I disagree, if this is passed, everybody break it and call your congress person / senators and complain that it was passed.
disclaimer: also not a lawyer.
disclaimer: also not a lawyer.
Especially since a very large use case for crypto - especially in non-custodial wallets - especially people avoiding KYC, is crime.
The ratio of ancaps to criminals on this list is likely very low.
[edit] The real risk of finding yourself on this shortlist of non-custodial wallets is suddenly finding yourself on the wrong side of the IRS.
Most blockchains are pseudonymous, and the government has tools to track and de-pseudonymize, or at least map and aggregate - transactions. If the government wanted to go after you for breaking this law, they'd probably just throw together a quick list of people the IRS should start poking around at.
They know as well as you do that you probably didn't report every transaction you've ever done on every exchange, DEX, or platform. That's tax fraud, straight up. Much easier to prove, and much harder to argue on merits.
I've said this before, and I'll say it again: if your government is coming for you, no amount of magic beans in your computer will keep you or your value safe. If you don't trust your government you've got bigger problems than crypto. If you trust your government crypto is irrelevant.
As Beria, Stalin's side-kick said, "Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime."
Even if you kept a blacklist of wallets with dirty money, I think it would be possible to spin up a chain of brand new wallets and quickly funnel coins through them before the blacklist could keep up in a way that would be impossible with fiat transactions and traditional banks. I could be wrong though, maybe someone’s got an algo for that.
Opinions my own.
Can't you spin up a chain of brand new offshore accounts/shell companies in a friendly jurisdiction and quickly funnel money through them before the blacklist could keep up?
The reason many, especially smaller, banks don't want to do business with criminals is they fear they'd lose their access to the US market through a termination of these relationships. This would then push the bank into insolvency.
I know this because all this happened to Tether, lol. There's been some documentation, likely as part of the NYAG lawsuit or the Paradise Papers leak -- or both. Noble initially refused to bank them for this reason, so they invested in Noble, who then took them on as customers. Their custodial bank (Wells, IIRC) told them to eat dirt, and it pushed Noble into insolvency.
This barely qualifies as an opinion. It's a simple fact.
This is far too black and white. You may trust your government not to engage in a vendetta against you for no reason and still not trust them not to pass onerous regulations that harm you unintentionally and then provide no recourse for the victims of that outcome.
I have yet to hear a solid argument for why it should be in all circumstances be regulated like investment securities even when only being used as currency (like cash).
But even accepting that the majority of existing holders are using it for speculation, why do we have to pre-ruin its ability to ever be used as a medium of exchange?
Acceptance obviously has network effects. The user doesn't have much incentive to set up crypto if nobody accepts it, and the vendor doesn't have much incentive to accept it if few of their customers have it set up. But everything starts that way. Then some large merchant or group thereof decides they want to promote its use and offers everybody a 15% discount for using it, so a third of their customers do so for the discount, and then millions of people have it set up and other vendors start accepting it now that there are a large enough population of customers. That hasn't happened yet, but what's your theory for why it never could?
The credit for that goes to the core team and the 7tx/sec limit.