EU to make Bitcoin traceable, ban anonymous crypto wallets
euronews.com
euronews.com
However, I sort of expected more people on here would sympathize with the Cypherpunk Manifesto [1] and band together against pressures to minimize our privacy.
I don't want companies to share my information to third parties, this includes the banks about my purchases. And eg. Facebook shouldn't be able to target me because a site added their 'like button'.
Privacy doesn't mean lawless land of crypto companies hiding in unknown countries. I actually expect governement regulation to protect it's tax-paying citizens.
That's why we vote for them.
Edit: As a counter argument, there are also a lot of downvotes without reasonable arguments when you argument against crypto ;)
Edit 2: the informed article you shared is actually pretty biased from my POV, definitely not neutral + The additional sanity check when checking the author didn't check out either.
Not their business.
What about a simple letter as invitation on how to register for a COVID vaccination center.
Or a sms-alert for a incoming storm.
Or if someone hits you with their car and runs away. Based on the license plate that they can track them down.
Or if you call 911 for an emergency and you can't finish your sentence with the address.
Or if you die, that you children are taken care of and can receive your inheritance. They need to be a neutral party.
Even a simple birth certificate is done by the government.
Where does this ‘government doesn’t know any of that’ actually work in practice? America has become a joke, the rich do not pay their share of taxes and face no punishment.
They do not declare what they should be paying taxes on (spirit of the law, not what they can get away with, remember you wanted that honesty policy).
It’s unfortunate that crypto has become a worse state of affairs in terms of greed and inequality, but I think long term it offers the capacity for transparent finance.
I’m pro privacy on a individual basis, but I don’t think financial or corporate privacy has served the world well.
The government tracks everything we do right now, and the rich still don't pay their share of the taxes or face punishment for it. So why don't we stop the tracking, since the rich aren't paying anyway, and stop pretending that blanket surveillance is somehow beneficial and desirable for the rest of us?
Credit cards require you to disclose your secret credentials that allow withdrawals from your account. Cryptocurrency payments do not because they apply math and computer science to the problem.
The banking systems are also mostly obsolete because they are usually on an outdated paradigm without a blockchain. Blockchains are the starting point for cheat-proof ledgers. Most existing financial ledgers are susceptible to manipulation. Some by design.
The issue with current card transactions is the size of the identifier string - 16 digits isn't enough to do anything particularly useful with that can't be near-instantly brute forced.
Chip and pin somewhat improves that, all we need is to completely deprecate the idea of a "16 digit card number" and it opens up a world of possibilities. No "cryptocurrency" or "blockchain" needed.
And for many a "reverse-able" ledger is a bonus not a disadvantage - the "Average Guy On The Street" falls for personal scams or need to do chargebacks waaayyyyy more than fall foul of bank-level fraud.
No amount of cryptocurrency-bro tech is going to help with a DOA washing machine...
I don’t know whether predatory investments and outright scams are simply inevitable with the anonymity cryptocurrency provides. I’d like to think there are some perfectly valid and net-beneficial use cases. But it seems pretty clear that crypto, in its current iteration, is exploitative at best and the only real use case beyond pyramid schemes is facilitating criminal activity.
It was a cool experiment. We tried it. It doesn’t work. A lot of people have learned (and some are still yet to learn) the hard way why our financial systems are so heavily regulated. But if we’re looking for increased privacy (and we should be!) we need to start looking beyond Bitcoin.
Our centralized financial systems have a lot of regulation for outsiders, but the rules selectively apply to those with power and capital. If the Panama Papers/FinCEN leaks have shown me anything its that our financial systems are not sufficiently policing themselves.
Having all transactions on open source ledgers is a good start. With zero knowledge proofs I’m fairly confident we can design auxiliary systems that can obfuscate senders/receivers/amounts while also allowing for fraud detection by the community as a whole - with slashing style incentives we won’t have to worry as much about regulatory capture and similar things.
You can’t have fraud detection and privacy. They are mutually exclusive.
And, you can’t have privacy and still prevent illicit transactions. Any way that leaks intent is by definition not private.
Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies work fine, and achieve their goals.
Sure you can. Cash does. It’s why we don’t have large denominated bills.
It's a fundamentally "wrong" currency in that you cannot request labor in exchange for debt. Instead you can request labor in exchange for waiting for a machine to generate the value of labor.
People say, well that's great, because no one wants debt. Except you do. You do want debt to exist in the world, because you want people to have an incentive to make things and do things versus not making things and doing things.
