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it’s trivial to accept huge amounts of money across state and international borders once you create a cryptocurrency wallet. Still illegal in all jurisdictions
by grey-area 6y ago
it’s trivial to accept huge amounts of money across state and international borders once you create a cryptocurrency wallet.
Still illegal in all jurisdictions though, and at any point in the future people with guns may come to seize your assets based on the very complete and pseudo-anonymous list of transactions, because creating money and taxing transactions is a right that governments jealously guard and will not easily give up.
I find currencies-as-code fascinating partly because of this strange mix of utopian thought and sincere attempts to overthrow global systems of governance (many of which are corrupt and self-serving) with code. People have been proclaiming they would upend the financial system and governments since 2008, but overthrowing systems of government requires physical acts of defiance and real loss, not just switching currency.
I disagree that cryptocurrencies are currently disrupting centuries of customs, simply because most transactions on them are fake and volume/value is far lower than claimed[0], but also because if they do become popular enough to matter for real transactions (not speculation on price), states can easily impose regulation, audits and taxes on them by taking them over and changing the rules. Developers or exchanges would easily be suborned for example, since the code makes the rules and the majority wins, the rules can be changed.
There are also good reasons that state currencies require auditing, rollback, identity verification and trusted third parties overseeing transactions - because without those you end up with a wild-west where bad actors can steal your money with impunity. For these reasons cryptocurrencies in their current form will never be very attractive to most people or corporations.
0: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkauflin/2019/07/02/the-anatomy-of-a-fake-cryptocurrency-trade-how-exchanges-create-phony-transactions/#31cabac63132 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkauflin/2019/07/02/the-anat...
- sillysaurusx 6y agoMonero is anonymous, though, and any real transaction would probably be done in such an anonymous currency. Obviously, ospec can still blow your cover. But Monero and other assets are certainly a game changer in this space. The recent $4.5M ransom was evidence that this isn't really theoretical: https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN24W25W https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN24W25W (Bitcoin can be converted to Monero, and the bitcoin can be mixed, so it's still quite hard to do what you're suggesting: to track down the perpetrators of large-scale crimes such as this. The flipside is that criminals' opsec tends to be very poor; good police work is usually enough to capture them.)
- grey-area 6y agoI'm not convinced that more than a tiny minority of people want or need the pain that comes with truly remaining anonymous from state-level agencies.
- seibelj 6y agoI mean - come and get me / us / everyone? Create a new wallet and fund it anonymously. There is no one to target! Statists can keep dreaming but the level of control they have over crypto is extremely weak compared to licensed banking institutions. You cannot deny this fact.
- grey-area 6y agoTransactions on the wallet and exchanges can be tied to identifiers like IP, browser fingerprint, email accounts, bank accounts etc with a little dragnet surveillance of the type the NSA already participates in. Your opsec is not as good as you think it is, and how good was it several years or even 10 years ago? By the time you know you're being targeted, it's too late to up your game. This is how they caught Dread Pirate Roberts, and this is how they'd catch you. If the government was interested in your illegal transactions, they would find you, and they would take everything you own in recompense if they wished. Your 'anonymous' wallet will not save you if cryptocurrencies actually become important. If you want to stop that, you need to consider what a revolution entails - civil disobedience and breaking unjust laws en masse and standing up to the state in the real world, not just in code.
- seibelj 6y agoYou are comparing a drug kingpin to normal transactions for commerce. The state cannot attack small amounts. You are dreaming of a dragnet that does not and IMO cannot exist.
- grey-area 6y agoThe dragnet already exists. Look up Tempora in the UK for one example - everything you do online is recorded and can be linked to transactions retrospectively, bank account, blockchain records, ISP records, email, there are so many vectors to find you that it would not be hard if you ever make significant money to come after you. Though given you are posting your thoughts on defying the state and avoiding taxes in detail under your real name here and probably elsewhere, I'm not sure dragnet surveillance would be required.
- soulofmischief 6y agoIn the meantime, it's illegal in my country for Airbnbs to operate as short-term rentals in residential areas and yet up until Covid my tiny apartment building was 20% Airbnbs despite numerous complaints to multiple parties. So OP has a point.
- HarryHirsch 6y agoThis just shows that the government is run by landowners, not tenants. If they wanted to come down on short-term rentals that drive up rents they could; the fact that they don't want to should tell you something.
- soulofmischief 6y agoBelieve me, it tells me something.