If you are buying and selling real estate in a functioning jurisdiction, hiding your identity by making the payment opaque is not going to do much for you.

There are title deeds and tax rolls. In many jurisdictions you have obligations like building codes that need to be inspected and an owner needs to be held to account. If you need privacy, you have to set up shell companies to act as the legal owner, not hide the payment from your bank or government.

Speaking of showing the source of the money, if you bought my house from me with bitcoin, I would have to speak to a lawyer about not running afoul of money-laundering regulations. And no, I won’t take the internet’s word for it that somehow, those laws only pertain to fiat currency.

Something tells me that the cost of fighting my government in court would far exceed the value of my home regardless of whether I was technically in the right not to fill out all those same forms.

Are you saying that if you were buying a house with Bitcoin that the government wouldn't want to see where the money is sourced from?

It would be easier, this TX came from my work's hotwallet & this one was part of my inheritance, you can see these TXs where that address sent to the tax authority assuring all tax has been paid as opposed to being passed around a call centre to talk to "Bob" so the bank can provide those details.

So......exactly the same way it works with a bank nowadays? When I did it it was just a printed statement from my bank(that I printed myself), showing money arriving from X account, Y amount paid for tax, document from solicitor confirming inheritence, 3 copies of my payslip, done. How exactly is that easier with bitcoin?

Bitcoin is useful for evading the law, but of course there had a host of other issues and risks.

Like finding out that the house is actually not yours after landing in a foreign country and having spend you life saving on a BTC transaction.

Big issues, big risks, but maybe you have big balls too... I personally don't feel so self assured about myself.

No they don't? I frequently send large(about £50k/month) amounts of money between one EU country and UK, we always pay extra(50 euro) to have the transfer done as an express transfer and the money arrives within 60 minutes in the UK bank. Or if you don't mind doing a SEPA transfer then it's 15 minutes. And no, I was never asked to prove any source of anything, it's an invoice payment, it goes straight through.

Maybe by "international" you mean something else, but at least in the EU(and EEA and UK) transfers can be incredibly quick.

14x more people live outside of SEPA than live within it.

And it's the biggest(by operating revenue) market in the world, what's your point?

Apologies, I thought I was being clear. A payment system that lets people transfer unlimited amounts of value to 14x more people than SEPA (presuming internet access), without censorship, irreversibly, and effectively for free, has, it seems to me, substantial value.

Even if it's less useful than, say, access to SEPA, it'd have to be 14x less valuable to break even (again, presuming internet access available to everyone, which isn't a thing yet).

> irreversibly

People think that's a feature until they don't.

Does the SEPA network use >1.0 Argentina worth of electricity to operate?

The main reason for a lot of that documentation is know your customer/anti-money-laundering laws. Even if you were sending BTC, you would still have to provide that documentation to not break the law.

>International wire transfers take multiple days

Not in the EU they don't. A SEPA transfer takes max 1 business day and is usually free. More info: https://www.gbm.hsbc.com/solutions/global-liquidity-and-cash...

Ummm, I've seen a lot of movies and international wire transfers are not like that at all. Basically one click and they're instantaneous.

Well, almost -- they do always feature cool progress bars as the money is transferred.