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Comment by mitchdoogle | Hacker News Reader

I think they mean if you are using your own wallet to store your bitcoin, then coinbase and gemini have no control over what you do with it, except not using their own services

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Then back to my original point: If no exchanges allow you to deposit BTC, what are you doing with it?

Once you've shamir-secret-split your multi-sig cold-storage private keys, laminated them, placed them in fireproof envelopes and dug them deep in the ground in 5 different continents... what exactly do you DO with your BTC?

Your original point was that _Coinbase and Gemeni_ had prevented you from exchanging your BTC for fiat currency. There's nothing preventing you from taking your BTC to some other exchange, or just some guy that accepts BTC for goods or services. That's the beauty of this whole decentralized thing.

No, you misread. "et cetera" is latin for "and the rest"... I put that there because exchanges are all tied. A ban on one leads to a ban on another, depending on the severity of your crime.

> There's nothing preventing you from taking your BTC to some other exchange

I've already showed you that exchanges can freeze your assets, so yes they can prevent you from sending to other exchanges.

> some guy that accepts BTC for goods or services. That's the beauty of this whole decentralized thing.

If your marker for decentralization is currency adoption, then USD is the most decentralized.

I thought we were passed this whole "Bitcoin is not created by humans" meme...

Can’t you just do a private transfer to a fresh wallet?

You might have to tumble it first.

> Can’t you just do a private transfer to a fresh wallet?

Isn’t the point of Bitcoin not to have private transfers?

It doesn't work that way, every transaction is fully traceable all the way back to the block the coin was mined in.

> "I've already showed you that exchanges can freeze your assets"

Your point is well taken, however it needs to be made clear: exchanges can only freeze those assets which you yourself have placed in their control.

p2p trades

Washing your coins through monero / Zcash is a simple option (With enough splits and spread over time so amount correlation is harder).

If you have some time, rent mining power with BTC, and get freshly minted totally clean bitcoin in return.

You can exchange your bitcoin for stuff outside of those exchanges. Lot of ways to spend bitcoin without having to use an exchange ;)

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