“A blow to Bitcoin? Europe plans to ban anonymous crypto wallets”
Wait until they find out that people can pay in cash for things… https://www.zdnet.com/article/bitcoin-transactions-could-become-easier-to-trace-as-europe-plans-to-ban-anonymous-crypto-wallets/
Have you tried buying a house or even a car for cash recently? 🤔
Cash payments for anything more than a bag of potatoes have been subject to KYC and general scrutiny by banks since like forever, in the UK and EU and everywhere. Main reason for that is kind of obvious: cash has been the driver of tax evasion and black market like forever too. Can't really think of a legitimate purchase today where you'd be paying 10k... in cash.
@kravietz
Probably many think in the similar way.
They also claim #Ihavenothingtohide.
I use cards only to withdraw money from ATM and to buy e.g airline tickets or very rare to buy something online.
I often even give a deposit in cash at hotels. If venues don't accept cash I go to other places. Is it tax evasion?
@rysiek @neil
I haven't said cash == tax evasion.
I said "cash has been the driver of tax evasion (...) like forever", so deriving one from another is a syllogistic fallacy.
Because cash has been the instrument of tax evasion, countries have long ago imposed KYC (know your client) and other AML (anti-money laundering) measures on financial institutions that include limitations on traveling with or paying with large sums in cash.
That's my whole point - what you describe, was the original vision behind Bitcoin.
Life turned otherwise - instead of being a *currency* Bitcoin turned into a speculative commodity that was dominated by The Silk Road and ransomware gangs, simply because they can accept high transaction costs and volatility.
All that is mostly coal-powered, and concentrated in a few pools in one country.
So it's neither decentralised, nor currency, and has very high external costs.
Ethereum is *trying* to achieve something like that but is also puzzled by complexity - transactional costs now made Ethereum v1 useless, and they're working on Ethereum v2 which should have lower transactional costs and use proof-of-stake to avoid high energy consumption. Ethereum will remain a commodity by design, but on top of that you can build tokens like DAI which have constant exchange rate.
I don't know what is "obvious" here. You clearly haven't had much to do with services sector (car mechanics, builders etc) who will charge you +20% if you prefer to pay using any method that leaves trace in the system, like bank transfer - the difference being of course VAT, which they don't declare when using cash.
@kravietz
I didn't mentioned that you said that.;) It was a rhetorical q.
kyc and aml has been introduced to 'shoot' average Joe.
If I withdraw a bigger amount of money and a clerk asks me what the purpose of that is I answer 'to buy food'.
If you want to launder big amount of money you don't do it using cash. It's obvious. Legislators know that very well.
Bottom line is we all should use cash as often we can.
@rysiek @neil