Still illegal in all jurisdictions though, and at any point in the future people with guns may come to seize your assets based on the very complete and pseudo-anonymous list of transactions, because creating money and taxing transactions is a right that governments jealously guard and will not easily give up.

I find currencies-as-code fascinating partly because of this strange mix of utopian thought and sincere attempts to overthrow global systems of governance (many of which are corrupt and self-serving) with code. People have been proclaiming they would upend the financial system and governments since 2008, but overthrowing systems of government requires physical acts of defiance and real loss, not just switching currency.

I disagree that cryptocurrencies are currently disrupting centuries of customs, simply because most transactions on them are fake and volume/value is far lower than claimed[0], but also because if they do become popular enough to matter for real transactions (not speculation on price), states can easily impose regulation, audits and taxes on them by taking them over and changing the rules. Developers or exchanges would easily be suborned for example, since the code makes the rules and the majority wins, the rules can be changed.

There are also good reasons that state currencies require auditing, rollback, identity verification and trusted third parties overseeing transactions - because without those you end up with a wild-west where bad actors can steal your money with impunity. For these reasons cryptocurrencies in their current form will never be very attractive to most people or corporations.

0: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkauflin/2019/07/02/the-anat...

Obviously, ospec can still blow your cover. But Monero and other assets are certainly a game changer in this space.

The recent $4.5M ransom was evidence that this isn't really theoretical: https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN24W25W

(Bitcoin can be converted to Monero, and the bitcoin can be mixed, so it's still quite hard to do what you're suggesting: to track down the perpetrators of large-scale crimes such as this. The flipside is that criminals' opsec tends to be very poor; good police work is usually enough to capture them.)

If the government was interested in your illegal transactions, they would find you, and they would take everything you own in recompense if they wished. Your 'anonymous' wallet will not save you if cryptocurrencies actually become important.

If you want to stop that, you need to consider what a revolution entails - civil disobedience and breaking unjust laws en masse and standing up to the state in the real world, not just in code.

I have some sympathy as I have the same approach to online identity (don't bother as anonymity simply isn't realistic), but if working for a company that recently had to flee US jurisdiction I'd be more circumspect about advocating breaking the law!

It's almost impossible to be anonymous to a nation state even if you try harder than us anyway, and most people slip up early and often - you won't know you want to hide from a state till it is too late in most cases.

Though given you are posting your thoughts on defying the state and avoiding taxes in detail under your real name here and probably elsewhere, I'm not sure dragnet surveillance would be required.

More like decades. On a historical timeline, electronic bank accounts and the ensuing financial surveillance and financial censorship laws are themselves recent developments.

I think you are forgetting to talk about the other part of the glass where there is a ton of illegal money flowing in the financial system by people with enough power and/or financial complexity and current rules apply mainly to average Joe, and terrorists. Don't forget that the compliance system changed dramatically since 9/11 and not in the last centuries.

There's an implication here I think gets missed when discussing the political implications of cryptocurrency (as opposed to just the technology part). People spend a lot of time arguing over whether cryptocurrencies can truly keep free of states, but that has the implicit argument that this would make for more a more just or free system, and I don't think this is a well-grounded assumption.

Who benefits from crypto? To the portion I quoted, people who want to move large amounts of money. But if you already have large amounts of money, you're already in a position of a fair amount of privilege and power. If you're someone who does NOT have a large amount of money, crypto isn't going to usher in a world where wealth is more evenly distributed. It's just as likely to do the opposite. Now those who already have a lot can save on the hassle and expense of having to actually lobby and corrupt state institutions, keeping more of their wealth with no gain for the rest of us. There's plenty of legitimate criticism to be made of the failures of the state to truly defend and advocat for the interests of all its citizens, but I'm very skeptical that a a technology that empowers people with lots of wealth to move it around with less friction is really a net gain for humanity.

Do you mean that Ethereum in fact has allowed collusion to happen within the greater context of the world more easily and at larger scales ? Such as by enabling groups of criminals around the world to collude together against the rest of us?

Not sure if that's what you were saying, but in any case, I find this an interesting thought when contrasted with the message of the article.

For example, what prevents a bank from transferring money to each other without declaring it? Or for accepting a deposit that they don't report on? And similar withdrawals?

Similarly, why isn't a crypto exchange obligated to do the same?

