're sitting on a huge gain and it would require a large tax bill to do this, also this wash trading loophole for crypto might not be around forever. You can't do that with stocks, if you sell a stock at a loss and then buy it back within a certain amount of time, it is considered "wash trading", and you are unable to write the loss off your taxes. This is not currently the case for cryptocurrencies, so you might want to take advantage of it. Buy your bitcoin without KYC from plebs, not KYC/AML exchanges. Every time you buy bitcoin from Coinbase or something, it is a wasted opportunity. If you are actively stacking sats, whether you are dollar cost averaging regularly, or just buying now and then when you can, then you need to be viewing every purchase as an opportunity to help support the Bitcoin circular economy. If you are buying your bitcoin on a KYC exchange or service, then you are wasting an opportunity and helping the bad guys win. Yes, it can be more inconvenient to buy Bitcoin without KYC instead of just pressing a button on a KYCed app, but if you truly believe in the freedom that Bitcoin represents, that's what you should be doing. I can understand if you want to have a KYC stack and non-KYC stack, especially if you are public about your involvement with Bitcoin, but at least make some of your purchases off the books. This is not legal or tax advice, but as far as I know, it is not illegal to simply buy bitcoin and not report the purchase. It's only when you sell it that you are required to report any capital gains. If you already have any KYCed bitcoin that you have an unrealized loss on, you might want to consider selling it immediately for cash, realizing the loss for your taxes, and then take that cash and buy non-kyced bitcoin from a fellow pleb at a meetup. You don't want to wait until you're sitting on a huge gain and it would require a large tax bill to do this, also this wash trading loophole for crypto might not be around forever. You can't do that with stocks, if you sell a stock at a loss and then buy it back within a certain amount of time, it is considered "wash trading", and you are unable to write the loss off your taxes. This is not currently the case for cryptocurrencies, so you might want to take advantage of it. Buy your bitcoin without KYC from plebs, not KYC/AML exchanges. Spread the word. Normies need to know about the assault on their freedoms, it goes beyond bitcoin or crypto. You may think you are just one voice, and maybe you don't have thousands of followers on social media, so can you make a difference in this battle? It's important that we all use what reach we do have to spread the word about the assault on our rights by governments around the world. I doubt the average person, even if they might own a little bitcoin, even knows what's going on. If they do have an idea, they probably don't realize the full extent of it. You need to tell everyone who will listen to you that governments are attacking our rights and that we are so close to living in a completely dystopian nightmare if we don't do something to stop it now. Explain to your friends and family the truth about what inflation is and what causes it. We must find a way to inform the average person how the state's assault on financial privacy and freedom affects them personally whether they use Bitcoin or not. We need the support of the average Joe who doesn't necessarily care about Bitcoin but still doesn't like the idea of the Government tracking everything they do with their money. It should creep people out when they are told about how the government now watches everything you do financially and is even examining bank account transactions with AI and without a warrant. Education is important because currently many people aren't even aware of what fiat currency means, that the gold standard is gone, or that price inflation isn't a result of corporate greed. The Federal Reserve means nothing to average people and neither does the advantages of having a decentralized permission-less store of value. This has to change, the Government is getting away with acts of tyranny, like locking up people for writing code, partly because many people outside of our community have no idea it's going on or its implications. We have to get the public angry about this! It might be uncomfortable talking about these kinds of issues with normie friends and family (if you still have any normie friends), and many hesitate because they don't want to come across as some kind of radical anti-government conspiracy theorist type. Get over that hesitation though, because this is that important and they need to know the truth. Spread the word. Normies need to know about the assault on their freedoms, it goes beyond bitcoin or crypto. You may think you are just one voice, and maybe you don't have thousands of followers on social media, so can you make a difference in this battle? It's important that we all use what reach we do have to spread the word about the assault on our rights by governments around the world. I doubt the average person, even if they might own a little bitcoin, even