The banned person was Indonesian. Something something his bank account. (One more reason for me why payment system of the future must be permissionless. Like, you know, bitcoin)

> One more reason for me why payment system of the future must be permissionless. Like, you know, bitcoin

That's not possible with a public ledger and current state of analysis - instead of proactive cancellation of the transaction on the legacy banking system, you'll get a delayed reaction from the authorities. When you file your tax return you'll get a notice to explain transaction ID 0x...34 to a certain banned individual. So it will be about as "permissionless" as tax-fraud: you will only be able to get away with it for a while, and I don't doubt there will be future analytical tools (and laws) that will make tracing payments even easier. It is politically untenable for bitcoin payments to be opaque when "Funding Terrorism" is a high-priority security issue.

Bitcoin payments might be traceable from wallet to wallet, but wallets don't have a name on them. Not even for governments. So if anyone takes basic precautions, you can't trace them.

Although I assure you a normal person can't read bitcoin transactions lists like they can a bank statement, and this goes for people working at the tax office too. And they can't forbid those transactions, either. It raises the bar significantly on Tax offices, and therefore means less enforcement.

And if need be, there are several anonymous cryptocurrencies that would love nothing more than to replace Bitcoin, and of course they will as soon as governments actually start tracing payments.

https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/is-cryptocurren...

That's actually can be circumvented rather trivially. Wallets are anonymous, and you can just do some mixer transactions off chain. Wallet A pays to mixer M, mixer's address N sends funds to wallets B and C minus comission. In effect A paid B (and C), and nothing links them to each other. Schemes can get even less transparent with Lightning network.

Who owns the mixer?

nobody https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/JoinMarket

> When you file your tax return you'll get a notice to explain transaction ID 0x...34 to a certain banned individual. S

We were talking about PayPal banning someone and you equate that to tax authorities banning someone?!

There are already ways to avoid that outcome today. You can use a fresh wallet and launder the money through a mixer like the other poster suggests, but you can also use shielded transactions like Zcash has (based on zero knowledge proofs) or coins where transactions are private if there is enough volume like Monero.

Or just had a similar name or used a “bad” word. The data quality for those lists is very poor.