(Btw, the enormous majority of bitcoin usage already goes through exchanges, just because it's almost the only practical way to use it so I don't really think this law is gonna change anything in itself)
Sending Transactions over SMS is a thing. This may exist today, but I assume in the future bots on WhatsApp will broadcast raw hex/base64 encoded transactions to the network for peers in restricted countries. Policing WhatsApp content is extremely difficult, we have seen in the recent years.
One can restrict the centralized exchanges. One cannot control every communication channel, or prevent every ECDSA signature from being signed.
And it assume you can get this whatsapp proxy from a reliable source because it would be a pity if it was in fact a honeypot run by the government to find you (EncroChat-like).
If someone trusts a WhatsApp bot with their bitcoins, they brought it upon themselves.
1. Not forward the transaction (I can tell relatively quickly by checking the mempool)
2. Doxx me/report me/etc by observing my IP, Whatsapp account name, and what wallet it is connected to.
Besides that, I can put my transactions up on a billboard for all I care.
You mixing things up here, the mempool won't help you since your whatsapp proxy could tamper it. The only reliable thing is the chain itself once your transaction has been inserted in a mined block.
> 2. Doxx me/report me/etc by observing my IP, Whatsapp account name, and what wallet it is connected to.
But when doing direct crypto transaction is a crime in your country, this is a more serious threat than “tampering the transaction” or anything. Going to jail, or being tortured by some gang who want your private key, or both depending how corrupt the police is in that country.
But as I said, this is not what matters: the doxxing part is the deadly threat.
You can tell within about 15 seconds or so if a transaction hasn't hit the memepool. Just look up you wallet on blockchain.com/etherscan etc. It's a standard step that nearly every send/receive UI offers a link after submitting a transaction. These services mark mempool transactions as "pending" before they are inserted into a block.
For example, here's a wallet for Gemini, you can see pending transactions under the "Age" column as they hit the mempool [0]. They are "pending" while in the mempool and then are labeled with a time as they are added to blocks.
I'm continually impressed with how resilient the system is, even more-so after our thread about a hypothetical adversary.
(Again you can run your own mempool service on your own node, and publish transactions to it, but in our hypothetical situation you need to instead issue it out through a Whatsapp channel manually.)
[0] https://etherscan.io/address/0x056fd409e1d7a124bd7017459dfea...
In the case of bitcoin should the public don't use it anymore, the price would collapse, making the current mining unsustainable, and as the mining difficulty declines the robustness of the protocol reduces sharply, especially if state actors start buying the unused mining devices…
BTW, the sneakernet is unsuited for most uses of bitcoin transactions: you don't just want to be able to transfer the token from one address to another. Most of the time a transaction is an interactive process: you send the money and I give you something in return after I've checked that I actually received the funds. This usage simply doesn't work well on the sneakernet, because of the very high latency.