knows what's going on. If they do have an idea, they probably don't realize the full extent of it. You need to tell everyone who will listen to you that governments are attacking our rights and that we are so close to living in a completely dystopian nightmare if we don't do something to stop it now. Explain to your friends and family the truth about what inflation is and what causes it. We must find a way to inform the average person how the state's assault on financial privacy and freedom affects them personally whether they use Bitcoin or not. We need the support of the average Joe who doesn't necessarily care about Bitcoin but still doesn't like the idea of the Government tracking everything they do with their money. It should creep people out when they are told about how the government now watches everything you do financially and is even examining bank account transactions with AI and without a warrant. Education is important because currently many people aren't even aware of what fiat currency means, that the gold standard is gone, or that price inflation isn't a result of corporate greed. The Federal Reserve means nothing to average people and neither does the advantages of having a decentralized permission-less store of value. This has to change, the Government is getting away with acts of tyranny, like locking up people for writing code, partly because many people outside of our community have no idea it's going on or its implications. We have to get the public angry about this! It might be uncomfortable talking about these kinds of issues with normie friends and family (if you still have any normie friends), and many hesitate because they don't want to come across as some kind of radical anti-government conspiracy theorist type. Get over that hesitation though, because this is that important and they need to know the truth. Spread the word. Use your wealth and purchasing power. Use services and products that accept Bitcoin/crypto payments, and offer your own services and products in return for Bitcoin. Donate to pro-crypto candidates and Bitcoin/privacy developers. Every time you can spend bitcoin on products and services. Offer your own products and services in exchange for bitcoin. List items on bitcoin marketplaces. Donate to organizations and campaigns that are fighting for Bitcoin, or developers that are working on it. Bitcoin has generated a lot of wealth for a lot of people, and if it has benefited you, now is the time to give some back to support this fight. If a dev gets arrested, they should know the community is going to rally around them and they are going to have good lawyers. We need to play the game in Washington as well with lobbyists and the whole nine yards, yes it is disgusting to participate in this system to any degree but until a new system takes its place we may have to. Many anarcho-capitalists consider the very act of voting to be immoral, which I get because you are trying to impose your will on others by voting. But they are playing dirty my friends, so we might have to get dirty ourselves. Use your wealth and purchasing power. Use services and products that accept Bitcoin/crypto payments, and offer your own services and products in return for Bitcoin. Donate to pro-crypto candidates and Bitcoin/privacy developers. Every time you can spend bitcoin on products and services. Offer your own products and services in exchange for bitcoin. List items on bitcoin marketplaces. Donate to organizations and campaigns that are fighting for Bitcoin, or developers that are working on it. Bitcoin has generated a lot of wealth for a lot of people, and if it has benefited you, now is the time to give some back to support this fight. If a dev gets arrested, they should know the community is going to rally around them and they are going to have good lawyers. We need to play the game in Washington as well with lobbyists and the whole nine yards, yes it is disgusting to participate in this system to any degree but until a new system takes its place we may have to. Many anarcho-capitalists consider the very act of voting to be immoral, which I get because you are trying to impose your will on others by voting. But they are playing dirty my friends, so we might have to get dirty ourselves. Use your wealth and purchasing power. Use services and products that accept Bitcoin/crypto payments, and offer your own services and products in return for Bitcoin. Donate to pro-crypto candidates and Bitcoin/privacy developers. Help normalize privacy by using tools to protect your privacy and encourage family and friends to do the same, the bigger the herd the better otherwise the very act of using a privacy tool makes you stand out, negating some of the benefits. If only a few people are using tools and services to protect their privacy, the very act of using that tool or service makes you stand out. We need the protection of the crowd, if everyone is using privacy tools, then it no longer is a weird thing to be doing. Just because you may have nothing to hide doesn't mean you shouldn't protect your privacy regardless. For example, a lot of