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Comment by erosenbe0 | Hacker News Reader

If you are living in the US or EU then being able to hide assets and transfer without censorship is mostly a bug, not a feature. And eventually the governments will have to do something about it in order to preserve the rule of law.

What happens if you are disabled in a horrible negligent accident or defrauded in some conventional transaction and defendant hides all assets and transactions in BTC?

I can't imagine a long term equilibrium where [Americans, at least] store trillions and trillions of dollars in BTC without substantial additional regulation.

Edit: for those in relatively more corrupt, tenuous circumstances then BTC is a net positive, of course.

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>Edit: for those in relatively more corrupt, tenuous circumstances then BTC is a net positive, of course.

Even that I'm not sold on. You could argue that it gives incentives for the rich and powerful to maintain the status quo since their own riches become out of reach from the corrupt government.

Meanwhile the commoners are still very much under threat since most of their assets will be physical (their house, their clothes, their belongings, their bodies etc...).

The idea that cryptocurrencies are empowering the poor makes about as much sense to me as trickle down economics. If you are in a position to benefit from Bitcoin it means that you already have a significant amount of disposable income you can convert into bitcoin and afford to "HODL" in your wallet for a while. "Being able to transfer money across political boundaries without censorship" is completely irrelevant if you're a poor farmer in Buthan or an elderly shoemaker in rural Pakistan. Transfer what money, to whom and for what purpose?

This whole concept is just social-washing cryptocurrencies to obfuscate that it's profoundly libertarian (the USA flavor) at the core. If you consider that the government is always the enemy and it can't be fixed and should instead be thoroughly destroyed, then and only then do cryptocurrencies make sense. It's not about good vs. bad government, it's about no government.

> If you consider that the government is always the enemy and it can't be fixed and should instead be thoroughly destroyed, then and only then do cryptocurrencies make sense. It's not about good vs. bad government, it's about no government.

Certainly not. As I keep telling people here, cryptos are property, not currency. Why should governments be in the business of telling people what type of property they can and can't own?

A coin is nothing but a couple of large numbers that are easy to multiply together but very difficult to factor...that's it. If the people of earth want to assign large fiat currency values to complicated key-pairs, then why shouldn't they have the right to do that?

Of course crypto-traders need government...like we need libraries and schools and police and all that, just like everyone else, right?

> Certainly not. As I keep telling people here, cryptos are property, not currency. Why should governments be in the business of telling people what type of property they can and can't own?

Uh what? That's like the second biggest thing the government does after, you know, army.

You can't own a dead lobster shorter than 6 3/4 inches in the United States without committing a felony, even if the lobster met its untimely end without your assistance.

Of course that's what the government should be in the business of doing otherwise we'd likely all be dead, and separately, there wouldn't be any more lobsters.

Are you really comparing baby lobsters to key-pairs?

Private property right go back to the Magna Carta and form the basis of the US Constitution and it's Bill of Rights.

If you believe it's governments duty to control all property rights than your a Marxist and to be honest, I have no interest in debating you.

Not all property rights no, of course not, however it's fairly obvious that the government has the freedom and/or duty to impose restrictions on property as necessary.

Bitcoin is regressive and would be harmful to the economy if it obtained widespread adoption, and therefore, the government has the right to curtail its use and ownership.

Are you claiming that if instead of sending millions of dollars to ISIS (currency) I send them millions of dollars worth of food (property), the government has no business telling me that I can't do that?

I mean, maybe you're claiming that I can't transfer the property, but that I have the right to own the property as long as the government approves of where it's going. Sure. That certainly reduces people's willingness to assign a large fiat currency value to my pantry.

I don't see anything particularly hard about regulating bitcoins.

You're registering your wallets with your government and that's about it. Bitcoin is fully transparent, so government can track every transaction and if you're doing transaction to some non-verified wallet, you have to explain it to your government.

I would argue that bitcoins are even easier to track than bank accounts.

What government can't do is to steal your money or block your access to your money.

> What government can't do is to steal your money or block your access to your money.

https://xkcd.com/538/

> What government can't do is to steal your money or block your access to your money.

Gov: “Here is our wallet blacklist feed. If you transact with these wallets, you go to jail.”

On the plus side, FinCEN can automate currency transaction report generation and monitoring on a public distributed ledger.

> Gov: “Here is our wallet blacklist feed. If you transact with these wallets, you go to jail.”

Me: "I'm already in Africa, find me, losers"

"Hi, I'm in Africa hiding from the USG and my wallet is on the FBI blacklist. Can I buy a phillips screwdriver?"

