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If you are living in the US or EU then being able to hide assets and transfer without censorship is mostly a bug, not a feature. And eventually the governments

If you are living in the US or EU then being able to hide assets and transfer without censorship is mostly a bug, not a feature. And eventually the governments will have to do something about it in order to preserve the rule of law. What happens if you are disabled in a horrible negligent accident or defrauded in some conventional transaction and defendant hides all assets and transactions in BTC? I can't imagine a long term equilibrium where [Americans, at least] store trillions and trillions of dollars in BTC without substantial additional regulation. Edit: for those in relatively more corrupt, tenuous circumstances then BTC is a net positive, of course.

vbezhenar 6y ago
I don't see anything particularly hard about regulating bitcoins. You're registering your wallets with your government and that's about it. Bitcoin is fully transparent, so government can track every transaction and if you're doing transaction to some non-verified wallet, you have to explain it to your government. I would argue that bitcoins are even easier to track than bank accounts. What government can't do is to steal your money or block your access to your money.
- free_rms 6y ago
  > What government can't do is to steal your money or block your access to your money. https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  > What government can't do is to steal your money or block your access to your money. Gov: “Here is our wallet blacklist feed. If you transact with these wallets, you go to jail.” On the plus side, FinCEN can automate currency transaction report generation and monitoring on a public distributed ledger.
  - vbezhenar 6y ago
    > Gov: “Here is our wallet blacklist feed. If you transact with these wallets, you go to jail.” Me: "I'm already in Africa, find me, losers"
    - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
      You know that it takes some USD cents and a couple of network confirmations to transfer any asset to a different wallet, right?
      - virgilp 6y ago
        Come on. It also takes a couple of USD cents (per operation) for the government to automatically blacklist all wallets that "touched" (received any amount of transfer from) a blacklisted walled. The great advantage of BTC is that the ledger is public...
        frankenst1 6y ago
        Blacklisting addresses based on where they received money from doesn't make any sense. Blacklisted wallets can just send microcents (dust) to whitelisted wallets, which would now have to be blacklisted as well. You can make it illegal to use Bitcoin, but it was designed to make it practically impossible to enforce such a ban.
        virgilp 6y ago
        You just need to modify the rule a little bit. "If you transact with these blacklisted wallets, your wallet also automatically becomes blacklisted, and if we find you then you go to jail. As an exception - if you receive any amount of BTC from a blacklisted walled, you have 7 days to send the same amount (or greater) to [this government wallet] and that will erase all your legal liability and make your wallet whitelisted again. We can even automate the process for you if you trust us enough to give us your wallet keys. Alternatively, register email/phone numbers with us and we'll notify you when your wallet is blacklisted, and tell you how much BTC you should pay us"
  - adhoc32 6y ago
    Hardware wallets generate a new address for each transaction (receive & transmit). It's impossible to maintain a blacklist feed.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      Oh I wouldn't worry, they'll find a way. It's only 7 tx/sec lol, that's literally nothing. Not that hard to put 2 and 2 together.
    - bird84 6y ago
      You can receive every time with a new address generated by HD Wallet. But transmission can only happen from an address which has positive balance. And after receiving the money, destination balance becomes positive, and you are bound to use that destination address as a source to transfer assets further.
simias 6y ago
>Edit: for those in relatively more corrupt, tenuous circumstances then BTC is a net positive, of course. Even that I'm not sold on. You could argue that it gives incentives for the rich and powerful to maintain the status quo since their own riches become out of reach from the corrupt government. Meanwhile the commoners are still very much under threat since most of their assets will be physical (their house, their clothes, their belongings, their bodies etc...). The idea that cryptocurrencies are empowering the poor makes about as much sense to me as trickle down economics. If you are in a position to benefit from Bitcoin it means that you already have a significant amount of disposable income you can convert into bitcoin and afford to "HODL" in your wallet for a while. "Being able to transfer money across political boundaries without censorship" is completely irrelevant if you're a poor farmer in Buthan or an elderly shoemaker in rural Pakistan. Transfer what money, to whom and for what purpose? This whole concept is just social-washing cryptocurrencies to obfuscate that it's profoundly libertarian (the USA flavor) at the core. If you consider that the government is always the enemy and it can't be fixed and should instead be thoroughly destroyed, then and only then do cryptocurrencies make sense. It's not about good vs. bad government, it's about no government.
- cubano 6y ago
  > If you consider that the government is always the enemy and it can't be fixed and should instead be thoroughly destroyed, then and only then do cryptocurrencies make sense. It's not about good vs. bad government, it's about no government. Certainly not. As I keep telling people here, cryptos are property, not currency. Why should governments be in the business of telling people what type of property they can and can't own? A coin is nothing but a couple of large numbers that are easy to multiply together but very difficult to factor...that's it. If the people of earth want to assign large fiat currency values to complicated key-pairs, then why shouldn't they have the right to do that? Of course crypto-traders need government...like we need libraries and schools and police and all that, just like everyone else, right?
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    > Certainly not. As I keep telling people here, cryptos are property, not currency. Why should governments be in the business of telling people what type of property they can and can't own? Uh what? That's like the second biggest thing the government does after, you know, army. You can't own a dead lobster shorter than 6 3/4 inches in the United States without committing a felony, even if the lobster met its untimely end without your assistance. Of course that's what the government should be in the business of doing otherwise we'd likely all be dead, and separately, there wouldn't be any more lobsters.
Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
> If you are living in the US or EU then being able to hide assets and transfer without censorship is mostly a bug If you completely ignore how big corporations and ultrarich are able to hide their assets behind shell corporations and various other structures, then yes maybe your vision is correct. But that it not what happens in reality. In reality right now the rich can hide whatever they can, and the poor have no recourse against frivolous seizures, lawsuits etc. What crypto does is levels the playing field.
- iamben 6y ago
  But then surely - if you take the position that generally some kind of government and law is a good thing, and generally they're not out to hurt the everyman - the idea that anyone should be hiding anything (away from taxes) is destructive to the detriment of the things that hold society together (laws, roads, having the rubbish collected, etc?)?
  - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
    Yes there are useful things that the government does. But I believe there are ways to tax for things which are more fair than what is being used today, and crypto is not a detriment to that. (Roads and rubbish can easily by taxed by usage, from the people who clearly use those services, but there are other central commons that should be taxed on state or federal level.)
porknubbins 6y ago
Your point about a personal liability suit is interesting, but there are many ways to hide money before an incident occurs, Bitcoin is just one possibility that has its own risks. If you’re trying to hide money after an accident then it will be obvious so you will still be on the hook.

