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EU plans to make Bitcoin transfers more traceable
- yawaworht1978 5y agoPretty late and how will they deal with location independent companies like Binance? The CEO is more or less permanently on the lam.
- sadfasdfsad 5y ago> The CEO is more or less permanently on the lam. Source?
- digianarchist 5y agoBinance isn't location independent. They're incorporated in the Caymans.
- wyager 5y agoThe EU regularly fines companies that don’t even have a business entity in the EU so I doubt they’re worried about it.
- meltedcapacitor 5y agoYes, theoretically. Has it actually happened in practice? Did they pay? (All cases I can find are either local EU companies or large multinationals who do have boots on the ground in the EU.)
- peteretep 5y ago> location independent companies That’s not a real thing
- knownjorbist 5y agoHow is it not? A DAO with with the right setup would require international collaboration to extradite all the members and coerce them to unlock their holdings
- meltedcapacitor 5y agoYes sure but most existing crypto players want to be able to drive their Lambo to a nice restaurant in San Francisco or London, not have to live in a cave in Belarus or Haiti as a fugitive from the civilised world.
- yawaworht1978 5y agoWell, but not this CEO, and if this site is to be believed, he is just a public strawman. https://scambinance.com/investigations/131-who-owns-binance-casino-guangying-chen-heina-chen-or-changpeng-zhao.html https://scambinance.com/investigations/131-who-owns-binance-...
- ulzeraj 5y agoI'm going to be honest with you but considering last time I've visited SF I'd take a nice Belarusian cave in a heartbeat.
- peteretep 5y agobecause a company is a legal entity and a DAO is a cryptographic slot machine. A DAO is no more a company than my 10 year old nephew’s gang is a company, although there exist similarly arcane rules, a complex voting system, and a great deal of wishful thinking in both. Could you turn a DAO into a company? Sure, if you incorporated it, but that requires a country to incorporate it in.
- ForHackernews 5y agoHuman beings are not "location independent". They will arrest the humans who run the companies.
- lxgr 5y agoAll crypto on- and offramps are by definition connected to the regulated banking infrastructure. If customers can‘t deposit or withdraw money to an exchange, that makes the exchange effectively inaccessible to customers in that jurisdiction.
- Animats 5y ago"The new rules would also prohibit providing anonymous crypto-asset wallets." That's awful. Hosted wallets are an invitation for "exchanges" to steal.
- Tenoke 5y agoI don't see the full rules but perhaps self-hosted can still be allowed if you do KYC with a central authority to link the address to your identity.
- BitwiseFool 5y agoWhat about generating your own wallet? Are EU citizens required to report that when they do?
- elmo2you 5y agoI believe that the moment you hold valuable assets (i.e. any value of crypto currency) in any wallet, then you should report that (even now). I have no idea how these new rules will play out, but I can image how exchanges might be forced allow only transactions with "sanctioned" wallets (i.e. traceable to person), and international exchanges not playing complying being blocked from to the EU market.
- atatatat 5y agoGood luck.
- garmaine 5y agoIn parts of the EU, maybe. That's definitely not the case in the US. Do you generally have to report accounts for which there have been no taxable events?
- tinco 5y agoYou don't have capital tax? Here in The Netherlands we pay a tax over assets exceeding some value. If you have a million, whether it's sitting a bank, or it's stuffed in your mattress, you have to report it and pay (a small amount of) tax on it. Afaik we also don't have taxable events, we just have income tax.
- ipnon 5y agoCryptocurrency financial crimes are often masked as a technical issue inherent to decentralized, trustless networks rather than the truth; they are issues inherent to centralized, trustful systems.[a] Transfers within the blockchain are already perfectly traceable. Perfect traceability is the reason for the blockchains being. It is the interface between the blockchains and traditional finance where this problem lies. [a] The history of finance is the history of financial crime. Jews starting banks because of Christian usury laws, the Medici sidestepping the monetary power of the church and kingdoms, etc.
