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> All you get is traceability for people with nothing to hide Have we officially abandoned the original goal of privacy/anonymity with bitcoin? Privacy isn't o

• AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > Have we officially abandoned the original goal of privacy/anonymity with bitcoin? Privacy isn't only a good thing when you have something to hide. But if you have something to hide and the official on ramps and off ramps don't allow you to hide it, you can just use the black market, so the only people using the official system in that context are the people who believe themselves to be uninteresting to the government. Which naturally excludes nearly all the people the government is legitimately interested in, making the KYC requirements a pointless burden on innocent people. > On and off ramps are generally meant to only include the legal avenues for buying and selling bitcoin. The government can absolutely regulate those, the black market is a separate concept. Generally speaking government regulations only work when at least one of the buyer or seller wants the regulations, e.g. you buy your medication from the pharmacy and not a drug dealer because you want the quality controls the government imposes, even if the seller would rather not. So the openly operated pharmacy outcompetes the black market for aspirin. When both the buyer and the seller have no interest in the rules, neither of them reports the other for violating them and then they're basically unenforceable. Which is hot garbage, because the costs of the rules still fall on the people they weren't meant to constrain, and the vig on the transactions funds other black market activities, and the inability of the parties to resolve disputes through the legal system begets violence etc.
  • _heimdall 3y ago
    > making the KYC requirements a pointless burden on innocent people. Oh I'd be all for getting rid of KYC laws and similar, no complaints here. > you buy your medication from the pharmacy and not a drug dealer because you want the quality controls the government imposes Personally if I were buying prescription meds I'd go to a pharmacy simply because I don't went to be caught and charged with illegally buying a controlled substance. I don't have much faith in the pharmaceutical industry or its regulation. > When both the buyer and the seller have no interest in the rules, neither of them reports the other for violating them and then they're basically unenforceable. This is where you lose me a bit. The laws are enforceable if they catch you. Catching you will be harder on the black market, but you absolutely can be charged if they do. My original point was more about the limited market if you have to go black market. Fewer potential customers to transact with means demand goes down, in all likelihood the value of bitcoin would be much lower if there were no legal uses for it.
    • AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      > Oh I'd be all for getting rid of KYC laws and similar, no complaints here. I'm not entirely sure why we still have them. They're expensive and inconvenient, studies have shown that they're extraordinarily ineffective, as far as I can tell they persist because people have the perception that they're important and then resist getting rid of them. > Personally if I were buying prescription meds I'd go to a pharmacy simply because I don't went to be caught and charged with illegally buying a controlled substance. Aspirin isn't a controlled substance. In theory someone who didn't have to comply with regulations could supply it for a lower price. But the drug store's price isn't particularly excessive and risking your life on your distant acquaintance's chemistry skills generally isn't worth saving $0.50. If the price difference was much higher or the pharmacy wasn't allowed to sell it to you at all then many people would do exactly that, as we've seen. > The laws are enforceable if they catch you. Catching you will be harder on the black market, but you absolutely can be charged if they do. You have to consider how catching you generally happens. Suppose you have a law requiring merchants to offer a 30 day warranty. This is easy to enforce -- the customer goes to have the merchant honor the warranty and if they don't the customer reports them to the government. Now suppose the law prohibits certain types of transactions, even if neither party is deceiving the other and both are entering into the transaction with informed consent and of their own free will. Well then they're just going to do it and not tell anybody about it, and how is anybody going to find out? The government can try to enforce laws like that. But their ability to depends on the perpetrator's willingness to do business with strangers who are really undercover law enforcement. In general the higher level operators avoid doing that and the low level pawns are disposable and arresting them doesn't make a dent. Trying to do that with digital currency is possibly the hardest of any of them because by its nature it's fungible and can be transferred across the internet. If someone set up a foreign site where anyone could exchange cryptocurrency for bullion or some other commodity, what does KYC enforcement look like? The party intended to be doing it would be outside the jurisdiction and the most visible artifact would be a package with some non-contraband fungible commodity going through the mail. > Fewer potential customers to transact with means demand goes down, in all likelihood the value of bitcoin would be much lower if there were no legal uses for it. The premise isn't that there are no legal uses, it's that the legal uses would have to do KYC. So the people not breaking any laws would do the KYC and the people breaking laws would not. Also, the value of Bitcoin only really matters to people holding non-trivial amounts of it or making contracts denominated in it, i.e. speculators. It makes little difference to anyone using nominal amounts as a currency.