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The way I usually phrase this situation is something like "The goals of a strong government are in direct opposition to the goals of most modern cryptocurrenci

• jeofken 6y ago
  With cryptocurrency you can travel across a border with a million $ worth, by just keeping a 12-word recovery phrase on you. Cryptocurrencies can never be stopped, and will more likely outlive governments than vice versa. Long live tax evasion! Vive la liberté!
  • bouncycastle 6y ago
    I don't think you should be travelling with the 24 word recovery phrase. That one should be encrypted, backed up, and stored in a safe place
    • jeofken 6y ago
      Symmetrically encrypt it and tell the border guard it’s your moms laptop password
    • krageon 6y ago
      You can memorise it, that's still safe
    • csomar 6y ago
      Brain Wallet? You could easily memorize the 24 words.
      • bouncycastle 6y ago
        If so, don't use anything from literature or too easy to remember, see https://www.coindesk.com/brainwallet-bitcoin-wallet-shouldnt-use https://www.coindesk.com/brainwallet-bitcoin-wallet-shouldnt... I guess for the purpose of travel, and you really need to, you can always use symmetric encryption to encrypt your seeds with a strong passphrase, then travel with that.
  • thefounder 6y ago
    The issue is converting that crypto into cash.
    • refurb 6y ago
      This is what I don’t get. Great, you can transfer Bitcoin to anyone for cheap, anywhere in the world. But that Bitcoin is useless to you or whoever you give it to unless it’s converted to currency. That’s where the gov’t puts it’s grip. Move as much Bitcoin wherever you want. Who cares. Want to convert to dollars or Euros or Yen? That’s where the gov’t steps in and say fine - prove who you are for this transaction. With the public Bitcoin ledger they can now connect you back to the source of the money.
      • intotheabyss 6y ago
        Just wrap your Bitcoin into renBTC on Ethereum, and exchange it for DAI stablecoin. Then, deposit it into a zero knowledge mixer contract called tornado.cash and withdraw to a fresh address. Now you've broken the link. An entirely decentralized process of converting BTC into a stablecoin without an intermediary while maintaining some privacy.
        • Karunamon 6y ago
          How many bites of the pie did you lose during those 4 transactions? Besides, you still need to convert DAI to fiat to use it IRL in most ways, DAI is just another form of space money despite being pegged to the dollar. I could also see criminalization of mixing tools being a thing.
          • tuxxy 6y ago
            > How many bites of the pie did you lose during those 4 transactions? Probably between ~1-2%, if that.
            • Karunamon 6y ago
  • volta87 6y ago
    The problem isn't tax evasion per-se, but rather logic inconsistencies. For example, I've met quite a bit of people that don't want to pay any taxes. Yet they all want for them and their goods to be able to use roads for free, roads that are built and maintained with taxes. That's actually ok: two incompatible goals just means you have to make a trade-off; welcome to engineering. The problem is that none of them understand why they can't have both. In their minds, there is no trade-off to make, because they want both, feel entitled to both, and having both should be possible. No idea why they are not able to understand that both things are incompatible. If there is some option that allows both that I am missing, they didn't manage to explain that.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • logicchains 6y ago
      >For example, I've met quite a bit of people that don't want to pay any taxes. Yet they all want for them and their goods to be able to use roads for free, roads that are built and maintained with taxes. That's a complete strawman and you know it. Any libertarian would say they'd be happy to pay to use privately-run roads. >No idea why they are not able to understand that both things are incompatible. If there is some option that allows both that I am missing, they didn't manage to explain that. Privately owned/built roads! These even already exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_highways_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_highways_in_the_United.... What's hard to understand about roads being built by people that aren't the government? Yes such roads might not be as optimally placed/efficient, but the libertarian's goal isn't efficiency, it's minimising what they consider the moral injustice of taxation.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    • jimz 6y ago