- Sargos 5y ago>The history of finance is the history of financial crime. Jews starting banks because of Christian usury laws, the Medici sidestepping the monetary power of the church and kingdoms, etc. Most societal advancements are crimes in the beginning as those in power disagree with the new ideas of the subjects. Civil rights, religious freedom, even literacy itself was deemed to be dangerous and unacceptable in their times. Breaking laws like this and ignoring government bureaucracy is actually quite a noble act and should be encouraged as much as possible.
- uniqueid 5y agoHuman trafficking, illegal arms sales, ransomware attacks every day, one of the world's richest men pumping and dumping a meme coin... no big deal? It might be that 'most societal advancements are crimes in the beginning' but it doesn't follow that most new kinds of crime are societal advancements.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoHmm the whole way bitcoin is set up is tailored to making this impossible. Anyone can write a wallet program and create a private key. Of course when converting to Fiat money they have a chance to ask for ID but I don't see this happening with bitcoin to bitcoin transactions unless the whole protocol is changed around.
- vinni2 5y agoYa the Bitcoin protocol won’t allow it but the law can certainly be make it illegal to make anonymous wallets.
- meltedcapacitor 5y agoNo need to change the protocol. It can be done by making unaccounted-for keys unusable, if the regulated industry coordinates. For instance: - the regulated crypto industry can form a mining cartel that only approves tx between whitelisted addresses and orphans any attempt at doing otherwise (a 51% attack), to save their investment in the "number go up" game. - the regulated industry can at transaction level reject any output that is not, transitively, formed only of whitelisted addresses. Unapproved transactions could still be mined and used between unapproved participants, but it would cause a split inside the network with a BTC-dark (all contaminated outputs) and BTC-clear (whitelisted only) and an (underground) exchange rate between both would emerge, analogous to some third world fiat currencies with a regulated fixed government exchange rate with say USD that differs from the street rate. The latter is already emerging in a way with discounts for paying ransomware in monero (which gives an implied xrate between tainted BTC and clean BTC) as a response to the small amount of blacklisting clear exchanges have started doing.
- ulzeraj 5y agoI guess we can route around that with something like BIP47.
- gruez 5y ago>The new rules would also prohibit providing anonymous crypto-asset wallets. As a business/service, or in general? If the latter, then it's literally a ban on cryptography.
- the_mitsuhiko 5y agoYou're already not allowed to move undeclared cash across borders, not sure why you can't have a rule that you can't have undeclared crypto wallets. That does not ban cryptography, that just forces people to declare their wallets.
- darig 5y agoPeople don't own wallets... whoever holds the private key owns the coins. If I don't have the key memorized or on my person, I don't own anything.
- arthurcolle 5y agoThis is completely unenforceable.
- ben_w 5y agoFor small amounts; large amounts tend to get noticed by what they end up buying, and that’s probably what they care about.
- BobbyJo 5y agoIt's very enforceable, in a practical sense, for the majority of holders. Most people use services to exchange crypto for fiat. If you're in the EU, and use any such services, expect changes. For the people that it isn't enforceable for, they're stuck either moving countries, hodling eternally, or laundering the cash they get in return for their crypto assets.
- vkou 5y agoIt's perfectly enforceable by asking exchanges to do KYC. Yes, you'll be able to break the law if you turn to a hawala payment system, but I can also break the law against murder by hiring a hitman. That doesn't mean laws against murder are completely uneforceable.
- young_unixer 5y ago> The new rules would also prohibit providing anonymous crypto-asset wallets. Does that include open source wallets that you can run in your own computer, like Electrum?
- verdverm 5y agoyour wallet == a BTC address, not the software or hardware you create or access it with
- nybble41 5y agoFrom the actual text of the proposal it seems "wallet" means an account hosted at a Crypto-Asset Service Provider (CASP). Nothing to do with crypto wallets at all, really. These are "Know Your Customer" rules; if you're transacting between two unhosted wallets there is no CASP involved and you are not a customer.
- Trias11 5y agoThat's why the move to decentralized everything. This total control nonsense will eventually end and these dinosaur idiots will stuck with their own destructive ideas
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y agoI do not really want to discourage this line of thinking, but please note the old fashioned golden rule ( he with the gold makes the rules ). Apart from that, check crypto trends and quickly you will notice that they are very few projects that care about it in any real way. Every major crypto now effectively all about centralization, not the opposite. For different reasons than the central banks, naturally. Still, the trends are hard to ignore. Otherwise, we would already have crypto outright banned or fully decentralized by now.
