EU to make Bitcoin traceable, ban anonymous crypto wallets

https://www.euronews.com/next/2021/07/21/eu-will-make-bitcoin-traceable-and-ban-anonymous-crypto-wallets-in-anti-money-laundering-d

by mgh2 • 5 years ago

185 258 5 years ago

euronews.com

amacalac• 5 years ago

lol

seibelj• 5 years ago

It is very hard to ban math. An “anonymous wallet” is a random number!

rspeele• 5 years ago

In practice, this means that a service provider exchanging crypto on behalf of a customer would have to record their name, address, date of birth and account number, as well as the name of the intended recipient of the transfer.

As usual, the regulation checkpoint is at the exchanges.

nyanpasu642• 5 years ago

And what happens when you transfer it to a mixer? A self-hosted wallet? Or the EU regulate exchanges to the point you can't transfer your Bitcoin to a wallet you own?

spywaregorilla• 5 years ago

It's very hard to ban math. It's very easy to ban communications, which may happen to contain math.

dt2m• 5 years ago

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

croes• 5 years ago

When did the EU ban tracking cookies?

lmkg• 5 years ago

The EU regulates tracking cookies. They're not banned, but the requirements for their use are rather strict, due to the interactions between the ePrivacy Directive (2002) and the GDPR (2016).

To GP's broader point, "what about GDPR?" the GDPR basically steps back when other laws apply. Processing personal data requires a legal basis, and one option for legal basis is "Legal Requirement," so if another law says it's required, GDPR says it's OK. And furthermore several provisions (like erasure) don't necessarily apply. GDPR would impose some restrictions like access and notice. The biggest issue is going to be "who is the Controller?", i.e. who 'owns' the data and who is in control of the processing?

liuliu• 5 years ago

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.

_Algernon_2• 5 years ago

If they were competent, they would have worked with web browser developers, and made it browser side like other permission dialogs.

Imagine what could have been: a standardised prompt that is always the same, persists when clearing cookies, etc. Instead we have full screen modal popups that render 5 seconds after page load and move around while loading.

paulgb• 5 years ago

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.

hogFeast• 5 years ago

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.

0xy2• 5 years ago

Instead of making meaningful change, the EU proceeded to make almost every European website 10x worse with egregious cookie nag screens filled with dark patterns.

They trained users to accept all advertising cookies, while being massive hypocrites (a lot of EU bureaucratic websites ship user data to Google via GA or GTM).

The EU is one of the biggest threats to online freedom. Threatening to ban memes, egregious copyright laws to serve Hollywood interests, cookie nag screens and US media excluding EU IPs altogether because EU law is insane.

Access to media within the EU has never been worse. A significant portion of US news media exclude all EU traffic due to regulation.

lkramer• 5 years ago

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?

yrro• 5 years ago

Instead of making meaningful change,

Meaningful change: the ways that web sites track you are now disclosed and require your explicit consent.

the EU proceeded to make almost every European website 10x worse with egregious cookie nag screens filled with dark patterns.

It is the web sites that have chosen to make your experience worse. The blame lies with them.

RivieraKid• 5 years ago

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.

dheera• 5 years ago

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 "Login") popups illegal, arrest the CEOs of companies that violate this, put them in a CEO jail for a week, make them wear an "I suck" T-shirt and dunce cap, and live stream their faces the entire time.

blibble2• 5 years ago

I'm mostly pro-EU but the cookie thing is just a display of unbelievable incompetence.

this is an example of you knowing the area they're legislating in better than they do

they're just as bad in pretty much every other area too

tpush• 5 years ago

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.

penultimatebro• 5 years ago

Thank you EU - Bitcoin transactions weren’t traceable at ALL before.

qnsi• 5 years ago

I understand anti-EU sentiment, but who uses bitcoin for something different than transfering illegal funds and speculation?

I understand Ethereum and other smart contract cryptocurcies, but time when people believed Bitcoin is going to become currency are long gone

frankbreetz• 5 years ago

El Salvador is trying to use it a currency. Well, I still wouldn't consider it a currency since pretty much everything will be priced in dollars, but they are using to transfer value. One of the man reasons for this was to send home remittances.