It makes no sense. It's mass appeal is driven by the fact that one person exchanges fiat to another person in exchange for the currency itself in larger price to fiat over time.
I think it's actually somewhat sustainable nonsense too, because people really think you can dollar cost average it. And if you have it and need to actually buy something with it, you are only incentivized to ask for more fiat in exchange for it, because people will buy it for strange reasons like simple moving average.
It's not a good currency, because it's not price stable, and it's not a good investment, since there's no underlying or relational value associated with it. So what is it?
To the OP, is this copy-pasted to every new BTC post? Truly curious.
I like hard money. Infinity / 21M
It makes no sense. Labor capacity increases as population grows. Gold does not grow. Should we all exchange slivers of gold? No. That would be nonsensical.
I don’t think we should go back to physical element based scarcity to measure wealth, the asteroids are full of it. What nothing else in the universe is full of is nonces for near hash collisions in SHA256. That’s as good or better than any other way to secure the ledger.
The currency shortages and depressions of the gold standard era were due to government intervention in banking, not gold backing of currency: https://www.alt-m.org/2015/06/04/ten-things-every-economist-...
This brings me to the second part: anyone who does care about privacy is _especially_ not going to recommend use of Bitcoin since a system which requires you to make an irrepudiable public record of your transactions is actually worse than the status quo. Similarly, people will confabulate about it allegedly being “uncensorable” when it's both easy to censor and, being public, extremely risky for anyone concerned about censorship to use.
Last week my bank informed me that I passed my ATM limit for the year and it's going to give me a small daily allowance for the rest of the year. And then lied me on the phone that it's a requirement from the central bank. This is neither a joke nor a metaphor - this literally happened to me this month (ING in Romania -they're widely considered the best bank here). Ah, they're an ATM-only bank, they have no tellers, so I can simply not take my money out, unless I make an account with another bank and have it transferred. And this just means I'm going to hit another set of limits.
There is a concerted effort to control the financial movements of the population. If you fit within common patterns you don't see it. I'm probably barely at the edge - I've moved on the order of tens of thousands - and I'm hitting it pretty hard. Revolut had my account completely blocked for a couple of months earlier this year, while completely ignoring my calls. Couldn't even close it, since it was not on zero and couldn't take money out of it. And this was for moving around on the order of thousands over a few months, mostly sending money to a few friends. This is not money laundering, this is simply using the money I make very legitimately and paying taxes for.
It's ironic, but a fair share of my withdrawals were simply because the pandemic made me want to have a cash reserve on hand, in case of emergencies. Plus a used car purchase and some renovations. Very white money, taxes already paid.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, makes every transaction public and permanent so anyone in the world can track you and they can retroactively link your activity at any point in the future. If you're trying to stay anonymous, every transaction you make is an opportunity to have your identity permanently revealed if you or the other party are compromised. If, say, you make a donation to a political campaign now and power changes hands a couple of years later, there's no way to retroactively scrub that record. People will say “oh, use a tumbler” — which is again putting a permanent “I'm trying to hide illegal activity” flag up in any of the situations where you really need it (not to mention the risk of being caught in someone else's activity and having to explain that you had no idea that you were using the same tumbler as a mafioso).
Note that I'm definitely not saying that the status quo is great, only that I think it's worse to make promises which the system cannot deliver. If people actually believe the Bitcoin salespeople and act as if it's privacy-preserving, they're at more risk than doing nothing at all.
This is probably a correct analysis. It's very disheartening though.
Replace tumbler with encryption and you'll get the picture. My desire for privacy shouldn't be a reason to "Minority Report" me.
By the way, I know you didn't say otherwise - I'm just pointing out how bad the status quo can be.
The irrepudiable public record of transactions is needed to make it censorship resistant, and does indeed come with severe privacy risks, though those can be mitigated with zk-proof cryptography (e.g. https://aztec.network/).
That's definitely a good example of the sales pitch, but think about how it works in the real world:
1. Nobody wants random numbers, so you have to link your Bitcoin addresses to real world identities on every transaction. Anyone you deal with can deanonymize you if required or compromised, which means that if you actually have cause for concern this is not a system you can trust.
2. Almost all transactions will require conversion to real currency at an exchange. This is, of course, a great place for a government to require KYC since the exchanges and businesses in your country are subject to local laws.
3. The network requires an easily-blocked protocol to send large amounts of data on a continuous basis. This makes it easy for a government to block unapproved exchanges — and, of course, since trying to circumvent the system is effectively waving an “illegal activity here!” flag that means that any transactions you try to make over something like a VPN have a high level of risk unless they're parties which you are certain are fully outside of your government's control. How much do you really trust that guy who says he works for the resistance with your full transaction history?
