El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

If your end goal is to get to cash it's quite difficult without doxxing yourself. For eg. imagine you do a ransomware hack, you have a BTC address with the BTC on it. Law enforcement as well as the company hacked both know the address. From that point they can follow where the money goes, it really doesn't matter how many different ways you elaborately transact.

You might try and run the BTC through a coin mixer however these attract attention and afaik are unreliable against an opponent like Chainalysis.

You can send the BTC to an exchange like Binance where you have not done KYC, however two issues with that. Firstly, law enforcement can contact the exchange and request halting the account. Secondly, without KYC you'll have very low daily limits and it will likely take a while before you can swap the BTC into something more private like XMR.

All your examples don't consider that we can trivially follow a wallet, get notifications when it does something and follow where the money goes. Yes law enforcement could absolutely knock on the doors of organisations that receive tainted BTC.

Speaking of global fracturing, partially true but I would still ask how do you intend to cash out? The only way that would work would be on a p2p website where you can directly sell to other users. This won't work if your somewhere off the map where there is not a lot of wealth. And somewhere where there is wealth you open yourself up to being caught if you have many large swaps.

Here in NL, everybody is "entitled" to a bank account. However, banks can, and do, freely reject people. They will block and ban your account if they want to. For businesses it's even worse.

So even if everybody has the right to have a bank account, it just doesn't work like that.

>Nope, although the fake currency transfer rates that are the big obstacle here are structurally similar in their economic impact to prohibitively-high export tariffs, they aren't actually taxes; they don't go to the Treasury but to the Central Bank, and so they don't pay for social services but rather to subsidize imports, further hollowing out the Argentine economy and destroying our competitiveness. But the evidence suggests that, even if I'm willing to take the 38% haircut, TransferWise and PayPal simply don't work. They just don't have service here.

As I said on my previous post, you are circumventing local laws and taxes while living in Argentina by using Bitcoin. TransferWise and Paypal may not work in Argentina (I'm pretty sure TW works but just doesn't offer you a favorable exchange rate), but you could still receive a normal bank transaction from abroad and sell your dollars cheaper as stipulated by the laws in the country you choose to live in.

>Argentina does have a little bit of income tax, which I'm not allowed to pay (I tried, but the tax office turned me away because they don't accept income taxes from illegal immigrants), but most of the tax revenue here comes from the VAT, which I pay just like everyone else, because it's included in the price of everything. Exports of information technology services, which is what I do, are exempt from VAT. In fact, when I had a company here, before I was an illegal immigrant, I had to pay a lot of extra VAT that was supposed to get refunded, but it never was, because following that aspect of the law is too inconvenient to the government. (Because all my revenue came from exports, you see.) One accountant suggested that I bill a friend's domestic company for fake services in order to get the refund. I refused.

Not true. Illegal immigrants can be registered as autonomous workers, and since you earn in dollars you probably would fall in the 'Responsable Inscripto' category and have to pay autonomous worker fees + 35% of what you earn. You are just choosing not to. Also, the VAT is not the lion's share of tax collection in Argentina, but income taxes.

>I understand that if you've lived in a country all your life with a more or less reasonable government, all of this sounds ridiculously implausible.

I'm Argentinian. I simply chose to migrate away to a country without stupid taxes or laws rather than having an unfair advantage over my countrymen by avoiding them abusing the low-attachment-to-where-I-work-from nature of my career. The local tech scene in Argentina is filled with guys like you who avoid as many taxes as they can (except VAT, of course) using crypto or offshore accounts and then goad on the internet about it. You are lucky tax evasion is not a jail-able offence in Argentina, probably because the corrupt politicians are cut from the same cloth.

Sorry if I come across as too harsh on my opinion on tax evasion. I think it's an understandable crime in Argentina, but it somehow rubs me the wrong way when people openly discuss it like this on the internet.

> Fundamental properties of bitcoin are its decentralization and security achieved via and expressed in, very transparently and using very simple formula, in terms of energy expenditure, tying it unambiguously to the real world physics. >No other project has such properties or comes close to the level to which those properties are achieved in bitcoin.

There are other PoW coins. Some of those do calculation that are actually useful on their own. That means that there are coins with better, as you say, fundamentals.

> Nope.

Yes.

> Only if you don’t understand what performance of a cryptocurrency is, or what decentralization of cryptocurrency means.

Only if performance and decentralization mean something completely different in cryptocurrency than anywhere else. If so, can you explain or provide a source that explains it that I can check.

> And independence is from marketing campaigns, politics and other shenanigans that crypto world is full of.

BTC is full of marketing campaigns, politics and other shenanigans. To claim otherwise is to ignore, or be completely oblivious, to bitcoin history and present.

What about using a blockchain internally within the country to manage the high throughput and still avoid centralization by relying on a single "trusted" third party?

For e.g., mining operations can be distributed within the country itself to ensure decentralization within the country. Then this internal blockchain network interfaces with the slower and more expensive bitcoin blockchain to do final settlements?

Could this work?