The thing is that cryptocurrencies in their current form are generally good for the US and the dollar. The US is already a fairly open jurisdiction in that you can move money in and out of the country without too much hassle, that isnt the case for a place like China.
So stablecoins, which are vastly dominated by dollar denominated coins, actually increase the dominance of the dollar and allow people to get around chinese currency controls in ways I am not sure they like.
A second point here is that the US already using stablecoins like USDC to support semi controversial foreign policy in places like Venezuela.
"According to the company’s blog post, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve deposit funds seized by the U.S. into a bank account in the U.S. tied to the Guaidó government, which converts the funds into USDC that Circle then sends to Airtm."
The overwhelming majority of stablecoins are Tether which are backed by literally nothing. $20B market cap and rising at the rate of $2B/month with no banking infrastructure - and the target of 6? lawsuits including by the NYAG. WCGW?
> Not to mention China investing tons of money into cryptos.
Cryptocurrencies are for the most part banned in China, it's probably one of the most difficult places on Earth to own them, have no idea how people come to conclusions like this other than just playing some blatant jingoistic angle.
Biggest meritorious gold rush in decades with the potential to drastically uproot a very class based financial system and minorities have to be protected from it? This is absolute insanity.
We have had these laws in place for decades in the banking system and minorities have constantly been discriminated against. The last thing we need is for these same laws to be put in place in an arena where millionaires are printed overnight and no one even needs to know the color of your skin.
This post misses a couple of key points about illegality. Do not break this law if it's passed. Here's why.
Once your government determines that participation in crypto networks without using a registered intermediary is illegal, they have reasonable grounds to subpoena network providers for participation in such networks.
Once your government can reasonably determine that your IP address has accessed a crypto network without using an intermediary, then they have probable cause for search and seizure of your digital and physical property.
If you are caught by any means to be using VPNs or TOR to dodge network-layer inspection, this will result in more strict sentencing decisions, as doing so can be interpreted as knowingly breaking the law.
Additionally, as a bonus risk to everyone who knowingly participates in crypto, consider the malware problem:
If you're infected by malware that is doing so without your knowledge or consent, you may regardless be found liable, depending on how poorly the law is written and how poorly the authorities choose to treat you, if you are found to be knowingly participating in crypto in any respect whatsoever.
(I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice, seek legal counsel, etc.)
EDIT: Or any law like it passed it any non-US country, either!
It sounds like you're talking about domestic mass surveillance but there's no way the US would use such a dangerous tool just to find random cryptocurrency geeks.
Your comment highlighted a point I consider valid, though likely not the one you intended; I’ve added a footnote about non-US countries, as many of them have no such reservations about wiretapping network traffic to catch financial criminals.
Too few people know enough about crypto, and also care enough, for you to get lost in a sea of folks breaking the same law. It'll be a short list of very loud, vocal, easy targets. I'd wanna be as far away from that as I could be.
Especially since a very large use case for crypto - especially in non-custodial wallets - especially people avoiding KYC, is crime.
The ratio of ancaps to criminals on this list is likely very low.
[edit] The real risk of finding yourself on this shortlist of non-custodial wallets is suddenly finding yourself on the wrong side of the IRS.
Most blockchains are pseudonymous, and the government has tools to track and de-pseudonymize, or at least map and aggregate - transactions. If the government wanted to go after you for breaking this law, they'd probably just throw together a quick list of people the IRS should start poking around at.
They know as well as you do that you probably didn't report every transaction you've ever done on every exchange, DEX, or platform. That's tax fraud, straight up. Much easier to prove, and much harder to argue on merits.
I've said this before, and I'll say it again: if your government is coming for you, no amount of magic beans in your computer will keep you or your value safe. If you don't trust your government you've got bigger problems than crypto. If you trust your government crypto is irrelevant.
As Beria, Stalin's side-kick said, "Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime."
I work at a bank and the mountain of anti money laundering / KYC regulations we have to deal with is mind-boggling. I’m not surprised that such a law is coming especially since in my view, the decentralized nature of crypto makes money laundering even easier.
Even if you kept a blacklist of wallets with dirty money, I think it would be possible to spin up a chain of brand new wallets and quickly funnel coins through them before the blacklist could keep up in a way that would be impossible with fiat transactions and traditional banks. I could be wrong though, maybe someone’s got an algo for that.
>I think it would be possible to spin up a chain of brand new wallets and quickly funnel coins through them before the blacklist could keep up in a way that would be impossible with fiat transactions and traditional banks
Can't you spin up a chain of brand new offshore accounts/shell companies in a friendly jurisdiction and quickly funnel money through them before the blacklist could keep up?
This would work for some amount of time. However, foreign banks are unlikely to hold USD-type value without a correspondent banking relationship or a custodial banking relationship exposed to the US market (and hence US regulation).
The reason many, especially smaller, banks don't want to do business with criminals is they fear they'd lose their access to the US market through a termination of these relationships. This would then push the bank into insolvency.
I know this because all this happened to Tether, lol. There's been some documentation, likely as part of the NYAG lawsuit or the Paradise Papers leak -- or both. Noble initially refused to bank them for this reason, so they invested in Noble, who then took them on as customers. Their custodial bank (Wells, IIRC) told them to eat dirt, and it pushed Noble into insolvency.
Well that’s precisely why we have all these customer onboarding / AML regulations. To onboard trading clients (think hedge fund) I’ve seen compliance ask for corporate structure diagrams, lists of the major shareholders with bios, list of the board of directors, articles of incorporation, addresses, copies of the counterparty’s AML policy, etc.
Actually an incorrect opinion. A vast majority of criminals as in the EU study you can find online use fiât money because it's untraceable while Bitcoin is traceable and transparent publicly.
Right but the blockchain for people with something to hide will be about as conspicuous as El Chapo Dollars haha. Again you knock it out at the gateways.
That's fair. I was mostly operating under the impression banks care primarily about problems at scale (where they are invested in being part of the problem), but perhaps that was naive.
> If you don't trust your government you've got bigger problems than crypto. If you trust your government crypto is irrelevant.
This is far too black and white. You may trust your government not to engage in a vendetta against you for no reason and still not trust them not to pass onerous regulations that harm you unintentionally and then provide no recourse for the victims of that outcome.
Oh all I meant was the proposed legislation is a form of onerous regulation that harms folks, intentionally or otherwise, that offers no recourse - that crypto can’t help you out of. That likely extends outward IMO.
That's exactly why the proposed legislation is so problematic. It harms folks and offers no recourse... other than breaking the law. Then some of the innocent victims of the harm become criminals because they prefer that to suffering the harm at no fault of their own, and you introduce all of the problems inherent in black markets.