- Trias11 5y agoLots of crypto projects are commercial businesses and this certainly creates conflict of interest toward monetizing and centralization. However there are more and more truly decentralization projects. Anything that doesn't do KYC when related to crypto trading/exchanging - have to be
- csomar 5y ago99% of crypto ventures are pump-and-dump schemes. Centralized crap pays better in the short term and that's what these projects are after: a quick pump. Don't focus on the short-term if you want to make serious money or learn a technology that will stick around.
- delaaxe 5y agoDecentralize everything = make all your transactions visible by anyone
- stavros 5y agoExcept this is completely untrue, since there are private cryptocurrencies you can use.
- dylkil 5y agoSo this is just going to apply to exchanges operating inside the EU right? This will only make bitcoin transfers to and from custodians more traceable.
- shiado 5y agoCash wouldn't be allowed to be invented today.
- thomasahle 5y agoCash mostly isn't allowed today, if you are transferring large enough sums of money. Probably for the better.
- gambiting 5y agoSource of such bold claim? You can absolutely pay cash for (almost) anything. Even if you're buying a house, you can pay cash if both sides agree to it, and the solicitors check everything is legit and you can prove where you got the money from - but there is completely nothing in law that would prohibit such transaction from happening.
- jsbdk 5y agoIn Spain soon it will be impossible to pay more than 1k in cash. Current limit is around 3k iirc. I guess it's the same in most EU countries.
- forty 5y agoNot sure why someone downvoted that. In France it's limited to 1000€ currently. https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F10999 https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F10999
- jsbdk 5y agoAny comment that criticises the EU gets downvoted immediately here. Link to a news piece commenting the new Spanish law: https://www.rtve.es/noticias/20210630/congrso-aprueba-ley-prohibe-pagar-mas-1000-euros-efectivo/2116761.shtml https://www.rtve.es/noticias/20210630/congrso-aprueba-ley-pr...
- Trias11 5y ago>> The new rules would also prohibit providing anonymous crypto-asset wallets. Where should I send my Ledger to so i can be a good, obedient citizen and be compliant with this law?
- SavantIdiot 5y agoPretty easy actually: let me give you 0.01BTC, then I'll know what you spend your money on. Forever.
- arthurcolle 5y agoThis is not right - pretty much all modern wallet software generates brand new key pairs each time there is a transaction, thereby creating a new address. The unspent utxo's (unspent transaction outputs) are then sent to the new address and the old address can (but shouldn't) be used.
- beervirus 5y agoBut anyone can see the new address to which the utxo's were sent...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- lxgr 5y agoThis amounts to little more than trivial obfuscation in practice. The UTXO "privacy" model of Bitcoin has never worked out, and more modern cryptocurrencies aren‘t even attempting anything like it anymore.
- SnowProblem 5y agoIn practice, Bitcoin's privacy model was never even tried though. BTC fees are so prohibitively expensive that no wallet or user would generate more UTXOs or transactions than they have to, making it trivial to trace, yes. But if BTC had been allowed to scale like it was originally designed, then wallets would not fear inputting and outputting potentially hundreds of UTXOs in every transaction of varying amounts so that it becomes practically impossible to trace. On Bitcoin SV, basically a high-scale version of Bitcoin, there are today several wallets taking smarter approaches to privacy. HandCash's Output Bills [1] for example splits outputs into fixed denominations like cash, and Paymail [2] is a email-like addressing scheme to avoid sharing addresses publicly. I'm sure more approaches will be tried too now that wallets have some freedom to experiment. [1] https://handcash.medium.com/introducing-output-bills-a-coin-splitting-technique-for-increasing-the-privacy-of-handcash-360322fbe1db https://handcash.medium.com/introducing-output-bills-a-coin-... [2] https://bsvalias.org/ https://bsvalias.org/
- idownvoted 5y agoThe only thing stunning about this, is how anyone ever could've believed that cryptocurrencies would not end in the dystopian future of a government knowing every single transaction of yours plus being able to confiscate every single e-penny at will.
