Why Isn't Bitcoin Banned Everywhere?

https://hackernoon.com/why-isnt-bitcoin-banned-everywhere-32a2caec90

by morpheos137 • 5 years ago

52 126 5 years ago

I think the writer's speculation about government central banks buying Bitcoin in the future is economically illiterate...

ilaksh4• 5 years ago

Right. I think it's a good explanation.

I am very hopeful about Ethereum 2.0. But as the article says, it seems that if it really starts to have high transaction rates that make it compete as real money or even see things like distributed autonomous organizations take off, governments will probably protect their turf.

Here are a couple of fantasy scenarios. First, maybe government will just not be able to effectively ban Ethereum, despite trying. And a new era of decentralization and effective and fair international cooperation flourishes.

Or two, maybe instead of WWIII, countries decide to work together to create a new international system, based on a shared currency built on Ethereum and tied to a comprehensive decentralized resource tracking system (possibly bringing in other distributed protocols). Designed to ensure food, housing, sustainability, and security security for the global populace and cut back on runaway inequality. It will be a new type of economics, more sophisticated and based on sustainable practices rather than infinite growth.

Well I did say they were fantasies.

JumpCrisscross7• 5 years ago

Designed to ensure food, housing, sustainability, and security security for the global populace and cut back on runaway inequality

Why do you think a deflationary currency built on staking assets would reduce inequality?

ilaksh4• 5 years ago

It's a starting point that provides much more capability than something like a traditional currency. The potentially deflationary aspects can be changed with source code modifications if necessary.

But I did mention other decentralized technologies. What I was proposing was a massive social-technological engineering task rather than a complete solution.

But it seems obvious that the economic tools we are working with are severely outdated and insufficient.

epx• 5 years ago

Bitcoin happens to be a handy money sink. Governments did nothing to deter the real estate bubble because it helped/helps to sink excess liquidity. (It is long debated that inflation rates are bogus because they don’t take the price increase of houses into consideration). For me, if this Bitcoin craze helps to keep low the prices of things I want, I am happy.

listenallyall3• 5 years ago

what's cheap? food? nope. gasoline? nope. lumber or housing materials? definitely nope. a decent computer? nope. financial assets? nope. healthcare? nope. tv set? ok sure.

twelve402• 5 years ago

stock (sp500): one year ago: 2500. Today: 4000.

retail gas in US: one year ago: 2.41. Today: 2.86.

So yes, compared to some major asset classes that are omitted from consumer inflation calculations, gas is "cheap".

rawtxapp4• 5 years ago

It's simple, you can't ban it. You can ban the on-ramps and off-ramps, you can't ban p2p transactions.

baby8• 5 years ago

Yes you can, you could shut down access to seed peers IPs, to miner pool IPs, at the exchange level, etc.

rawtxapp4• 5 years ago

What do you mean by pool IPs?

edit: after your clarification, you can easily use tor, IP addresses can be easily changed, miner's don't have to use the same IP address, they can solve the block wherever they want and broadcast it from wherever they want. There is even satellite blockchain connections now.

At exchange level, that's what I mean by on-ramp and off-ramp, that would only push exchanges to decentralized platforms and to black markets.

jMyles5• 5 years ago

OK, so it's perhaps possible to ban it by completely changing the nature of the internet (and hoping that each block isn't beamed down from satellites). If that's the yardstick, then I think it's not unreasonable to simply say it can't plausibly be banned.

marcinzm• 5 years ago

Technically governments can't ban anything but they can discourage anyone from doing something by levying massive penalties if they are caught. Which in practice means those without power go to jail for it while those with power can do whatever they want with it.

14• 5 years ago

Exactly. I recently saw a near by forest tourist area closed off with threat of $143 fine. I thought damn I have that cash I could literally go for a private picnic in the woods worst case is $143. I can afford that. Then I realized that mentality must exist to a greater extent with the rich. Park where they want and just pay the ticket. Ignore rules and for anything and perhaps just pay a fine.

jayd16• 5 years ago

Sure you can. Banning doesn't mean eradicating. Making it illegal or taxed heavily would push it underground and tank adoptions. People will still be able to break the law and use it, but no businesses will invest.

In fact its extremely easy to go after users seeing as its a public ledger and all that. You can claim some laundering schemes will protect users but any significant movement of money will be trackable unless your opsec is perfect.

rawtxapp4• 5 years ago

Making it illegal or taxed heavily would push it underground and tank adoptions.