Many people still believe Bitcoin could at least be used to transfer value, like a currency. AMC, Starbucks, and United Wholesale Mortgage are all looking into accepting it. Whether these come to be seems to be seen, but there is obviously a lot of people that still expect Bitcoin to be a currency, or at the very least a way to transfer value.

jacobr1• 5 years ago

My understanding is that they are trying to use the Lightning Network. Though my brief googling of this only shows speculation that this is the case, rather than confirmation.

mech4226• 5 years ago

Bitcoin is generally considered a 'store of value' rather then a day to day 'currency'...

Sorta like a savings bond vs a credit card

And a few years back, before the transaction fees got so high - there were a few places that took it. NewEgg comes to mind.

unemphysbro2• 5 years ago

I've used eth twice for motorcycle purchases from private sellers.

Perhaps it's useful in for medium-large purchases.

rootusrootus2• 5 years ago

Does it have a particular advantage over something like Venmo or Zelle? At least in the US?

kobalsky3• 5 years ago

but who uses bitcoin for something different than transfering illegal funds and speculation?

A lot of people. You just have to NOT live in a country that uses a currency that could be considered a global reserve to find us.

burnished6• 5 years ago

could you elaborate? I'm ignorant. From my perspective it seems like the value of bitcoin changes too much, having risen sharply in value recently, to spend as currency, but I'm also assuming that there are other more stable options. What kind of things do you buy, and how often? What sort of things do you do considering that the value might sky-rocket or dive overnight?

SamPatt• 5 years ago

When governments stop taking monetary policy seriously and inflation starts to meaningfully destroy savings, you can understand why alternatives gain some traction.

sleavey• 5 years ago

This is the correct answer. Bitcoin is the hardest money ever invented, at least while SHA256 stays secure. History has shown us that people move their savings from softer to harder stores of value as they become available, eventually making softer forms worthless as a currency (seashells, stones, silver, etc.). Currently we see gold as the hardest form of money but Bitcoin has zero supply elasticity which ensures an increasing stock to flow ratio over time, making it harder. Bitcoin is also in most, arguably all, respects better than gold as a store of value, and will, if it isn't replaced by something better or if a flaw isn't discovered that destroys its advantages over gold, make gold worthless as a store of value in the long run.

imtringued5• 5 years ago

Bitcoin miners use Bitcoin to pay their bills.

dannyobrien• 5 years ago

a couple of stories from Palestine and Cuba (I'd say both of these classes fall mostly under the category of where remittances and other cashflows deliberately exclude some communities)

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/can-bitcoin-bring-palest...

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/cubas-bitcoin-revolution

wesleywt• 5 years ago

If you are in the HN news bubble then you will not have a rounded view on the use of crypto. It has bad and good aspects.

ls15• 5 years ago

who uses bitcoin for something different than transfering illegal funds and speculation?

A couple of months ago, a combination of Covid-related travel restrictions and new EU KYC regulation lead me into a situation where the only way to renew my VPN in a timely manner was through crypto. I was really lucky to have some.

rad_gruchalski4• 5 years ago

Everybody who ever thought that crypto currencies will not come under this scrutiny was highly delusional.

All other governments will follow soon.

ProjectArcturis• 5 years ago

Yup. A technology which is mainly used for money laundering, dark-net markets, ransoms, and speculation will certainly attract the attention of government.

ashwagary7• 5 years ago

Savings/store of value is a bigger use case than anything you mentioned. Not sure why critics have to be so disingenuous if they have a strong enough bear case.

herbst4• 5 years ago

Why do people think that? Where do you get your data from?

oceanplexian• 5 years ago

Governments can either get onboard, and come up with a reasonable, practical regulatory environment, or alternatively they will be left behind and Crypto will evolve to circumvent their wishes.