- no_time 5y agoOptimism and naivety on my part. When I bought a few (legal) things with bitcoin I have acquired from my friend around 2014 I really thought I was living in a better, more free future. Reality only started to dissapoint me more and more from there. >government knowing every single transaction of yours plus being able to confiscate every single e-penny at will. That can already happen with or without crypto.
- idownvoted 5y ago> That can already happen with or without crypto. True but not in such a centralized way. You can have less tangible assets like Gold or Cash. Your stock notes are physically deposited somewhere else. Your home ownership will exist somewhere else. Contracts, Health- or Welfare entitlements, Child Support Claims exist on their own and somewhere else. Some will mail you a check, or wire the money to different bank accounts. Or you have to collect it physically. Now imagine if all of that has moved to the "anonymous" blockchain and you're an "apostate" (e.g. a US socialist in the 1950s, a devout muslim in the 2000s, a Trump supporter yesterday or a corona-restrictions critic today). We will learn the hard way that inefficiencies can be a feature and not a bug.
- ushakov 5y agoi'm shocked how ignorant these lawmakers are, trying to gain control over a decentralised structure nobody asked them for this and even if this change ends up in bitcoin's core, it will ultimately fail to reach consensus our wallets are none of your business, EU, get out!
- bpodgursky 5y agoFrom the bureaucrat's point of view, all of your assets are "yours" contingent only on the goodwill of the relevant regulations. Parable of the scorpion and turtle; expect neither more nor less.
- BitwiseFool 5y agoYou will own nothing, and be happy. What are you going to do, rebel against the EU? \s
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sergiomattei 5y agoI'm shocked how naive the DeFi industry was to think they could get away with little to no regulation. Tech doesn't rule the world. Old power structures are still in place.
- ushakov 5y agoDeFi was built with censorship resistance in mind EU can come up with new laws all day every day, but considering the technical detail, these laws will be impossible to enforce
- stavros 5y agoThe laws will be trivial to enforce. Expect to be unable to exchange cryptocurrency (that you own in your wallet) to fiat, which will almost kill the cryptocurrency market for anything other than speculation. I expect a parallel, dark economy will still be around, where people transact with cryptocurrency and can only exchange it for cash.
- yellow_lead 5y ago> The new rules would also prohibit providing anonymous crypto-asset wallets. When you drill this down, it seems they are really outlawing certain math.
- cecilpl2 5y agoWhen you drill down, laws against murder are really just outlawing moving various atoms around in specific ways.
- dalmo3 5y agoThere you go. People have been successfully brainwashed into believing that money transfer is equivalent to murder.
- xtracto 5y agoDon't know why you are being downvoted, this is the same case as DeCSS and and AACS. A "crypto wallet" is nothing but a public/private key pair. So... will SSH keys be banned? will sharing a SSH public key be banned? will sharing a program that transforms a public SSH key into a "wallet address" be banned? The premise is stupid.
- ushakov 5y ago> a company transferring crypto-assets for a customer would be obliged to include their name, address, date of birth and account number, and the name of the recipient guess what, Mr. Commissionaire? Bitcoin isn't a company and you don't need to ask companies to transfer crypto assets edit: this just shows how little power they have over the network, so they will tyrannise the middlemen instead
- Barrin92 5y agonope but if you want to actually convert your crypto into any good or service or currency that doesn't happen to be crypto, you're going to be rendered legible. And that alone is going to make tax evasion or laundering a lot harder, and probably makes it a way less attractive asset for criminals.