I agree with you! It wouldn't stop it though, just like prohibition didn't stop alcohol consumption. If anything, it would make the system more resilient over time. Besides, the governments would want to retain some control through exchanges, rather than lose all control and possible tax benefits, etc.

JumpCrisscross7• 5 years ago

Banning doesn't mean eradicating

Eradicating Bitcoin wouldn’t be that hard. Publicly committing to repeatedly launching 51% attacks is well within the budget of many governments. It would singularly destroy the currency without even requiring criminal statute. Hell, I think the President could do it without permission from Congress.

But why? Why do that? Bitcoin threatens nobody. It underwrites a lot of wealth. And voters don’t care about it.

contravariant• 5 years ago

Sure, but if you ban the on-ramps and off-ramps you've mostly blocked the ways people can obtain and use bitcoins.

You could also ban mining if you wanted to, though that's slightly more difficult to enforce.

acdha7• 5 years ago

A nation state has a number of effective measures to block it: require ISPs to block its port and major sites, put punitive taxes on any exchange points into the local currency, require people to certify under oath the origin of funds they’re using for transactions, etc. Since Bitcoin helpfully provides the government with a full transaction log, it’s extremely risky to try to bypass these controls since your history is revealed if you or anyone you have ever dealt with leaks your identity. They also have enough capacity to either do a 51% attack directly or to compromise enough miners to get there – does anyone think those groups are NSA-proof?

The better question is why they’d want to. For example, the U.S. government doesn’t have an ideological crusade – pay your taxes, follow anti-money laundering laws, etc. and they don’t care.

yawaworht1978• 5 years ago

Governments do not want to ban things, they want to have them subjected tk kyc, aml , taxes if possible. They are also slow to adapt, laws cannot be passed with the stroke of a pen.

And btc is not really anonymous.

The government does not need monetary policy to be in charge. They need firepower and a monopoly on law enforcement.

bondarchuk• 5 years ago

A store of value is not threatening

Quite so. After all, every other store of value is mostly owned by the ruling class. The way to neutralize the threat of a new store of value is simply to own it. I don't think it is too late for that. Elites already own 6.5% of the total supply: https://bitcointreasuries.org/

throwaway8581• 5 years ago

People forget that government authority comes from their monopoly on the right to bust down your door, take your physical possessions, and imprison you. Sure, you might have billions of dollars worth of BTC, but that's no good for you from the inside of a prison cell or if the government prevents you from acquiring the physical possessions that wealth normally lets you buy.

If you come up with some way to cheat the tax man, the tax man will come up with a way to make you pay interest and penalties. One man can evade all of the taxes, and all people can evade some of the taxes, but all people can't evade all of the taxes. The state always wins and will always take as much of a cut of the economy as it wants to.

doggosphere4• 5 years ago

At some point people just leave. Or revolt. There's a reason there isn't a 90% income tax.

JumpCrisscross7• 5 years ago

At some point people just leave. Or revolt.

Sure. But this has almost nothing to do with which currency is used.

jokethrowaway• 5 years ago

It looks like governments in the world keep getting bigger and bigger. If all western countries all agreed to raise taxes, people wouldn't have much of a choice.

Is saving more of your income worth living in Africa, South America or South Asia? There have been proposals for a Global Minimum Tax which is pretty scary.

There are also alternative ways to redistribute wealth from individuals to a centralised state. The Great Reset seems to go in this direction.

heavyset_go3• 5 years ago

There was a 91-92% top marginal tax rate 70 years ago, and there wasn't a mass exodus or revolt.

People with incomes that high have too much to lose in a revolution. Also, part of being filthy rich is living wherever you want without having to worry about the cost, which is why most rich people live in the most expensive locales in first world countries.

coinward5• 5 years ago

Power like what you've described comes from control of the money supply. If I have billions of dollars worth of BTC I may start paying men with guns to defend me from the other men with guns, well then we have a power struggle.

JumpCrisscross7• 5 years ago

Power like what you've described comes from control of the money supply

So Ecuador [1] and every member of the Eurozone are powerless? As well as practically every revolutionary force in history? What about governments when we were on the gold standard?