4. The next point on the sales pitch is usually “use a tumbler” or “use separate wallets for everything”. These are impractical on a regular basis, guaranteeing that people will be compromised by mistakes and again have their full public transaction history linked, and there's a huge trust problem: do you really believe everyone you interact with will keep your identity history? Will you ever make a mistake and use the wrong wallet? Will you always have so much money available that you never need to transfer funds? What happens when the police search your phone and find a banned Bitcoin client, which is to say a signed confession? Are you certain the tumbler you're using isn't compromised or run by the police? What happens when the police find someone else using the same tumbler to launder money and now you're being charged as an accomplice for the mob and are trying to prove that you were just breaking the law for some lesser crime and had no knowledge of what those guys were doing?
None of that is practical: real people are not going to want or reliably keep some kind of strict opsec regimen AND they're not capable of vetting that the software is actually implementing the promised privacy features. If you actually care about censorship, the first questions you'd want to think more deeply about are how people discover and use this system: can you be certain that the exchange someone told you was private isn't a sting operation? Is the person you're trying to send money to really who you think, and operating with perfect opsec?
At every point, the answer is “it's safer to use real cash” because then at least your risk exposure is limited to a single transaction at a specific point in time rather than a retroactive unveiling of your lifetime history.
Now, that's not great and it'll be cool if someone does come up with a truly robust anonymous system but that is not and never will be Bitcoin so it's recklessly irresponsible to run around telling people that Bitcoin is good for privacy and censorship avoidance when it can never meet those goals. It's also irresponsible to tell people that some new thing which was just developed is safe to use when it'll take decades both to prove that and develop safe community practices around the tool — many of the approaches people have hypothesized are not known to be safe in the context of an adversary with significant network visibility or statistical analysis capacity.
The other thing to remember, as we've seen with cryptography, is that you need to look at the whole system. One very nice trait about cash is that it's a robust system: I don't need to analyze a complex software stack and operating network to understand the threat model. It doesn't help anyone if, say, someone comes up with a great anonymous coin system but the local government is actively promoting exchanges and apps which are compromised — and even if you really are correct in believing that your opsec will be perfect for life, that's probably not true of everyone you deal with.
No, you only need to be able to receive/transmit the data relating to your own addresses when using a light client. The full nodes can sit outside of any censored country.
>>The next point on the sales pitch is usually “use a tumbler” or “use separate wallets for everything”. These are impractical on a regular basis, guaranteeing that people will be compromised by mistakes and again have their full public transaction history linked, and there's a huge trust problem
I agree that that is true with Bitcoin, and that is why I don't promote Bitcoin.
>>It doesn't help anyone if, say, someone comes up with a great anonymous coin system but the local government is actively promoting exchanges and apps which are compromised
Good point.
Yes but don’t you think the government would monitor traffic to those and either block connections which aren’t made by approved local banks or ask you to prove you weren’t evading local laws? I just don’t see how this could safely be addressed with an optional network most people have no reason to use.
It's very little data being used by light clients, that can be routed a thousand different ways, not to mention encrypted.
And yes governments could certainly do a lot of things but I think that as the object of enforcement becomes the end users, the political cost of enforcing laws against technologies becomes higher, and a blanket crypto ban would require pretty Draconian measures against end users.
HN is not a person but many different people in different places. Your message and mine will be probably received differently at another time of the day.
It boggles my mind that anyone would support having the government tell you, at the point of a gun, what kind of software you are allowed to run on your own computer.
That’s not a neutral stance. The idea that anything that happens on a computer should be completely free of law, trace or any kind of governmental control is not just a stance of “we want privacy” and in fact most of the pushes are just establishing the exact same level of accountability that you have always had in pre-digital financial systems.
The government has always asked you to truthfully under penalty of law report your income and financial activities. The fact that it was difficult for them to tell if you lied is not a question about rights that’s a question of accountability.
The government has always had financial regulations for banks, financial institutions and securities, the fact that it has been easy for people to ignore those rules is not a question of rights, it’s a question about accountability.
You claim neutrality but the very framing of the discussion you take is an extremist point of view. It’s essentially like saying “The civil war was about states rights and I’m neutral about if they where right”
The bigger countries are in general tightening up on tax havens; incorporating in the Cayman Islands or Vanatu raises more red flags now.
The Economist has an article this week, "What if Bitcoin went to zero?"[1] Cryptocurrencies haven't hit a recession yet, and we're getting close to one. Look at house prices. In a recession, things which depend on a net inflow of money collapse.