- nybble41 5y agoOn the contrary, nothing has really changed here. If you're moving your crypto to an exchange in order to sell it and withdraw euros or dollars or whatever, guess what—you're already in the system. These rules already applied due to the interaction with the traditional financial system when you withdraw your balance. Now the exchange will be required to do the same reporting on the crypto side, but they already had that data. The same goes for moving traditional currency into an exchange to buy crypto. The only areas really affected by the new rules would be exchanges which only involve crypto (e.g. BTC for ETH), direct transfers between customers on an exchange or between exchanges—which aren't actually crypto transactions to begin with even if they are denominated in crypto units—and withdrawals to addresses controlled by parties other than the account holder, which many exchanges didn't permit anyway. (Withdraw to your own unhosted wallet first.) It's still a huge invasion of privacy etc., completely unjustified and unethical etc., but let's not get too worked up over what seems to me like a fairly predictable shift in which businesses are subjected to KYC/AML regulations. The more reputable exchanges have basically been assuming that these rules applied to them all along. Unhosted wallets and direct transfers between them are unaffected since they don't involve a Crypto-Asset Service Provider. Centralized exchanges were always an awkward stop-gap measure in any case, not a fundamental part of the crypto ecosystem. If this encourages people to trade directly through the decentralized network and avoid CASPs wherever possible, so much the better.
- kozak 5y agoBitcoins are not really fungible. There are already services that provide "fresh, minted straight to your wallet with no history" bitcoins, which cost more than normal "used" bitcoins.
- lxgr 5y agoWouldn‘t a coin mixer achieve the same outcome of obfuscating the coins‘ source (if the provider of the service can be trusted and does not run away with the money) in exchange for explicitly tagging them as "somebody laundered these coins"?
- tobltobs 5y agoIf anybody wants to read the fine-print for this proposal: https://ec.europa.eu/finance/docs/law/210720-proposal-funds-transfers_en.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/finance/docs/law/210720-proposal-funds-...
- nootropicat 5y agoI traced the definitions a bit and it applies to: " (8)‘crypto-asset service provider’ means any person whose occupation or business is the provision of one or more crypto-asset services to third parties on a professional basis; " "‘crypto-asset service’ means any of the services and activities listed below relating to any crypto-asset: (a)the custody and administration of crypto-assets on behalf of third parties; (b)the operation of a trading platform for crypto-assets; (c)the exchange of crypto-assets for fiat currency that is legal tender; (d)the exchange of crypto-assets for other crypto-assets; (e)the execution of orders for crypto-assets on behalf of third parties; (f)placing of crypto-assets; (g)the reception and transmission of orders for crypto-assets on behalf of third parties (h)providing advice on crypto-assets; " which is extremely broad. In particular '" (14)‘the execution of orders for crypto-assets on behalf of third parties’ means concluding agreements to buy or to sell one or more crypto-assets or to subscribe for one or more crypto-assets on behalf of third parties; " is the most worrying - it appears to make block generation itself illegal (because of the kyc requirements) on any blockchain that can do anything more than simple transfers (which includes even bitcoin), because every transaction could be a dex swap of some type, knowingly or unknowingly to the block generator. On the other hand, the additional point is "Crypto-asset service providers that are authorised to execute orders for crypto-assets on behalf of third parties shall take all necessary steps to obtain, when executing orders, the best possible result for their clients taking into account the best execution factors of price, costs, speed, likelihood of execution and settlement, size, nature or any other consideration relevant to the execution of the order, unless the crypto-asset service provider concerned executes orders for crypto-assets following specific instructions given by its clients." so clearly the intention was to regulate cexes, but the definition language is dangerously broad. If interpreted in the most strict way, it would basically make all blockchains that can't run on anonymous home nodes force every user to kyc - while anonymous home nodes would break the law, it would be unenforceable without China-style network filtering at least. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:52020PC0593&from=EN https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
- Lichtso 5y agoI think total traceability would be fair, if it was truly total. But the state is gonna scramble all their addresses and transactions, leaving only the citizens unprotected in the open. Otherwise they (the state) themself would become transparent and suddenly people could find out where their tax money actually went. Corruption anyone?
- nly 5y agoI recently tried to figure out how to transfer some GBP in to a crypto asset and couldn't find a way to do so without losing 3% or more. Direct GBP pairings didn't exist, so choices were either go through a USD denominated service or through multiple pairings, losing a high % each time and/or gas fees in uniswap etc. None of the forex efficient services like Wise or Revolut will wire money to US crypto exchanges. In the end I didn't bother. People really underestimate how quickly regulators can snuff out mainstream crypto.