services and websites are blocking VPN users these days, but if the majority of people were all using VPNs, they would be committing suicide as a business by blocking VPNS. It's also important to support open-source software developers who are working on privacy tools. Many people who bought KYCed bitcoin on centralized platforms and then wanted to gain some forward privacy relied on tools such as Samourai Wallet, but if the Government isn't going to allow such tools to operate, it's more important than ever to protect your privacy in other ways. The easiest way to ensure BTC privacy is to stop buying Bitcoin on centralized exchanges and services, if you buy bitcoin directly from other plebs and especially home miners, and that Bitcoin is never deposited into a KYCed account, you don't even have to worry about trying to use mixers. Another way is to use Monero to break the link between your bitcoin and you. Monero as a tool for spending bitcoin is more valuable than ever before, I believe that Monero can become the de facto privacy layer of Bitcoin. Until major changes are made to the Bitcoin protocol to improve privacy, then it will remain a good strategy to save in bitcoin and spend in monero. Help normalize privacy by using tools to protect your privacy and encourage family and friends to do the same, the bigger the herd the better otherwise the very act of using a privacy tool makes you stand out, negating some of the benefits. If only a few people are using tools and services to protect their privacy, the very act of using that tool or service makes you stand out. We need the protection of the crowd, if everyone is using privacy tools, then it no longer is a weird thing to be doing. Just because you may have nothing to hide doesn't mean you shouldn't protect your privacy regardless. For example, a lot of services and websites are blocking VPN users these days, but if the majority of people were all using VPNs, they would be committing suicide as a business by blocking VPNS. It's also important to support open-source software developers who are working on privacy tools. Many people who bought KYCed bitcoin on centralized platforms and then wanted to gain some forward privacy relied on tools such as Samourai Wallet, but if the Government isn't going to allow such tools to operate, it's more important than ever to protect your privacy in other ways. The easiest way to ensure BTC privacy is to stop buying Bitcoin on centralized exchanges and services, if you buy bitcoin directly from other plebs and especially home miners, and that Bitcoin is never deposited into a KYCed account, you don't even have to worry about trying to use mixers. Another way is to use Monero to break the link between your bitcoin and you. Monero as a tool for spending bitcoin is more valuable than ever before, I believe that Monero can become the de facto privacy layer of Bitcoin. Until major changes are made to the Bitcoin protocol to improve privacy, then it will remain a good strategy to save in bitcoin and spend in monero. Help normalize privacy by using tools to protect your privacy and encourage family and friends to do the same, the bigger the herd the better otherwise the very act of using a privacy tool makes you stand out, negating some of the benefits. Work together and join forces, bitcoiners and shitcoiners have to work together against the assualt on our freedoms. Crypto is a very tribal community, you got your Bitcoin maxis, you got your ETH maxis, and you got random shitcoin communities who think their coin is the best coin or whatever. That's all fine and good, but it is past time to work together to stop attacks on crypto, what's bad for crypto in general is bad for Bitcoin. For a long time, many bitcoin maximalists espoused the opinion that what was bad for shitcoins was good for bitcoin. They would cheer on the SEC when it went after shitcoin projects because they thought bitcoin wasn't considered a security so it was "safe" and money would just flow out of targeted shitcoins into Bitcoin. Cheering on tyrannical government intervention because it might have the side effect of making your bags go up is antithetical to everything Bitcoin stands for. Many people tried to warn them, that bitcoin wasn't by any means "safe" just because it wasn't a security, and that the government would find other ways to attack bitcoin outside of securities laws. Now that scenario is playing out and it's time for maximalists to hold their nose and ally themselves with the rest of crypto against the government's war on crypto. This is taking some time to sink in apparently for some people like the host of a Bitcoin maxi podcast I won't name. They were saying that they would rather elect Elizabeth Warren over John Deaton because he is a "shitcoiner". When I heard this, I was flabbergasted. This person was willing to put Bitcoin in more danger from an avowed anti-crypto politician like Warren just so they didn't have to support a shitcoiner who is also going to be pro bitcoin. I mean come on, can you get over your hatred of shitcoiners for five minutes please! If we don't work