I don't expect Bitcoin to go to zero, but Tether could, easily. When stablecoins crash, they crash all the way.
[1] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/08/02/w...
https://futurism.com/the-byte/cryptocurrency-worth-more-than...
Crypto has a muchlower velocity of trading than currency.
As you say, crypto has a much lower velocity of trading than currency. That is the hint.
We've been in a recession since Feb 2020...
So just to be clear, your definition of "safe haven" is, what, total lawlessness with no governmental oversight?
Frankly, these moves make me think people are taking crypto seriously now, as we're finally treating it like real money or the banking sector and regulating it accordingly. If anything, it seems to me that should be a sign of success, not failure.
(and I should point out I own no crypto and I think blockchains are the biggest technical snake oil grift I've seen in the history of computing)
It's slower, it expensive to run, fees are very flexible, value depends only on speculation and electricity spending - it would be a success if crypto trends towards 0 and we can finally try to USE them, but again, it would most likely be suboptimal compared to a banknote.
Afaik shitcoins aren't even backed by the threat of violence (i.e. "fuck with us and we'll do bad shit").
They only work as long as actual organizations with actual armed forces let them be.
Most people forget how fickle their freedoms are, and overestimate their extent.
Which further proves the idea that cyberspace is independent of actual space is a lie, which renders any idea predicated on that as suspect.
There may be a brief periods where cyberspace is "more free," but it doesn't take long for the real-space authorities to notice and assert control (often in a way that's more complete than could ever be achieved in real-space).
I can cut a tree and trade it around in piece more easily than I can use the internet state-monitored access to ask someone to use the state-monitored energy grid to print me a bitcoin.
As for internet access, with encryption, it's very hard if not impossible to discriminate on how people use the internet, so the state will have to either choose to ban people from using encryption, or live with crypto.
No. As long as "crypto" traffic is identifiable in any way, the state can ban it, encrypted or not. It's unnecessary for them to go through the trouble to decrypt it.
For instance:
1. VPN traffic can be fingerprinted, which is one of the methods the GFW uses to block them. I see no reason something similar can't be done for "crypto."
2. People need to get the software to participate in a "crypto" network. A state can target and taken down legitimate channels for getting that software, and backdoored versions can be distributed through replacement channels.
3. A state can setup nodes in a cypto network and then go after anyone in their jurisdiction who connects to them. Whatever "clever" trick you think you can do to avoid connecting to them (sort of only peering with people you personally know) can be easily defeated (e.g. "well I won't connect to any node in my home country" can be easily defeated by a state that rents VPS's in foreign countries).
No, with encryption, it's possible to make crypto traffic completely indistinguishable from all other encrypted traffic.
>>1. VPN traffic can be fingerprinted, which is one of the methods the GFW uses to block them.
The state would indeed need to block both VPNs and TOR to make a dent in crypto traffic. The former would have huge negative economic repercussions. The latter, while not directly impactful on any significant economic sectors, would face major challenges from civil liberties advocates.
>>A state can setup nodes in a cypto network and then go after anyone in their jurisdiction who connects to them.
Crypto nodes that transmit their data through VPNs or TOR cannot be detected like this. In any case, I think it's highly unlikely that the people in any country with a strong democratic tradition would put up with their government doing what you describe. The government is not the master of society. It is the representative of the collective will, and the collective will be very unlikely to support such nakedly authoritarian measures.
Crypto would not have existed in the first place if most people felt that the fiat system was fair.
People who don't acknowledge this at this stage are either totally blind or totally corrupt.
Problems must be fixed at the root instead of endlessly trying to patch the symptoms. Most software developers are familiar with what happens when you try to fix bugs quickly with hacks instead of first trying to identify the root cause.
Binary options are more like a game on a slot machine. You put money in, wait a bit and see if you get money out. You can't own them or transfer them to anybody else. There isn't an open market for them, the counterparty is the broker (i.e. casino). The broker is usually barely regulated if at all, so they can (and do) freely scam people as they please.
But it doesn’t say anything about whether the ban will apply to FOSS crypto wallets people can download and run on their personal computers.
As long as the latter remains protected by free speech laws, similar to cryptography code, and commercial custodial wallets are affected, then this is a reasonable compromise not a huge problem imho.
Custody of the two assets has bordering on nothing in common.
Exchange of the who assets has bordering on nothing in common.
Conflating them is wildly innacurate.
How much of world GDP does that leave?
