[Cryptography] playing lawyer, Incentive Politics

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Sun, Oct 15, 2023 at 5:39 PM John Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:

> It appears that Sebastian Stache via cryptography <zeb at qtt.se> said:
> >But I do think there is explicit Bitcoin legislation in the EU, the
> >United States, China, Canada, Japan, Australia, Singapore, South Korea,
> >India and Brazil. The UK regards crypto currency as property. El
> >Salvador and CAR both have adopted Bitcoin as a national currency. An
> >uncomprehensive list and possibly partly erroneous.
>
> I suppose you might be right about El Salvador and the CAR. I do know
> that the El Salvado Volcano Bonds that were supposed to invest in
> Bitcoin and somehow at the same time fund a non-existent Bitcoin City
> didn't sell.
>
> The CAR barely has a government so who knows.
>

You asked for citations?

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/why-bitcoin-failed-in-car

The CAR deal followed a very familiar coinwashing approach: Bunch of coin
scammers move in, bribe officials to adopt their scheme, government commits
to BitCoin technology, glitzy launch followed by utter failure.

The backstory here is Wagner Group and Russia:

https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/wagner-troops-arrive-central-african-republic-ahead-referendum-2023-07-17/

The real point of making BitCoin legal tender was so that the Wagner
terrorist mercenary group could launder the proceeds of ransomware attacks
into conflict diamonds from the dictator's mines.

So like Pat Robertson's infamous 'operation blessing' in which US
evangelicals donated money for medicine and 'missionary work' which
Robertson use to hire mercenaries and helicopters to seize diamond mines,
this shabby little scheme is just a Russian version of the same.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/mission-congo-alleges-pat-robertson-exploited-post-genocide-rwandans-for-diamonds

Prigozhin was heavily linked to the St Petersburg cyber-mafia being one of
the go-betweens who provided protection from police. His involvement in
bank fraud, ransomware and the rest predated his involvement in Wagner.
Connecting up his cyber-crime operations and his mercenary operations was
an obvious move and a way to put lots and lots and lots of money in his
pocket.


So when people bring up CAR, it is not a demonstration of BitCoin doing
anything good, it is yet more proof of the fact that pseudo-currencies need
to be criminalized. Infrastructure whose main purpose is to bypass
financial regulations designed to stop terrorism and crime should incur the
same penalties as the crimes it enables.


I follow this topic fairly closely and I have never seen any Bitcoin
> legislation in Europe or North America. Once again, citations rather
> than hand waving would be appreciated. I'm aware of some court cases
> that have treated Bitcoin as property, but that's just applying
> existing law, nothing special there.
>

Well legislation may in fact be coming but certainly not the sort of
legislation the chap is hoping for, quite the reverse.

The Hamas/Quds force attack in Israel may spur action here. The backstory
there being Quds force is in a similar position to Wagner and looking at
the possibilities of moving into the vacuum left by Putin's murder of
Prigozhin. The aftermath of the hostilities will inevitably create
opportunities for Quds to recruit Palestinian refugees for its to be formed
foreign mercenary wing.
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