Amboss Wants To Free Humanity Through Compliance

Lightning Network infrastructure and analytics company Amboss recently announced a new tool called Reflex to help customers make their lightning nodes OFAC Compliant. Reflex allows node runners to ensure their node enforces U.S. trade sanctions, foreign policy, and discriminates against some of the most non-compliant foreign state entities in the world.

Amboss says Reflex increases freedom for node runners. Amboss CEO Jesse Shrader, who goes by Jestopher on Twitter, says "While some of our competitors continue down the fatalistic path of adversarial business practices, Amboss believes freedom and sovereignty can be achieved through compliance." Amboss employees report that the company has started using a new moniker internally which states "Compliance is Defiance." The company is also trying to spread the message that Reflex creating "freedom for node runners" isn't just about giving customers more choices when it comes to customizing their lightning infrastructure, it's literally increasing their overall freedom and that freedom is a direct result of compliance.

Shrader also said that Amboss was planning to drop the term "OFAC Compliant" for nodes that leverage the new Reflex product. Instead, Amboss plans to market Reflex with the term "OFAC Defiant." He clarified the strategy by saying, "Compliance has a negative connotation due to the public's poor understanding about what it means. We are on a mission to help educate Bitcoiners that compliance is actually the boldest method of defiance one can use. By using Bitcoin to help enforce U.S. sanctions and censor U.S. adversaries, you are using Bitcoin in a way that Satoshi never intended. That's defiance. It's extremely cypherpunk. When the state sees how irreverent we are to the ethos of our own community and how willing we are to comply with their rules its going to be a shock to their system. I don't think they will know how to react."

While Reflex is quite possibly the most subversive product ever to be offered by a Bitcoin company, Amboss isn't stopping there. The company also announced that it has new products being developed which will help lightning node runners auto report their activity and revenue to government authorities as well as automation tools which will help them pay their taxes as their owed, in real time, directly from their cold storage wallets. The latter tool is expected to save the IRS millions in compliance enforcement in coming years.

"It's literally impossible to be TOO compliant" the company said in a press release. Tapping into that is a super power. The more we can find ways to comply and the more creative we can be in those efforts, the more free and sovereign Bitcoiners will become.