So for example, there could be a cryptocurrency that imposes a tax on transactions, but the tax could just go back evenly distributed to all members of the cryptocurrency?

And if a certain group within that didn't like this scheme, they could choose to move to some other cryptocurrency with a scheme they'd prefer? But now between cryptocurrencies, your exchange power would be dictated based on which crypto's total assets are? Thus which crypto is most popular would be valued more between cryptos as well?

If I understood well till here let me know.

From that, what I wonder is, wouldn't each cryptocurrency then be it's own state, but just in a virtual sense?

So if that aligned with a geography, wouldn't we just be back in the same system as gold and/or cash money but digital?

For example, if all US citizen traded in crypto X. And if crypto X had in its code rules that transactions outside crypto X into another crypto arn't allowed? Or come with some tax on the transaction? Or needed to be recorded permanently as too how much each wallet was transacting outside? And after some amount the wallet would get seized, or would get capped out? Etc. And that all taxed and seized money would go a particular wallet that is controlled by an elected group of member that can allocate where the money goes? Etc.

I say that because, all this happened with gold and cash money? And they were similarly anonymous and untraceable? So I'm trying to see what is different in crypto that it couldn't lead to this type of group organization of people into states?

In contrast, moving millions in bitcoin is no more difficult than moving cents.

Let's say the US decides to use some new UScoin cryptocurrency. And that as part of that network all transactions are taxed automatically and it goes into the US governments wallet.

Now let's say everyone can create a UScoin wallet or not. But in the US, any company is regulated such that it must pay its employees in US coins, and any company must only accept payment in UScoin or otherwise convert it to UScoin.

So what's different with the status quo? Except that maybe we no longer need to waste paper?

In fact, it seems a cryptocurrency would be way easier to apply regulations and monitor, since the coin code itself could guarantee all transactions are taxed and kept track off.

You could even have it that each wallet must be associated with an SSN, and if not, the wallet coin's could be automatically taken from the wallet by the network.

Where's as today, you need to have audit mechanisms to find cheaters, with crypto it could all be guaranteed.

As I understand, currently the Bitcoin network and others have implemented relax regulations on their transactions and provide anonymity and all that. But this is only true as countries have allowed the use of the currencies. If a country wanted to ban it? How hard would that be?

And even if say you couldn't ban it, you'd still have the problem people have today. When you transfer US dollars into Bitcoin and back, this is where they can track you. This seem like it be true as well if transferring some UScoin in/out. In fact again, I think such a UScoin would make it even easier to monitor than current cash money.

Why? because last year my bank sent me a letter saying my interest would be reduced to 0.01% and then this year they reduced it to 0.00%.

It might seem high risk to some people, but I have no pension and massive student loans and I don't see how what my bank offers is going to help me change that in any meaningful way, I really have nothing to lose at this point. And from what I can see (as someone in their late 20s) a lot of people my age are in the same situation and can't find a way out.

So why not try something different? Why not be inventive? I feel like when you are young you are told to be bold and dream big and invent new ways of doing things, be idealistic and try improve the world. But for some reason if its to do with money then we should accept that everything is fine and smarter people know what they are doing. I've met millionaire traders in charge of the savings of thousands of people, and can say I would much rather be in the ethereum community, and much rather have financial systems be opensource, borderless, and free.

This is not a pipe dream. This happens every day in increasing numbers. I’m sorry if you don’t like this.

Also- are there defenses against physical seizure/confiscation under duress of e.g. the bit-coins used for Ethereum, built into the protocol? If not, how can it be free from government interference? Unless you're paying entirely for digital goods which can be delivered anonymously, wouldn't you still have to interact with the physical world at some point? Is the idea just that it makes it harder for the government to stop money laundering and so they'll hopefully give up?

I mean, look at your examples, Uber and AirBNB. They moved fast and made lots of money for themselves... And, what, changed the world? Eh, not really. As they matured, governments caught up with them, and now they're collaborating more and more. Uber and AirBNB aren't subversive anymore- they've done their disruption, had their fun, made their money, and now they're just another app. And looking at the bitcoin space, I see similar movements- miners are big conglomerates now, major exchanges roll out more and more invasive KYC protocols, the IRS releases guidelines describing how to declare these on your taxes...