vbezhenar 6y ago

I don't see anything particularly hard about regulating bitcoins. You're registering your wallets with your government and that's about it. Bitcoin is fully transparent, so government can track every transaction and if you're doing transaction to some non-verified wallet, you have to explain it to your government. I would argue that bitcoins are even easier to track than bank accounts. What government can't do is to steal your money or block your access to your money.

free_rms 6y ago
> What government can't do is to steal your money or block your access to your money. https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
toomuchtodo 6y ago
> What government can't do is to steal your money or block your access to your money. Gov: “Here is our wallet blacklist feed. If you transact with these wallets, you go to jail.” On the plus side, FinCEN can automate currency transaction report generation and monitoring on a public distributed ledger.
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  > Gov: “Here is our wallet blacklist feed. If you transact with these wallets, you go to jail.” Me: "I'm already in Africa, find me, losers"
  - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
    You know that it takes some USD cents and a couple of network confirmations to transfer any asset to a different wallet, right?
    - virgilp 6y ago
      Come on. It also takes a couple of USD cents (per operation) for the government to automatically blacklist all wallets that "touched" (received any amount of transfer from) a blacklisted walled. The great advantage of BTC is that the ledger is public...
      - frankenst1 6y ago
        Blacklisting addresses based on where they received money from doesn't make any sense. Blacklisted wallets can just send microcents (dust) to whitelisted wallets, which would now have to be blacklisted as well. You can make it illegal to use Bitcoin, but it was designed to make it practically impossible to enforce such a ban.
        virgilp 6y ago
        You just need to modify the rule a little bit. "If you transact with these blacklisted wallets, your wallet also automatically becomes blacklisted, and if we find you then you go to jail. As an exception - if you receive any amount of BTC from a blacklisted walled, you have 7 days to send the same amount (or greater) to [this government wallet] and that will erase all your legal liability and make your wallet whitelisted again. We can even automate the process for you if you trust us enough to give us your wallet keys. Alternatively, register email/phone numbers with us and we'll notify you when your wallet is blacklisted, and tell you how much BTC you should pay us"
- adhoc32 6y ago
  Hardware wallets generate a new address for each transaction (receive & transmit). It's impossible to maintain a blacklist feed.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Oh I wouldn't worry, they'll find a way. It's only 7 tx/sec lol, that's literally nothing. Not that hard to put 2 and 2 together.
  - bird84 6y ago
    You can receive every time with a new address generated by HD Wallet. But transmission can only happen from an address which has positive balance. And after receiving the money, destination balance becomes positive, and you are bound to use that destination address as a source to transfer assets further.

