Cryptocurrencies can never be stopped, and will more likely outlive governments than vice versa. Long live tax evasion! Vive la liberté!
For example, I've met quite a bit of people that don't want to pay any taxes. Yet they all want for them and their goods to be able to use roads for free, roads that are built and maintained with taxes.
That's actually ok: two incompatible goals just means you have to make a trade-off; welcome to engineering.
The problem is that none of them understand why they can't have both. In their minds, there is no trade-off to make, because they want both, feel entitled to both, and having both should be possible.
No idea why they are not able to understand that both things are incompatible. If there is some option that allows both that I am missing, they didn't manage to explain that.
That's a complete strawman and you know it. Any libertarian would say they'd be happy to pay to use privately-run roads.
>No idea why they are not able to understand that both things are incompatible. If there is some option that allows both that I am missing, they didn't manage to explain that.
Privately owned/built roads! These even already exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_highways_in_the_United.... What's hard to understand about roads being built by people that aren't the government? Yes such roads might not be as optimally placed/efficient, but the libertarian's goal isn't efficiency, it's minimising what they consider the moral injustice of taxation.
Your taxx dollars pay for the carceral state, they pay for ICE raids conducted through ruses and guises ordinarily illegal but not in the administrative law context. DHS has a discretionary budget of around $50 billion a year. A similar amount is earmarked for nondiscretionary disaster relief which pretty much lost all meaning lately. Of course, the agencies bring in somme revenue as well, but that's usually even worse news. In July an IG's report fouhnd that the DEA, without legally required congressional oversight, have been profitably laundering money for the cartels for most of the past decade, and had even somehow got involved in buying a private jet that was then left off initial budget reports. Like Aliens v. Predator, whoever wins, we lose, since this is self-justifying behavior, not in the public's interest but to create reasons for their own relevance. Some degree of fraud, waste,and abuse is bound to happen in all bureaucracies, but in America the impact isn't felt evenly. Black and brown parents have to have a second talk with their kids about encounters with the police. Immigrants, documented or not, pay taxes but receive either abbreviated or absolutely no means-t4ested benefits. In spit4e of contributing to the continued survival of social security, they're literally considered second-class citizens subject to indefinite detention. Or, for about a few thousand Americans, you'll experience the exact same because that's about how many Americans get deported a year to god knows where.
And there's plenty of indicators showing that mere spending isn't really sufficient to achieve any of the goals we thought we could just throw taxpayer dollars at. HHS has a $2 trillion budget, almost half of that is used in conjunction with medicaid programs and grants, yet, neither party seems particularly happy with the status quo, not to mention that it excludes 20 million or so immigrants. And we have really convinced ourselves that money can cover up expertise and competency. American farmers are seeing their entire year's revenue coming from subsidies due to the trade war this year. For so many communities in this country, it makes perfect sense to wonder where the tax money go, since frankly it's pretty difficult to see sometimes, and what's most visible sometimes is also the most disturbing, egregious, and kafkaesque one can witness in the system. When that's the vector you interact with what your tax dollars pay for, it's perfectly logically consistent to want actual services yet not want to pay for the abuse. And we don't do public infrastructure stuff well anymore anyway. Think how long it took for the 2nd Avenue subway to go up 3 stations.
They go towards bombing brown people in the Middle East, and a smaller portion goes to programs like Medicare.
I'm not American, but I used to live in NYC, and thus paid my taxes there. I was always under the impression that: federal budget is for the armies/FBI/CIA/NSA/FDA and other three letters agencies. On the other hand state taxes, city taxes, and sales taxes are for roads, schools, hospitals, firefighters, police and the MTA.
I'm surprised the federal budget even has a line item for Education, or Housing & Community!
Even if this wasn't a falsehood, characterizing all military spending as "bombing brown people in the middle east" is ignorant, incendiary political flamebait.
But that Bitcoin is useless to you or whoever you give it to unless it’s converted to currency. That’s where the gov’t puts it’s grip.
Move as much Bitcoin wherever you want. Who cares. Want to convert to dollars or Euros or Yen? That’s where the gov’t steps in and say fine - prove who you are for this transaction. With the public Bitcoin ledger they can now connect you back to the source of the money.
I could also see criminalization of mixing tools being a thing.
It's currently not illegal to obscure your financial trail as long as it's not in service of anything that is itself illegal, but I could see the legislators saying that any funds from a mixer are to be considered tainted, and made de facto illegal all on their own.
Probably between ~1-2%, if that.
I'm quickly coming to the conclusion that while crypto cuts out a lot of the obvious middlemen, there are a lot more hidden ones. It is currently non-economical to do small transactons.
I’d need to go through a registered money exchange and the gov’t will have a record of my name and the cash I received in the exchange. If it’s enough cash they will ask about the source of funds.
On the other hand if you pay digitally with "classic" currencies today, your privacy is severely diminished as well. Fintech companies often rely on third parties for some aspects of their services and financial data has special legal standing making it harder to control like you could do with other personal data (under the GDPR, for example).
Besides even if bitcoins cannot be directly traded for dollars on an exchange, the same could still occur with intermediate objects. If I give you bitcoins in exchange for a laptop, I can then turn around and sell that laptop for money. It's not as convenient (and could be illegal), but it would work.
Not taking either side, just pointing out this fact.
The only reason piracy isn't enforced is because it's largely a civil, as opposed to a criminal matter, which constrains the tools available to copyright holders to go after pirates. Criminal investigations, in comparison, are not hamstrung the way that Warner Brothers going after someone downloading The Matrix is.
You significantly overestimate the financial incentives for building special purpose hardware solely for the purpose of participating in a criminal economy. That would be trivial for the police to shut down, because hardware manufacturers have a very conspicuous physical presence.
There's a reason nobody sells 'piracy-solutions-in-a-box'. It's because you need factories to build those, and you can't exactly own a factory in secret.
Piracy boxes are a thing. There are Android TV set top boxes loaded with all kinds of piracy software being sold at a premium, and they manage to do so without factories.
Similarly, you don’t need a factory to build a Bitcoin wallet if (hypothetically) you can no longer use a general purpose computer for that - a microcontroller and hobbyist-level tooling is enough to build one.
Even then you’re just turning your goods into cash. Which is still difficult to spend when buying high value assets like property. At some point if you’re a criminal that wants to spend their cash, and live in a developed country you need to turn your crypto into clean fiat in a bank account, or prove the crypto didn’t come from illicit sources.
That one should be encrypted, backed up, and stored in a safe place
I guess for the purpose of travel, and you really need to, you can always use symmetric encryption to encrypt your seeds with a strong passphrase, then travel with that.