together then we are going to be destroyed eventually. There is no more time for infighting and pseudo-religious maximalism. If you hate shitcoins, repeat after me, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend". I don't care if you are the worst ponzi-shilling, ugly NFT bag-holding, grifter, scumbag, and pump and dumper, if you are going to help stop this madness then I will work with you all day long (well maybe not someone like Sam Bankman Fried). Working together includes voting for pro-crypto candidates regardless of your views on shitcoins or voting. Although as they say, democracy is just two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner(attribute quote), we might as well cast self-defense votes on candidates that are pro-crypto. Work together and join forces, bitcoiners and shitcoiners have to work together against the assualt on our freedoms. Crypto is a very tribal community, you got your Bitcoin maxis, you got your ETH maxis, and you got random shitcoin communities who think their coin is the best coin or whatever. That's all fine and good, but it is past time to work together to stop attacks on crypto, what's bad for crypto in general is bad for Bitcoin. For a long time, many bitcoin maximalists espoused the opinion that what was bad for shitcoins was good for bitcoin. They would cheer on the SEC when it went after shitcoin projects because they thought bitcoin wasn't considered a security so it was "safe" and money would just flow out of targeted shitcoins into Bitcoin. Cheering on tyrannical government intervention because it might have the side effect of making your bags go up is antithetical to everything Bitcoin stands for. Many people tried to warn them, that bitcoin wasn't by any means "safe" just because it wasn't a security, and that the government would find other ways to attack bitcoin outside of securities laws. Now that scenario is playing out and it's time for maximalists to hold their nose and ally themselves with the rest of crypto against the government's war on crypto. This is taking some time to sink in apparently for some people like the host of a Bitcoin maxi podcast I won't name. They were saying that they would rather elect Elizabeth Warren over John Deaton because he is a "shitcoiner". When I heard this, I was flabbergasted. This person was willing to put Bitcoin in more danger from an avowed anti-crypto politician like Warren just so they didn't have to support a shitcoiner who is also going to be pro bitcoin. I mean come on, can you get over your hatred of shitcoiners for five minutes please! If we don't work together then we are going to be destroyed eventually. There is no more time for infighting and pseudo-religious maximalism. If you hate shitcoins, repeat after me, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend". I don't care if you are the worst ponzi-shilling, ugly NFT bag-holding, grifter, scumbag, and pump and dumper, if you are going to help stop this madness then I will work with you all day long (well maybe not someone like Sam Bankman Fried). Working together includes voting for pro-crypto candidates regardless of your views on shitcoins or voting. Although as they say, democracy is just two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner(attribute quote), we might as well cast self-defense votes on candidates that are pro-crypto. Work together and join forces, bitcoiners and shitcoiners have to work together against the assualt on our freedoms. When I first started writing this article, things were looking a lot more dire for Bitcoin than they are today. We have a pro-Bitcoin president for the first time in history and our Congress will be much more pro-Bitcoin than it was as well. Politicians will say anything to get elected though, and it's important to remember that. At the end of the day, Trump and other pro-crypto candidates are still politicians and statists who probably don't give a shit about your freedom beyond winning your votes. Even if Trump follows through on the promises he's making regarding cryptocurrency, it will only be a temporary reprieve in the overall war. The state knows Bitcoin is a threat to it, and whatever administration comes after Trump might not be nearly as friendly to the industry. So if the assault on crypto does cool off with a Trump presidency, it will be an opportunity to strengthen our community, shore up our defenses, and ensure that a strong circular economy is up and running outside of the traditional financial system. This way when the state inevitably attacks us again, whether it be in 4 years or 10 years, we will be ready for them. I know it can be tempting to just sit back, watch your bags grow in value, and let other people worry about fighting for freedom. However, we need your help, we need every single person's help that we can get or we will lose. You don't have to be fighting all day every day, but do something! Many of the things on the list above are very simple for anyone to do and don't require much effort, but if enough people do them it can make a significant impact. We have the power, we just have to use it.