It is a shame but the USA may end up leapfrogging the EU in the same way they have done with other innovations, like Social Media, Self Driving Cars, and other cutting edge tech. It turns out regulating entire sectors of the economy out of existence has consequences.

user-the-name3• 5 years ago

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

imtringued5• 5 years ago

Cutting edge? The only special thing about Bitcoin is the blockchain which only matters when there is a shortage of trust. Bitcoin may force government to be more responsible because it can be used to circumvent capital controls or price controls. Any advantage other than trust that a public blockchain has can be replicated through a private blockchain. It's just software after all.

Considering the monetary philosophy behind Bitcoin it is basically motivated by gold which is something we abandoned as a currency because we know it doesn't work and doesn't make sense. It's akin to having shares in the global economy. If you own 1% of the economy in 1930 then you will also own 1% of the economy in 2021. You're just a deadweight leeching off the economy. Since your share is fixed but the economy growing you are getting richer at the expense of other people. More and more people start investing "into money" and then quit working. You get a bust or recession or depression when people consider money a superior investment over actual work. Thus the economies' size is limited by the quantity of shares. If you issue new shares people will immediately start working for them even if it is at the cost of diluting them. You can clearly see it happening with the block reward. Bitcoin miners work like crazy, consuming an absurd amount of energy. The same applies to gold.

elric2• 5 years ago

And then what? Crypto will magically take over all government functions? Or will people be happy in a governmentless-society? Where hospitals and roads don't get built but at least there's "freedom"?

sennight5• 5 years ago

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.

rad_gruchalski4• 5 years ago

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

gjsman-1000• 5 years ago

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."

laurent92• 5 years ago

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

vinni2• 5 years ago

Previous discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27897314

nathias• 5 years ago

This is good for Bitcoin. (really, we need more traffic to go to fully decentralized exchanges)

randomopining3• 5 years ago

Can the DEX's work even if they are outlawed in the future?

codehalo• 5 years ago

Can TCP/IP still work if it's outlawed?

dmantis3• 5 years ago

Like torrents or dark markets. Technically not a problem, but will cause more effort and risks for creators (goodbye VC backed "Decentralized" swaps) and higher costs for clients who will pay for covering those risks.

I assure you, though, that some sneaky guy from Africa, Russia, Ukraine or China would always find his way to help people changing their money.

Btw, in theory there is a way to create completely decentralized versions (hosting frontend on IPFS/torrents/other distributed storage) and the whole backend made on smart-contract, but it would be slower and harder to use than current systems with partially centralized backends and CDN js/static distribution.

anm893• 5 years ago

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

Daishiman3• 5 years ago

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.

anm893• 5 years ago

The EU prints Euros. The EU does not in any direct way control production of bitcoin.

Custody of the two assets has bordering on nothing in common.

Exchange of the who assets has bordering on nothing in common.

Conflating them is wildly innacurate.

ashwagary7• 5 years ago

Adding 1 additional p2p hop to transactions is trivially easy with Bitcoin and readily automatable. With 1 additional hop, you facilitate somebody's purchase of bitcoin and they pay for the services you need in fiat (usually at a discount). Good luck regulating that.

imtringued5• 5 years ago

They can't regulate bitcoin but they sure can discourage investors from putting in billions into Bitcoin. Considering that the growth story is based around those future investors it would be pretty bad news for Bitcoin if that flow of investors suddenly stopped.

snarf21• 5 years ago

Serious question: Couldn't they ban ISPs from connecting to known networks? A public blockchain must remain public and they can largely prevent that. They could (not saying they will) ban VPN connections to other countries.

askl56• 5 years ago

The EU can't tell each country's ISPs what to ban or not. That is a matter for each country.

bdcravens5• 5 years ago

Blockchain isn't where the concern is. It's where the exchanges interact with the banking system.

zarzavat• 5 years ago

You don't need to connect to a blockchain to make a transaction. You just need to connect to someone who is connected to a blockchain. Big difference.

elric2• 5 years ago

They don't need the ability to regulate bitcoin. They can just treat illegal exchanges as money launderers (or terrorism funders, or whatever else the go-to argument is today) and slap them with hefty fines. Anyone using these exchanges is committing a crime and can be treated accordingly.

