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Comment by zivkovicp | Hacker News Reader

This is probably good advice, just remember that crypto is also digital and totally transparent (mostly). If you obtain your crypto via an exchange, then your wallet can be positively linked to your physical person, and (eventually) prohibiting transactions by blacklisting wallets would be trivial. :(

I imagine that is a ways off still because crypto is not _that_ mainstream, but I suspect the time to get started and make the effort to anonymise your wallet is now.

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Monero is a good thing to look into. Even if you don’t want to hold it yourself, swapping in and out of it will make the “paper” trail that much harder to follow.

I’ve heard a lot of reports of popular exchanges freezing accounts of customers who traded with other exchanges that don’t have strong KYC requirements. How am I supposed to exchange for Monero if Coinbase (and the state of New York) dislike it?

I’m not trying to be sarcastic. I genuinely don’t know what to do in order to use Monero.

Only use exchanges to put in cash or to do exchanges. If you're serious about crypto and want more than a few hundred dollars in there, you should get a ledger and move your money off of the exchanges (hardware wallet).

Or, you can make your own bitcoin by hand. https://estudiobitcoin.com/do-you-trust-your-seed-dont-gener...

Where are these reports of popular exchanges freezing customer accounts? I'm also genuinely curious, because I've never heard of them, and a cursory Google search isn't turning up much.

As for exchanging for Monero, there's starting to be the option of atomic swaps with Bitcoin. Alternatively, you could also try going through one of the various non-KYC automated swapping services.

Ahh -- it seems there are quite a few cases of what you mentioned here: https://sethforprivacy.com/posts/fungibility-graveyard/

The first generation of crypto is totally transparent, if people need to start using crypto to have political freedom of expression then no doubt more anonymous systems will gain prominence. There'll be something that draws broad parallels between the HTTP -> HTTPS transition.

Once there are laws in place to force a check at a central service for blocked funds, certainly very easy them.

We must fix and strengthen our governments - there's no way around that.

I’m confused. Shouldn’t we weaken our governments ability to freeze an account without due process?

I think parent means that by weakening your government's ability to do things without due process is strengthening it. Assuming that your government has at its basis a respect for such things as due process, individual privacy etc.

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