I have yet to hear a solid argument for why it should be in all circumstances be regulated like investment securities even when only being used as currency (like cash).
First of all you're literally wrong. I've seen people use it to buy things with.
But even accepting that the majority of existing holders are using it for speculation, why do we have to pre-ruin its ability to ever be used as a medium of exchange?
Acceptance obviously has network effects. The user doesn't have much incentive to set up crypto if nobody accepts it, and the vendor doesn't have much incentive to accept it if few of their customers have it set up. But everything starts that way. Then some large merchant or group thereof decides they want to promote its use and offers everybody a 15% discount for using it, so a third of their customers do so for the discount, and then millions of people have it set up and other vendors start accepting it now that there are a large enough population of customers. That hasn't happened yet, but what's your theory for why it never could?
> But even accepting that the majority of existing holders are using it for speculation, why do we have to pre-ruin its ability to ever be used as a medium of exchange?
The credit for that goes to the core team and the 7tx/sec limit.
I wager way more people did that in its heyday than have a moral objection (rather than an, err, pragmatic one) to custodial wallets. Further, copyright infringement tends to be a low priority civil matter, while laundering billions of dollars tends to be a high priority criminal matter.
the laundering of billions of dollars is usually done in, dollars which are totally anonymous rather than a transparent blockchain that transmits all your transactions to the feds.
If you VPN / Tor almost everything (except services that ban you from using a VPN), I don't know if they have much of a leg to stand on about that part. I use VPNs so my ISP does not have a record of my internet traffic to sell to internet marketers and many other perfectly legal and moral reasons.
I can’t remember the name of one of those famous cases of people that got arrested for thinking that they could use TOR to break the law without punishment, but there’s been so many by now that I honestly don’t feel bad having forgotten. No doubt someone else does - Russ something, maybe? No doubt there’ll be some sort of “but it’s decentralized” reply and, yeah, it’s decentralized, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily untraceable. Bitcoin isn’t the sort of thing that’s worth betting my freedom on. YMMV.
Traceability through VPN / Tor is a different thing than being charged more for using a VPN, and I was more referencing the USA vs any generic country.
>If you VPN / Tor almost everything (except services that ban you from using a VPN), I don't know if they have much of a leg to stand on about that part
presumably they can also ban VPNs while they're at it, but it doesn't seem plausible. If your threat model is a tyrannical government willing to do anything (ie. ban encryption, backdoor every piece of computing equipment, install 1984 style telescreens everywhere), then there's no real way to defend it.
> If your threat model is a tyrannical government willing to do anything (ie. ban encryption, backdoor every piece of computing equipment, install 1984 style telescreens everywhere), then there's no real way to defend it.
Well, there is, you just have to abandon the premise that doing what your adversary tells you to do is the right thing.
Putting telescreens everywhere doesn't help them much if every one of them is immediately smashed with a rock and anyone who comes to repair it is also smashed with a rock.
This requires a certain amount of public resistance, because you can't be the only one doing it, but a certain amount of public resistance is what systems like that tend to generate. And when you're not the only one doing it, they run out of telescreens and telescreen repair personnel before you run out of rocks.
Yeah except after the first repair man meets an untimely end you will too.
This whole "my math can save me from a tyrannical government" thing is so tired. If they don't play by the rules, and want to stop you, they will. They'll take your knee caps, your finger nails, your life, or the entire nation's internet service down. No amount of math will change that.
Here's a worked example. North Korea. Their leadership has amassed a few billion dollars of cryptocurrency they've used to finance their nuclear program. How much has crypto helped the average North Korean? Zero because it's super illegal, they'll get sent to the gulags, and their internal internet likely has it disabled seven ways to hell.
Think of this like blowing smoke in the face of a cop. Is it illegal? Probably? Hard to say. Will you immediately be arrested for something else you happen to be doing at that very moment that just so happens to be illegal? Oh yeah. Technically correct is not the best kind of correct in this situation.
Given our past interactions and your posting history, it's clear you have a strong dislike for crypto.
However, your opinion (or mine) will be irrelevant.
> They'll take your knee caps, your finger nails, your life, or the entire nation's internet service down
They totally can! The only problem is they eventually run out of people or things the country can sell. And in the meantime, even before reaching that ultimate point, they destroy the economy by destroying hope: forced labor is less productive that voluntary labor.
That's because it's hard to rule people who don't care anymore. Even the threat of death may not cut it: just look at the risks people took to flee the soviet block!
A good tyrant applies just a sprinkle of violence.
> Technically correct is not the best kind of correct in this situation.
Indeed. And you are correct the government monopoly of violence keeps people in-line.
But it's not without end: a tyrannical government survive only so long as the population is willing to tolerate it. As the person you replied to tried to explain, civil disobedience happens.
If you need current examples, look no further than people not wearing masks, or the riots that happened on the 2nd lockdown of Europe: the more force you apply, the more resistance you get.
I don't believe governments will find the "ideal" amount of violence to keep people in-line - not for something like money. The blue dollar in Argentina, the existence of a cash economy etc. - there are too many signs that show this can't be done. Same as for drug or alcohol: the prohibition failed. The war on drugs is currently failing.
Yet it's clear that crypto will not operate in a wild west forever: just like the internet, some rules will be added, to tax it.
But it won't go away, as governments prefer taxing to killing!
Sorry to break your dream of crypto becoming illegal and drying, but that ship has sailed.
I don’t think crypto should be illegal. I think it should be regulated like everything else in the space, and it’s horrifying externalities like energy consumption and criminality should be internalized via taxation. Once it has the same constraints as traditional finance it offers nothing of value, and will wilt away on its own. Or it won’t. Whatever. Makes no difference to me, once the harms are mitigated. JMHO.
My point as always is if you trust your government you don’t need crypto - as trust is a massive optimization - and if you don’t, you have much bigger problems. Just ask the North Koreans.
The rest is but a fictional dramatization of what life under authoritarianism might be like, just you, your MacBook Pro and your GPU cluster against the man, smashing TVs, killing TV repair men and scribbling down hashes. It just doesn’t reflect any reality I know of. I’d watch an HBO series based on it though! Maybe a modern reimagining of 1984 combined with Escape from Tarkov; we all know how 1984 ended yeah?
> horrifying externalities like energy consumption and criminality
Opinion varies. For many people, being able to access drugs outside of government control (cancer patient victims of the opioid crisis), or receiving donations (wikileaks) is worth a lot more that the small drawbacks.
Same as due process and the "fruit of a poisonous tree" legal doctrine - it lets bad people walk out of jail, but overall I think it does more good than harm to society.
