> It's not 'semantics', it's the opposite of 'semantics'.
Is there an opposite of "semantics"? Isn't semantics just the topic around the meaning of words and communication? Is the opposite just everything else?
Anyways the point was that Coinbase is likely acting not because it extends the "practical usefulness" of their products, i.e. it adds no new features or functionality. They are likely acting out of regulatory necessity.
The semantic argument is whether regulatory necessity falls under "practical usefulness". I'd argue no, as the usefulness of their product as it applies to users either doesn't change or actually goes down as a result of this, but one can similarly argue that not satisfying regulators likely results in the loss of the product altogether.
> It's not mostly 'terrorism and protect the children' - it's tax evasion, wire fraud, bribery, insider trading, financial fraud, scams etc.
Can you elaborate on this a bit? Collecting beneficiary data is useful for things like redundant checks against sanction lists such as OFAC (terrorism, organized crime, and human trafficking falls under here). I don't see how tax evasion, insider trading, and bribery even apply here.
- Tax evasion would likely deal with the exchange reporting both trades and received funds for a user, neither of which applies to beneficiary data on outgoing funds afaik
- How is insider trading relevant here? Would that not be dependent on trading and not the transferring of assets. Does providing beneficiary data do anything to shed light on trading with privileged data?
- Bribery? Maybe, but seeing as this still happens fairly regularly with traditional finance, I doubt that this will curb much behavior.
> We mostly derive our protections from 'government overreach' via the constitution, not anonymity.
I assume you are talking about the US constitution which doesn't much apply to non-US persons. The US Constitution doesn't provide much context or protection around the financial system either.
In Section 8 we have
> "Congress shall have Power [...] to coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin."
And in Section 10,
> "no state [...] shall make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts."