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EU to ban anonymous crypto accounts and privacy coins by 2027

cointelegraph.com

51–60 of 139 posts

Re: EU to ban anonymous crypto accounts and privacy coins by 2027

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I think is that your argument is in bad faith and breaking HN rules. The governments, being useless and focusing on the wrong things, are banning objectively non-nefarious objects (ninja swords, anonymous coins) that can be use for good by good actors (cutting stuff in the garden, sending money in privacy) but are sometimes used for evil by bad actors (murder, money laundering), like many other things. How can r…

> ninja swords > cutting stuff in the garden Wait, are you talking about like using a Ninja sword as a gardening tool? Or do you mean something like playing Fruit Ninja IRL in your backyard, chopping up watermelons and other fruits being thrown around in the air, for fun?

The swinging bladed tool people might use for gardening is a machete, which (absurdly) is banned under separate legislation along with "zombie knives", whatever the hell that is (some sort of serration?)

You have to understand that as a headline factory. The Offensive Weapons Act already prohibits carrying anything with the intent of using it as a weapon. Police routinely confiscate kitchen knives from the pockets of young men in stop-and-search. The specific bans on specific weapons are part of a stupid media cycle where a crime is carried out using a fancy weapon so the government legislates against that specific weapon. It's like trying to outlaw cryptocurrencies by banning them by name one at a time. It's incredibly stupid but a tradition of UK politics because it's easier than trying to untangle the actual problems of knife crime.

It's also a UK thing, not an EU thing. There isn't an EU level knife directive, rules vary; Czechia and Finland seem to be loosest from some brief googling.

Re: EU to ban anonymous crypto accounts and privacy coins by 2027

#52
post #44
post #28

Monero in particular absolutely terrifies governments and financial institutions - you can tell because it's been banned and delisted practically everywhere. This gives me great confidence in it. Not as a speculative asset, but as a means of having truly private transactions.

In a way Monero is more a cryptocurrency than Bitcoin. A fast, cheap, global, and private currency; in contrast to the speculative asset that is Bitcoin.

Bitcoin advocates pivoted on Bitcoin being a currency after it, to be brutally honest, failed to function as a currency. Last few times I transacted BTC, the fees were anywhere between $5 and $15 and the transaction times were more than 1hr. Not to mention the whole world can see all of your transactions.

So they pivoted the marketing to it being a "store of value".

Re: EU to ban anonymous crypto accounts and privacy coins by 2027

#53
post #45

> Under the new Anti-Money Laundering Regulation (AMLR), credit institutions, financial institutions and crypto asset service providers (CASPs) will be prohibited from maintaining anonymous accounts or handling privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies, such as Monero This isn't really an issue, AML exists for a reason, having had experience in countries where corruption was extremely bad, AML combined with solid privacy o…

> People can complain about "I want fully private transactions" - Okay then use cash.

I want fully private transactions over the internet, cant use cash with someone a continent away.

Re: EU to ban anonymous crypto accounts and privacy coins by 2027

#54
post #48

The fact that Bitcoin itself has never been banned strongly suggests that it was government approved from the beginning or even developed at the NSA. The tracking is a feature, and many governments want a CBDC. What does the CIA think? The CIA thinks Bitcoin is great: https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/bitcoin-price-million-cia...

Have you read the article ? The currencies are not being BANNED, simply anonymous accounts are, this is standard practice in financial institutions where you're required to Know Your Customer (KYC) and provide Anti Money Laundering (AML) provisions.

I have. Handling Monero, presumably for real currency conversions, is banned. If that were done for Bitcoin worldwide, the price would collapse, because it is no longer useful for, e.g., sanctions evasion.

By the way, the article itself claims:

"The European Union is set to impose sweeping Anti-Money Laundering (AML) rules that will ban privacy-preserving tokens and anonymous cryptocurrency accounts from 2027."

This statement is walked back later.

Re: EU to ban anonymous crypto accounts and privacy coins by 2027

#55

I wonder what the impact will be on ransomware attacks. It'll probably make it harder for people who aren't in "bullet-proof" countries (i.e. without good cooperation with to receive ransom payment, which sounds like a good thing. It could also cause some decidedly negative effects during the transition, when companies that really want to pay a ransom (because they cannot recover otherwise) are unable to.