> Once it has the same constraints as traditional finance it offers nothing of value, and will wilt away on its own
Actually, at the bare minimum, it removes political control of the monetary supply, leaving only fiscal policy, which may enable better long term control of public deficit by implementing a Milton Friedman like rule (whether it's constant inflation, deflation, or nothing, all is good as long as it remains constant and predictable)
Given the long term inefficiency of the Phillips curve, and a lot of economic similar concepts, most economists would think it's for the better.
See also the founder charter of the ECB, which enshrined similar policies until politicians made it dance to their tune.
This shows the problem isn't our lack of understanding, but our lack of self control and long term motivation- just like kids with a cookie jar: we can't help it!
> if you trust your government you don’t need crypto
Hackers often fall prey to black-and-white thinking. Trust isn't binary, because you can't fully trust an organization made of people, regardless of how "good" they are, or which legal constraints they have.
If anything, look at HIPAA laws: even without them, you should be able to trust your healthcare provider, but if there're things you don't want out ever, you better not share them with your health provider regardless of the laws protecting the confidentiality.
Because leaks happen, even for whole countries sometimes (look at Finland mental health leaks)
This doesn't mean you have "0 trust", just 0.7 or something non binary.
We both know the ideal medical file would be encrypted with the patient private key, or would have some other mechanism of plausible deniability - just like how DKIM was denounced recently. It wasn't possible or even imaginable before we had the technology. Now that we do, it may take a while to get there, and the world will be a slightly better place.
Crypto is a similar small step for finance, and it may also enable most countries to use the same coin (because once monetary policy is out, there's little reason to use your own thing)
> we all know how 1984 ended yeah
It didn't end: we're right inside.
> Whatever. Makes no difference to me, once the harms are mitigated. JMHO.
You are so close to understanding, yet so far. I hope eventually you'll admit more complexity in your reasoning.
To be clear I think all narcotics should be legal. It is the narcos who create the harm. I'm 100% pro dugs and 100% against allowing narcos to thrive.
> Actually, at the bare minimum, it removes political control of the monetary supply, leaving only fiscal policy, which may enable better long term control of public deficit by implementing a Milton Friedman like rule (whether it's constant inflation, deflation, or nothing, all is good as long as it remains constant and predictable)
I don't agree with any of that. I don't want any of that.
> Hackers often fall prey to black-and-white thinking. Trust isn't binary, because you can't fully trust an organization made of people, regardless of how "good" they are, or which legal constraints they have.
Which is why we have legal recourse.
It sucks to have to re-explain this from first principals, but trust is infinitely more efficient, so long as you accept some small fraction of the time you'll get screwed. So, you create legal recourse.
However it's clear you're far more likely to get screwed over in a crypto economy with zero recourse than you are to get screwed over in a fiat economy -- separate from the fact you have recourse in a fiat economy.
> I would argue it is you who are falling for black-and-white thinking that all trust is bad and that currency should be trustless.
I think our differences boil down to one thing: I don't share the belief than trust is better than trustless. Actually, I believe the opposite is true in most situations, because trustless allows abstractions in a simple manner.
For handling exceptions (ex: ETH DAO), we can revert to trust mechanism, but most of the time, we're better off without.
> > Actually, at the bare minimum, it removes political control of the monetary supply, leaving only fiscal policy, which may enable better long term control of public deficit by implementing a Milton Friedman like rule (whether it's constant inflation, deflation, or nothing, all is good as long as it remains constant and predictable)
> I don't agree with any of that. I don't want any of that.
Yet I don't think you are an economist, so I'm afraid your wants are biased. Most people don't want to wait - they want to break open the cookie jar. They want to eat the seed corn.
It's a human bias, with an economic name: the time discount factor, which has been researched in how it leads to substandard outcomes (ex: not saving for your own retirement)
At the society level, 401k and the like is a way of removing trust in your saving ability: the decision is taken for you in advance.
Of course, there are exceptions (ex: you're out of work or sick and need the money now), but that's when the "exception" of trust comes in handy.
> > To be clear I think all narcotics should be legal. It is the narcos who create the harm. I'm 100% pro dugs and 100% against allowing narcos to thrive.
I 100% agree, but yet I think it's better for me not to have vodka and cocaine at home - because if I'm extremely tired but can't sleep, I could be tempted to take the former, then if I have to fly somewhere and it's important I'd be tempted to take the latter the morning after.
So I don't buy any - another way of favoring a trustless system. If I want booze, I go to a bar as needed.
Crypto can offers many features like that, and I believe a smart contract that would automatically save to your retirement account (while exactly equivalent to a 401k on paper) would be better, by sheer virtue of removing the needed trust in the government: I could see a government plundering retirement accounts in a grand announcement of a more redistributive retirement made available to everybody past some given age.
Most people pretend the DAO never happened because the DAO is a terrible example. All it shows is if the big powerful players get screwed they can just change the rules whenever they want. If grandma gets screwed out of her life savings it’s SFYL
It’s trustless for me and none for thee. Seriously. It destroyed the whole narrative.
If tustlessness was any better intrinsically vitalik would be on eth classic today. The smart contract worked as designed. Code is law is it not? How dare you tell me that vitaliks magic bean jar is more important thank my grandmas? :) is what’s good for the goose not good for the gander?
There’s a reason we moved past strict majority rule and added checks for the rights of the powerless or minority.
The difference between us is you’re ignoring the edge cases and I’m saying when livelihood is at stake basic function is table stakes edge cases are effectively the only thing that matters. I’m applying medical rigor and you’re applying My First JavaScript React Native app in the App Store - we can just patch it later whatever.
> I 100% agree, but yet I think it's better for me not to have vodka and cocaine at home - because if I'm extremely tired but can't sleep, I could be tempted to take the former, then if I have to fly somewhere and it's important I'd be tempted to take the latter the morning after.
Look up the Portuguese model that’s not what happens, evidence tells us. Anyone who wants drugs now can get them, and legalization doesn’t make people who don’t want drugs want them. We have laws that people tend to follow like not flying impaired.
The government didn't have that much of an incentive to ban VPN and Tor until now (other than for capturing criminals).
But if this law gets passed, the government will be financially incentivized to put more budget on enforcing this. They can easily make life difficult for VPN providers for example, and as a result the price will go up, and it will no longer make economic sense for casual users to use crypto.
This kind of alarmist narrative sidesteps some simple economic realities: as soon as non trivial amounts of wealth are locked up in blockchains, basically the powers that be are hopelessly dependent on them. Rich people outlawing being rich is prevented by power facilitating corruption. BTC for all its flaws already is well on its way to replace the Switzerland as a popular place for all sorts of shady characters to park their wealth; hence the high prices.