"No thanks. We're in America and have $20M of assets and 50 employees and we'd rather not lose it all and go to jail."

If the entire world will bend under US regulations and will respect their white-lists and black-lists, it might be an issue. But that means losing independence (because surely US won't respect Russian blacklists) and plenty of countries won't agree with that. So there will always be escape routes as long as you're physically outside of the US.

>If the entire world will bend under US regulations and will respect their white-lists and black-lists, it might be an issue.

You should read about US sanctions, that's actually pretty close to the truth. Living outside of US jurisdiction means... living in Russia, AFAIK.

You know that it takes some USD cents and a couple of network confirmations to transfer any asset to a different wallet, right?

Come on. It also takes a couple of USD cents (per operation) for the government to automatically blacklist all wallets that "touched" (received any amount of transfer from) a blacklisted walled. The great advantage of BTC is that the ledger is public...

Blacklisting addresses based on where they received money from doesn't make any sense. Blacklisted wallets can just send microcents (dust) to whitelisted wallets, which would now have to be blacklisted as well.

You can make it illegal to use Bitcoin, but it was designed to make it practically impossible to enforce such a ban.

You just need to modify the rule a little bit.

"If you transact with these blacklisted wallets, your wallet also automatically becomes blacklisted, and if we find you then you go to jail. As an exception - if you receive any amount of BTC from a blacklisted walled, you have 7 days to send the same amount (or greater) to [this government wallet] and that will erase all your legal liability and make your wallet whitelisted again. We can even automate the process for you if you trust us enough to give us your wallet keys. Alternatively, register email/phone numbers with us and we'll notify you when your wallet is blacklisted, and tell you how much BTC you should pay us"

So people need to watch all their wallets every 7 days? What if it's a cold storage wallet that is 2of3 signature protected and signatories are in different countries? What if you go on several weeks vacation? What if it's in a vault along with your gold, are you going to walk to the bank every week, open the vault, load the keys, then export them to some other cold storage? What if you have a virus that makes you have to restore large chunks of your infrastructure from backups that takes longer than a week? This is simply ridiculous. What you propose is just not realistic, no one who deals with crypto often will ever think that this is a solution.

> We can even automate the process for you if you trust us enough to give us your wallet keys.

Haha seriously? Your solution is that people give their private keys to the government? You must have no experience with crypto or what it's about it all. Nor really experience with how the government works and how often it gets corrupt. A corrupt clerk now is a small nuissance, a corrupt clerk in your proposed scenario means that thousands of addresses get stolen of all of their tokens. There is zero chance that this scenario will ever be implemented in any meaningful way.

So it would be enough to send any amount to any public wallet to make it blacklisted and additionally also make SWAT teams come to the owners of those accounts? Yeah "good idea" /s. You know there is no way to prevent receiving bitcoins right?

Hardware wallets generate a new address for each transaction (receive & transmit). It's impossible to maintain a blacklist feed.

Oh I wouldn't worry, they'll find a way. It's only 7 tx/sec lol, that's literally nothing. Not that hard to put 2 and 2 together.

You can receive every time with a new address generated by HD Wallet. But transmission can only happen from an address which has positive balance. And after receiving the money, destination balance becomes positive, and you are bound to use that destination address as a source to transfer assets further.

> If you are living in the US or EU then being able to hide assets and transfer without censorship is mostly a bug

If you completely ignore how big corporations and ultrarich are able to hide their assets behind shell corporations and various other structures, then yes maybe your vision is correct. But that it not what happens in reality.

In reality right now the rich can hide whatever they can, and the poor have no recourse against frivolous seizures, lawsuits etc. What crypto does is levels the playing field.

But then surely - if you take the position that generally some kind of government and law is a good thing, and generally they're not out to hurt the everyman - the idea that anyone should be hiding anything (away from taxes) is destructive to the detriment of the things that hold society together (laws, roads, having the rubbish collected, etc?)?

Yes there are useful things that the government does. But I believe there are ways to tax for things which are more fair than what is being used today, and crypto is not a detriment to that.

(Roads and rubbish can easily by taxed by usage, from the people who clearly use those services, but there are other central commons that should be taxed on state or federal level.)

Your point about a personal liability suit is interesting, but there are many ways to hide money before an incident occurs, Bitcoin is just one possibility that has its own risks. If you’re trying to hide money after an accident then it will be obvious so you will still be on the hook.

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