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Comment by stef25 | Hacker News Reader

Trading privacy coins is set to banned in the EU as from 2027. Not sure how easy it will be to circumvent this rule.

https://bitcoinblog.de/2025/05/05/eu-to-ban-trading-of-priva...

This will initially go the same way as the porn ban that's being enacted all over Europe — VPN usage will skyrocket, people will still do whatever they want.

Then they will have to resort to the only other alternative: require a government ID and static IP allocation to access to the internet, for complete surveillance and traceability. You know it's coming.

A lot of people have bought real, legal, government IDs from places like Palau[] which sell them for like $300 and no crime is committed by doing so.

[] https://rns.id/app/palauidinfo

I guess what the parent is saying is that every user will be issued a private/public key pair to be able to access the internet. You can, maybe, buy one. But it’ll be easy for the gov. to ban it.

"All over Europe" meaning UK, France, and Italy.

If you think it’s gonna be limited to those three you haven’t been paying attention.

Nobody cares about privacy coins but criminals.

There's 0 real world cases for them except some extremely far fetched ones.

The US already cracked down on mixer Tornado Cash [1]. Wouldn’t surprise me if they (try to) follow suit on privacy coins as well.

There’s a chance there’s enough political influence by libertarian/crypto folks in the US to push back though.

On the other hand, the transparency of bitcoin could be a boon in ways as well. Currently only governments, large banks, some multinationals can track large transfers of money. Bitcoin levels the playing field and enables internet sleuths to uncover government or corporate corruption.

1: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0916

Old news, that's been reversed and Tornado cash is back off the sanctions list.

https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0057

A reversal is indistinguishable from a scenario where Tornado was turned and is now cooperating with US LEO. Hypothetically, of course - US prosecutors wouldn't use this tactic to go after bigger fish.

Europe lost on crypto. There are only users but no infra. providers based in Europe (and even the UK). So my guess is that this will do very little to nothing.

Paper wallets, so, trivial?

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