- Alternitarius 5y agoIs there really any point in maintaining the 'legality' of crypto anymore? If we're just shuffling around entries from one centralised exchange to another, with a side order of still massive electricity and hardware waste from wherever in the world mining still occurs, what's the point of the asset class? Why not just ban the fiat onramps entirely, and at least reduce the incidence of ransomware (since hackers won't be able to get paid as easily) and reduce hardware and electricity waste? (Since mining will decline as the price does)
- xvilka 5y agoI guess free promotion for Monero[1]. It's a shame they don't support anonymous smart contracts and don't even plan to. [1] https://github.com/monero-project/monero https://github.com/monero-project/monero
- hanniabu 5y agoThere's secret network
- digianarchist 5y agoLots of promise and a lack of delivery from that project. They sunk tens of thousands of community dollars into i2p integration instead of simply using Tor. Multi-sig was totally impractical last time I looked. Can't comment on atomic-swaps though. If that works that would make it useful.
- tiluha 5y agoIMO i2p integration was the right choice. I2P actively encourages P2P traffic, while on Tor it would put a lot more load on the more centralized routing nodes. Also tens of thousands are practically nothing. The general fund currently holds more than 22 millions USD worth of monero.
- digianarchist 5y agoI disagree for similar reasons the Monereo guys say that Monereo is better than Zcash. It's easier to hide in the larger pool of users.
- d--b 5y agoI’m amazed by how short sighted most of the comments here are. When it comes to large financial operations, society has clearly chosen transparency over privacy. Cause guess what, tax evasion, money laundering, political fixing, terrorism financing are things that exist and really are hurtful to our economies. Stop fantasizing that the government cares about the shit you buy. This is not about you. And Bitcoin’s anonymity is not a feature of blockchain and never has been. There is the wallet, but who holds the wallet is not part of the protocol. You can’t show up in a bank with a bucket load of $100 bills and open an anonymous bank account. Well you shouldn’t be able to with bitcoins either.
- ekianjo 5y ago> You can’t show up in a bank with a bucket load of $100 bills and open an anonymous bank account. Well you shouldn’t be able to with bitcoins either. So we have to make a superior system inferior?
- bryanrasmussen 5y agowell, we had to make the superior system of cash inferior - as just described.
- OtomotO 5y agoWe didnt have to, some chose to. I never voted for any of those clowns in power
- alkonaut 5y agoThere is currently no political (and therefore I assume public) will to go for privacy over transparency for large money transfers. You can vote for someone who wants to reverse this, and it might change. Since this is pretty much an international system though (banks offering anonymous accounts will have difficulty interoperating with other actors), it’s likely not enough with political/public opinion in just one country.
- 5y ago
- naveen99 5y agoWhat about central banks themselves sending bitcoin to each other. Maybe they don’t want to announce to the rest of the world which country they are sending money to. What about dictators of sovereign nations wanting to embezzle money out of their country ? unless there is already a global order, but one with eu running the show instead of the us ? Questionable !
- chemmail 5y agoBut BTC is basically the most traceable asset we have in existence lol.
- aaccount 5y agohow can it be made more traceable? Everything is already in the ledger.
- countername 5y agowhen you add your private address to every transaction
- seany 5y agoAnd this is why monero, zcash etc have and will always be better in the long run.
- betwixthewires 5y agoThe regulators still think they can regulate this stuff. They can regulate you, but only if you let them. What this stuff allows for is that if you want to be unregulated, you can.
- RandomLensman 5y agoI am a little shocked at the policy and coalition building blindness here: 1) The KYC/AML/CFT burden is high for financial institutions, too, it is not like they want to spend all that money. 2) The efficacy of the measures is not uncontested by academia, regulators, and financial actors. 3) The CBDC discussions tend to have a thread on anonymous wallets, so why not for other things, too? Not like every low value artwork is government registered. What does not work is open defiance, because if policy wants it can come for "you". Usually easier to go for the person but do not underestimate the effect of committing billions to software disruption either. There are valid policy and regulatory points to made about what exchanges people should have anonymously and the pendulum on financial regulation is probably just at one of its peaks...