Anyone caught with large amounts of crypto can be treated as a criminal, the same way people who have large amounts of cash on them are treated. It's obviously harder to spot someone walking around with a hoard of crypto coins, no black briefcase required.

This is just another tool in an already very expansive toolbox. All in the name of "security".

vkou2• 5 years ago

There's no need to put scare quotes around security. Cryptocurrencies are mostly used for one of three things.

1. Paying ransomware. 2. Buying drugs. 3. Day-trading.

That's it. There's no meaningful slice of the pie that goes to #4.

Almost all of us can agree that #1 is illegal, many people and countries currently believe that #2 is illegal, and almost all of us can agree that people participating in #3 should probably pay taxes on their gains/get tax credits on their losses.

bdcravens5• 5 years ago

Any government can't regulate Bitcoin per se, but they can always regulate the intersection of their currency and Bitcoin. If they require banks to observe a whitelist of acceptable exchanges when honoring transfer requests, the banks will happily comply.

drummer• 5 years ago

Monero and Pirate Chain will reach the moon in 2 years.

nenadg4• 5 years ago

Pure wapor. How will they ban anonymous wallets?

viro• 5 years ago

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

nenadg4• 5 years ago

Good luck making it a crime to install program.

herbst4• 5 years ago

This will thrive business to Switzerland and other crypto save heavens. Nice one EU

lottin5• 5 years ago

By passing a law that makes them illegal, simple as that.

vbezhenar• 5 years ago

They should make gravitation illegal. Would save lots of money spent on transportation.

nenadg4• 5 years ago

It's the same thing as if EU jumped to ban our classic, leather, pocket wallets. Pure bullshit, except if this is marketing?

wrs• 5 years ago

If your leather wallet has more than $10,000 in it, there are restrictions today on what you can do with it anonymously.

saba2008• 5 years ago

Limit monthly cash withdrawals to 100 EUR

Limit cash currency exchange to 100 EUR (or just outlaw it)

Wait for some time

Retract cash being mandatory debt settling tender

Wait a little more

And then pompously declare, that only criminals need cash (not far from truth, anybody but criminals and hardcore privacy people will be driven away by then) and ban it completely.

xtracto4• 5 years ago

What about the EU banning ivory wallets?

tomp• 5 years ago

"Every retailer, bank or money transmitter that receives a cryptocurrency must show the origin and past transactions of the funds."

burnished6• 5 years ago

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 expect to find said things. They don't have to make it physically impossible, they just need to introduce enough friction into the process that for most people it stops being worthwhile.

nenadg4• 5 years ago

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.

rlpb• 5 years ago

I think maybe they mean anonymous _hosted_ wallets where the hoster is inside the EU.

uniclaude• 5 years ago

Typically, by preventing regulated institutions to accept deposits from and withdrawals to addresses that do not match a wallet that has been associated with an identified entity. That would be unfortunate.

CarelessExpert2• 5 years ago

Unless you only ever transact in crypto, at some point you need an on-ramp or off-ramp from/to the traditional banking system, and at that point regulation is pretty straight forward. My read of it is that they're going to ban anonymous accounts on platforms that provide those services.

bdcravens5• 5 years ago

By putting pressure on the banking system. No transfers to or from exchanges that don't play by their rules.

zigradett• 5 years ago

This was news back on July 20th. What has changed?

gfodor4• 5 years ago

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.

volta83• 5 years ago

The downvotes you are getting is for not reading the article.