simias 6y ago

>Edit: for those in relatively more corrupt, tenuous circumstances then BTC is a net positive, of course. Even that I'm not sold on. You could argue that it gives incentives for the rich and powerful to maintain the status quo since their own riches become out of reach from the corrupt government. Meanwhile the commoners are still very much under threat since most of their assets will be physical (their house, their clothes, their belongings, their bodies etc...). The idea that cryptocurrencies are empowering the poor makes about as much sense to me as trickle down economics. If you are in a position to benefit from Bitcoin it means that you already have a significant amount of disposable income you can convert into bitcoin and afford to "HODL" in your wallet for a while. "Being able to transfer money across political boundaries without censorship" is completely irrelevant if you're a poor farmer in Buthan or an elderly shoemaker in rural Pakistan. Transfer what money, to whom and for what purpose? This whole concept is just social-washing cryptocurrencies to obfuscate that it's profoundly libertarian (the USA flavor) at the core. If you consider that the government is always the enemy and it can't be fixed and should instead be thoroughly destroyed, then and only then do cryptocurrencies make sense. It's not about good vs. bad government, it's about no government.

cubano 6y ago
> If you consider that the government is always the enemy and it can't be fixed and should instead be thoroughly destroyed, then and only then do cryptocurrencies make sense. It's not about good vs. bad government, it's about no government. Certainly not. As I keep telling people here, cryptos are property, not currency. Why should governments be in the business of telling people what type of property they can and can't own? A coin is nothing but a couple of large numbers that are easy to multiply together but very difficult to factor...that's it. If the people of earth want to assign large fiat currency values to complicated key-pairs, then why shouldn't they have the right to do that? Of course crypto-traders need government...like we need libraries and schools and police and all that, just like everyone else, right?
- arcticbull 6y ago
  > Certainly not. As I keep telling people here, cryptos are property, not currency. Why should governments be in the business of telling people what type of property they can and can't own? Uh what? That's like the second biggest thing the government does after, you know, army. You can't own a dead lobster shorter than 6 3/4 inches in the United States without committing a felony, even if the lobster met its untimely end without your assistance. Of course that's what the government should be in the business of doing otherwise we'd likely all be dead, and separately, there wouldn't be any more lobsters.

Erlich_Bachman 6y ago

> If you are living in the US or EU then being able to hide assets and transfer without censorship is mostly a bug If you completely ignore how big corporations and ultrarich are able to hide their assets behind shell corporations and various other structures, then yes maybe your vision is correct. But that it not what happens in reality. In reality right now the rich can hide whatever they can, and the poor have no recourse against frivolous seizures, lawsuits etc. What crypto does is levels the playing field.

iamben 6y ago
But then surely - if you take the position that generally some kind of government and law is a good thing, and generally they're not out to hurt the everyman - the idea that anyone should be hiding anything (away from taxes) is destructive to the detriment of the things that hold society together (laws, roads, having the rubbish collected, etc?)?
- Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
  Yes there are useful things that the government does. But I believe there are ways to tax for things which are more fair than what is being used today, and crypto is not a detriment to that. (Roads and rubbish can easily by taxed by usage, from the people who clearly use those services, but there are other central commons that should be taxed on state or federal level.)

porknubbins 6y ago

Your point about a personal liability suit is interesting, but there are many ways to hide money before an incident occurs, Bitcoin is just one possibility that has its own risks. If you’re trying to hide money after an accident then it will be obvious so you will still be on the hook.