If I have billions of dollars worth of BTC I may start paying men with guns to defend me from the other men with guns, well then we have a power struggle

This works equally well with your holding Bitcoins or dollars or renmimbi. Wealth conveys power. Whether it is held in gold or Bitcoin or Amazon stock is irrelevant.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_of_Ecuador

toxik• 5 years ago

A Bitcoin-funded military coup. Now that’s sci-fi stuff!

specialist• 5 years ago

My phrasing: the USA military determines the value of the USA dollar.

I binged on David Graeber last year. I so appreciate criticisms of the Liberal tradition from outside of the Liberal (left vs right) sphere. It's like only being able to appreciate the forest once you get out of the forest.

Anyway. Graeber asks a lot of hard questions. Such as "What is money?" And provides historical precedents which may lead to answers. Like prior relationships between money, currency, debt, empire, military, markets, capitalism.

For a long time, governments minted gold (or whatever) into currency. Then we adopted some kind of virtual currency, so now there's more money than their is actual currency. (Which, humorously, is not first time in history.)

More recently, non government systems like bitcoin are minting electricity into currency. I don't really care that "there's no there there". Meaning the lack of a physical existence (eg gold or unobtainium or whatever) doesn't bother me.

However, I am concerned that there's no big ass military compelling everyone to treat bitcoin as a fiat currency. Until then, bitcoin is just an escrow or collectible.

A very, very fragile escrow.

It feels like the tulip bulb craze. aka Castles in the sky. Bitcoin's preceived value is held up by everyone's belief that they can sell their holdings to the next sucker.

Which is fine. Until it isn't.

What happens when the inevitable shock happens? When there's the equivalent of a run on the bank? When everyone tries to "withdraw" by converting bitcoin to US dollars at the same time?

Who's gonna step in and stabilize the system?

Right now, no one.

So then all that currency, minted bitcoin, just goes up in smoke. Poof.

We've seen this story play out so many times.

kjrose4• 5 years ago

My explanation is that Bitcoin is precisely the opposite of anonymous. If everyone started to use a currency like this it would almost impossible to hide transactions without obviously using something like a "bitcoin laundry service" which in itself would be easy to make illegal.

Essentially, you want to guarantee a way for governments to be able to track every transaction, this would be the way to do it.

That being said, I am not anti bitcoin, I just don't see it as a privacy thing.

grumple• 5 years ago

This is the real answer. It allows governments around the world to easily track all of your transactions- without subpoenas or laws required.

kjrose4• 5 years ago

I'm amazed at how many people don't get this. Like the sec would kill for this level of control.

thatswrong02• 5 years ago

Yeah I don't know how anyone with a cursory knowledge about how it works would think that it's about privacy. Especially when there are alternatives (such as Monero) that do explicitly try to solve that problem.

acdha7• 5 years ago

Have you ever known someone who got involved in some MLM scheme and didn’t want to admit that they a) didn’t check the sales pitch and b) have no way to make more money than they put in unless they convince you to buy something? Bitcoin is the tech version of that.

baobolus• 5 years ago

It's impossible to make coinjoins ("bitcoin laundry service") illegal as they can be run p2p and over tor. EDIT: you can of course make them illegal, however it's impossible to enforce that.

You could however make "accepting" coinjoined UTXO's illegal, but the lightning network fixes this (you can use coinjoined coins to open channels, lightning payments do not know the payer).

If a government decides you need to do full kyc to buy a coffee, then it might be time to emigrate :D

acdha7• 5 years ago

It’s trivial to require all businesses not to touch transactions involving a list of addresses. Once that happens, all these games fall apart because trying to obscure the identity means that people will only participate in them if they intend to break the law and after the first busts they’ll learn that it’s a bad idea to publish that intention to a public ledger.

gruez5• 5 years ago

If a government decides you need to do full kyc to buy a coffee, then it might be time to emigrate :D

The more likely scenario would be that it's treated like cash. You're not going to be questioned for using it to buy coffee, but if you decide to buy a house with a sack of cash they'll start asking questions.

hypersoar• 5 years ago

You can actually test that regulators are doing exactly this. There are a few digital currencies which (attempt to) protect the anonymity of all transactions. Monero is the most popular such coin. Go try and exchange some directly with fiat currency. You'll find that it's quite a bit more difficult than with bitcoin. Most legitimate exchanges don't take Monero to stay within anti-money laundering regulations.

baby8• 5 years ago

Looks like coinbase, kraken and binance have zcash. What do you make of that?

laurent92• 5 years ago

Fun thing, I looked it up for banknotes. Turns out there are only 15 billion euro banknotes. Fits in a Postgres database! Most of the cycles are extremely short: Withdraw at the ATM, pay at the bakery, back to the bank. If banks took note of note numbers, it would probably be straightforward to trace 80% of the transactions. And trace banknotes that stayed 6 months offline, and those that are always withdrawn by someone and used in a specific suburb (=possible drug deal), especially when he pays everything else with credit card.