- _trampeltier 5y agoEven there was no paper money in the whole Wirecard debacle, but there are still 2 Billions missing. So what's the point then.
- diragon 5y agoThat'll be great for Monero and others.
- ElvisTrout 5y agoGreat news for Monero!
- qwertox 5y agoI'm ok with this. Ideally private persons should have an allowance of around 5.000€ (or so) per month in privacy coin usage, where an invoice is the only traceable thing, and everything above that amount should be fully transparent to the authorities (IRS), and pseudoanonymously visible to the public, for journalists to be detectable. Buy a car? -> IRS can see it. Buy a home? -> IRS can see it. Buy a Smartphone? -> None of anyone's business. Companies on the other hand should have no such privacy allowance, unless they request and register it with the government and are forced to report any transaction made by them, where the level of detail of the transaction may vary (ie to hide the recipient of a weapons transaction, governments wouldn't approve otherwise, since they like to do shady stuff). The more detail is hidden, the more suspect the transaction will become, but will not appear anywhere public. I'm not sure how feasible this is, but this would be somewhat similar to the distinction of cash and electronic transactions, with far better control on the amount of spendable cash and a good visibility of the transactions to the IRS.
- linspace 5y agoAnother approach I have seen is giving privacy to the spender but not the receiver of money: https://taler.net/en/index.html https://taler.net/en/index.html
- mjevans 5y agoThe issue with any 'cap' is that the batches just get sharded to be under that cap and you get the 'working from home' style mix of scam and money laundering. As the sibling links, the answer is anonymity for spenders, but not for recipients of money. This also, ideally, blocks moral panics and instead forces law enforcement to go after cash flow into 'bad activities' and actors.
- qwertox 5y agoSure it will get sharded. But this is a pattern which can be detected, specially if you're not using your opaque money on stuff like groceries and normal day to day stuff. If you're constantly maxing out your cap and buying normal stuff without that privacy-enabled money, it may well raise eyebrows in the IRS. It's not a per-transaction cap, but a monthly allowance.
- vishnugupta 5y agoIts worth reading the original press release[1] Relevant section: "At present, only certain categories of crypto-asset service providers are included in the scope of EU AML/CFT rules. The proposed reform will extend these rules to the entire crypto sector, obliging all service providers to conduct due diligence on their customers. Today's amendments will ensure full traceability of crypto-asset transfers, such as Bitcoin, and will allow for prevention and detection of their possible use for money laundering or terrorism financing. In addition, anonymous crypto asset wallets will be prohibited, fully applying EU AML/CFT rules to the crypto sector." "In addition, providing anonymous crypto-asset wallets will be prohibited, just as anonymous bank accounts are already prohibited by EU AML/CFT rules." https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_21_3690 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_21_... Edit: More content.
- noxer 5y ago"Good for Bitcoin" - Bitcoin people
- labrador 5y agoI suspect very few American crypto enthusiasts are reporting their gains to the IRS. Who wants to pay taxes right? I guess someone else can pay for the roads and bridges we drive on.
- gohbgl 5y agoHow do you know when you paid enough money for roads and bridges? I mean they don't give you an invoice.
- labrador 5y agoYour comment made me laugh because I thought of those ads for the new GardenHoze 2000 when they switch to b/w and show some pretend moron who pretends to not know how garden hoses work and has all kinds of trouble with them. Morons obviously need the GardenHoze 2000 to solve their garden hose problems! You're the pretend moron who pretends to not know how taxes work.
- I_am_tiberius 5y agoI doubt there are many people who don't want to pay taxes at all. But I think there are many people (like me) who don't understand why it should be necessary to pay taxes just for owning a specific asset like gold, cash, bitcoin etc..
- Temasik 5y agoSuch news craig wright is satoshi?
- Sunscratch 5y agoWell, Bitcoin and other crypto garbage should be banned. It’s already obvious that it’s mostly used for money laundering and price gambling. It’s very environmentally unfriendly, and non efficient piece of technology.
- cynusx 5y agoThis is actually a great idea because the lack of KYC in cryptocurrency is holding the technology back a lot as no serious financial service company can adopt it