The UK has essentially made a (political) choice that rather than cover the cost of policing finance through taxes, they’ll just make the banks sort it out for them.
This is not great for some people for obvious reasons. But for everyone else it’s lower taxes. Where one falls on the political spectrum largely determines how one feels about this.
Money isn’t the only motivation factor.
> To get back the seized property, owners must prove it was not involved in criminal activity.
Some cases:
https://ij.org/report/policing-for-profit-2/grading-state-fe...
https://prosperityeconomics.org/stolen-savings-civil-forfeit...
basically Obama got rid of it then Trump put it back then Biden didn't anything
I was pretty transparent with the person(s) calling - after years of doing their best to push business customers away, someone up high decided to make to get as many business customers as possible and everyone was on a fat commission to open up new accounts (I think lure of government guaranteed covid loans might have had something to do with it).
High street bank was open within 3 days, fill out the form and done.
I set up an account with HSBC about seven years go, and they were a nightmare. It took over a month to open the account, and everything had to be done in branch. Also, HSBC in the UK is not the same HSBC in other countries. I once had to fly back to London from Athens just to "pop in to my local branch" for some uninteresting bureaucratic process.
I closed that account and switched to Tide. It took me like 15 minutes to open the account online.
For my [meagre] business banking intents and purposes, the difference is immaterial, and Tide is a bank.
That is assuming Ethereum sees that kind of mass adoption to the point governments start to regulate its usage.
But at that point, if a government level threat actor wants to stop you from doing something and you are in their jurisdiction, jail cells tend to be quite effective at limiting people from spending money. If using non-government sanctioned cryptocurrencies is a crime in the future, than it doesn’t really matter if it is perfectly privacy preserving or not does it if you need to pay taxes in not the privacy preserving crypto.
De-anonymizing people who are not attempting to prevent it is fairly trivial. You tie one transaction to their wallet and they use the same wallet for everything. But that's an entirely different question than whether you can have a "block list" for wallets.
What do you do when people in other jurisdictions pay no attention to the block list and then someone uses the money in the "blocked" wallet to buy some other fungible commodity there?
> But at that point, if a government level threat actor wants to stop you from doing something and you are in their jurisdiction, jail cells tend to be quite effective at limiting people from spending money.
But then it has nothing to do with the money at all. "You can't sell heroin for cryptocurrency because heroin is illegal" applies just as well to cash or gold or iTunes gift cards.
And then, in a country with rule of law, they have to prove your guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. The original problem was a random bank's fraud algorithm unjustly stealing your money as an innocent person.
Ignoring solving the problem of the government not respecting people’s right to privacy and due process is not acceptable to me in my opinion. Saying Ethereum has private transactions isn’t any different than telling someone whose bank account was frozen without due process that they should just use cash.
The trouble is the current system has failed to provide both of those at once, because of the incentive structure. The government wants the intermediary to try to prevent fraud or crimethink or what have you so they don't punish the intermediary for making mistakes, so the intermediary makes lots of mistakes and tramples over innocent people without enough power to push back.
In other words, it's much harder to have a non-abusive intermediary than to remove the intermediary.
> For one, I believe cryptocurrencies will be the government spyware of the future that allows for total control over our finances, since crypto evangelists push “code is law” and the blockchain is immutable and completely transparent.
This is true of Bitcoin to an extent but there are at least two ways to avoid this.
One, you can have a blockchain that doesn't work like that but still doesn't subject you to the whims of an intermediary, e.g. Monero.
Two, a blockchain like Bitcoin is completely transparent, but it also doesn't tie your name to your wallet or limit you to a single wallet, so in principle you can use a separate wallet for separate activities without any way for someone with only access to the blockchain to correlate them. Apps could make this easier to automate.
You could also just use a third party payment processor which is only using cryptocurrency for settlement between payment processors, so the individual transactions aren't being recorded on the blockchain. But then you don't have to, which is important to give the user leverage over the intermediaries, and make it easy to switch because anyone who accepts Bitcoin accepts Bitcoin regardless of whether or which intermediary is used to send or receive it.
But you can legally spend it, because nobody has found you guilty of a crime, because you haven't committed a crime.
The existing problem is that you don't have to be convicted of a crime to have some payment intermediary extrajudicially lock your account. To which the solution is to not have a payment intermediary.
Then if the government wants to stop you spending your own money, they can accuse you of a crime, but then they would presumably have to prove that you have committed the crime that makes it unlawful to spend the money instead of just letting the bank steal it from you without due process.