Of course it is 20x less efficient than tracking Bitcoins, and requires input sources from several places, but it’s fun to know that even banknotes are quite easily traceable.

jMyles5• 5 years ago

The post glosses over the most obvious explanation: because any serious and widespread ban will cause its price to soar, and this will be both an embarrassment to the state(s) in question and, if it truly is threatening in some way, make it moreso.

I'm astonished at the way this is hand-waved:

Remember, if governments truly believed Bitcoin were a threat, they would outlaw it and shut down cryptocurrency exchanges. This would crater prices and liquidity. It would not be the end of Bitcoin of course, but it would be the end of Bitcoin’s dream of displacing gold.

...what? Is there any example of government banning something and that thing later appearing in an illicit market at a lower price? I can't think of one.

amelius3• 5 years ago

You're missing the fact that people can still invest in other things.

jMyles5• 5 years ago

Am I? In what way do you think that the presence of a nearly infinite number of other instruments changes the tendency for illicit markets to price things at a premium?

JumpCrisscross7• 5 years ago

Not every country controls its own currency [1]. Sovereignty and monetary authority are distinct.

(I’m personally increasingly convinced that the U.S. dollar’s reserve currency status no longer benefits America [2].)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_of_Ecuador

[2] https://carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancialmarkets/56856

kkwteh2• 5 years ago

It seems to me there is one important reason which isn't mentioned here. Attempting to ban Bitcoin would just confirm the need for its existence, giving it a ton of credibility and making it all the more compelling. Any ban attempt would simply be counterproductive.

frankbreetz• 5 years ago

This is not true. Whether you believe it or not, there are several reasons the government could use to ban bitcoin and say they are protecting the customer.

-It's a speculative bubble, that will cause a transfer of wealth from the poor to rich(I.E. Hedge funds will find a way to front run)

- It uses a ton of energy, with the climate accords they could get many countries to ban it at once. Why should a few bitcoin holders be allowed to destroy the plant.

Whether these arguments hold water or not( I think they both do) They both at least make sense and the majority of people can understand them.

kkwteh2• 5 years ago

It’s not clear to me how the public would receive these kinds of arguments. The public has little trust in government. I think they would be too skeptical to take these arguments at face value. A ban attempt would come with considerable risk it seems to me.

biolurker13• 5 years ago

No bitcoin was not starting a new shadow financial system. Op has the wrong idea. You don't base such a system on the most transparent money the world has ever seen. Why do people even tech people think that bitcoin is shadow money when it's traçable and designed to be so? That's such a mystery. I think people want it to be shadow so they can blame it or just that they like conspiracies and illuminati.

tejohnso• 5 years ago

Why do people even tech people think that bitcoin is shadow money when it's traçable and designed to be so?

As I understand it, it is designed to be easily verifiable by any participant. How is it designed to be traceable?

biolurker13• 5 years ago

Go on blockchain.info and track all money exchanges. Pick one and track all its history. It's like the universe you can see as far as the big bang.

coinward5• 5 years ago

The reason is that there is no entanglement to the material world which allows you to remain pseudonymous if you choose so

biolurker13• 5 years ago

You mean you can't buy stuff with paper dollars? Can someone track those dollars?

heavyset_go3• 5 years ago

No bitcoin was not starting a new shadow financial system

If Bitcoin started a new shadow financial system, then so did collectible card games and Ebay.

paulpauper• 5 years ago

This is a bad article. Governments are pushing back by trying to destroy the fungibility of bitcoin through blocklists and kyc

CyberRabbi• 5 years ago

The same reason any asset isn’t banned by governments. Government overreach notwithstanding, we still have a legal system based on economic liberty. The only thing illegal about Bitcoin, like any non-monetary asset, is not playing taxes when you trade it.

mrkramer• 5 years ago

Some useful links:

[1] Is Bitcoin Legal?

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/121515/bitcoin-lega...

[2] Legality of bitcoin by country or territory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_bitcoin_by_country...

