Comment by zizzles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zizzles | Hacker News Reader

That advent of cryptocurrency such as Monero are a god-send to the underground. It is almost bread & butter. They serve their purpose of being a difficult-to-trace decentralized currency very well. Did any of you oldies imagine that in 2016, you would be able to have recreational drugs of your choice shipped to your doorway, anonymously? Paid for with a cryptographic medium of exchange?

Although, there exists a con: Cryptocurrency as a whole is gaining a "dirtier" reputation thanks in part to it's new-found use as a black market medium of exchange. People had a vision of Bitcoin being an easy to use, mainstream currency for the general population (pipe-dream in my opinion) It is clearly not going in that direction.

Governments can very easily outlaw Bitcoin if they so please at any moment. Any legitimate exchanges would be shut-down, no LocalBitcoin, no Bitcoin ATM's, no BitPay, no NewEgg and Overstock accepting Bitcoin payments, banks ceasing operating with Bitcoin copmanies (good luck converting to fiat)

"Did any of you oldies imagine that in 2016, you would be able to have recreational drugs of your choice shipped to your doorway, anonymously? Paid for with a cryptographic medium of exchange?"

Yes, we did:

http://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html

This reminds me of all the people currently mocking bitcoin and crypto-enthusiasts as "fundamentally flawed and impossible" when discussing replacing fiat currencies..

In 20-30 years those same people will be coming up with great insights like "I bet all those nerds never saw this coming!"

More likely is that governments will allow Bitcoin 'traffic' to be funneled through exchanges, like Coinbase, that are FinCEN-compliant and responsive to law enforcement, while cracking down hard on peer-to-peer exchangers and anyone else who isn't diligent about collecting user data and responding to subpoenas.

IIRC, collecting information on customer's identities is a legal requirement of any money-transmitter with a nexus in the U.S., so any Monero exchanges are either going to need to collect user data (rendering the whole thing kind of pointless), blacklist all users in the U.S., or accept that they'll probably be relentlessly hounded by the feds.

So what's the next step in the arms race when people move to decentralized exchanges like Bitsquare?

Either Bitsquare makes good with federal law enforcement, it freezes out all U.S. persons and severs any possible nexus with the U.S. (which would seem to be impossible without defeating the whole point of the exchange), or the feds eventually figure out a legal mechanism for shutting it down.

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