I can figure some complex ways but somewhere, because there are not enough people using crypto, it will get exchanged and there you will be caught. In this scenario you are actually doing something illegal; spending money you did not declare to the gov for KYC/AML, so you can still be traced via the baker who exchanged your payment to euros. And if you used Monero or whatever, you are now an actual criminal trying to hide their tracks.
There would need to be a very large crowd accepting crypto for the crypto sake, not for the USD value to get anywhere here. Which is the dream of all the fans but this is not even close where crypto is currently and most govs are taking steps to prevent it getting there.
Currently, buying gift cards using the lightning network is faster than buying gift cards directly from merchants and there is no way Amazon or any other merchant can win the speed race using the traditional financial network.
From my understanding p2p exchange is the whole purpose of gift cards, so this activity is indistinguishable from other mainstream uses.
Anyone caught with large amounts of crypto can be treated as a criminal, the same way people who have large amounts of cash on them are treated. It's obviously harder to spot someone walking around with a hoard of crypto coins, no black briefcase required.
This is just another tool in an already very expansive toolbox. All in the name of "security".
1. Paying ransomware. 2. Buying drugs. 3. Day-trading.
That's it. There's no meaningful slice of the pie that goes to #4.
Almost all of us can agree that #1 is illegal, many people and countries currently believe that #2 is illegal, and almost all of us can agree that people participating in #3 should probably pay taxes on their gains/get tax credits on their losses.
Ironically, that's the strongest long term feature. But probably the one driving the least amount of volume (outside of hyperinflation states).
If the only reason for it existing is to show how many you have, it has zero value outside the possible curiosity of "Having the largest number that happens to match this set of arbitrary mathematical restrictions"
What external transaction use does is even out the day to day value changes and decrease volitility (transaction volume >> trading volume).
Without that, you'd see some value placed on it, but a large price moves as trading affects it. Come to think of it, that looks a lot like... hmm.
I understand Ethereum and other smart contract cryptocurcies, but time when people believed Bitcoin is going to become currency are long gone
Many people still believe Bitcoin could at least be used to transfer value, like a currency. AMC, Starbucks, and United Wholesale Mortgage are all looking into accepting it. Whether these come to be seems to be seen, but there is obviously a lot of people that still expect Bitcoin to be a currency, or at the very least a way to transfer value.
Sorta like a savings bond vs a credit card
And a few years back, before the transaction fees got so high - there were a few places that took it. NewEgg comes to mind.
Since a real reserve currency is stable and backed by consistent demand, it’s unclear why anyone expects a pure fiat currency backed only by a small community of speculators to be successful.
But it had a 1MB block size limit, which was initially implemented to prevent spam. This was obstinately kept in place, and that quickly destroyed its usefulness as a currency -- since now there's a lot of contention, transacting is slow and expensive. This doesn't bother the people who want an asset to buy once, but makes it useless as a currency.
And yup, the deflationary model certainly favors not using it as a currency.
Fees are currently 5-10 cents to get in the next btc block and most lightning network transactions complete in 1-2 seconds and cost 1 cent or less in fees.
I think most of the people still tied to proof-of-work crypto despite the massive environmental concerns which have become obvious more recently, have switched to a variety of other platforms, bitcoin cash being the closest one to bitcoin (but without the block-size constrained, allowing basically fee-less transactions, though you still have to wait for confirmations)
For full disclosure, I don't hold or use any proof-of-work crypto now (other than perhaps Nano, which is sort of a hybrid that has very small proof-of-work performed by the user making the transaction, and proof-of-stake at the validation/confirmation layer)
I heard about this from a few people I knew who tried it but stopped because it was slow and they felt it was more profitable to hold Bitcoin. I’d be quite happy to have Visa/MasterCard see more competition but this didn’t seem like it was ever going to reach that point.
I gotta admit, this is my biggest issue with crypto. So far, it's just too slow/expensive to be attractive to me as a day to day tool.
Cryptocurrencies are area of hot research and it innovates fast. Bitcoin was just first (and least capable).
Can't reply to your comment for some reason..
I been in Cardano/ADA for years now, and it generally takes about an hour to get the required confirms for moving between exchanges.
Not familiar with Nano, and AVAX...
Using El Salvador as an example would be funny because they use Bitcoin as a life raft for remittances, not because the currency is a good fit for day to day transactions.
Many here are comfortably banked and can't seem to put themselves in less privileged people's shoes.
Also, the 'value' of art, books, and collectables is rather subjective and fairly volatile. TBH, they seem pretty comparable to cryptos to me. You collect them for fun, hoping the value goes up.
