So basically, does that mean KYC/AML are officially dead in BTC's environment? The picture was not bright before, but with this kind of innovations, it seems impossible for this network to build banking systems that respect regulations.
Real dangerous criminals don't give a damn about KYC/AML laws and operate freely within the banking framework. The European Central Bank chairwoman is a felon convicted for massive government payouts.
If KYC/AML is not possible in the bitcoin world, you're not going to be getting a world with bitcoin that doesn't have KYC/AML.
You're going to get a world with no bitcoin.
Just because the response is a bad one doesn't mean that the problem doesn't exist.
FWIW, even if TSA is bad at stopping terrorists, I AM glad that all of these people punching flight attendants are, with certainty c. 1, not packing heat.
Seriously, how often does this happen? I've flown a fair amount in my life (in Europe though) and I've never seen any commotion on a plane. I've read about some incidents, but I've read about a lot of fucked up stuff that I'm not concerned about in my life.
It's along the lines with everything these days. Someone does something bad and someone else gets shocked and then everyone wants to stop something like that from happening ever again, through whatever means, without realizing the incredible inconvenience (and complexity) this causes over time when repeated ad infinitum.
If only 1% of those people were armed, that would still be very very scary!
The real analogy here is that the ultra rich needn’t deal with the TSA because they fly private.
Why do people feel the need to deliberately mislead by leaving out all the important details? I had no idea what you were talking about, so I looked it up, it's the second item under https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Lagarde#Controvers....
Regardless of your opinions on that particular court case, or the fact that the letter of your statement may be true, do you honestly think "The European Central Bank chairwoman is a felon convicted for massive government payouts" would give the average reader an accurate view of what happen? Because after reading what actually happened, and which IMO comes nowhere near to the deliberate malfeasance you imply, I just conclude that, to put it colloquially, "You're full of shit."
absolutely. Your wikipedia link is absolutely clear :
"the court found Lagarde guilty of negligence"
So, she is a convicted felon for conveniently looking the other way. Some of course may question whether the 400M euro is "massive" these days...
P.s. "My currency is signed by my own private key, yours - by a convicted felon". Whom would you trust more?
P.S. Also, how come you can use such language ("You're full of shit.") and not be banned? Could a moderator take a stance on this one? I don't see the flag button for some reason.
Of course there's also nothing stopping you from sending your coins somewhere with reduced reporting and spending them from there, but then there never really was in the first place.
We should stick with USD. No one does anything illegal with USD
this is not even worth looking at compared to other money-related crimes (just new and in media so people are scared)
Way to skip over the different potentials for abuse and just dive to the cryptonerd's handwaive argument.
Looking forward to your insights about rubber and glue.
The claim wasn’t "BitCoin is for illegal things (and by comparison, USD is never used for crime)", it was "BitCoin's lack of support for KYC makes it more likely to be attractive to criminals and therefore likely to have its use criminalized" which you CAN'T just hand waive away.
means different things in different places
> made illegal
it's already illegal here and there
Bitcoin is designed to be fungible - it's digital cash.
BTC has a history, so if I had 1 BTC, and you had 1 BTC, they wouldn't be equivalent.
When you deposit BTC into a Coinbase account from a gambling site, CB shuts down your account. That is irrefutable proof that BTC is not fungible.
Compare it to cash which is fungible. If you win money at a casino and deposit it at a bank, the bank doesn't know where you got the cash from.
You're off base here. There's serial numbers on money and many databases maintained both public and private meant to track those and flag inflows of marked bills. The bank absolutely might know where you got the cash from -- the difference is that there are legal guarantees for the fungibility of cash. It is enforced by law that if someone pays you a dollar, you are legally obligated to accept that as tender. For all debts both public and private.
The fungibility of the dollar is not rooted in lack of ability to track dollars, it is rooted in state violence.
Anyways everyone should use Monero. BTC is obviously far less fungible than a dollar.
Allocation of resources to try and ban cryptocurrency (or encryption in general) is probably one of the dumbest things ever conceived, probably even more so than the drug war.
People have been yelling about this all being made illegal for literally a decade, and it hasn't happened yet.
Of course, you could not do all those things...but it would be just as illegal and lead to you being just as in jail (and your assets seized) as it would for any other currency.
So sure: technically you can hide a bunch of stuff with BTC, but you can do that with USD just fine too (cash is pretty untraceable). The moment you get caught though, you're just as screwed.
Of course crypto privacy features are not going to be made illegal. That was my entire argument. Crypto has been around for a decade, and lots of privacy coins exist, and are not illegal.
Therefore, other crypto features that make KYC more difficult are also not going to be made illegal.
BTC is built to not support KYC/AML.