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EU plans to make Bitcoin transfers more traceable

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Re: EU plans to make Bitcoin transfers more traceable

#181

Post by RandomLensman »

I am a little shocked at the policy and coalition building blindness here:

1) The KYC/AML/CFT burden is high for financial institutions, too, it is not like they want to spend all that money.

2) The efficacy of the measures is not uncontested by academia, regulators, and financial actors.

3) The CBDC discussions tend to have a thread on anonymous wallets, so why not for other things, too? Not like every low value artwork is government registered.

What does not work is open defiance, because if policy wants it can come for "you". Usually easier to go for the person but do not underestimate the effect of committing billions to software disruption either.

There are valid policy and regulatory points to made about what exchanges people should have anonymously and the pendulum on financial regulation is probably just at one of its peaks...

Re: EU plans to make Bitcoin transfers more traceable

#182

Post by thomasahle »

dannyw wrote: post #128
thomasahle wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cash mostly isn't allowed today, if you are transferring large enough sums of money. Probably for the better.

Better for whom? Because it's the Wikileaks, Snowdens, and Extinction Rebellions that get hurt by laws like these. In terms of money laundering for the rich, that's all through 'fine art' and real estate.

Even if visa and the others have stopped doing transactions to Snowden et al., I don't think sending them bitcoin is illegal? It shouldn't matter whether their accounts are anonymous

Re: EU plans to make Bitcoin transfers more traceable

#183

Post by pennaMan »

Barrin92 wrote: post #116
beiller wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not understanding your argument. You are against anonymous money? You realize what the alternative is? Credit cards. Ie you can only transact with visas permission, also they skim some cents off each transaction inflating all prices for all consumers. Have you heard about interest rates before? Because credit cards have the worst interest rate of any financial product. This is what centralized money gets us. The…

credit and debit cards are rate regulated in the EU to a 0.2% maximum fee and moving money between users these days is usually free completely with almost any payment service or bank account. Cryptocurrency fees are significantly more expensive, and process a fraction of the transactions. The ability to have a monetary policy is a bonus and it's the reason centralized money is price stable. If you were paid your sala…

>Cryptocurrency fees are significantly more expensive

That statement makes no sense. Crypto transfer fees are not a percentage of the transferred amount.

Re: EU plans to make Bitcoin transfers more traceable

#184

Post by pennaMan »

mdoms wrote: post #109
ushakov wrote: post #31

i'm shocked how ignorant these lawmakers are, trying to gain control over a decentralised structure nobody asked them for this and even if this change ends up in bitcoin's core, it will ultimately fail to reach consensus our wallets are none of your business, EU, get out!

> nobody asked them for this I'm in favour of regulating and tracing cryptocurrency. I don't think people should be able to sell kiddie porn, bribe officials, scam innocent people or launder money with impunity. I think lots of people would agree with me.

Criminals by definition do not care how many laws and regulations a honest person has to deal or wrongly go to prison for.

Re: EU plans to make Bitcoin transfers more traceable

#185

Post by monkeydust »

aledalgrande wrote: post #132
api wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The location is where the secret key is stored. Wallet data is distributed but wallet holders are not. In any case this kind of thing will be implemented by mandating it at the exchanges where crypto is converted to/from traditional currencies, making it impossible to actually use crypto (legally) without complying.

There are other systems to exchange fiat for crypto, including but not limited to in person transactions and peer to peer marketplaces.

Peer to peer as in DEXs such as uniswap, sushiswap? They will be more challenging to regulate for sure. I kinda see this regulation and others coming as a way for authorities to keep control of current financial establishment...hence also lot of talk about central bank coins ...very interesting to see how this plays out in next 5yrs

Re: EU plans to make Bitcoin transfers more traceable

#186

Post by pennaMan »

thomasahle wrote: post #182
dannyw wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better for whom? Because it's the Wikileaks, Snowdens, and Extinction Rebellions that get hurt by laws like these. In terms of money laundering for the rich, that's all through 'fine art' and real estate.

