EU to ban anonymous crypto accounts and privacy coins by 2027
cointelegraph.com
cointelegraph.com
For over a year, I was locked out of financial services due to my inability to pass KYC. The reason was that I had already left one country, but was still in the process of getting a residency visa in another. During the process, I'm allowed to live in this country, but I have no ability to prove it to any financial institutions.
So, no wonder I'm bitter about KYC and AML.
Regarding privacy, I appreciate the EU's effort, but I also feel they focus too much on the legal side and not enough on the implementation side of it.
My ID was photocopied at almost every accommodation I visited in the last decade. I have no way to make private digital payments, and even offline cash is not being promoted.
At least once, my private financial record was accessed by a 3rd party that used it against me. But I'm not the kind of person who would go into a legal battle. I'm the kind of person who uses technology to protect his privacy. And the EU, with decisions like this, makes it very difficult for me.
I doubt banning Monero or Zcash would prevent criminals from tax evasion. They'll find other ways. So, as often happens, "Locks keep honest people honest".
That is very strange, because you should be able to get a temporary residence certificate (whatever it's called in your respective country) and thus get an account with if not all then at least most banks.
KYC is way, way more complex than it seems. Essentially, complete remote KYC is simply impossible.
The problem is that the only thing you get is a stamp in your passport saying you applied for a temporary residence permit (including the request number).
The border control people can then (I guess) use this number to verify that your case is still pending, so you're legal in the country. But since no one else can, you get no services.
[Edit: I should add that my main problem was with other financial services, not a bank, since I could use my existing bank accounts from another country. So maybe if I'd make enough effort, I would be able to open a physical bank account, but this was not the main problem for me]
Global KYC provider couldn't possibly know. To get paid, they need to serve the majority of customers, not all of them.
Funnily enough this is still better compared to classic offline banks: none of them would have me even with the 4-year residence permit I have now. I come from a sanctioned country, I guess it raises some internal risk alarms. Only BNP did accept me at first but then after 3 months they froze my account with my salary on it.
So legally yes, you can pass a KYC, but in practice you're an edge case no one cares about
You realize that "locks keep honest people honest" is a reason to have locks, right? The point is that honest people will commit tax fraud if we make it easy for them to do.
wouldn't that make them dishonest by definition?
The point of creating friction is that it's the friction that keeps most people in line. A bike lock isn't going to protect your bike from being stolen by someone who is okay with being a bike thief, but if you leave your bike out without a lock, you've just opened yourself up to having it stolen by a much, much larger portion of the population who don't see themselves as "thieves" as they commit theft.
You can just look at what's happened on SF transit. SF has (intentionally) created a system where you technically don't have to scan your card to get on the bus if you have a monthly pass or use the iphone version of payment... the result is a shitload of people who would otherwise pay for the bus if you had to scan your card, and everyone knew you were cheating the system if you don't, they just don't pay now. If you make it easy for people to be bad actors, more people will be bad actors.
I don't think KYC keeps people honest, I think it's just making the life of honest people uncomfortable.
I understand the goal of KYC/AML, and maybe in some places it's implemented correctly. But from my limited experience in the EU, it can be easy for criminals to avoid it, but it makes my life difficult for no good reason (both for privacy violation and for times when it is simply fails).
A fast, cheap, global, and private currency; in contrast to the speculative asset that is Bitcoin.
So they pivoted the marketing to it being a "store of value".
The lowest daily average cost per transaction in the last month was $0.81, and the highest was $2.52.
That's not remotely true. Nano is up and running like 9 years now and has survived countless spam attacks. The last attacks have gone completely unnoticed except by people watching for them.
As a non-inflationary feeless currency it's inherently far more decentralized, and tends to decentralize over time.
Why on earth would POW be the standard when block lattice is better in literally every way? It's faster, safer, and 10x more efficient than a Visa transaction.
And then there's quantum resistance.