Owning a crypto wallet is of course nice but it is the financial equivalent of putting money in an old sock under your bed: it's kind of not very safe at all. Sure they are hard to hack or break into but the very real scenario you have to worry about more than the government coming after you is that of a person with a gun forcing at gun point you to transfer your belongings to their wallet.
What's going to happen is that those people currently making use of loopholes in our laws to avoid paying taxes by using crypto currencies will find that using their secret stashes of wealth in a system that basically implements an extremely hard to forge transaction history, is going to be increasingly hard. There are ways around that but it doesn't change the reality that working in secret in a surveillance society is going to be increasingly hard. And like it or not, that's where we are heading. George Orwell was only off by a few decades.
In any case, laws can be changed and they change all the time. Changes provide short term opportunities. But the long term perspective is always that people with power impose their will on people without.
> BTC for all its flaws already is well on its way to replace the Switzerland as a popular place for all sorts of shady characters to park their wealth; hence the high prices.
You saw what happened to banking in Switzerland for Americans, right? Not the best analogy on which to make your case. The law of the United States has a long arm, and it's questionable at best to believe that BTC is out of its reach.
In the same way the American government currently has a list of all of the assets that every American has in any bank overseas. FATCA requires that if a bank wants to do business with US persons (including citizens regardless of residence) they have to regularly comb their database of clients to look for flags that they may be Americans and report this directly to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). If this doesn't line up with your FBARs they may just take half your money.
FATCA is the reason American citizens can't open bank accounts in many parts of the world -- local laws forbid the banks from transferring the data necessary to comply with FATCA; and if the banks chose to serve US persons anyways, the US government would cut the banks off from the entire US financial system.
This is not only a solved problem, but there's strong precedent.
You wanna play in the big market? You play by their rules. Even if you don't chances are your bank does. And even if they don't, chances are their correspondent or custodial banks do. All roads lead back to DC for American citizens - and anyone one America's shit list.
... and before you consider renunciation, there's an exit tax to be paid in the amount of the capital gains due on all of your assets as though you disposed of them on your last day as a US citizen. And you better believe they'll be checking for your tax compliance on your crypto accounts on the way out. Of course tax evasion is an extraditable offence, too, which really limits your choices.
America has a big carrot and a whole lot of sticks, and it's willing to use both to get what it wants.
I dunno, criminalize the incorporation of transactions from unidentified wallets in new blocks? Criminalize transacting with such wallets, or wallets containing funds sourced from such wallets? I'm confident that they can think of something, if they are sufficiently motivated.
Generally, "don't break the law" isn't considered an alarmist narrative. I concede that the supporting case I make assumes technical and legal competence by a government actor, which is frequently unlikely, but I wouldn't recommend building a house on sand just because an earthquake is unlikely, either.
He's going to make it worse because people deplatformed by the socialists and globalists (I mean Twitter, YouTube and others) are increasingly using crypto to fund themselves.
You seem to mistake the Dems' unwillingness to fight crime for support of freedom of expression.
So the Fed and central banks are going to relinquish their control of the money supply? What's the saying: when hell freezes over...?
They will fight this tooth and nail until they finally get control of it somehow. Or keep it buried deeeep underground.
Being able to self-host your wallet is the entire point of cryptocurrencies. Without that, all of the clever innovations such as the blockchain, or mining are pointless.
You can self-host your wallet. No one is forbidding that. You just need to share KYC information to exchanges when you withdraw to self-hosted wallet. This seems very reasonable to me.
And then what? Everyone has to keep KYC records of the counterparties that they transacted with? What if there's a country where such regulations don't apply? There goes your KYC chain.
> So, if you currently use a cold storage wallet like a Ledger Nano S or a software wallet such as MetaMask, you may soon find yourself running afoul of new regulations.
But apart from that, the rest of the article seems to agree with you.
Decentralized finance is all about automated counterparties, smart contracts that run code to match buyers and sellers, execute transactions and move funds. There's nobody there to verify KYC information.
Users must "cash out" at some point (Even the miners need to be able to convert to their currency to pay for electricity, etc.).
And you can only cash out through these "custodial wallets". For example you can't "cash out" and convert your ETH into USD from MetaMask. So all that's needed for the government is to enforce the law on these custodial wallets.
It's not so different from how they deal with Tor. Even though the onion network gives the false sense of security, government agents mostly have taken over the entrance and exit nodes of the Tor network, and most criminals get caught this way. Using the "cash out" analogy, the entrance and exit Tor nodes are equivalent to the custodial wallets.
Oh my goodness, no. The point of crypto is not to speculate and “cash out.” The point is to actually use it, as currency or as a platform (for smart contracts, etc.). No conversion to fiat is required.
The OP is being naive. He's probably never been sent a warning notice from Comcast/Time Warner Cable to stop using Torrent to illegally download movies, or otherwise you may need to pay penalty or get sued.
Sure, it IS possible to go through all kinds of convoluted ways to bypass the law, the same way you can go through all kinds of convoluted ways to illegally download movies (using Tor/VPN/etc.)
This means something like Bitcoin will end up being as mainstream as Tor. It will be enough to cripple the entire industry so it never grows to a meaningful size.
No matter how easy it is to do, passing a law like this has one important effect: it narrows down the set of those using non-custodial wallets to just people willing to break the law to do it. That's a valuable selection effect for the government, because it means if you can find out that someone is using a non-custodial wallet, it means ~waggles eyebrows~ they probably do have something to hide. You can get a warrant to seize their stuff and figure out what's going on. Which solves the main problem the government has with cryptocurrencies -- that they can be used to easily hide illegal activity.
Yeah this law is easily enforced because on/off ramps to the crypto ecosystem are regulated. If Coinbase and et al stops accepting transfers from private wallets youre coins are fucked
There will be always ways to cash out your crypto if exchanges are not willing to serve you. In extreme case using marketplaces on darknet. Of course that is not desirable.
Also how "fucked" you are depends on what kind of amounts you are dealing with. If it is small amount you can just use it for online shopping or something.
Exodus is a non-custodial self-hosted wallet. This means that you have access to the funds and only you have access. We don't have access nor do we see your activity.
Betteridge's law of headlines applies here... i.e. no, the government is not banning crypto wallets.
I'm biased, but this regulation will be worse for exchanges. Each customer will likely have to take onerous actions to withdrawal their funds. This will further bifurcate centralized custodial exchanges and non-custodial decentralized products like wallets and DeFi.
> In many regions, we're currently more popular than the bible
Google searches tend to be contextualized and personalized, so i'm not sure if that's a universal statement - nonetheless, you seem to be the first result for me in an incognito window (although the knowledge panel does talk about the book of Exodus).
You say you don't collect transaction fees, but that you make a small amount of money off the spread. I'm confused, whats the difference between these two?
So by that logic, the airport Travelex that charges "no commission" but a 20% spread between the bid and the ask is also not charging transaction fees? I suspect cribbing from Travelex and calling it "no commission" is likely both more accurate, and probably more legal, but IANAL.
You have a better Google results position for one URL (that you've paid lots of money for).
The bible still outranks you for every other result on the first page (Exodus wallet isn't until page 2), and Google adds rich snippets for the definition of "exodus" and the Book of Exodus above the link to your homepage.
So I guess you're less interesting than a dictionary?
I speculated that the US is likely to take very adverse actions against Bitcoin very soon. In the regime of waning manufacturing and trade deficits, US dollars will become increasingly the chief export of the American economy. Anything that is viewed by the policymakers a threat to this main export good, including Bitcoin, will be suppressed.
If policymakers didn't see Bitcoin as a threat, then that would mean that Bitcoin didn't work, or wasn't popular, or was just a niche curiosity for enthusiasts.
The more actions they take to thwart Bitcoin, the more evidence that it's working as designed.
It doesn't have to be a threat to the dollar to be a thorn in the side. The narco trade isn't a threat to the dollar and yet enforcement action is pretty regular. I wouldn't read too much into that.
If this happens, Bitcoin and the rest of cryptos will drop significantly. Watch out since we are due for a big drop (30-40%) after this huge run up from March.
Also, this will impact large buyers of crypto and we should see less demand from the larger buyers (those that trade in the million $ plus range). Hence, more downward pressure on price.
The run up is driven by the mining reward halvening in May and we've barely scraped the ATH. In the past, the year after a halvening saw approx. 10fold increase in price. I would expect at minimum a price of 40k before this one pops down to ~15k. The last local minimum was 3k.
Short-to-medium term this can damage crypto prices, but long-term it's further evidence that crypto was right all along. Bitcoin (to name the most popular) is valuable because the government can't manipulate it. That's essentially its value-add to money - a computer controls its inflation rate, it's capped at 21 million coins, and the government can't print it at will. Such a simple concept being such a danger to the monetary system should be a damning indictment of central banks' mismanagement of our economic system.
I mean, the tax implications of doing anything with crypto as an "investment" already made it a basically useless asset class to get into. Not to mention, anyone with half a brain knows that exchanges manipulate markets with favored liquidity providers. This is really kind of hilarious.
I guess I'll have to lose my Ledger Nano S along with my firearms in my boating trip planned for late January ;).
What tax implications you speak of? The implications that you have to pay taxes on capital gains? That's not very pleasant, but it hardly makes it useless to invest in.
Every trade is a taxable event. If I buy btc with dollars and then trade that for eth and then trade my eth for neo, each of those transactions is taxable. If I finally trade my neo for dollars again, that transaction is also taxable.
Definitely still a potentially very profitable asset class but the taxation method is brutal, versus a system like stocks where you buy the stock and when you sell it for dollars that's the taxable event.
AFAIK something like USD->EUR->GBP->AAPL is just as complex for taxes as USD->BTC->ETH->NEO. Don't make complex trades that aren't profitable enough to justify the paperwork burden.
> Definitely still a potentially very profitable asset class but the taxation method is brutal, versus a system like stocks where you buy the stock and when you sell it for dollars that's the taxable event.
I don't see the difference. When you buy GOOG stock, and want to trade it for AMZN stock, you sell it, and buy AMZN with proceeds. This generates taxable event. Sounds like exactly same situation as you describe.
It would be like if you could trade GOOG for AMZN without having to sell GOOG first, just an exchange. They tax that swap. Versus taxing you only when you convert GOOG or AMZN to dollars. It like if I have a printer that I don't want anymore and you have a leaf blower and we trade. That transaction is taxed in cryptocurrencies.
Yes, and IRS also taxes the swap of GOOG for AMZN. See[1]:
> Amount realized. The amount you realize from a sale or exchange is the total of all the money you receive plus the fair market value (defined below) of all property or services you receive.
The rules are exactly the same for stocks as for cryptocurrencies. There is no difference.
Actually you need to do Kyc to join major exchanges and even WhatsApp. Any virtual action that can touch us$. Hence it is not banning wallet but banning annoymous touching us$. And if you are kyc but your other party is not you are in trouble. Ultimately there would be a list of acceptable wallet to transact ... not banning ?
Well shit. I was considering investing in bitcoin eventually, but this tells me that crypto is too legally unstable to put any money into.
I don't have issues with centralized exchanges, but if they're going this far, they could end up outright banning crypto, or banning everything but the government approved (tm) currencies. So, yeah, in reality, the value of BTC should drop like a lead bowling ball.
Well, the whole financial system with its zero interest rates and 0% bank deposits looks rediculous compared to insane 50%+ gains by just buy and hodl. No government would tolerate this, especially without the ability to collect taxes.
This is a stalemate. On one hand they cannot call it a Ponzi scheme, which is what it is, because everyone is already in, on the other hand, they want to regulate it to death and tax every single transaction.
So, adoption and other bullshit aside, the internet meme stocks for the poor will be allowed only on coinbase and others "certified" exchanges with direct data feeds right to IRS and other govt agencies. Everything else will be banned. Nice and simple.
Are you implying that all tech leaders and financial leaders (read Blackrock ceo comments to the bank of England, PayPal CEO) lately recognizing bitcoin as a potential global store of wealth but you are more right? Interesting tip: the creator of the forum you are reading this PG, all YC and all a16z leaders see crypto as the next frontier. But again, you know better.
The title is far more alarmist than what I interpret it to be. Basically, if you use a centralized exchange, all bets are off and any expectations of privacy you have are greatly reduced, so you're expected to comply to AML/KYC whenever withdrawing and depositing, so not really much of a change there. Peer to peer transactions are out of scope for this and any attempts at enforcing any law there would be nightmarish to say the least. This is not to say I exactly like this, but it's more of tightening a screw rather than installing a whole new set of them.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadI root for cryptocurrencies, but I think the government will deem them to be to risky for their monopoly on printing money.
Not to mention China investing tons of money into cryptos.
So stablecoins, which are vastly dominated by dollar denominated coins, actually increase the dominance of the dollar and allow people to get around chinese currency controls in ways I am not sure they like.
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3098981/c...
"According to the company’s blog post, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve deposit funds seized by the U.S. into a bank account in the U.S. tied to the Guaidó government, which converts the funds into USDC that Circle then sends to Airtm."
https://www.coindesk.com/circle-usdc-venezuela-airtm
Cryptocurrencies are for the most part banned in China, it's probably one of the most difficult places on Earth to own them, have no idea how people come to conclusions like this other than just playing some blatant jingoistic angle.
https://tlaib.house.gov/media/press-releases/tlaib-garcia-an...
Biggest meritorious gold rush in decades with the potential to drastically uproot a very class based financial system and minorities have to be protected from it? This is absolute insanity.
We have had these laws in place for decades in the banking system and minorities have constantly been discriminated against. The last thing we need is for these same laws to be put in place in an arena where millionaires are printed overnight and no one even needs to know the color of your skin.
Once your government determines that participation in crypto networks without using a registered intermediary is illegal, they have reasonable grounds to subpoena network providers for participation in such networks.
Once your government can reasonably determine that your IP address has accessed a crypto network without using an intermediary, then they have probable cause for search and seizure of your digital and physical property.
If you are caught by any means to be using VPNs or TOR to dodge network-layer inspection, this will result in more strict sentencing decisions, as doing so can be interpreted as knowingly breaking the law.
Additionally, as a bonus risk to everyone who knowingly participates in crypto, consider the malware problem:
If you're infected by malware that is doing so without your knowledge or consent, you may regardless be found liable, depending on how poorly the law is written and how poorly the authorities choose to treat you, if you are found to be knowingly participating in crypto in any respect whatsoever.
(I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice, seek legal counsel, etc.)
EDIT: Or any law like it passed it any non-US country, either!
disclaimer: also not a lawyer.
Especially since a very large use case for crypto - especially in non-custodial wallets - especially people avoiding KYC, is crime.
The ratio of ancaps to criminals on this list is likely very low.
[edit] The real risk of finding yourself on this shortlist of non-custodial wallets is suddenly finding yourself on the wrong side of the IRS.
Most blockchains are pseudonymous, and the government has tools to track and de-pseudonymize, or at least map and aggregate - transactions. If the government wanted to go after you for breaking this law, they'd probably just throw together a quick list of people the IRS should start poking around at.
They know as well as you do that you probably didn't report every transaction you've ever done on every exchange, DEX, or platform. That's tax fraud, straight up. Much easier to prove, and much harder to argue on merits.
I've said this before, and I'll say it again: if your government is coming for you, no amount of magic beans in your computer will keep you or your value safe. If you don't trust your government you've got bigger problems than crypto. If you trust your government crypto is irrelevant.
As Beria, Stalin's side-kick said, "Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime."
Even if you kept a blacklist of wallets with dirty money, I think it would be possible to spin up a chain of brand new wallets and quickly funnel coins through them before the blacklist could keep up in a way that would be impossible with fiat transactions and traditional banks. I could be wrong though, maybe someone’s got an algo for that.
Opinions my own.
Can't you spin up a chain of brand new offshore accounts/shell companies in a friendly jurisdiction and quickly funnel money through them before the blacklist could keep up?
The reason many, especially smaller, banks don't want to do business with criminals is they fear they'd lose their access to the US market through a termination of these relationships. This would then push the bank into insolvency.
I know this because all this happened to Tether, lol. There's been some documentation, likely as part of the NYAG lawsuit or the Paradise Papers leak -- or both. Noble initially refused to bank them for this reason, so they invested in Noble, who then took them on as customers. Their custodial bank (Wells, IIRC) told them to eat dirt, and it pushed Noble into insolvency.
This barely qualifies as an opinion. It's a simple fact.
This is far too black and white. You may trust your government not to engage in a vendetta against you for no reason and still not trust them not to pass onerous regulations that harm you unintentionally and then provide no recourse for the victims of that outcome.
I have yet to hear a solid argument for why it should be in all circumstances be regulated like investment securities even when only being used as currency (like cash).
But even accepting that the majority of existing holders are using it for speculation, why do we have to pre-ruin its ability to ever be used as a medium of exchange?
Acceptance obviously has network effects. The user doesn't have much incentive to set up crypto if nobody accepts it, and the vendor doesn't have much incentive to accept it if few of their customers have it set up. But everything starts that way. Then some large merchant or group thereof decides they want to promote its use and offers everybody a 15% discount for using it, so a third of their customers do so for the discount, and then millions of people have it set up and other vendors start accepting it now that there are a large enough population of customers. That hasn't happened yet, but what's your theory for why it never could?
The credit for that goes to the core team and the 7tx/sec limit.
We've had 28 years where the people in power get to do whatever they like with no consequences. Ordinary people might as well have a turn.
presumably they can also ban VPNs while they're at it, but it doesn't seem plausible. If your threat model is a tyrannical government willing to do anything (ie. ban encryption, backdoor every piece of computing equipment, install 1984 style telescreens everywhere), then there's no real way to defend it.
Well, there is, you just have to abandon the premise that doing what your adversary tells you to do is the right thing.
Putting telescreens everywhere doesn't help them much if every one of them is immediately smashed with a rock and anyone who comes to repair it is also smashed with a rock.
This requires a certain amount of public resistance, because you can't be the only one doing it, but a certain amount of public resistance is what systems like that tend to generate. And when you're not the only one doing it, they run out of telescreens and telescreen repair personnel before you run out of rocks.
This whole "my math can save me from a tyrannical government" thing is so tired. If they don't play by the rules, and want to stop you, they will. They'll take your knee caps, your finger nails, your life, or the entire nation's internet service down. No amount of math will change that.
Here's a worked example. North Korea. Their leadership has amassed a few billion dollars of cryptocurrency they've used to finance their nuclear program. How much has crypto helped the average North Korean? Zero because it's super illegal, they'll get sent to the gulags, and their internal internet likely has it disabled seven ways to hell.
Think of this like blowing smoke in the face of a cop. Is it illegal? Probably? Hard to say. Will you immediately be arrested for something else you happen to be doing at that very moment that just so happens to be illegal? Oh yeah. Technically correct is not the best kind of correct in this situation.
Given our past interactions and your posting history, it's clear you have a strong dislike for crypto.
However, your opinion (or mine) will be irrelevant.
> They'll take your knee caps, your finger nails, your life, or the entire nation's internet service down
They totally can! The only problem is they eventually run out of people or things the country can sell. And in the meantime, even before reaching that ultimate point, they destroy the economy by destroying hope: forced labor is less productive that voluntary labor.
That's because it's hard to rule people who don't care anymore. Even the threat of death may not cut it: just look at the risks people took to flee the soviet block!
A good tyrant applies just a sprinkle of violence.
> Technically correct is not the best kind of correct in this situation.
Indeed. And you are correct the government monopoly of violence keeps people in-line.
But it's not without end: a tyrannical government survive only so long as the population is willing to tolerate it. As the person you replied to tried to explain, civil disobedience happens.
