In recognition of this awesome development, I promise not to shit talk about NJ for the rest of the day. Hopefully I don’t have to make any left turns…

Check Elon’s basement

I know plenty of people with a critical outlook on crypto who have a clue what they are talking about.

I shouldn’t feed the troll, but there is a teachable moment here.

Crypto transactions that are direct on a Blockchain, by design, are immutable. Once they are validated in a block, and future blocks are validated on top of that, it is impossible for any entity to change that history unless they control a majority of the validation power of that network. Yes, even the NSA can’t do it. It’s math.

Yes, if the government wants your crypto, it will get it. But the only way to do that is to obtain your private keys. It cannot reverse a transaction, nor reverse-engineer your private keys from a transaction. Yes, not even the NSA can do it. It’s math.

Governments do have other tools at their disposal. But those tools must center on obtaining the key. They cannot “hack” it any other way.

Well, nothing anyone says is going to convince you, because you’re obviously correct. How silly of me to question you!

No, but if the US government sends money into your bank account, they can just as easily take it back.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2025/02/12/trump-administration-takes-back-80-million-in-fema-money-from-nycs-bank-accounts-city-alleges-highway-robbery/

Crypto was designed to be a peer-to-peer method for immutable transactions. Crypto transactions are irreversible, even for governments.

I’ve used crypto for legitimate transactions in the past. It bailed me out once, big time, when I had to top up a foreign SIM card while abroad and their website wouldn’t take my US credit card. I found a site selling top-up codes that took crypto and sent some from my phone, and I was back in business. (The site was legit, but even if it turned out to be a scam I knew they could never take anything more than what I sent them because of the way crypto worked.) But this was back when people were still using it to transact.

The worst thing that ever happened to law-abiding people using crypto was when it’s price zoomed up. Because for all those early adopters, every individual transaction now has a considerble capital gain attached. That’s why people don’t spend crypto anymore, because it’s been turned by the market into a Store of Value. (And by developers, but that’s a different thread).

This seems to be all about a technicality involving how these sanctions are applied. Sanctions are meant to be applied to people and the companies they run, and a US court ruled that these sanctions couldn’t be applied to a smart contract because it’s just a bunch of code, and not the property of a sanctioned individual. This ruling was made back in November, they are just getting around now to removing the sanctions. From what I can tell, the sanctions against the people involved in running the service are still in effect.

These agencies are sometimes able to retrieve stolen funds. In the case of the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack in 2021, the Department of Justice (DOJ) was eventually able to recover almost 85% of the bitcoin (BTC) ransom paid to Russian cybercriminal group Darkside. It’s unclear how investigators obtained the hacking group’s private keys.

Probably the old-fashioned way

I can believe areas of the White House have no cell service, on purpose. Remember when they found those fake cell towers around DC?

https://www.wired.com/story/dcs-stingray-dhs-surveillance/

I bet at some point they installed some cell phone jammers specifically to limit the amount of foreign spying that could be done by fake towers, and they simply “forgot” to tell the incoming Trump administration…

“Temu is designed to make this expansive access undetected, even by sophisticated users,” Griffin’s complaint said. “Once installed, Temu can recompile itself and change properties, including overriding the data privacy settings users believe they have in place.”

That’s just nuts