Your comment is not on-topic.

gfodor4• 5 years ago

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.

ajkdhcb2• 5 years ago

The title is simply incorrect and clickbait, so it should be changed. I think that is a quite relevant point

thirtyseven• 5 years ago

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.

gfodor4• 5 years ago

abstracting these things to sound silly doesn't move you outside the realm of well established norms regarding the government's role in mediating property rights through force.

what I wrote above is in a totally different ballpark - and we should expect to see government laws that pop up that do in fact attempt to regulate digit memorization or multiplication.

seriousquestion• 5 years ago

To build on this; Is code equivalent to speech? Is Bitcoin free speech?

user-the-name3• 5 years ago

Probably not, and no.

blibble2• 5 years ago

if the employees in charge of writing this legislation understood bitcoin enough to even consider that it would be impressive

but they don't, in the same way they don't understand cookies, databases or stock exchanges

none of this stops them legislating though...

burnished6• 5 years ago

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 reconciling what you may perceive as being an intractable problem. Like, laws against theft don't mean that any action where I take something of yours without express permission is theft, like a genuine intent with the context that it was needed to safely handle an immediate hazard to life or limb.

That example is admittedly weak, but do you see where I'm going with that?

gfodor4• 5 years ago

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.

Animats• 5 years ago

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...

peter303• 5 years ago

But the aggregate value of crypto is comparable to the US currency in circulation: two trillion.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/cryptocurrency-worth-more-than...

Crypto has a muchlower velocity of trading than currency.

user-the-name3• 5 years ago

Crypto "market cap" is a complete fiction. Only the tiniest fraction of that value actually exists in any form.

As you say, crypto has a much lower velocity of trading than currency. That is the hint.

sennight5• 5 years ago

Cryptocurrencies haven't hit a recession yet, and we're getting close to one.

We've been in a recession since Feb 2020...

CarelessExpert2• 5 years ago

The crypto world is running out of safe havens.

So just to be clear, your definition of "safe haven" is, what, total lawlessness with no governmental oversight?

Frankly, these moves make me think people are taking crypto seriously now, as we're finally treating it like real money or the banking sector and regulating it accordingly. If anything, it seems to me that should be a sign of success, not failure.

(and I should point out I own no crypto and I think blockchains are the biggest technical snake oil grift I've seen in the history of computing)

secondaryacct2• 5 years ago

But since it provides no advantage over normal currency, except lack of regulation, regulating crypto removes the incentive to onboard on it anyway.

It's slower, it expensive to run, fees are very flexible, value depends only on speculation and electricity spending - it would be a success if crypto trends towards 0 and we can finally try to USE them, but again, it would most likely be suboptimal compared to a banknote.

bserge4• 5 years ago

Any currency not backed by a military is doomed to fail the moment anyone with actual power decides they've had enough of it.

Afaik shitcoins aren't even backed by the threat of violence (i.e. "fuck with us and we'll do bad shit").

They only work as long as actual organizations with actual armed forces let them be.

Most people forget how fickle their freedoms are, and overestimate their extent.

tablespoon2• 5 years ago

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.

Which further proves the idea that cyberspace is independent of actual space is a lie, which renders any idea predicated on that as suspect.

There may be a brief periods where cyberspace is "more free," but it doesn't take long for the real-space authorities to notice and assert control (often in a way that's more complete than could ever be achieved in real-space).

secondaryacct2• 5 years ago

Especially since crypto relies on two state monopolies: internet licensed providers and electricity providers.

I can cut a tree and trade it around in piece more easily than I can use the internet state-monitored access to ask someone to use the state-monitored energy grid to print me a bitcoin.

cryptica3• 5 years ago

I've come to realize that the current fiat scheme and the crypto scheme are both unethical in their own way. But it makes me sick to hear people talk about banning crypto without at least suggesting to dramatically reform the fiat system.

Crypto would not have existed in the first place if most people felt that the fiat system was fair.

People who don't acknowledge this at this stage are either totally blind or totally corrupt.

mikem170• 5 years ago

I was just thinking this. The more control that governments try to exert over their populations the more of a reaction there will be to avoid these controls. One might assume the more they regulate bitcoin that more difficult to regulate alternatives will become more popular.

Youden• 5 years ago

Binary options shouldn't be compared to Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency and largely looks like a currency. You can buy it, own it, sell it and exchange it freely for other things. The same is mostly true for proper regulated options.