      While I certainly know people who for whatever reason fail to understand the relationship between taxes and benefits, I don't think they are really at all a significant portion of people who have taxation-related policy objections. The problem is amplified in America because of the long history of institutionalized subjugation and discrimination and the liberal use of violence both at home and abroad are taxpayer funded. Thanks to civil and administrative asset forfeiture that adds up to billions of dollars worth of cash and property seized without the government establishing a link to actual criminality that they can establish probable cause on (or for administrative forfeiture, there's no hearing at all, and they account for $500 million to $600 million a year). In a particularly galling and absurdist sort of way, Americans every day are paying for their own robberies, or paying in part for the settlement they receive after especially egregious cases manage to get past all of the legal hurdles protecting the authorities. Since most victims of what normal people would consider egregious abuse won't even get past that, we're talking about the victims of Chicago PD's systemic Holamn Square torture site and the likes, chipping in, along with their fellow citizens, while the perpetrators received pensions and when needed, covered for each other. All that are your taxpayer dollars at work. In some places, the police, with a hefty chunk of change from the Treasury and DoJ throigh "equitable sharing", are simply more incentized to use that taxpayer money to conduct more no-knock raids, because the war on drugs gets the feds involved which gets the local PD a chunk of federal funding as well. All that come directly from your tax dollars, in many cases far more than what goes into infrastructure. Your taxx dollars pay for the carceral state, they pay for ICE raids conducted through ruses and guises ordinarily illegal but not in the administrative law context. DHS has a discretionary budget of around $50 billion a year. A similar amount is earmarked for nondiscretionary disaster relief which pretty much lost all meaning lately. Of course, the agencies bring in somme revenue as well, but that's usually even worse news. In July an IG's report fouhnd that the DEA, without legally required congressional oversight, have been profitably laundering money for the cartels for most of the past decade, and had even somehow got involved in buying a private jet that was then left off initial budget reports. Like Aliens v. Predator, whoever wins, we lose, since this is self-justifying behavior, not in the public's interest but to create reasons for their own relevance. Some degree of fraud, waste,and abuse is bound to happen in all bureaucracies, but in America the impact isn't felt evenly. Black and brown parents have to have a second talk with their kids about encounters with the police. Immigrants, documented or not, pay taxes but receive either abbreviated or absolutely no means-t4ested benefits. In spit4e of contributing to the continued survival of social security, they're literally considered second-class citizens subject to indefinite detention. Or, for about a few thousand Americans, you'll experience the exact same because that's about how many Americans get deported a year to god knows where. And there's plenty of indicators showing that mere spending isn't really sufficient to achieve any of the goals we thought we could just throw taxpayer dollars at. HHS has a $2 trillion budget, almost half of that is used in conjunction with medicaid programs and grants, yet, neither party seems particularly happy with the status quo, not to mention that it excludes 20 million or so immigrants. And we have really convinced ourselves that money can cover up expertise and competency. American farmers are seeing their entire year's revenue coming from subsidies due to the trade war this year. For so many communities in this country, it makes perfect sense to wonder where the tax money go, since frankly it's pretty difficult to see sometimes, and what's most visible sometimes is also the most disturbing, egregious, and kafkaesque one can witness in the system. When that's the vector you interact with what your tax dollars pay for, it's perfectly logically consistent to want actual services yet not want to pay for the abuse. And we don't do public infrastructure stuff well anymore anyway. Think how long it took for the 2nd Avenue subway to go up 3 stations.
  • vkou 6y ago
    Sorry to burst the tax evasion bubble, but it is pretty easy to stop cryptocurrencies. Just require KYC at points of entry and exit into the ecosystem.
    • Nextgrid 6y ago
      This would still leave cryptocurrencies as a valid currency for the criminal underworld, and the points of entry/exit will become stolen/illegal goods/services. Not taking either side, just pointing out this fact.
      • st1x7 6y ago
        It's only valid for the criminal underworld if eventually there is a way to convert back to a legitimate currency and launder it efficiently.
        • Nextgrid 6y ago
          Stolen goods seem like an efficient enough way, and I can't see theft going away even if you eliminate the "elephant in the room" which is drugs (by either decriminalizing them or hypothetically winning the war on drugs)?
          • avianlyric 6y ago
            Theft doesn’t scale that very well. You try laundering $10 million by selling stolen goods at the pub. It’ll take you a while, and I can guarantee that the police are gonna notice. Even then you’re just turning your goods into cash. Which is still difficult to spend when buying high value assets like property. At some point if you’re a criminal that wants to spend their cash, and live in a developed country you need to turn your crypto into clean fiat in a bank account, or prove the crypto didn’t come from illicit sources.