You think AML enforcement won't be coming? "Hey, where'd you get that Ferarri?" "Uhh, well, somebody must have just accidentally sent the money to my Monero address, and it's untraceable so I can't send it back, so..."- you're not going to have a great time fighting that! Sorry if you can't handle the facts- but if you actually want to fight a government (whether or not that's a good thing for society) you should really think about what you're dealing with! In terms of enforcement, even a perfect privacy coin doesn't seem much harder for a government to handle than cash or precious metals.

The big exceptions are those working in areas where their local governments turn a blind eye- e.g. ransomware gangs. So, if you don't have to fear the government asking questions, but the people paying you might (or if you want the people paying you to not be able to find you), there could be a reasonable use case.

Although I keep all my savings in fiat at the moment, I can still understand the value of crypto, and the position of libertarians.

Should the government have the power to seize all your assets and savings?

Some will say yes, because they believe the government will always be just. Others don't trust the government to always do the right thing, and so believe it shouldn't have those powers to begin with. This is an especially common belief among the technically apt crowd, who watched whistleblowers like Snowden be punished for exposing mass surveillance. That eroded a lot of trust in the institutions of the United States. Citizens of other states may have even less trust in their institutions.

Some don't agree with what they consider to be reckless and needless levels of spending - especially when that money is wasted by a public sector that tends to be inefficient, corrupt, bureaucratic, and incompetent - that will have to be repaid through either perpetually increasing taxes or inflation. Even Alan Greenspan recently cited inflation as his top concern. Again, the situation is probably much worse in many other countries, where politicians pilfer public coffers, assign contracts to friends, or generally poorly allocate your money (whether through taxes or inflation).

If you believe the government cannot be tyrannical, aren't bothered by high taxes or inflation, aren't concerned by waste or corruption, then I could understand why you don't see the value of a currency outside of the jurisdiction of your government.

Of course, there are downsides as well, like facilitating criminal activity that does hurt regular people, or facilitating tax evasion for necessary spending and services. That can't be ignored either.

And of course governments are going to do everything they can to stop this- what makes it interesting is the wide-spread effort to make it generally difficult to do so.

I sort of felt like there was a missing step here- your arguments are supporting the statement "the government SHOULD NOT have the power to seize all your assets and savings", which doesn't necessarily imply "and therefore, cryptocurrency is good"- but then I looked at the parent posts and remembered I asked (approximately) for an answer to the former. So, yeah, you gave a good answer to the question you replied to, my bad.

Well, hmm, I guess I still do sort of object to this paragraph-

"If you believe the government cannot be tyrannical, aren't bothered by high taxes or inflation, aren't concerned by waste or corruption, then I could understand why you don't see the value of a currency outside of the jurisdiction of your government."

I actually do think you can believe/be bothered by/object to all of those things, except possibly inflation, and still not see the value in a currency outside the jurisdiction of your government- currencies don't really have jurisdictions, banks and financial systems do. People and assets can be in jurisdictions, though- so let me just steel-man you a bit here, if you don't mind:

If you believe the government cannot be tyrannical, aren't bothered by high taxes or inflation, aren't concerned by waste or corruption, then I could understand why you don't see the value of a currency that is harder for the government to track at scale, and more resource-intensive to seize.

I think that's even more reasonable, but let me know if I'm misrepresenting your argument at all.

And thanks again!

At least thinking about it myself, it seems like the conversation with an investigator might go something like this-

"Where did you get this money"

"I made this art, and then bought it from myself."

"Why?"

"No comment."

"...okay, where'd you get the money to buy it from yourself?"

...and now you're in the exact place you were before you tried the art thing, except you now look extra suspicious. There may, however, be some emotional benefit from letting your creative juices flow and expressing yourself, so I guess it's not all bad.

Or did I misunderstand what you were asking? Sorry- getting a bit late here.

Effectively what you’re advocating for is criminality, which is ironically the only major industry that’s thriving in crypto right now, as far as I can tell.

Just from last week

https://coinnounce.com/swift-report-reveals-criminals-prefer...

“ A new report by the SWIFT says criminals prefer using fiat currencies over cryptocurrencies for money laundering and other criminal activities”.