Binary options are more like a game on a slot machine. You put money in, wait a bit and see if you get money out. You can't own them or transfer them to anybody else. There isn't an open market for them, the counterparty is the broker (i.e. casino). The broker is usually barely regulated if at all, so they can (and do) freely scam people as they please.

seaourfreed• 5 years ago

How are they going to require this in open source crypto wallet applications that download to your computer. They can be made outside of the EU. Downloaded by EU citizens.

dusted• 5 years ago

Sounds like this will only cause people to trade more in crypto. It's not like bitcoin needs to be able to be traded to fiat to be useful as an item for transferring value.

bdcravens5• 5 years ago

Maybe that's the point. By accelerating the use of it as a currency, it may become more widely used by larger commercial interests that the government can lean on.

ajay-b• 5 years ago

Does this not defeat the whole purpose of cryptocurrency? The fact that a government can control its transparency, anonymity, the “currency” is now just a digital object, like any other in a bartering system. I don’t like that a government can trace and identify payment. Perhaps that is nihilistic but it speaks for me to the heart of freedom.

russdpale• 5 years ago

The entire point is accountability, that seems to be what many people have forgotten. Also, you still have to use the state to enforce property disputes, so cryptocurrency will never buck the traditional system, it simply cant.

bserge4• 5 years ago

Yeah, perhaps instead of working around it, people should work to change the existing systems.

Otherwise you're always going to be stuck completely underground and treated like a criminal/third rate citizen.

bdcravens5• 5 years ago

Was the ability to move money easily between the government-owned systems and cryptocurrency ever a purpose, or did it just evolve organically?

lamp9872• 5 years ago

If you dont want it to be transparent, you use Monero. Its now even getting atomic swaps with Bitcoin.

vjust• 5 years ago

Reaffirming the fact that Cash is king, as far as traceability is concerned. Unless of course, the FBI is tracking the bill numbers. But for all nefarious activities good old fashioned cash rules. No transaction or 'gas' fees either. If you can handle the physical bulk/inconvenience.

Bitcoin transactions take minutes or even hours to settle sometime, so 'digital speed' is vaporware at this point.

randomopining3• 5 years ago

Yeah but cash you have to physically transfer and exchange, which places you at a place at a point in time. Which is the ultimate "trace".

cryptica3• 5 years ago

EU regulations are all over the place. There is no cohesive moral thread behind any of them.

Firstly, they introduced GDPR regulations to prevent companies and organizations from collecting data on citizens... But now they introduce regulations to force companies and organizations to collect data on citizens. It's ridiculous.

It's frightening that the government could possibly win a case in a court of law with such fundamentally flawed logic. What would the verdict be like? "Collecting data on people is illegal, but it's also illegal to not collect data, therefore you are guilty!"

That must be how totalitarianism comes about; make sure everyone is guilty of something, then you can arrest all your political opponents on any pretext you like.

What is the point of the law if it contradicts itself? We may as well go back to living in caves.

avnigo• 5 years ago

I've experienced HN to be highly anti-Bitcoin for some reason -- got instantly downvoted for commenting neutrally on it [0].

However, I sort of expected more people on here would sympathize with the Cypherpunk Manifesto [1] and band together against pressures to minimize our privacy.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28114156

[1] https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html

NicoJuicy2• 5 years ago

The governement should know who you are and the bank you are associated too, if that's required to do business with them. Eg. VISA should be able to return my money to my bank account if someone has a chance to abuse the system and target me.

I don't want companies to share my information to third parties, this includes the banks about my purchases. And eg. Facebook shouldn't be able to target me because a site added their 'like button'.

Privacy doesn't mean lawless land of crypto companies hiding in unknown countries. I actually expect governement regulation to protect it's tax-paying citizens.

That's why we vote for them.

Edit: As a counter argument, there are also a lot of downvotes without reasonable arguments when you argument against crypto ;)

Edit 2: the informed article you shared is actually pretty biased from my POV, definitely not neutral + The additional sanity check when checking the author didn't check out either.

djbebs• 5 years ago

The government shouldn't know about any of that.

Not their business.

ilaksh2• 5 years ago

Visa is obsolete. That's the first point most people miss in these cryptocurrency discussions.

