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EU to make Bitcoin traceable, ban anonymous crypto wallets

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

#91

Post by afiori »

nenadg wrote: post #74
burnished wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, where I live weed was decriminalized relatively recently. I could still get weed before, but I couldn't rock up some where and get a CBD soda, or a vape cartridge, or nice edibles, or a variety of products. In the same way you say "how will they ban anonymous wallets" you might say "how do you criminalize a plant", and thats by making possession illegal and following up on that by targeting people/places they e…

Looks like a ton of bureaucracy with little or no output. I agree, might be the same thing as a war against the drugs lmfao.

The War on Drugs was a matter of method and intensity; the aim was to completely and swiftly eradicate drug abuse rather than move societal incentives.

This could go either way, as far as I know both are possible

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

#92

Post by sennight »

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #81
sennight wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 possibl…

I am not assuming. People have shared that sentiment with me at the beginning of the crypto craze.

The beginning, like when people were commonly introduced to the concept through the whitepaper and a link to the reference client source? And those people thought "public ledger" meant "governments can’t track how I spend my money"? A short time after the USG shuttered a non-fractional, gold reserve backed, paypal-like financial network? Okey dokey.

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

#93

Post by gfodor »

burnished wrote: post #83
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.

Yeah, it would be, if done to pursue ends that the law has deemed criminal. This isn't the gotcha you might think it is, because no one is going to bat an eye at your attempt to boil the nuance of a law out in an effort to expose some underlying paradox that only matters on a technical level. I'm not saying that the law will be wise, or efficacious, or even really pertinent, just that we already have ways of reconcil…

I see where you are going, but I'm not arguing that the government won't be willing or able to enforce what transactions are permissible if they can prove the multiplication involved was used to facilitate an exchange.

What I am saying is that governments who are passing laws not to regulate transactions, but to prevent the use of cryptocurrencies in general, will fail due to a first principles analysis of what they'll be trying to do.

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

#94

Post by tpush »

RivieraKid wrote: post #28
dt2m wrote: post #4

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

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.

What do you want them to do about that? The vast majority of those popups are already illegal according to GDPR. More legislation wouldn't fix that, I think.

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

#95

Post by danaris »

eurasiantiger wrote: post #86
user-the-name wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments have no interest in being "ahead" in enabling fraud, crime and tax evasion.

You have a lot of trust in people. There are plenty of politicians with financial crime convictions and organised crime ties.

Sure, but even looking at the most corrupt, they have little incentive to enable fraud, crime, and tax evasion by people they're not already in mutually beneficial arrangements with, and none to enable it for people who won't give them a cut.

Do you want to give them a cut?

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

#96

Post by afiori »

nenadg wrote: post #69
viro wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

by making it a crime to have one or accept money from one? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯....

Good luck making it a crime to install program.

It is quite easy to criminalize distribution and possession of digital assets.

Also no one care if you bounce bitcoins between your own wallets, any governments just needs to regulate at the border: retail shops that accept crypto and exchanges of crypto/fiat are very easy to identify and regulate.

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

#97

Post by eulenteufel »

0xy wrote: post #49
lkramer wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that not make you wonder what it is that they want to track which is so incompatible with those regulations that they'd rather ban the traffic?

Tracking is a choice. uBlock Origin is a free download. Geoblocking is not a choice. EU citizens are worse off only having access to insular media with one viewpoint. If you're German and a significant amount of foreign media is either blocked or scorned, you end up enabling giant frauds like Wirecard. Germany's homegrown DW had fawning coverage of the fraud, calling it remarkable and a "weapon against poverty". [1]…

For what it's worth DW is not allowed to broadcast in Germany and therefore relatively unknown amongst Germans.

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

#98

Post by afiori »

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…

You are blocking a legitimate use of the web platform.

It is as if you set a dns to the other side of the globe, disabled browser cache and then complained that pages now take longer to load.

Tracking is bad, scary, and with worring consequences in how much ML can predict statical human behaviour, but the solution is not "cookies bad" or "ads bad".

If a website as any kind of first-onboarding interaction (be it a video, some marketing crap, asking for permissions, or whatever) and you disable _any_ form of tracking how are they supposed to know it is not your first visit?

Many of those website do not need to track you, many do so with malicious intent, but the concept of the consent modal itself serves a useful purpose

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

#99

Post by afiori »

paulgb wrote: post #40
liuliu wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see that point, but the problem I have is the sites that offer the option (and respect it) are probably the sites that were the least offensive with tracking to begin with.

Sound like a good rule of thumb on how much to trust a website

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

#100

Post by xtracto »

nenadg wrote: post #69
viro wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

by making it a crime to have one or accept money from one? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯....

Good luck making it a crime to install program.

> Good luck making it a crime to install program.

It is already a crime to passively posses certain combinations of bits (i.e. that directly or indirectly [zip, truecrypt] represent a child porn image).

It has been made illegal to possess the implementation of a mathematical function (i.e. Kerberos being a "Auxiliary Military Equipment"). It will be pretty trivial for the government to make it ilegal to download, posses or install a program (e.g that interacts in some way with the Bitcoin network).

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