Comment by logicalmonster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by logicalmonster | Hacker News Reader

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> Normally, there'd be an aspect of plausible deniability

If it was publicly known that you had exactly 1 ton of legally acquired gold in your house, would you feel perfectly safe sleeping at night? Is there not 1 sicko out there that would be willing to torture your family to find the combination to your vault?

Plausible deniability exists here. It's called wanting privacy, and there's perfectly valid and non-criminal reasons to want privacy, despite repeated false claims.

Here is the problem. Many cryptos are not actually anonymous. If somebody has somebody's wallet address, they can look into tracing information about them like their net worth and their purchasing history. Even if you were smart enough to use a different wallet address for each transaction, you inevitably have to spend money to live or send money to others and then you can be traced. As tools grow more sophisticated and more data about wallet address ownership gets out there, the more at risk people will be. And once your identity gets out there, there's no shaking the ability to track it short of some form of mixing or obfuscation. In an of itself, mixing or trading to obfuscate your identity shouldn't be considered a crime or unreasonable in the slightest.

Why don't you use the traditional banking system, which doesn't result in publicly listed transactions?

I struggle to find a legitimate use case for hiding transactions from your bank and thus tax authority (assuming a developed country).

> Why don't you use the traditional banking system, which doesn't result in publicly listed transactions?

You mean the banking system that freezes protesters' accounts when they do something doubleplusungood?

Personal choices that don't violate the rights of others shouldn't require any explanation to retain your rights. But it's not hard to think of a lot of reasons for somebody to use crypto over banks besides the state not being able to trivially shut you out of your life. There's other good reasons to choose crypto over banks, but that's a good one in my book.

Exchanges could freeze any crypto you deposit with them and seize any UTXOs originating from your wallet just as easily. That's another reason to avoid crypto, having to worry about where it came from.

And I struggle to find a legitimate use case for being required to share anything whatsoever with any authority without a court order.

There is a huge difference between sharing the details of your finances with a tax or other authority by default and them being able to compel you to provide such information if they have good cause to believe (and convince a court) that you are evading taxes.

The fact the government required six illegitimate things of me before breakfast does not make them legitimate, it just means the abuse has become normalised to the point that people start believing this shit is reasonable.

> I struggle to find a legitimate use case for hiding transactions from your bank and thus tax authority (assuming a developed country).

Roe v. Wade

I assume you mean the overturning of and the lengths to which certain states appear to be going in order to determine whether women have attempted to have now-illegal abortions? I'd agree that's a pretty reasonable example of why we still need the ability to pay for things in an untraceable manner and why to object to any attempt to phase out cash as a legitimate method of payment. But I'd also much rather have constitutional protections that don't allow governments to declare consensual surgical procedures on your own body to be illegal.

> But I'd also much rather have constitutional protections that don't allow governments to declare consensual surgical procedures on your own body to be illegal.

Interesting concept, but a few quick thoughts on this.

1) I'd only point out that there exists a point of view that that says that a baby's body is a separate life from a woman's body.

2) Such a constitutional protection would open up some very complicated issues when it comes to children, particularly with regards to sexuality.

3) Many of the same people who very eloquently speak out on personal choice in some medical matters "lost the plot" during Covid. Who can credibly make this argument and advocate for such a policy credibly?

Well I have no desire to turn this into an abortion debate, but it certainly concerns me how easy it is in a country like the US for governments to criminalise women's personal health decisions. But mainly it is a reminder that there likely will always be legitimate reasons to hide your activities from authorities in certain cases.

> 1) I'd only point out that there exists a point of view that that says that a baby's body is a separate life from a woman's body.

By that point of view it would be reasonable to separate both bodies if one of them wishes to be left alone, so both can move on with their lifes. Equal rights.

Do abortion clinics accept crypto now?

Hosting providers do, and a doctor could lose their career for being found to author and purvey life-saving information on this topic.

Have you ever tried to make a wire transfer on a weekend?

Having access to your money outside of banking hours is just one of many use cases I can think of off the top of my head.

The vast majority of the time, you don't need a wire transfer. And if your debit/credit card doesn't work on the weekend, you need a new bank; That's not the fault of banking as a whole.

Sure. But, examples like buying a high end guitar off criagslist, or a car from a private party, aren't less of a use case because they aren't every day transactions.

The vast majority is not enough. The phrasing isn't "innocent until statistically guilty".

I live in Europe and routinely do bank transfers in seconds on weekends.

iDEAL? or something else?

This should be resolved next year with FedNow: https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about....

SEPA Instant works in seconds regardless of time of day. Next question?

Not everyone lives in the eurozone my friend.

>assuming a developed country

Bad assumption

Anonymous fundraising for political dissidents is the biggest use case I can think of.

> In an of itself, mixing or trading to obfuscate your identity shouldn't be considered a crime or unreasonable in the slightest.

"Financial privacy" isn't a real thing, because you owe taxes on income and investments. Can you explain to me how your tax assessor is able, then, to properly identify your income and tax you on it as appropriate?

(Money laundering and tax evasion do not always go hand-in-hand. Many launderers pay taxes as a cost of doing business. Cryptocurrency mixers seem to treat tax evasion as a feature.)

Privacy exists even if the government violates it due to their tax schemes. A _right_ to privacy may even exist as a natural human right. If a country decides collectively that this is the case, then what ought to change is the tax policy, not every user service.

We can argue over how easy it would be, but I would presume its possible for a government to switch over to taxing hard assets like land, machines, and shipments at ports rather than income and investment products if we decide those should be shielded by a right to privacy. Most of human history existed without a tax on income or loans (investments), an argument that a right cannot exists because of the present tax structure is like the ultimate status quo warrior-ing.

> If a country decides collectively that this is the case, then what ought to change is the tax policy,

Your post is largely meaningless because, while this line is inarguably true, this also hasn't happened and so AML and KYC are still a thing--and there's precious little to indicate that anyone really cares about it aside from starve-the-beast conservatives and cryptocurrency enthusiasts, and that's not a majority.

If a country does decide so collectively, great! We haven't. So yeah, it's illegal, and the currently-fictive right to financial privacy remains so.

I guess we differ on what rights are. I am arguing that a right to privacy including financial privacy could be a natural right and its recognition or lack thereof alone by the _current_ tax scheme cannot inform of of its existence or not.

The legality under existing laws has nothing to do with whether the right exists or not if its a natural right.

I also fail to see how one could construct a right to privacy that would include communications but not include financial transactions especially exchanges of value done over a btc-protocol (or one of its descendants) that exchange value with pure speech.

If congress and/or the judiciary was full of privacy enthusiasts, then the tax law would be changed majority be damned.

USA had been like this: import duties, use taxes, no income tax.

Now with USA fiat money there is no financial need to have personal income tax.

Your employer has your salary on record, so having financial privacy in no way prevents taxes being collected. Likewise you trade stocks through a broker, who knows how much you have in your brokerage account.

Finding an irrelevant case to talk about does not eliminate the relevant cases you're changing the conversation away from.

>> Cryptocurrency mixers seem to treat tax evasion as a feature

Historically there is huge market for that.

If I had 45 million dollars in my house, I'd look into whatever the hell individuals of that net worth are doing to protect themselves.

Which, as I understand it, mostly consists of not keeping it as a gold brick in their basement, and not living in a shitty neighbourhood. It's harder to rubber hose attack someone who isn't keeping all their wealth in a crypto wallet.

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