May I present, 6 ways you can peacefully resist the state's war against #Bitcoin (or #Monero, everything I say below works for Monero as well)
1. Buy your bitcoin without KYC from plebs p2p, not exchanges.
Every time you buy BTC from a centralized exchange, 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 KYCed exchange or service, then you are basically helping the bad guys win.
Yes, it can be more inconvenient to buy BTC without KYC, 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 a 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 taking that cash and buying non-kyced bitcoin with it. 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.
2.Spread the word.
Normies need to know about the assault on their freedoms, this goes beyond just Bitcoin. You may think you are just one voice, and maybe you don't have thousands of followers on social media, so can you even make a difference in this battle?
Absolutely you can, anyone you manage to wake up to this is one more person on our side. 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 inform people about 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. It should creep people out when they are told about these things, because not only is it creepy it just plain wrong.
Education is also important because currently many people aren't even aware of what fiat currency is, that the gold standard is gone, or that price inflation isn't just a result of corporate greed. The Federal Reserve means nothing to many 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 this is going on or its implications. We have to try 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. If your community doesn't have a meet up group yet, seriously consider starting one.
The more meet up groups we have around the world, the stronger we become. One more thing, if you are onboarding someone to Bitcoin, the time to have a discussion about KYC is before they buy their first bitcoin, not after. The best way to protect them going forward is to convince them not to KYC at all, ever. You can even just sell them their first sats yourself to make it easy for them so they aren't tempted to just buy some on a KYCed exchange for the convenience.
3. Use your wealth and purchasing power.
Use services and products that accept bitcoin payments, and offer your own services and products in return for bitcoin. Donate to pro-bitcoin candidates, open source developers, and legal defense funds. 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.
4. Help normalize #privacy by using tools to protect it and encourage family and friends to do the same, a larger herd is a safer herd for everyone.
Otherwise the very act of using a privacy tool makes you stand out, negating some of the benefits. We need the protection of the crowd, if everyone is using privacy tools, then it won't be 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 losing a lot of potential users by blocking VPNs and might change their policy.
It's also crucial 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 attempt 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 has become the de facto privacy layer of Bitcoin. It may be a good strategy to save in bitcoin but also swap some regularly into monero that just sits in a wallet ready to go when you do want to spend, like a private checking account. Having monero ready to go when you do need it protects your privacy more than swapping into it right before you want to spend it.
5. Work together and join forces, bitcoiners and altcoiners have to work together against the assault on our freedoms.
As I mentioned in the beginning, almost everything I have said in this article also applies to Monero (not a shitcoin, thank you) and without default privacy on the Bitcoin layer one, developing Monero's circular economy is equally important. Crypto is a very tribal community, you got your Bitcoin maxis, you got your ETH maxis, and you've got random 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 overall is usually also bad for Bitcoin.
For a long time, many Bitcoin maximalists espoused the opinion that what was bad for altcoins was good for Bitcoin. They would cheer on the SEC when it went after altcoin projects. Some of them thought that because bitcoin wasn't considered a security it was "safe" and money would just flow out of targeted altcoins 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 has played out with Samourai Wallet 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.
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 a complete ponzi-shilling ugly NFT bag-holding pump and dumper, if you are going to actually help stop this madness then I will work with you all day long.
6. Mine bitcoin and run your own node.
You don't have to have a bunch of fancy hardware to start helping secure and decentralize the network by mining and running a node. Anyone can start mining with a $200 investment and you can run a node on most computers as long as you have a 24/7 internet connection. The importance of plebs mining cannot be understated, mining centralization is a huge problem in Bitcoin, with most of the hashpower located in huge corporate mining farms that can easily be co opted or shut down by governments. It's much harder to stop tens of thousands of small miners than one big mining farm. You can solo mine and it is like having a machine that prints lotto tickets for you every 10 minutes, except the lotto tickets have decent odds. If you win a block you will earn more than 3 bitcoin from the block reward and transaction fees. Or if you prefer you can mine in a pool and split the rewards with every other miner in the pool if the pool wins a block. By running your own node and connecting to it whenever you use Bitcoin, you can verify your own transactions and ensure your IP address isn't captured whenever you send a transaction. Every node that people start up also helps make the Bitcoin network more decentralized and harder to stop. It's not enough to just "hodl", we need everyone who cares to actively participate in securing the network.
-This was pulled from an article I wrote awhile back which can be found here:
https://paragraph.com/@thoughtcrimetraphouse/fight-for-your-right-to-use-bitcoin-as-it-was-intended-to-be-used
Media file:
#podcasts #freesamourai
