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EU to make Bitcoin traceable, ban anonymous crypto wallets

euronews.com

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Re: EU to make Bitcoin traceable, ban anonymous crypto wallets

#51

Post by Animats »

The crypto world is running out of safe havens. China cracked down, and cut the power to large Bitcoin farms. In the US, the SEC and CFTC have been tightening up on crypto-related things that look like securities and things that look like exchanges. Israel kicked out the binary option crowd, which overlapped with the crypto crowd; they seem to have moved to Bulgaria. Now the EU.

The bigger countries are in general tightening up on tax havens; incorporating in the Cayman Islands or Vanatu raises more red flags now.

The Economist has an article this week, "What if Bitcoin went to zero?"[1] Cryptocurrencies haven't hit a recession yet, and we're getting close to one. Look at house prices. In a recession, things which depend on a net inflow of money collapse.

I don't expect Bitcoin to go to zero, but Tether could, easily. When stablecoins crash, they crash all the way.

[1] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/08/02/w...

Re: EU to make Bitcoin traceable, ban anonymous crypto wallets

#52

Post by gfodor »

volta83 wrote: post #45
gfodor wrote: post #38

In other news, the government has declared by decree that nobody is allowed to memorize seed phrases anymore. Also, multiplying prime numbers is now illegal. edit: Downvotes are funny because we are almost certainly going to see laws passed in the next few years that are functionally equivalent to the rules stated above.

The downvotes you are getting is for not reading the article. Your comment is not on-topic.

I read the article. Why is what I wrote not on-topic?

I tend to think the government will find its attempts to rein in crypto will just feed into the anti-fragility of the whole thing, and the result will be increasingly nonsensical attempts to stomp it out up until capitulation.

And yes, this leads to a prediction that some very technologically illiterate legislators will probably draft rules that are semantically equivalent to what I wrote.

Re: EU to make Bitcoin traceable, ban anonymous crypto wallets

#53

Post by gruez »

dheera wrote: post #39
RivieraKid wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm mostly pro-EU but the cookie thing is just a display of unbelievable incompetence. It's ridiculous that they still haven't fixed the highly annoying popup problem.

Exactly, I block all cookies (except for a whitelist of sites I need to log into) and that ironically prevents the fucking popups from tracking that they have been clicked away or agreed to. I use uBlock origin and various CSS injection to get rid of the popups but they don't catch every single one of them. I wish the US would institute law making unsolicited (i.e. not triggered by a user click, like clicking on "Log…

>arrest the CEOs of companies that violate this, put them in a CEO jail for a week, and live stream their faces the entire time.

I was with you until this point. Then it just turned into vengeance porn.

Re: EU to make Bitcoin traceable, ban anonymous crypto wallets

#54

Post by hogFeast »

liuliu wrote: post #18
dt2m wrote: post #4

This is going to work out just as well as when the EU banned tracking cookies!

I know this is an unpopular take, but for sites (like Stackoverflow) that give me options (if they don't, some times I just skip), I will select "strict" and continue. This is probably an improvement from previous status-quo for me.

Yes, what people really need when they browse the internet is to be asked every ten seconds what kind of cookies they want, every time a different form with different options that loads so many third-party scripts that my browser chokes...and then you have to fill out the form.

I can see why bureaucrats like this system though, try to inflict the horror of their jobs onto everyone else.

And ofc, this makes no difference for tracking at all. Most people just click whatever option is the default, they have no idea what cookies are, they have no idea how the cookies are being used because the forms don't tell you...what is the decision that is supposedly been improved here? People are still being tracked, but we showed them a totally baffling form and they clicked "Yes"...society has been preserved.

Oh, and you have now split the internet into different regions...it was all worth it, no ragrats.

Re: EU to make Bitcoin traceable, ban anonymous crypto wallets

#55

Post by sennight »

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #9

Everybody who ever thought that crypto currencies will not come under this scrutiny was highly delusional. All other governments will follow soon.

Are you assuming that somebody thought that? Or did somebody share that opinion with you? I don't mean some anonymous person you argued with, I'm talking about a real person. Because I was involved back in the single digit days - and I never encountered that kind of sentiment. Things have actually played out as expected: governments stalling for time in a weird prisoner's dilemma by sowing as much uncertainty possible without hamstringing their economies for the next century.

Re: EU to make Bitcoin traceable, ban anonymous crypto wallets

#56

Post by thirtyseven »

gfodor wrote: post #38

In other news, the government has declared by decree that nobody is allowed to memorize seed phrases anymore. Also, multiplying prime numbers is now illegal. edit: Downvotes are funny because we are almost certainly going to see laws passed in the next few years that are functionally equivalent to the rules stated above.

In other news, the government has declared by decree that you can't move objects outside of an arbitrarily defined border that a piece of paper says is someone's "house", and then exchange those objects for different pieces of paper that the very same government has declared has value.

Re: EU to make Bitcoin traceable, ban anonymous crypto wallets

#58

Post by Daishiman »

anm89 wrote: post #30

The EU isn't doing anything to bitcoin. They have no ability to regulate bitcoin. They can make it traceable when it is held on kycd exchanges In their jurisdiction. That is a big difference

They have the same ability to regulate it as they do cash transactions. Which is to say, people will still find workarounds if they really want to take a shot at it, but forget about transacting with legit companies and institutions unless you want the spotlight shone on you.

Re: EU to make Bitcoin traceable, ban anonymous crypto wallets

#60

Post by laurent92 »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #16

Old news... also the people announcing it are actually idiots or misinformed on terminology because they aren't talking about local wallets on your computer. By "anonymous crypto wallets" they are talking about anonymous wallets on exchanges , which is very different than most people would think at first glance. This is not "send in the public key of every wallet you've ever touched to the tax service."

Next step: Forbid exchanges from exchanging with non-compliant wallets.
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