99_005• 5 years ago

Bitcoin cannot break government's Monopoly on monitarey policy because you must, under threat of violence use the government's currency. If are productive you must use it to pay taxes. If you are dependent on government you must use it if you want government support.

louloulou7• 5 years ago

In Germany it's considered "private money". How is that not breaking "government's monopoly on monetarey policy"? They never had such a thing to begin with.

99_005• 5 years ago

How is that not breaking "government's monopoly on monetarey policy"?

You tell me why/how it is breaking the "government's monopoly on monetary policy, since it's your example.

parsimo2010• 5 years ago

I think the author comes pretty close to what I think is the right answer: on the scale of nations, BTC doesn't matter. It's an experiment. It's not more anonymous than paper currency, and not much more effective at laundering money. Governments aren't worried about it because it isn't really changing anything. If I want to buy a nuke, tank, or a fighter jet, BTC isn't solving the the hard problems related to that (taking delivery of said nuke, tank, or jet without being intercepted). BTC is enabling stoners to buy drugs online, and frankly, governments aren't that worried because stoners were already buying drugs.

I also don't think it's so much as "governments don't care about people storing wealth" so much as "it's not storing wealth." It's not worth as much as you think it is, and it's not that good at storing wealth (I will accept that it may be a decent high-risk opportunity for growth). The current $1 trillion market cap is calculated by assuming all of the 18.65 million BTC ever mined could be sold at the current asking price. But they can't be, because the order books aren't that deep and never will be, plus there are a lot of mined BTC that are in wallets with lost keys. It's probably still worth more than some small countries, but BTC definitely isn't worth $1 trillion. And when you consider BTC as a store of wealth, gold is a way better choice. I don't want my store of wealth to be experiencing gargantuan shifts in value over a few weeks.

It might sound like I'm shitting on BTC. I'm not, I think it's a cool experiment. I like the idea of being able to transfer money to friends without fees, and I'm glad that crypto helps keep banks honest. It was certainly novel. If I were to shit on anyone, it would be cryptocurrency bros that are full of themselves and think that their one thing is going to turn the world upside down. I'm for BTC as long as people don't get too hung up about it and instead we see BTC as helping us figure out ways to do financial things better.

gruez5• 5 years ago

The current $1 trillion market cap is calculated by assuming all of the 18.65 million BTC ever mined could be sold at the current asking price. But they can't be, because the order books aren't that deep and never will be

You can say that about literally any asset because "market cap" doesn't mean "liquidation price".

morpheos1374• 5 years ago

Assets that have a real income stream behind them at least have a price floor. For example you would not expect a house to sell for less than the present value of some number of years rent, you would not expect the sum of shares of a company to sell for less than the liquidation value of its assets less its liabilities, etc. Bitcoin has precisely 0 equity or income stream attached to it. It is not an income producing asset. It does not grant claim to real assets like a bond or a stock. There is zero underlying. That is why the term "Bitcoin market cap" is BS. There is nothing to capitalise. Bitcoin could be priced at $0 or $1,000,000 either way its present price per unit does not relate to the net value of all Bitcoins as a market cap would.

howmayiannoyyou• 5 years ago

Alternative explanations:

1. BTC is a proxy for gold and greatly relieves pressure on gold prices and the money-center banks and sovereigns accumulating/trading gold.

2. BTC circumvents capital controls in countries where those with the power to stop BTC are using it move funds into free market economies; and those free market economies are happy to see the outflows from adversarial regimes.

3. BTC (and crypto in general) expands global liquidity without the need to print even more USD/EUR/RMB.

4. A failure/crash of BTC - should it occur - would result in a flight to USD/US Treasuries and the like. If you're looking for a possible conspiratorial outcome - look here.

5. Massive money supply growth has laid bare the need for an alternative currency, and even USGOV/EU/CCP recognizes the need.

louloulou7• 5 years ago

At the end of the day Bitcoin is free speech. It's open source code that people run which allows them to sync and update a database.

It is untenable to ban such a thing in "free" societies and have people still buy in to the idea that they are free.

bcrl• 5 years ago

The code is free speech. Using it is not, however difficult enforcing that may be. Plenty of actions individuals may undertake are outlawed in modern society.

louloulou7• 5 years ago

How is using it not free speech? You're literally just signing a message and sending it to other nodes on the network.

baby8• 5 years ago

Ever heard of popcorn time?

choward• 5 years ago

If it came down to it, and central banks felt a digital currency posed enough of a threat, they would happily incentivize (or mandate) usage of their own currency in order to maintain sovereign monetary policy.