They say up to 2 trillion could be getting laundered annually- at that point, Bitcoin's entire 2019 transaction volume could be money laundering, and it would be no less true that "criminals prefer fiat over cryptocurrency for money laundering." Obviously, this is absurd- the point is the article doesn't tell you what you actually want to know (how prevalent is money laundering in cryptocurrencies compared to legitimate transactions in same?)

If you don’t understand this technology then it’s easy to be naïve. Check out https://tornado.cash/ It is an unstoppable contract to facilitate monetary anonymity! Good luck

There was a reason Poloniex pulled out of the US last year, right? What was that reason?

And remember- if your paycheck depends on this technology- or, particularly, if you hold lots of cryptocurrency- it's easy to be willfully naive about its potential.

That's not even approximately true.

Laws are only enforced if there are people that think that it's worth enforcing them and who have the means (which usually i closed government sanction) to do so, which often happens when far less than all of the governments constituents think the laws involved are just.

Nope. Bitcoin trading volume (for example) has plummeted to a miniscule fraction of its late-2016 hype height.

It’s difficult for people outside of this space to see, as you only notice when news hits the front page. I work at a major crypto exchange (Poloniex) and all of our metrics are very bullish. I don’t think your 2017 opinion is relevant anymore.

My "lie" is so trivially and easily confirmed: https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/all?c=e&t=b

Yesterday’s volume of $54,406,443,211 was the highest in one hundred and eighteen days, 138 percent above last year’s average, and 26 percent below last year’s high. That means that yesterday, the Bitcoin network shifted the equivalent of 871 tons of gold.

https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2020/09/11/satoshi-nakaboto-...

E: I quacked for myself.

This seems to show trade volumes in terms of BTC and trades/min have indeed plummeted since late 2016.

https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/5y?c=e&t=b

https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/tradespm/5y?c=e&t=a

You can draw your own conclusions as to what that means but the specific claim that trading volume has decreased does seem to be true.

A cursory glance:

- bitcoinity doesn't include Binance in its list of exchanges which is a strange omission. https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/

These might be a bit more accurate:

- Exchange traded volume: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/trade-volume

- Transactions per day : https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions

7 day averages are down from 2018, but up compared to 2016.

This applies to pretty much any company that pays both accountants and developers, or that pays developers to communicate with accountants through an API.

The savings comes from the fact that a network of organizations, each with it's own private ledger, engaging each other via a set of tailor-made ad-hoc protocols is far far worse at reaching consensus about anything than a single protocol with a shared ledger is.

We had an app store, so maybe a merchant would pay $5 monthly for an app that made their cash register double as a time clock. It was my team's job to slice that pie.

We keep $1, the bank that sold them the cash register gets $1, and the app developer gets $3. Or something.

But the merchants and the developers all live in various countries, so the "billing solutions" that we had to partner with in order to ensure that everybody gets their slice of the pie couldn't just accept "Give Joe $1" they had to know what the money was for so that they could justify the fees they were extracting from this pipe of money.

The smart way to do this would be to get all stakeholders to agree on a few hundred lines of code that would handle whatever regulatory needs they were on the hook for. That code would go in a smart contract and then we could use a blockchain as a single source of truth for the data.

Instead we had four companies all with their own separate, private databases, all attempting to reach consensus about what was owed to whom and why--usually based on out of date information from various channels.

What we needed were distributed systems engineers, and what we got was four stacks of middlemen and a directive to multiplex money between them. If they add a fifth stack of middlemen, the codebase will explode.

At least for me, once I saw one egregious inefficiency that would be solved by financial consensus algorithms I started seeing them everywhere.

Take wireless service for example. Why do we have several separate overlapping cell networks? Wouldn't it be better to have one big network and just pay the nearest network operator per-kilobyte? The only reason that doesn't work is that such a volume of USD payments would constitute more in fees than it did in payments.

----

Sorry for the rant. The point is that the way we do accounting in USD is so saturated by middlemen that it takes weeks for them to agree and allow money to move anywhere. During those weeks, the accounting complexity continues to increase.

Since our money moves so slowly, each company has to build at least two billing systems--one to handle the debts as they occur and another to move the money (usually monthly) to resolve the debts. But if the money can move as fast as the debts accrue, then you only need to build one billing system, and you don't have to pay an army of middlemen to badly approximate consensus.

It's not about the token itself, it's about the practices in place around that token. The people who occupy privileged positions in the ebb and flow of USD haven't had reason to change their ways for a very long time. The alternatives, on the other hand, are evolving rapidly.