My understanding is most ransoms are already paid in bitcoin. (or some other public ledger coin?) Privacy coins would probably be preferable for criminals to receive but they aren't as easy to purchase as bitcoin which I'd imagine significantly reduces the likelihood they get paid at all. Since most of these ransomware groups are hosted in countries with uncooperative governments the public ledger isn't really an impediment anyway.

Re: EU to ban anonymous crypto accounts and privacy coins by 2027

#56
post #4

[flagged]

The EU's legislation has been decidedly mixed, and not an unalloyed good. Makes me wish there was a functional mechanism by which different jurisdictions could have an overall collaborative framework and experiment with different approaches without eventually deciding to force others to comply. I had some hope of the EU being that, but both the US and the EU have trended towards homogenization. I wonder if, in a hund…

So the thing about physical cash is that handling it gets (roughly) linearly harder with the amount. Whether that's coins, notes, silver, gold or whatever. It is relatively easy to hand over $100 for private purposes, but it is seriously difficult to move $100,000,000 without attracting attention.

Digital money flattens that out. With cryptocurrency you can move either of those values equally easy. A few times people have done so by mistake!

This presents a new kind of risk, because suddenly a completely invisible empire of organized crime, bribery, or enough money to destabilize a government is possible. The EU is choosing the "high trust, high transparency, high enforcement" path. The US is now choosing the "open bribery of the President through his personal cryptocurrency" approach. Let's see how that works out.

(meanwhile, all the "police/courts rob person of their life savings in cash" asset forfeiture stories I hear about are from the US? Doesn't this happen in Europe? Or could it be that the different legal structure doesn't facilitate this?)

Re: EU to ban anonymous crypto accounts and privacy coins by 2027

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any example of when these powers were abused? Where I am, we have seen massive money laundering scandals, and I have yet to hear of anyone abusing it. My read is that the abuse currently comes from not applying it enough to stuff you want to make money from, not over applying it to things you disagree with.

It's a component of pervasive surveillance. But, as one of many examples, consider the many stories of someone going around with a larger than commonly carried amount of cash, such as the deposits of a business that accepts cash or the savings of someone who is underbanked, and is presumed to be up to something and that pretense is used to seize the cash with no recourse or reasonable legal proceeding or likely hope…

> consider the many stories of someone going around with a larger than commonly carried amount of cash, such as the deposits of a business that accepts cash or the savings of someone who is underbanked, and is presumed to be up to something and that pretense is used to seize the cash with no recourse or reasonable legal proceeding or likely hope of timely recovery.

.. in the US. I'm sure there must be examples of this happening in Europe, but it seems much less of a thing?

Re: EU to ban anonymous crypto accounts and privacy coins by 2027

#58
post #46

I'm a foreigner living in the EU for many years, here's my 2 cents. For over a year, I was locked out of financial services due to my inability to pass KYC. The reason was that I had already left one country, but was still in the process of getting a residency visa in another. During the process, I'm allowed to live in this country, but I have no ability to prove it to any financial institutions. So, no wonder I'm bi…

I assume there will never be any implementation side to focus on, if there's no legal side to push for it. Because as we can clearly see around us, the tech boys don't give a zit on your accesses and privacy and rights, so they have to be pushed to care.

Re: EU to ban anonymous crypto accounts and privacy coins by 2027

#59
post #45

> Under the new Anti-Money Laundering Regulation (AMLR), credit institutions, financial institutions and crypto asset service providers (CASPs) will be prohibited from maintaining anonymous accounts or handling privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies, such as Monero This isn't really an issue, AML exists for a reason, having had experience in countries where corruption was extremely bad, AML combined with solid privacy o…

> People can complain about "I want fully private transactions" - Okay then use cash. I want fully private transactions over the internet, cant use cash with someone a continent away.

I wonder, how private is hawala? Anyone knowing it enough to chime in?

Re: EU to ban anonymous crypto accounts and privacy coins by 2027

#60

Finally. It's a failed experiment by grifters and suckers. It had it's chance at being useful, time to get it out of public conscience so we can work on actual issues.

Monero does -exactly- what it is designed to do and is used by plenty of people for real transactions not just speculation. Grifters always gonna grift.
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