They already do mandate it which is why they don't see it as a threat. It's called taxes, fees, and fines. In the US you can only pay those in dollars so there's your demand for their own currency.

heavyset_go3• 5 years ago

This article uses the phrase "store of value" 11 times to describe Bitcoin. How is an asset that is as volatile Bitcoin considered a store of value and not a speculative asset?

louloulou7• 5 years ago

Because it has a fixed supply and known issuance schedule. Its supply has basically zero volatility. It has price volatility relative to other currencies because the market is having a hard time evaluating how much such a thing is worth.

coinward5• 5 years ago

Price discovery is a volatile thing

coinward5• 5 years ago

I've been using Bitcoin as money(store of value, unit of account, means of payment) as much as possible for the last 5 years.

From the perspective of a "pioneering early adopter", Bitcoin does not seem volatile. Instead, it seems like prices across the board are going down and everything is getting cheaper.

The effect on me is that since my saving is rewarded, I'm now way better at saving. I've stopped making irrational, impulse purchases. I'm far more in tune with my spending.

I'm also able to keep the purchasing power I earn from working. This beats the hell out of losing it slowly.

Volatility hasn't been a problem for me.

benreesman• 5 years ago

Governments have a label for financial activity they don’t like: “money-laundering” (or if you really piss someone off “financing terrorism”). I’ve never understood the techno-libertarian bloc of crypto enthusiasts. If someone were to succeed to at “decentralizing finance” they would land in prison if they were lucky, and if a nation sheltered them it would be sanctioned if it was lucky.

If I awoke from a fever dream with the unbreakable government-proof cryptography currency paper scribbled on a legal pad I’d burn it.

tlb• 5 years ago

Bitcoin is wildly profitable for governments whose citizens hold it. They can tax it as capital gains (when transferred or eventually as part of an estate) which means in the long term they'll get something like 25% of the market cap every 50 years.

ur-whale• 5 years ago

Not all countries have capital gains.

xiphias2• 5 years ago

There's another reason (that is actually written in the whitepaper): governments are made up of people. The people who recognize how powerful Bitcoin is can make more money from buying/mining it than attacking it. This game theory also works when governments are fighting eachother. Many people suspect that governments will have to get into Bitcoin mining in the future, as it will be part of national security.

jonahbenton• 5 years ago

(2018)

fragsworth• 5 years ago

Another reason why it hasn't been banned yet is that it is generally easier for people in political/legal positions to avoid making a commitment on whether they're for or against bitcoin by simply purchasing a little bit.

All they have to do is purchase JUST enough that they don't care which way it flips.

If you take the argument one level deeper, you might come to the conclusion that nearly all rational participants in politics will purchase some amount of it. And if the price rises while this happens, they may personally feel like supporting it rather than destroying it.

And since the price will rise while this happens, well, it becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

simonblack• 5 years ago

I have great difficulty in regarding BitCoin as 'real'. The same way that I have difficulty in regarding paper tokens (currency, share certificates, gold certificates, etc) as 'real'. Those paper tokens have ZERO real intrinsic value, no matter what numbers can be printed on them.

Examples where the zero 'paper'value is reflected in what the tokens represent: Zimbabwe and Confederate banknotes, share certificates in non-existent companies, deeds to nationalised land, etc.

BitCoin is really just a set of numbers, no different to the very simplistic "2 + 2", and having no more intrinsic value than that.

baby8• 5 years ago

These articles often seem to miss the fact that there are much more modern cryptocurrencies these days that are stable because they are tied to the price of a fiat currency like the USD, and much more efficient and green than Bitcoin.

This still poses the question: what about anonymity enhanced cryptocurrencies like zcash? Why are these legal?

Furthermore why are unhosted wallets legal as well? It seems like FinCEN is fine with them so far and do not treat them like VASPs (so not affected by the travel rule). Why?

injustice• 5 years ago

jangid• 5 years ago

Banning is not a solution to anything. And as far as the value is concerned, it will definitely go down initially when legitimate people will pull out. But in the long run, it will rise because of the alternative illegal use of the currency.

Another thought is that there are ~200 countries. Some of them survive only on illegal funds. Will it be possible to ban this thing completely?

Why Isn't Bitcoin Banned Everywhere?

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