I sort of feel like this is just a nitpick, since it was one big rant, but re: the cell network thing- we already have a mechanism where you can use data (and be billed for usage) on networks you don't subscribe to: roaming. The problem is the network operators don't really have much reason to allow other phones to roam on their network for cheap- they're selling data plans, and competing against others selling data plans. If a Network A customer can roam on Network B towers for not much more than the cost of data on Network A, Network B can't say "hey, customer, come switch to us, we have better coverage". So roaming costs are rather nasty.

This doesn't have to be the case, of course! They could certainly provide roaming at cost instead, so the user pays one flat price, almost like mutual peering in internet exchanges. The point is, even if there was a zero-fee, zero-latency micropayments system, this wouldn't really affect the dynamics of the market for mobile data- it's neither necessary or sufficient for the ideal world where a cell tower is a dumb RF-to-packets gateway that any device can use for a reasonable per-kilobyte fee.

But again, that's just one paragraph. I really appreciate the insight into some of the problems you had to deal with. And I can definitely see how - even regardless of the merits of a token itself! - the disruption it brings could cut out a lot of middle-men who are there just because they've sort of always been there. I just hope the practices that come with switching to a token don't have even worse downsides.

I.e. "Hooray! Now my code can control the flow of money, authoritatively, and nobody can override it!.... Oh, shit. My code controls the flow of money, authoritatively, and nobody can override it..."

Reminded of those AWS billing horror stories- when you can do expensive things with just a few lines of code, you can do expensive things with just a few lines of code.

The reason I think it will is that in a world with _n_ wireless providers that are set up to provide handsets, sim cards, marketing, account management, and billing, and _m_ network operators that only handle things like towers and cables, you need n*m roaming relationships and many many employees to keep them all straight.

I used to work for one of the first sort, and would occasionally get calls from customers in Minnesota who lived so close to the border that they accidentally connected to Canadian towers from time to time. We'd go through their bill and provide a credit to offset the charge since it wasn't fair to force them to pay for international roaming unless they truly traveled to that country--even if their service did.

It's that sort of retrospective debt juggling (and the overhead of maintaining custom infrastructure for it) that goes away if you just use an open source protocol to pay at the time of services rendered.

One thing I can't quite put my finger on is coming up with a quantitative answer to how high the cost of doing business in USD is.

Even if you're not a fan of these examples, we can probably agree that somewhere out there is a company that has inserted itself between supply and demand (maybe it did something helpful once), and by doing so slowed things down, and now it only justifies it's existence by mitigating the problems caused by it's inclusion in the system in the first place.

Sure, this usually involves fees of some sort, but it seems to me that the real cost isn't in dollars lost to transaction fees but instead in an overall increase in... Financial friction? Dollars and cents are a fiction, but there are real problems out there that need to be solved and we've accumulated so many reasons to resign ourselves to solving half of them and at half pace. Not sure how to put a number on that.

> I just hope the practices that come with switching to a token don't have even worse downsides.

I like the sentiment, but I'm gonna nitpick this statement for a moment.

We're already using a token, it's the USD. It has a fragmented ecosystem of competing API's (debit, credit, ach, wire, cash) most of which require you to pay for access to and none of which rely on modern cryptographic techniques to protect privacy and prevent fraud.

There certainly will be downsides to switching to any of the cryptocurrency tokens available today, but the thing that they all have that the dollar doesn't is an open API. The friction of switching from USD to BTC is high, but the friction of switching to from BTC to ADA or IOTA (or whatever token provides the right set of features for whatever the application is) is much lower.

It's like going from cable TV, where you have to deal with what they give you, to web-based content, where netflix and amazon and hulu and disney compete to be the one that makes you happiest.

I'm not arguing for one token over another, I'm arguing for competition among them. Who knows? Maybe if the USD has to compete for it's position it'll shape up.

And you're definitely right about the terrifying responsibility that a world without middleman-arbiters is going to face. We've got a lot of learning to do re: how to responsibly handle those sorts of problems, but it really looks like the alternative to accepting that challenge is stagnation and parasitism.

I don't have any particular hate for it, I would use it if it benefitted me, but I can't see any situation on the horizon where that would be the case.

This is pretty well established in the history of currencies.