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And “Ms Freeland said they were broadening Canada's "Terrorist Financing" rules to cover cryptocurrencies and crowdfunding platforms, as part of the effort.” is

And “Ms Freeland said they were broadening Canada's "Terrorist Financing" rules to cover cryptocurrencies and crowdfunding platforms, as part of the effort.” is also a sentence in that article. If the emergency powers enable them to freeze your bank assets without a court order surely they also allow them to deprive you of… whatever you think the crypto asset vehicle that would protect you from this outcome is.

roenxi 5y ago
The difference between that and a bank account ban is that I don't see a way for them to implement a crypto ban. They may as well legislate that said truckers are elephants - a legally interesting policy but with hard to determine practical implications. Australia has a soft ban on Monero, it isn't illegal but they've tried to make it difficult to buy using the same regulatory trick of pressuring the trading institutions. I assume because it is useful for trading drugs or something. That has had nearly no impact on my ability to buy some because in the world of crypto the government doesn't have a way of forcing me to deal with entities that follow their KYC laws. At least not without sending police to the door and they don't have the resources to pull that off. It isn't even clear they have the resources to figure out I bought Monero after buying an interim cryptocurrency. It'd be a massive waste of resources if they did, and it might not be feasible full stop. At a practical level, if something like that happened in Australia, one of those truckers could come to me and say "hey roenxi, I will give you $300 worth of Monero if you get me $150 worth of groceries". Or someday the reverse - basically barter. It is really, really hard for me to see how a government would prevent that without going seriously totalitarian in a way that the Trudeaus of the world haven't floated as an idea so far. But it is easy for me to see that a cryptocurrency would be a good way to execute that.

roenxi 5y ago

The difference between that and a bank account ban is that I don't see a way for them to implement a crypto ban. They may as well legislate that said truckers are elephants - a legally interesting policy but with hard to determine practical implications. Australia has a soft ban on Monero, it isn't illegal but they've tried to make it difficult to buy using the same regulatory trick of pressuring the trading institutions. I assume because it is useful for trading drugs or something. That has had nearly no impact on my ability to buy some because in the world of crypto the government doesn't have a way of forcing me to deal with entities that follow their KYC laws. At least not without sending police to the door and they don't have the resources to pull that off. It isn't even clear they have the resources to figure out I bought Monero after buying an interim cryptocurrency. It'd be a massive waste of resources if they did, and it might not be feasible full stop. At a practical level, if something like that happened in Australia, one of those truckers could come to me and say "hey roenxi, I will give you $300 worth of Monero if you get me $150 worth of groceries". Or someday the reverse - basically barter. It is really, really hard for me to see how a government would prevent that without going seriously totalitarian in a way that the Trudeaus of the world haven't floated as an idea so far. But it is easy for me to see that a cryptocurrency would be a good way to execute that.