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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

It is very hard to ban math. An “anonymous wallet” is a random number!

> In practice, this means that a service provider exchanging crypto on behalf of a customer would have to record their name, address, date of birth and account number, as well as the name of the intended recipient of the transfer.

As usual, the regulation checkpoint is at the exchanges.

And what happens when you transfer it to a mixer? A self-hosted wallet? Or the EU regulate exchanges to the point you can't transfer your Bitcoin to a wallet you own?

Mixers will be considered illegal by the EU. It sort of makes sense. Mixers are primarily used to hide one's identity when doing shady/illegal things with cryptocurrency.

What about deFi swappers?

No, they're cool with that specific kind of money laundering.

> “Or the EU regulate exchanges to the point you can't transfer your Bitcoin to a wallet you own?”

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).

Not allowing individuals autonomy over how they choose to spend their own money sounds authoritarian.

You live in a country where everything is legal to buy and sell, then?

It's very hard to ban math. It's very easy to ban communications, which may happen to contain math.

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