Stocks don't have scrap value because they're a financial derivative, whereas we were talking specifically about physical assets. A stock is a claim on a company's equity, and the company equity is defined as assets minus liabilities. Obviously if assets < liabilities, then equity is negative, but that doesn't contradict the assertion that physical objects have scrap value, which was my claim.
Bitcoin is not a derivative, because it has no underlying. It's not a commodity either, because it doesn't exist. It's an imaginary asset, like fiat money. But unlike fiat, Bitcoin doesn't work as money, so it really has no use-case other than be used as a speculative asset. It's a bubble asset.
BTC has no intrinsic value or cash flows or earnings or assets or..
Would you prefer comparing it to gold ? Art ? collecting sneakers ? or Comic books ? how about buying land ?
Edit: I should probably clarify..People buy/collect lots of things in the _HOPE_ they'll increase in value. BTC and crypto in general is not unique in that regard.
Perhaps it's useful in for medium-large purchases.
So for certain high-dollar cash-equivalent transactions, these might not be the best choice. Though personally I think I'd probably end up using something more formal if I were transferring that kind of cash in a single private party transaction.
[0] https://help.venmo.com/hc/en-us/articles/221010968
[1] https://www.bankofamerica.com/online-banking/zelle-transfer-...
Both sellers were happy accepting crypto. Otherwise, I stick to the traditional cash-in-hand.
A lot of people. You just have to NOT live in a country that uses a currency that could be considered a global reserve to find us.
The value of Bitcoin fluctuates UP and DOWN too much *when compared to the US Dollar*.
But compared say, to the Mexican Peso or say (more extremely) Venezuelan Peso, it has gone steadily up. So for us who don't live in a place with a sufficiently stable central bank and a trustful government, Cryptocurrencies are one avenue to safeguard the value of our income.
If the value of bitcoin relative to MXN is steadily going up (meaning that MXN is losing value relative to USD), then it automatically mean that the value of MXN is also steadily losing value relative to USD. So at the end, from a "value" point of view, nothing will change for you because both currencies are "pegged" to USD. If parity doesn't hold, there is an arbitrage opportunity there; suppose
1 USD = 2 BTC 1 USD = 4 MXN
The implied exchange rate MXNUSD would be BTC = 2 MXN. But imagine as you say that for some reason, this doesn't hold, and actually 1 BTC = 5 MXN in Mexico. I have then an incentive to buy 1 BTC at 0.5 USD, use that 1 BTC to buy 5 MXN, and sell all that MXN at the original rate of 0.25 USD, earning 1.25 USD.
I can understand that it may be easier to physically hold BTC as opposed to fiat USD in that situation, but I don't get the value store proposition. Anyone saying that they see Bitcoin as a store value, are implying they believe that in the future, some people will want to pay for 1 Bitcoin the same amount (or higher than) it's currently worth. It's a perfectly valid claim to make, but what is this belief based on?
Banks here have a bad history of keeping your foreign currency deposits when things go south and then converting your balance at a government mandated exchange rate, which was a fraction of the real value (think 1/10 of the real value).
Now, the government can always make cryptos illegal, but news like OP show that globally we moving towards regulation instead of prohibition, so for now cryptos are were we can still take refuge.
So here you can either keep your savings in a currency that evaporates, buy real state at insanely high price because that's where big money is stored, illegaly purchase foreign currency and physically hide it somewhere like a criminal, our you can legally purchase crypto and keep it safe outside the reaches of our governments and banks.
we tried to invest some backup cash we had in a company here a couple a years ago and it was a nightmare. the only way to operate was through phone calls.
EDIT: I read a bit to the check the current state of affairs and it's still complicated, and apparently there is a currency conversion process that is hit by a very heavy fee. Something similar happens with credit cards, when we pay for a service or product in a foreign currency we get charged a 65% tax that puts the official USD exchange rate in line with the real one.
I rarely used to for P2P transfers, but I find crypto super useful for online shopping.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/can-bitcoin-bring-palest...
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/cubas-bitcoin-revolution
A couple of months ago, a combination of Covid-related travel restrictions and new EU KYC regulation lead me into a situation where the only way to renew my VPN in a timely manner was through crypto. I was really lucky to have some.
Otherwise you're always going to be stuck completely underground and treated like a criminal/third rate citizen.
Also no one care if you bounce bitcoins between your own wallets, any governments just needs to regulate at the border: retail shops that accept crypto and exchanges of crypto/fiat are very easy to identify and regulate.
It is already a crime to passively posses certain combinations of bits (i.e. that directly or indirectly [zip, truecrypt] represent a child porn image).