          • vkou 6y ago
            If criminals are the only people using cryptocurrencies, it becomes socially trivial to criminalize the possession of software that interacts with cryptocurrencies.
• CryptoPunk 6y ago
  The Soviet economy had a substantial black market, especially if you include the Blat system of favor-trading [1]. New York today is seeing growth of ostensibly illegal, unlicensed street vendors, in reaction to lockdown restrictions [2]. Government is not efficient, and cannot effectively enforce rules, so cryptocurrency will undoubtedly survive. [1] https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/rees-577-fall2016/2016/10/18/the-importance-of-blats-in-soviet-everyday-life/ https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/rees-577-fall2016/2016/... [2] https://nypost.com/2020/12/26/mayhem-in-the-streets-illegal-vendors-are-overtaking-nyc/ https://nypost.com/2020/12/26/mayhem-in-the-streets-illegal-...
  • gabereiser 6y ago
    I agree with this at the macro level. It’s easy for a government to strong arm an individual into regulation, a small company even. When the markets themselves shift, that’s when government is going to have a hard time regulating. Crypto, good and bad, is here to stay because government is slow to respond to shifts. What’s going to be interesting to see is how this government regulations vs the people’s needs play out. The street vendors are suppling a demand, there’s a need, illegal vending or not.
  • logifail 6y ago
    > Government [..] cannot effectively enforce rules Counter-example: pick any one of the (new) rules that are currently being enforced due to C19? Government may not be efficient, but from time to time may just be efficient enough to catch you and/or punish you. Shameless movie quote: "You've got to ask yourself a question: 'do I feel lucky?'"
    • sildur 6y ago
      Paraphrasing another movie quote: "with everyone criminal, no one will be".
      • logifail 6y ago
        > with everyone [..] Hmm, "everyone"? Q: What proportion of Bitcoin holders are actually using as an approximate alternative to fiat currency (regularly purchasing real life stuff using Bitcoin) vs holding and hoping to get rich?
• codethief 6y ago
  > You can spend a decade developing a provably-anonymous cryptocurrency (which we have indeed now done) Looks like I've been out of the loop. Which cryptocurrency are you referring to?
  • dannyw 6y ago
    Monero.
  • SCHiM 6y ago
    I think the op referring to monero (XMR).
  • koheripbal 6y ago
    Monero (XMR) is the most notable example, but there are other coins that implement the same technology of truly anonymous and untraceable transactions. FinCEN will not change their course. From their perspective, they would rather try to kill or stifle all cryptos than allow illegal activity to be done within that market without an ability to seize assets or trace funds. Right now they have total control over traditional non-cash monetary transaction - and the US gov't specifically has a long reach into the global economy to enforce things like OFAC and sanctions. Cryptocurrency openly defies that power base by design (censorship resistance). There is fundamentally no solution here where the two will play nicely together. Cryptos will simmer in the background as the section of the global economy they facilitate grows (black market transactions), and erode the western financial power base. It's mostly limited today by the lack of scalability in the coin networks. I wonder if there's a future where innovation in scalability allows for a single crypto to reign supreme globally and eliminate all national currencies in our lifetime. It would be a monumental shift of power, which will undoubtedly involve a great deal of political/technological struggle and civil chaos.
    • panarky 6y ago
      Monero priced in Bitcoin is down 60% in the last year and it's down 90% since its peak in 2018. If Monero's purpose is to be anonymous and untraceable, and Bitcoin's purpose is to be a store of value, then it appears the market prefers the store-of-value use case. There's a popular idea that crypto currencies are only good for illegal activity. But the evidence so far from a nearly trillion-dollar market says that avoiding law enforcement is not what's driving the crypto phenomenon. There's another popular idea that central bank money printing is devaluing national currencies when priced in crypto. I'm sure that's part of it, but inflating the money supply by 30% doesn't really justify a 10x increase in crypto valuations. It's a small sample size, but the handful of wealthy families I'm acquainted with who are investing 0.1% to 2% of their net worth into Bitcoin (and a little into Ethereum) are more afraid of a collapse of the western political order than central bank money printing. Institutions and high-net-worth individuals aren't looking for privacy for illicit transactions so they're not putting their wealth into Monero. They've witnessed or researched what the collapse of the USSR did to the ruble and asset prices in the former Soviet Union, and they're buying some insurance against a similar unraveling in the US and Europe.