Credit cards require you to disclose your secret credentials that allow withdrawals from your account. Cryptocurrency payments do not because they apply math and computer science to the problem.

The banking systems are also mostly obsolete because they are usually on an outdated paradigm without a blockchain. Blockchains are the starting point for cheat-proof ledgers. Most existing financial ledgers are susceptible to manipulation. Some by design.

elliekelly2• 5 years ago

I am absolutely of the opinion that we deserve more privacy when it comes to our transactions. We need and deserve a privacy-oriented payment system but we also need a financial system that is reliable, trustworthy, and most of all, fair. That’s not Bitcoin.

I don’t know whether predatory investments and outright scams are simply inevitable with the anonymity cryptocurrency provides. I’d like to think there are some perfectly valid and net-beneficial use cases. But it seems pretty clear that crypto, in its current iteration, is exploitative at best and the only real use case beyond pyramid schemes is facilitating criminal activity.

It was a cool experiment. We tried it. It doesn’t work. A lot of people have learned (and some are still yet to learn) the hard way why our financial systems are so heavily regulated. But if we’re looking for increased privacy (and we should be!) we need to start looking beyond Bitcoin.

meowkit• 5 years ago

This is a really cynical and oversimplified take in my opinion.

Our centralized financial systems have a lot of regulation for outsiders, but the rules selectively apply to those with power and capital. If the Panama Papers/FinCEN leaks have shown me anything its that our financial systems are not sufficiently policing themselves.

Having all transactions on open source ledgers is a good start. With zero knowledge proofs I’m fairly confident we can design auxiliary systems that can obfuscate senders/receivers/amounts while also allowing for fraud detection by the community as a whole - with slashing style incentives we won’t have to worry as much about regulatory capture and similar things.

randomhodler844• 5 years ago

What makes you say it doesn’t work?

And, you can’t have privacy and still prevent illicit transactions. Any way that leaks intent is by definition not private.

Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies work fine, and achieve their goals.

andrewmcwatters3• 5 years ago

It's because it's an established technology that only attracts speculation and scams because it detaches the creation of capital from the utilization of labor and production and replaces it with hardware.

It's a fundamentally "wrong" currency in that you cannot request labor in exchange for debt. Instead you can request labor in exchange for waiting for a machine to generate the value of labor.

People say, well that's great, because no one wants debt. Except you do. You do want debt to exist in the world, because you want people to have an incentive to make things and do things versus not making things and doing things.

It makes no sense. It's mass appeal is driven by the fact that one person exchanges fiat to another person in exchange for the currency itself in larger price to fiat over time.

I think it's actually somewhat sustainable nonsense too, because people really think you can dollar cost average it. And if you have it and need to actually buy something with it, you are only incentivized to ask for more fiat in exchange for it, because people will buy it for strange reasons like simple moving average.

It's not a good currency, because it's not price stable, and it's not a good investment, since there's no underlying or relational value associated with it. So what is it?

glitchc• 5 years ago

It seems like this comment appears in every Bitcoin post. I get a deja vu feeling when I read it.

To the OP, is this copy-pasted to every new BTC post? Truly curious.

randomhodler844• 5 years ago

You have bought into the debt argument, and loose money.

I like hard money. Infinity / 21M

acdha9• 5 years ago

HN tends to have a lot of people who are good at technical analysis and allergic to hyperbolic marketing. By now there's been a decade of Bitcoin proponents endlessly repeating claims which are either untrue or highly aspirational while it continues to very expensively not deliver results.

This brings me to the second part: anyone who does care about privacy is _especially_ not going to recommend use of Bitcoin since a system which requires you to make an irrepudiable public record of your transactions is actually worse than the status quo. Similarly, people will confabulate about it allegedly being “uncensorable” when it's both easy to censor and, being public, extremely risky for anyone concerned about censorship to use.

radu_floricica2• 5 years ago

I'm not sure how you can call it worse than the status quo.

