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That only applies if you can pay everything in btc. According to coindesk, the same AML laws now apply to crypto (at least temporarily), and can be used to stop

by f001 5y ago

That only applies if you can pay everything in btc. According to coindesk, the same AML laws now apply to crypto (at least temporarily), and can be used to stop transactions from/to groups that are undesirable. https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/02/15/canadas-trudeau-enacts-emergencies-act-and-crypto-is-included https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/02/15/canadas-trudeau-e...

kragen 5y ago
As we saw with WikiLeaks, one thing is what the law says, and something else is what the government can actually do. In the case of WikiLeaks the government did a lot of things that the law clearly didn't permit; Bitcoin, by contrast, keeps authoritarian governments from doing undesirable things even if they pass laws that permit them. To "freeze" my Bitcoin "account" you'd have to steal my phone and then bruteforce the PIN before I used the seed phrase to sweep the coins into a different wallet on a new phone. Not impossible by any means, but of similar difficulty to imprisoning me. I have other coins that are stored under a different seed phrase that isn't on my phone, and there are people with safer storage than that. If the government was in a position to imprison all the protestors they wouldn't be trying to target their bank accounts. Of course centralized crowdfunding platforms and payment service providers aren't any safer than centralized banks, whether they use Bitcoin, dollars, or yuan. But your Bitcoin wallet is definitely a lot safer than your bank account from being frozen out from under you, unless it's something like a Binance account or a Coinbase account. Generally people don't "pay everything in btc", both because of the transaction costs (33¢ in my most recent transaction, but often as high as US$8) and because not many sellers accept BTC; instead they exchange the BTC for local currencies that are more widely accepted and have lower transaction costs.

by f001 5y ago

kragen 5y ago

As we saw with WikiLeaks, one thing is what the law says, and something else is what the government can actually do. In the case of WikiLeaks the government did a lot of things that the law clearly didn't permit; Bitcoin, by contrast, keeps authoritarian governments from doing undesirable things even if they pass laws that permit them. To "freeze" my Bitcoin "account" you'd have to steal my phone and then bruteforce the PIN before I used the seed phrase to sweep the coins into a different wallet on a new phone. Not impossible by any means, but of similar difficulty to imprisoning me. I have other coins that are stored under a different seed phrase that isn't on my phone, and there are people with safer storage than that. If the government was in a position to imprison all the protestors they wouldn't be trying to target their bank accounts. Of course centralized crowdfunding platforms and payment service providers aren't any safer than centralized banks, whether they use Bitcoin, dollars, or yuan. But your Bitcoin wallet is definitely a lot safer than your bank account from being frozen out from under you, unless it's something like a Binance account or a Coinbase account. Generally people don't "pay everything in btc", both because of the transaction costs (33¢ in my most recent transaction, but often as high as US$8) and because not many sellers accept BTC; instead they exchange the BTC for local currencies that are more widely accepted and have lower transaction costs.