If you need current examples, look no further than people not wearing masks, or the riots that happened on the 2nd lockdown of Europe: the more force you apply, the more resistance you get.
I don't believe governments will find the "ideal" amount of violence to keep people in-line - not for something like money. The blue dollar in Argentina, the existence of a cash economy etc. - there are too many signs that show this can't be done. Same as for drug or alcohol: the prohibition failed. The war on drugs is currently failing.
Yet it's clear that crypto will not operate in a wild west forever: just like the internet, some rules will be added, to tax it.
But it won't go away, as governments prefer taxing to killing!
Sorry to break your dream of crypto becoming illegal and drying, but that ship has sailed.
My point as always is if you trust your government you don’t need crypto - as trust is a massive optimization - and if you don’t, you have much bigger problems. Just ask the North Koreans.
The rest is but a fictional dramatization of what life under authoritarianism might be like, just you, your MacBook Pro and your GPU cluster against the man, smashing TVs, killing TV repair men and scribbling down hashes. It just doesn’t reflect any reality I know of. I’d watch an HBO series based on it though! Maybe a modern reimagining of 1984 combined with Escape from Tarkov; we all know how 1984 ended yeah?
Opinion varies. For many people, being able to access drugs outside of government control (cancer patient victims of the opioid crisis), or receiving donations (wikileaks) is worth a lot more that the small drawbacks.
Same as due process and the "fruit of a poisonous tree" legal doctrine - it lets bad people walk out of jail, but overall I think it does more good than harm to society.
> Once it has the same constraints as traditional finance it offers nothing of value, and will wilt away on its own
Actually, at the bare minimum, it removes political control of the monetary supply, leaving only fiscal policy, which may enable better long term control of public deficit by implementing a Milton Friedman like rule (whether it's constant inflation, deflation, or nothing, all is good as long as it remains constant and predictable)
Given the long term inefficiency of the Phillips curve, and a lot of economic similar concepts, most economists would think it's for the better.
See also the founder charter of the ECB, which enshrined similar policies until politicians made it dance to their tune.
This shows the problem isn't our lack of understanding, but our lack of self control and long term motivation- just like kids with a cookie jar: we can't help it!
> if you trust your government you don’t need crypto
Hackers often fall prey to black-and-white thinking. Trust isn't binary, because you can't fully trust an organization made of people, regardless of how "good" they are, or which legal constraints they have.
If anything, look at HIPAA laws: even without them, you should be able to trust your healthcare provider, but if there're things you don't want out ever, you better not share them with your health provider regardless of the laws protecting the confidentiality.
Because leaks happen, even for whole countries sometimes (look at Finland mental health leaks)
This doesn't mean you have "0 trust", just 0.7 or something non binary.
We both know the ideal medical file would be encrypted with the patient private key, or would have some other mechanism of plausible deniability - just like how DKIM was denounced recently. It wasn't possible or even imaginable before we had the technology. Now that we do, it may take a while to get there, and the world will be a slightly better place.
Crypto is a similar small step for finance, and it may also enable most countries to use the same coin (because once monetary policy is out, there's little reason to use your own thing)
> we all know how 1984 ended yeah
It didn't end: we're right inside.
> Whatever. Makes no difference to me, once the harms are mitigated. JMHO.
You are so close to understanding, yet so far. I hope eventually you'll admit more complexity in your reasoning.
> Actually, at the bare minimum, it removes political control of the monetary supply, leaving only fiscal policy, which may enable better long term control of public deficit by implementing a Milton Friedman like rule (whether it's constant inflation, deflation, or nothing, all is good as long as it remains constant and predictable)
I don't agree with any of that. I don't want any of that.
> Hackers often fall prey to black-and-white thinking. Trust isn't binary, because you can't fully trust an organization made of people, regardless of how "good" they are, or which legal constraints they have.
Which is why we have legal recourse.
It sucks to have to re-explain this from first principals, but trust is infinitely more efficient, so long as you accept some small fraction of the time you'll get screwed. So, you create legal recourse.
However it's clear you're far more likely to get screwed over in a crypto economy with zero recourse than you are to get screwed over in a fiat economy -- separate from the fact you have recourse in a fiat economy.
I think our differences boil down to one thing: I don't share the belief than trust is better than trustless. Actually, I believe the opposite is true in most situations, because trustless allows abstractions in a simple manner.
For handling exceptions (ex: ETH DAO), we can revert to trust mechanism, but most of the time, we're better off without.
> > Actually, at the bare minimum, it removes political control of the monetary supply, leaving only fiscal policy, which may enable better long term control of public deficit by implementing a Milton Friedman like rule (whether it's constant inflation, deflation, or nothing, all is good as long as it remains constant and predictable)
> I don't agree with any of that. I don't want any of that.
Yet I don't think you are an economist, so I'm afraid your wants are biased. Most people don't want to wait - they want to break open the cookie jar. They want to eat the seed corn.
It's a human bias, with an economic name: the time discount factor, which has been researched in how it leads to substandard outcomes (ex: not saving for your own retirement)
At the society level, 401k and the like is a way of removing trust in your saving ability: the decision is taken for you in advance.
Of course, there are exceptions (ex: you're out of work or sick and need the money now), but that's when the "exception" of trust comes in handy.
> > To be clear I think all narcotics should be legal. It is the narcos who create the harm. I'm 100% pro dugs and 100% against allowing narcos to thrive.
I 100% agree, but yet I think it's better for me not to have vodka and cocaine at home - because if I'm extremely tired but can't sleep, I could be tempted to take the former, then if I have to fly somewhere and it's important I'd be tempted to take the latter the morning after.
So I don't buy any - another way of favoring a trustless system. If I want booze, I go to a bar as needed.
Crypto can offers many features like that, and I believe a smart contract that would automatically save to your retirement account (while exactly equivalent to a 401k on paper) would be better, by sheer virtue of removing the needed trust in the government: I could see a government plundering retirement accounts in a grand announcement of a more redistributive retirement made available to everybody past some given age.
It’s trustless for me and none for thee. Seriously. It destroyed the whole narrative.
If tustlessness was any better intrinsically vitalik would be on eth classic today. The smart contract worked as designed. Code is law is it not? How dare you tell me that vitaliks magic bean jar is more important thank my grandmas? :) is what’s good for the goose not good for the gander?
There’s a reason we moved past strict majority rule and added checks for the rights of the powerless or minority.
The difference between us is you’re ignoring the edge cases and I’m saying when livelihood is at stake basic function is table stakes edge cases are effectively the only thing that matters. I’m applying medical rigor and you’re applying My First JavaScript React Native app in the App Store - we can just patch it later whatever.