Last week my bank informed me that I passed my ATM limit for the year and it's going to give me a small daily allowance for the rest of the year. And then lied me on the phone that it's a requirement from the central bank. This is neither a joke nor a metaphor - this literally happened to me this month (ING in Romania -they're widely considered the best bank here). Ah, they're an ATM-only bank, they have no tellers, so I can simply not take my money out, unless I make an account with another bank and have it transferred. And this just means I'm going to hit another set of limits.

There is a concerted effort to control the financial movements of the population. If you fit within common patterns you don't see it. I'm probably barely at the edge - I've moved on the order of tens of thousands - and I'm hitting it pretty hard. Revolut had my account completely blocked for a couple of months earlier this year, while completely ignoring my calls. Couldn't even close it, since it was not on zero and couldn't take money out of it. And this was for moving around on the order of thousands over a few months, mostly sending money to a few friends. This is not money laundering, this is simply using the money I make very legitimately and paying taxes for.

CryptoPunk6• 5 years ago

The privacy comes from the system being censorship resistant, so the platform itself can not require you to KYC yourself to the state in order to use it, or be shut down or blocked by the state.

The irrepudiable public record of transactions is needed to make it censorship resistant, and does indeed come with severe privacy risks, though those can be mitigated with zk-proof cryptography (e.g. https://aztec.network/).

Hokusai• 5 years ago

HN is different depending on the time of the day. It's 02:00AM here in Europe, most of it at least. So the opinions that you see are not Europe time opinions but USA time opinions. I'm going to sleep now, but I'm part of the crowd that is strongly in favor of this type of regulations. I doubt that is going to be perfect, but it's a step in the right direction.

HN is not a person but many different people in different places. Your message and mine will be probably received differently at another time of the day.

ranbdj• 5 years ago

There are more places in the world than Europe and USA. I'm in Vietnam and it's 8.30 am. So maybe the opinions you're seeing are from Russia, India, China, Thailand, Indonesia, or Mongolia as well as the USA?

StanislavPetrov2• 5 years ago

but I'm part of the crowd that is strongly in favor of this type of regulations.

It boggles my mind that anyone would support having the government tell you, at the point of a gun, what kind of software you are allowed to run on your own computer.

boublepop• 5 years ago

minimize our privacy.

That’s not a neutral stance. The idea that anything that happens on a computer should be completely free of law, trace or any kind of governmental control is not just a stance of “we want privacy” and in fact most of the pushes are just establishing the exact same level of accountability that you have always had in pre-digital financial systems.

The government has always asked you to truthfully under penalty of law report your income and financial activities. The fact that it was difficult for them to tell if you lied is not a question about rights that’s a question of accountability.

The government has always had financial regulations for banks, financial institutions and securities, the fact that it has been easy for people to ignore those rules is not a question of rights, it’s a question about accountability.

You claim neutrality but the very framing of the discussion you take is an extremist point of view. It’s essentially like saying “The civil war was about states rights and I’m neutral about if they where right”

southerntofu• 5 years ago

That's the case for me indeed. I strongly agree with the arguments against Bitcoin, but i can only sympathize with a p2p protocol being hunted down by governments.

a_square_peg• 5 years ago

One thing that I find hard to sympathize in terms of Cyperpunk Manifesto is that a lot of it seems to do with perceived oppression of government and is written and supported by those who live in a countries with representative democracy.

hamburgerwah• 5 years ago

europe will also ban the practicing of arithmetic and mathematics

SkyMarshal• 5 years ago

By “ban anonymous crypto wallets”, this article is referring to commercial custodians that offer wallet services to customers.

But it doesn’t say anything about whether the ban will apply to FOSS crypto wallets people can download and run on their personal computers.

As long as the latter remains protected by free speech laws, similar to cryptography code, and commercial custodial wallets are affected, then this is a reasonable compromise not a huge problem imho.

0xdeadb00f• 5 years ago

Sorry, but bitcoin has always been "traceable".

fabioyy• 5 years ago

everytime bitcoin reaches a High value.. some bad news appears on the internet..

EU to make Bitcoin traceable, ban anonymous crypto wallets

Related Stories