Even if visa and the others have stopped doing transactions to Snowden et al., I don't think sending them bitcoin is illegal? It shouldn't matter whether their accounts are anonymous

>I don't think sending them bitcoin is illegal?

Well, according to the EU, not yet.

Re: EU plans to make Bitcoin transfers more traceable

#187

Post by CuriousCosmic »

seanalexander wrote: post #129
Trias11 wrote: post #10

That's why the move to decentralized everything. This total control nonsense will eventually end and these dinosaur idiots will stuck with their own destructive ideas

If it's a decentralized database then how does it enhance privacy?

Something like Monero or ZCash is decentralised by the same (or similar) means that Bitcoin and Ethereum are however they use various mechanisms to maintain privacy.

Monero uses ring signatures and several other mechanisms to separate a transaction from the sender, recipient, and contents so that you can't reconstruct chains of transactions but you can still verify consistency across the blocks. Monero is reasonably private but it's still technically possible to rebuild some fragments of transaction chains even if it's extremely unlikely.

ZCash on the other hand uses Zero Knowledge Proofs to verify correctness of the blocks and the transactions without leaking information about the system (such as the sender, recipient, or amounts). ZCash is much more computationally expensive, needs to be carefully callibrated, and needs the founding keys to be safely destroyed following the bootstrap of the system to remain secure however it does provide stronger and more easily mathematically verifiable assurances of privacy. "The Ceremony" is a really good one-off podcast about the story.

But in general it is possible to have privacy preserving functionality in decentralised services, it just requires far more complicated maths and lots of statistics to make work correctly.

Re: EU plans to make Bitcoin transfers more traceable

#188

Post by delaaxe »

d--b wrote: post #141

I’m amazed by how short sighted most of the comments here are. When it comes to large financial operations, society has clearly chosen transparency over privacy. Cause guess what, tax evasion, money laundering, political fixing, terrorism financing are things that exist and really are hurtful to our economies. Stop fantasizing that the government cares about the shit you buy. This is not about you. And Bitcoin’s anon…

> You can’t show up in a bank with a bucket load of $100 bills and open an anonymous bank account.

You used to be able to do this at HSBC, and for a very long time, before all these annoying KYC laws

Re: EU plans to make Bitcoin transfers more traceable

#189

Post by forty »

chrisco255 wrote: post #148
forty wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really sure your comment was criticizing anything though, just stating fact. Whether this is good or bad is a matter of opinion. Personally I'm more than happy to see cash disappear since I think it's mostly useful for laundering money and tax avoidance.

It's useful for privacy, which is a basic human right. It's useful if electronic systems go down. It's useful in an emergency situation. It's useful for donations. It's useful for instant settlement. You're more than happy to give away your financial sovereignty and to take away your optionality because you think they'll collect more taxes from it?

Financial sovereignty? I'm not sure what you mean exactly, but cash has value just because the states says so. If they ever said it's just paper, the next day it's worth 0. And I don't use cash already so I'm not giving anything away :)

In my country, privacy doesn't include hiding financial transactions from the state. I think they have the right to know everything on this topic, even though cash obviously makes it harder for them (and more expensive for them, so for the tax payer). I don't really see how I benefit from that except that I need to pay more taxes to make up for those who use cash to hide their taxable transactions.

Absolutely agree on the fallback in case of downtime from the payment systems. We'll have to find a good solution to that probably before dropping cash completely. (Note that I never said that cash can/should be dropped right now. They are other missing things, like garantying that anyone can get a payment mean for free)

Re: EU plans to make Bitcoin transfers more traceable

#190

Post by seanalexander »

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #187
seanalexander wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's a decentralized database then how does it enhance privacy?

Something like Monero or ZCash is decentralised by the same (or similar) means that Bitcoin and Ethereum are however they use various mechanisms to maintain privacy. Monero uses ring signatures and several other mechanisms to separate a transaction from the sender, recipient, and contents so that you can't reconstruct chains of transactions but you can still verify consistency across the blocks. Monero is reasonably…

Cool, thanks for the resources!
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