Why do people on a tech site full of 'smart' people let statements that wrong go unremarked. It's weird.
It's like someone was saying, watermills are great because they can help you mill your flour. Someone else chimes in like, hey, you can actually just get a wind turbine or a solar panel now; it's way more efficient... And then you - a year old account with -1 karma - jump in saying, 'lol solar power shills still exist?!'.
Like... Who's the shill here? How much BTC is in your bag?
Globally visible transaction permanence.
When you pay the 1.5% visa transaction, you don't get that.
And you don't need that for buying a coffee, or almost anything.
Microtransactions are just not a good use-case for the Bitcoin network.
The drawback with anything beyond Bitcoin is that in order to buy those currencies, you need Bitcoin. There is an extreme correlation with the price of Bitcoin and every other cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin's current hashrate is 95 Petahashes/second, while Litecoin is 2.35 PH/s.
I suppose both are big enough that one does not have to worry about the network being easily hijacked.
But when you get below a certain point, the price for taking over the head of the chain temporarily is a real amount of money, not an astronomical one.
And what's worse is that it's impossible to reliably predict the correct fee to be able to get into the next block.
This means that at any time if you're unlucky your payment might get stuck for hours, days or even weeks.
Lightning exists for a reason. Comes with far more privacy too -- arguably even more than Monero, if done right.
The problem is that a cryptocurrency could support both large and small transactions, which Monero does.
The fast-cheap-private part may or may not be fixed at some point, especially the fast-cheap, or other currencies may help with it.
If there's a single company or "foundation" that is in charge of development decisions, then it's not a distributed currency. That's no different from Paypal.
If a random country (that you don't even live in) can block your wallet-address/transactions then what you have is not a cryptocurrency worthy of its name (they can force miners and exchanges to not accept any funds that can easily be traced to your wallet address). Just use Venmo or Paypal at that point they have lower fees and faster transactions.
It'll probably make it harder for people who aren't in "bullet-proof" countries (i.e. without good cooperation with to receive ransom payment, which sounds like a good thing. It could also cause some decidedly negative effects during the transition, when companies that really want to pay a ransom (because they cannot recover otherwise) are unable to.
A person i know works in an art/craft company - so not tech - and the boss faced a hard time to pay 40k€ in btc for a ransomware a few months ago, since many of the transfers were blocked and had to pass through a middle man. the backup they had was last done months earlier, i don't know if its their fault or their security company's fault but i guess in the future they'll gladly pay more for working backups
They don't ban the coins and their private usages, they ban them on exchanges.
In the end you'll be able to exchange coins for other coins but by itself it's meaningless.
People will just (legally) use decentalised exchanges to convert between monero and bitcoin so it won't have much impact
Haveno already works by providing p2p multisignature escrow. With this design, you need to match with an individual and do a direct exchange. There is a Tor-based application
BasicSwap has another model with noncustodial atomic swaps and some sort of decentralised orderbook.
I expect that Serai will be much more effective than those. It will launch soon with a liquidity pool design, similar to Uniswap for Ethereum. With this model, other people can profit by providing liquidity for pools. It will be very easy for anyone to initiate a trade and do an exchange for a different currency from the pool. It will be incorporated into the most popular mobile app Cakewallet, so it should be accessible even for non-technical users and quickly gain adoption. I think this has the potential to provide an even more convenient, generally superior experience compared to centralised exchanges.
The idea is that "lawful limits", even if you wholeheartedly support them now, can change at a whim if a new government is elected or a war starts or some other major crisis happens. These things come and go every few decades, one is not improbable to occur within the frame of your lifetime and place of residence.
For example the fact that ruzzia ha such a stable budget for 3 years in row is not in a last part due to the token system, where they can trade with Iran, China, and others and launder tokens through UAE/SA/Qatar exchanges etc.
Never did much care for Rousseau myself though, or the fascists and communists he spawned.