It has been made illegal to possess the implementation of a mathematical function (i.e. Kerberos being a "Auxiliary Military Equipment"). It will be pretty trivial for the government to make it ilegal to download, posses or install a program (e.g that interacts in some way with the Bitcoin network).
Limit cash currency exchange to 100 EUR (or just outlaw it)
Wait for some time
Retract cash being mandatory debt settling tender
Wait a little more
And then pompously declare, that only criminals need cash (not far from truth, anybody but criminals and hardcore privacy people will be driven away by then) and ban it completely.
This could go either way, as far as I know both are possible
All other governments will follow soon.
It is a shame but the USA may end up leapfrogging the EU in the same way they have done with other innovations, like Social Media, Self Driving Cars, and other cutting edge tech. It turns out regulating entire sectors of the economy out of existence has consequences.
Do you want to give them a cut?
Considering the monetary philosophy behind Bitcoin it is basically motivated by gold which is something we abandoned as a currency because we know it doesn't work and doesn't make sense. It's akin to having shares in the global economy. If you own 1% of the economy in 1930 then you will also own 1% of the economy in 2021. You're just a deadweight leeching off the economy. Since your share is fixed but the economy growing you are getting richer at the expense of other people. More and more people start investing "into money" and then quit working. You get a bust or recession or depression when people consider money a superior investment over actual work. Thus the economies' size is limited by the quantity of shares. If you issue new shares people will immediately start working for them even if it is at the cost of diluting them. You can clearly see it happening with the block reward. Bitcoin miners work like crazy, consuming an absurd amount of energy. The same applies to gold.
The reason we went off the gold standard is because the US government printed off more money than they had gold and then got caught.
Instead of trying to make up for their crime the government decided to ban ownership of gold.
Cryptocurrency doesn't have a deflationary restriction. If bitcoin is too similar to gold, people will just use some other coin.
What if Bitcoin continues as it is, which is a way to preserve a part of wealth in a semi-liquid way. Once it hits an equilibrium point, it doesn't go any higher due to the limit in it's liquidity.
Private hospitals based on private insurances will surely build themselves, I promise you that, that's a too highly profitable sector of economy not to invest if there is no competition from the government.
There are like zero real reasons why person with 100k EUR income should pay more than 10k EUR income person living in the same city and consuming the same amount of public services. Current system is completely unjust and based on money redistribution (that's called robbery if that's is done by a mob without the gov id card).
Free capital controls provided by crypto (i.e. ability to flawlessly move billions through the border without anyone's allowance) introduces unprecedented competition between govs for educated and rich citizens, which may lead to lower taxes, less regulations, more freedoms and less bureaucracy. That a good goal and incentive, don't you think?
In the hindsight, the central control over crypto may give it a credibility boost. It doesn't really solve the problems of how easy is it to get scammed / lose it but it may swing the usage majority towards legit markets.
I have no idea, really. My initial statement in this thread was an emotion driven one.
Clueless people didn't start showing up in appreciable numbers until much later, well after the events of the MtGox implosion. Even then they stuck mostly to the scamcoins, because "who can afford spending $125 for one coin?!"
I don't know what you're referring to with regard to centralized control lending credibility, but I will say that fungibility is a property of currency that people generally don't seem to understand - and that you may want to consider proposed "anti-fraud" methods in that light. That was what we were talking about years ago - a currency, that was the premise. It still is, there is just a more representative cross section of the general population showing up now - unsurprisingly half of them posses a below average level of intelligence.
I assure you, though, that some sneaky guy from Africa, Russia, Ukraine or China would always find his way to help people changing their money.
Btw, in theory there is a way to create completely decentralized versions (hosting frontend on IPFS/torrents/other distributed storage) and the whole backend made on smart-contract, but it would be slower and harder to use than current systems with partially centralized backends and CDN js/static distribution.
To GP's broader point, "what about GDPR?" the GDPR basically steps back when other laws apply. Processing personal data requires a legal basis, and one option for legal basis is "Legal Requirement," so if another law says it's required, GDPR says it's OK. And furthermore several provisions (like erasure) don't necessarily apply. GDPR would impose some restrictions like access and notice. The biggest issue is going to be "who is the Controller?", i.e. who 'owns' the data and who is in control of the processing?
Imagine what could have been: a standardised prompt that is always the same, persists when clearing cookies, etc. Instead we have full screen modal popups that render 5 seconds after page load and move around while loading.
That could work, yes.
I can see why bureaucrats like this system though, try to inflict the horror of their jobs onto everyone else.
