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Comment by nenadg | Hacker News Reader

Pure wapor. How will they ban anonymous wallets?

Look, where I live weed was decriminalized relatively recently. I could still get weed before, but I couldn't rock up some where and get a CBD soda, or a vape cartridge, or nice edibles, or a variety of products. In the same way you say "how will they ban anonymous wallets" you might say "how do you criminalize a plant", and thats by making possession illegal and following up on that by targeting people/places they expect to find said things. They don't have to make it physically impossible, they just need to introduce enough friction into the process that for most people it stops being worthwhile.

Looks like a ton of bureaucracy with little or no output. I agree, might be the same thing as a war against the drugs lmfao.

well, it had a lot of output! it completely stifled a whole industry of economic activity, for one. thats sort of my point, you might not be able to make a completely 100% unbeatable ban, but you really don't need to in order to effectively stifle certain kinds of activity. like, the harder you make something to do, the fewer people are going to have the energy to do it. arguments like "why bother, you cant make it literally impossible" miss the point that you can make it difficult enough that for most people it may as well be impossible.

The War on Drugs was a matter of method and intensity; the aim was to completely and swiftly eradicate drug abuse rather than move societal incentives.

This could go either way, as far as I know both are possible

wasn't it to discredit political rivals and minorities? like, there really wasn't ever a strong argument against weed (that relied on that stated aim), especially in a post-prohibition America.

Yeah, that never stopped them before. Taxpayers are a magical thing.

They love bureaucracy, they pay themselves for it.

Unless you only ever transact in crypto, at some point you need an on-ramp or off-ramp from/to the traditional banking system, and at that point regulation is pretty straight forward. My read of it is that they're going to ban anonymous accounts on platforms that provide those services.

"Every retailer, bank or money transmitter that receives a cryptocurrency must show the origin and past transactions of the funds."

I think maybe they mean anonymous _hosted_ wallets where the hoster is inside the EU.

By putting pressure on the banking system. No transfers to or from exchanges that don't play by their rules.

Typically, by preventing regulated institutions to accept deposits from and withdrawals to addresses that do not match a wallet that has been associated with an identified entity. That would be unfortunate.

by making it a crime to have one or accept money from one? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯....

Good luck making it a crime to install program.

It is quite easy to criminalize distribution and possession of digital assets.

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.

> Good luck making it a crime to install program.

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).

This will thrive business to Switzerland and other crypto save heavens. Nice one EU

By passing a law that makes them illegal, simple as that.

They should make gravitation illegal. Would save lots of money spent on transportation.

It's the same thing as if EU jumped to ban our classic, leather, pocket wallets. Pure bullshit, except if this is marketing?

If your leather wallet has more than $10,000 in it, there are restrictions today on what you can do with it anonymously.

Limit monthly cash withdrawals to 100 EUR

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.

What about the EU banning ivory wallets?

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