This isn't really an issue, AML exists for a reason, having had experience in countries where corruption was extremely bad, AML combined with solid privacy obligations of data from the exchanger is a net positive thing.
People can complain about "I want fully private transactions" - Okay then use cash.
Otherwise force your exchange provider to keep your data secure.
I want fully private transactions over the internet, cant use cash with someone a continent away.
The big problem seems to be that then you allow for arbitrary speculation, causing high volatility, and scarcity of reliable ways to exchange the money, because no organisation that could otherwise stabilise the exchange rate can put their name to fully private transactions.
And you can still do this, the AML is related to the using the Exchanges themselves ?
Cash too is becoming more and more restricted over time. Large denominations are removed from circulation, transactions above certain threshold are made illegal, limits are put on cash withdrawals per day and per month.
Realistically the current trajectory of the EU is "less and less private transactions until there are none in a couple of decades".
On a side note good luck in regulating Crypto that doesn't require KYC when most people transfer to an anonymous wallet using a wallet address.
The medium-large company I used to work in the US hired a full-time senior director to address GDPR. He had a team and the effort took years and touched every corner of the company.
Sob stories about companies being forced to reckon with their unethical business practices in the face of new laws are nothing new. Companies that profit from playing fast and loose with people's personal data complain about the hardships of following GDPR, food companies complain that the limits for cancer-causing chemicals and heavy metals are too low, and factories complain that they should be allowed to dump toxic waste in the rivers.
And employees working for those companies often pick up these sorts of irrational views by osmosis to preserve social cohesion within the company.
Want to stay private, there always FIAT currency, which protects your privacy (until you reach certain amounts of transactions).
Also, Chat control has almost been passed twice by now.
So much harm has been done in the name of AML/KYC. Money laundering is auxiliary to some other activity that governments define as "evil". Laundering the proceeds of some activity a government does not approve of is exactly as good or evil as whatever the activity itself is, and as always, law and morality are two different things. When passing such provisions, governments will always cite the worst possible activity whose proceeds might be laundered, but the resulting powers are far too easy to abuse.
Where I am, we have seen massive money laundering scandals, and I have yet to hear of anyone abusing it. My read is that the abuse currently comes from not applying it enough to stuff you want to make money from, not over applying it to things you disagree with.
But, as one of many examples, consider the many stories of someone going around with a larger than commonly carried amount of cash, such as the deposits of a business that accepts cash or the savings of someone who is underbanked, and is presumed to be up to something and that pretense is used to seize the cash with no recourse or reasonable legal proceeding or likely hope of timely recovery.
.. in the US. I'm sure there must be examples of this happening in Europe, but it seems much less of a thing?
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Digital money flattens that out. With cryptocurrency you can move either of those values equally easy. A few times people have done so by mistake!
This presents a new kind of risk, because suddenly a completely invisible empire of organized crime, bribery, or enough money to destabilize a government is possible. The EU is choosing the "high trust, high transparency, high enforcement" path. The US is now choosing the "open bribery of the President through his personal cryptocurrency" approach. Let's see how that works out.
(meanwhile, all the "police/courts rob person of their life savings in cash" asset forfeiture stories I hear about are from the US? Doesn't this happen in Europe? Or could it be that the different legal structure doesn't facilitate this?)
Is that like different countries inside the EU implementing their own laws and drawing from that experience to influence the shape of EU laws? Or how neighbouring countries (like DACH, Benelux, Scandinavia or the Iberian peninsula) use regular international cooperation to shape cluster-local policies without involving the entire Union?
No, we don't have any of that here.
The tracking is a feature, and many governments want a CBDC.
What does the CIA think? The CIA thinks Bitcoin is great:
https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/bitcoin-price-million-cia...
By the way, the article itself claims:
"The European Union is set to impose sweeping Anti-Money Laundering (AML) rules that will ban privacy-preserving tokens and anonymous cryptocurrency accounts from 2027."
This statement is walked back later.