And ofc, this makes no difference for tracking at all. Most people just click whatever option is the default, they have no idea what cookies are, they have no idea how the cookies are being used because the forms don't tell you...what is the decision that is supposedly been improved here? People are still being tracked, but we showed them a totally baffling form and they clicked "Yes"...society has been preserved.
Oh, and you have now split the internet into different regions...it was all worth it, no ragrats.
They trained users to accept all advertising cookies, while being massive hypocrites (a lot of EU bureaucratic websites ship user data to Google via GA or GTM).
The EU is one of the biggest threats to online freedom. Threatening to ban memes, egregious copyright laws to serve Hollywood interests, cookie nag screens and US media excluding EU IPs altogether because EU law is insane.
Access to media within the EU has never been worse. A significant portion of US news media exclude all EU traffic due to regulation.
EU citizens are worse off only having access to insular media with one viewpoint. If you're German and a significant amount of foreign media is either blocked or scorned, you end up enabling giant frauds like Wirecard.
Germany's homegrown DW had fawning coverage of the fraud, calling it remarkable and a "weapon against poverty". [1] [2]
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/whats-behind-the-remarkable-rise-of-ge...
[2] https://www.dw.com/en/is-fintech-the-latest-weapon-in-the-fi...
Meaningful change: the ways that web sites track you are now disclosed and require your explicit consent.
> the EU proceeded to make almost every European website 10x worse with egregious cookie nag screens filled with dark patterns.
It is the web sites that have chosen to make your experience worse. The blame lies with them.
I use uBlock origin and various CSS injection to get rid of the popups but they don't catch every single one of them.
I wish the US would institute law making unsolicited (i.e. not triggered by a user click, like clicking on "Login") popups illegal, arrest the CEOs of companies that violate this, put them in a CEO jail for a week, make them wear an "I suck" T-shirt and dunce cap, and live stream their faces the entire time.
I was with you until this point. Then it just turned into vengeance porn.
It is as if you set a dns to the other side of the globe, disabled browser cache and then complained that pages now take longer to load.
Tracking is bad, scary, and with worring consequences in how much ML can predict statical human behaviour, but the solution is not "cookies bad" or "ads bad".
If a website as any kind of first-onboarding interaction (be it a video, some marketing crap, asking for permissions, or whatever) and you disable _any_ form of tracking how are they supposed to know it is not your first visit?
Many of those website do not need to track you, many do so with malicious intent, but the concept of the consent modal itself serves a useful purpose
this is an example of you knowing the area they're legislating in better than they do
they're just as bad in pretty much every other area too
Firstly, they introduced GDPR regulations to prevent companies and organizations from collecting data on citizens... But now they introduce regulations to force companies and organizations to collect data on citizens. It's ridiculous.
It's frightening that the government could possibly win a case in a court of law with such fundamentally flawed logic. What would the verdict be like? "Collecting data on people is illegal, but it's also illegal to not collect data, therefore you are guilty!"
That must be how totalitarianism comes about; make sure everyone is guilty of something, then you can arrest all your political opponents on any pretext you like.
What is the point of the law if it contradicts itself? We may as well go back to living in caves.
As usual, the regulation checkpoint is at the exchanges.
Why not? The EU regulates banks to the point that you can’t transfer money to an account in North Korea. It’s not obvious why Bitcoin exchanges should be regulated differently (as you can’t prove the random Bitcoin address isn’t controlled by NK).
Also, multiplying prime numbers is now illegal.
edit: Downvotes are funny because we are almost certainly going to see laws passed in the next few years that are functionally equivalent to the rules stated above.
Your comment is not on-topic.
I tend to think the government will find its attempts to rein in crypto will just feed into the anti-fragility of the whole thing, and the result will be increasingly nonsensical attempts to stomp it out up until capitulation.
And yes, this leads to a prediction that some very technologically illiterate legislators will probably draft rules that are semantically equivalent to what I wrote.
what I wrote above is in a totally different ballpark - and we should expect to see government laws that pop up that do in fact attempt to regulate digit memorization or multiplication.
https://www.eff.org/cases/bernstein-v-us-dept-justice?elqTra...
but they don't, in the same way they don't understand cookies, databases or stock exchanges
none of this stops them legislating though...
That example is admittedly weak, but do you see where I'm going with that?
What I am saying is that governments who are passing laws not to regulate transactions, but to prevent the use of cryptocurrencies in general, will fail due to a first principles analysis of what they'll be trying to do.
Bitcoin transactions take minutes or even hours to settle sometime, so 'digital speed' is vaporware at this point.