Or this now-poor bastard: https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/k7cnrn/butter_los...
> I 100% agree, but yet I think it's better for me not to have vodka and cocaine at home - because if I'm extremely tired but can't sleep, I could be tempted to take the former, then if I have to fly somewhere and it's important I'd be tempted to take the latter the morning after.
Look up the Portuguese model that’s not what happens, evidence tells us. Anyone who wants drugs now can get them, and legalization doesn’t make people who don’t want drugs want them. We have laws that people tend to follow like not flying impaired.
Unless you're self-hosting your VPN, then your VPN has a record of your internet traffic, and most VPNs are even sketchier than your ISP.
But if this law gets passed, the government will be financially incentivized to put more budget on enforcing this. They can easily make life difficult for VPN providers for example, and as a result the price will go up, and it will no longer make economic sense for casual users to use crypto.
Owning a crypto wallet is of course nice but it is the financial equivalent of putting money in an old sock under your bed: it's kind of not very safe at all. Sure they are hard to hack or break into but the very real scenario you have to worry about more than the government coming after you is that of a person with a gun forcing at gun point you to transfer your belongings to their wallet.
What's going to happen is that those people currently making use of loopholes in our laws to avoid paying taxes by using crypto currencies will find that using their secret stashes of wealth in a system that basically implements an extremely hard to forge transaction history, is going to be increasingly hard. There are ways around that but it doesn't change the reality that working in secret in a surveillance society is going to be increasingly hard. And like it or not, that's where we are heading. George Orwell was only off by a few decades.
In any case, laws can be changed and they change all the time. Changes provide short term opportunities. But the long term perspective is always that people with power impose their will on people without.
You saw what happened to banking in Switzerland for Americans, right? Not the best analogy on which to make your case. The law of the United States has a long arm, and it's questionable at best to believe that BTC is out of its reach.
FATCA is the reason American citizens can't open bank accounts in many parts of the world -- local laws forbid the banks from transferring the data necessary to comply with FATCA; and if the banks chose to serve US persons anyways, the US government would cut the banks off from the entire US financial system.
This is not only a solved problem, but there's strong precedent.
You wanna play in the big market? You play by their rules. Even if you don't chances are your bank does. And even if they don't, chances are their correspondent or custodial banks do. All roads lead back to DC for American citizens - and anyone one America's shit list.
... and before you consider renunciation, there's an exit tax to be paid in the amount of the capital gains due on all of your assets as though you disposed of them on your last day as a US citizen. And you better believe they'll be checking for your tax compliance on your crypto accounts on the way out. Of course tax evasion is an extraditable offence, too, which really limits your choices.
America has a big carrot and a whole lot of sticks, and it's willing to use both to get what it wants.
He's going to make it worse because people deplatformed by the socialists and globalists (I mean Twitter, YouTube and others) are increasingly using crypto to fund themselves.
You seem to mistake the Dems' unwillingness to fight crime for support of freedom of expression.
How would the accused have the mens rea?
> So, if you currently use a cold storage wallet like a Ledger Nano S or a software wallet such as MetaMask, you may soon find yourself running afoul of new regulations.
But apart from that, the rest of the article seems to agree with you.
And you can only cash out through these "custodial wallets". For example you can't "cash out" and convert your ETH into USD from MetaMask. So all that's needed for the government is to enforce the law on these custodial wallets.
It's not so different from how they deal with Tor. Even though the onion network gives the false sense of security, government agents mostly have taken over the entrance and exit nodes of the Tor network, and most criminals get caught this way. Using the "cash out" analogy, the entrance and exit Tor nodes are equivalent to the custodial wallets.
Sure, it IS possible to go through all kinds of convoluted ways to bypass the law, the same way you can go through all kinds of convoluted ways to illegally download movies (using Tor/VPN/etc.)
This means something like Bitcoin will end up being as mainstream as Tor. It will be enough to cripple the entire industry so it never grows to a meaningful size.
Also how "fucked" you are depends on what kind of amounts you are dealing with. If it is small amount you can just use it for online shopping or something.
Exodus is a non-custodial self-hosted wallet. This means that you have access to the funds and only you have access. We don't have access nor do we see your activity.
Betteridge's law of headlines applies here... i.e. no, the government is not banning crypto wallets.
I'm biased, but this regulation will be worse for exchanges. Each customer will likely have to take onerous actions to withdrawal their funds. This will further bifurcate centralized custodial exchanges and non-custodial decentralized products like wallets and DeFi.
Google searches tend to be contextualized and personalized, so i'm not sure if that's a universal statement - nonetheless, you seem to be the first result for me in an incognito window (although the knowledge panel does talk about the book of Exodus).
You have a better Google results position for one URL (that you've paid lots of money for).
The bible still outranks you for every other result on the first page (Exodus wallet isn't until page 2), and Google adds rich snippets for the definition of "exodus" and the Book of Exodus above the link to your homepage.
So I guess you're less interesting than a dictionary?
The more actions they take to thwart Bitcoin, the more evidence that it's working as designed.
So I say, bring it on.
Also, this will impact large buyers of crypto and we should see less demand from the larger buyers (those that trade in the million $ plus range). Hence, more downward pressure on price.
Institutional buyers don't care about KYC.
Notice how following the elections, in many states, drugs are now at the "then you win" part.
I guess I'll have to lose my Ledger Nano S along with my firearms in my boating trip planned for late January ;).
Definitely still a potentially very profitable asset class but the taxation method is brutal, versus a system like stocks where you buy the stock and when you sell it for dollars that's the taxable event.
I don't see the difference. When you buy GOOG stock, and want to trade it for AMZN stock, you sell it, and buy AMZN with proceeds. This generates taxable event. Sounds like exactly same situation as you describe.
> Amount realized. The amount you realize from a sale or exchange is the total of all the money you receive plus the fair market value (defined below) of all property or services you receive.
The rules are exactly the same for stocks as for cryptocurrencies. There is no difference.
[1] - https://www.irs.gov/publications/p544#en_US_2019_publink1000...
I don't have issues with centralized exchanges, but if they're going this far, they could end up outright banning crypto, or banning everything but the government approved (tm) currencies. So, yeah, in reality, the value of BTC should drop like a lead bowling ball.
This is a stalemate. On one hand they cannot call it a Ponzi scheme, which is what it is, because everyone is already in, on the other hand, they want to regulate it to death and tax every single transaction.
So, adoption and other bullshit aside, the internet meme stocks for the poor will be allowed only on coinbase and others "certified" exchanges with direct data feeds right to IRS and other govt agencies. Everything else will be banned. Nice and simple.
It is when, not if. EU will follow.