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baby

BTC is not built to support KYC/AML.

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Then it's going to be weaponized to launder money and be made illegal eventually.

That's an argument that has been made yes.

> Then it's going to be weaponized to launder money

We should stick with USD. No one does anything illegal with USD

Yes, which is why all ransomwares ask money in USD, right?

Your point being what? That because USD is uncommonly used in ransomware it can't be used to commit crimes? Do you really think that no extortion has ever taken place via USD? Because I can guarantee you that money-related crimes and scams happen in just about every single form of currency, even things that technically aren't even currency like gift cards.

> ransomwares

this is not even worth looking at compared to other money-related crimes (just new and in media so people are scared)

Holy fucking strawman, Batman!

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.

"bitcoin is for illegal things" is the OG handwaive argument so nothing substantial was needed to swat it down :)

There you go strawmanning again.

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.

I can trade stacks of USD without any KYC.

> launder money

means different things in different places

> made illegal

it's already illegal here and there

There is no future tense here.

Bitcoin is designed to be fungible - it's digital cash.

Maybe it was "designed to be", but in reality it isn't.

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.

> 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.

You're right about dollars being only legally-fungible. It's been hypothesized that there are databases tracking when and where dollars are used based on serial numbers, but to my knowledge, there hasn't been any reliable confirmation of that. If there is such a database, at least it's not publically available like Bitcoin's is. So, I agree with you that Monero should be used over Bitcoin (disclaimer, I own some XMR).

The banks themselves launder money for organized crime. Why shouldn’t money laundering be available to the masses too?

Banks and governments*

Good old "private banking services".

It’s available. You just can’t enter the monopoly.

>and be made illegal eventually

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.

Regulators don’t have to ban cryptocurrency use among citizens, they only have to ban/overtax everyone trying to cash it out or to run a legal business in it, to reduce liquidity to a level when it’s more risky or expensive than regular laundering. Cryptokids may then play their encryption penny as usual.

It's entirely easy to make crypto legally useless for legal transactions. The fellow making you coffee won't take crypto if he can only use it to buy drugs. This doesn't mean it will happen but conflating encryption and crypto is poorly considered because we have a long history of regulating commerce.

There are a multitude of other crypto coins, that have been around for a long while, that similarly provide lots of privacy, and yet they aren't illegal.

People have been yelling about this all being made illegal for literally a decade, and it hasn't happened yet.

Why would any of this be made illegal? It's a jurisdictional enforcement issue, that isn't targeted at the asset - it's targeted at the individual who thinks they're going to make large financial transactions and not meet the KYC requirements - which will come up when you have to declare how you attained a whole lot of assets or cash to the IRS.

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.

> Why would any of this be made illegal?

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 less anonymous than cash.

You could even go further:

BTC is built to not support KYC/AML.

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