Your original point was that _Coinbase and Gemeni_ had prevented you from exchanging your BTC for fiat currency. There's nothing preventing you from taking your BTC to some other exchange, or just some guy that accepts BTC for goods or services. That's the beauty of this whole decentralized thing.

No, you misread. "et cetera" is latin for "and the rest"... I put that there because exchanges are all tied. A ban on one leads to a ban on another, depending on the severity of your crime.

> There's nothing preventing you from taking your BTC to some other exchange

I've already showed you that exchanges can freeze your assets, so yes they can prevent you from sending to other exchanges.

> some guy that accepts BTC for goods or services. That's the beauty of this whole decentralized thing.

If your marker for decentralization is currency adoption, then USD is the most decentralized.

I thought we were passed this whole "Bitcoin is not created by humans" meme...

> "I've already showed you that exchanges can freeze your assets"

Your point is well taken, however it needs to be made clear: exchanges can only freeze those assets which you yourself have placed in their control.

Can’t you just do a private transfer to a fresh wallet?

It doesn't work that way, every transaction is fully traceable all the way back to the block the coin was mined in.

> Can’t you just do a private transfer to a fresh wallet?

Isn’t the point of Bitcoin not to have private transfers?

You might have to tumble it first.

Washing your coins through monero / Zcash is a simple option (With enough splits and spread over time so amount correlation is harder).

If you have some time, rent mining power with BTC, and get freshly minted totally clean bitcoin in return.

You can exchange your bitcoin for stuff outside of those exchanges. Lot of ways to spend bitcoin without having to use an exchange ;)

p2p trades