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A comment on Bitcoin is a ‘boon for surveillance’, says former CIA director. Parent comment

Re:Bitcoin is a ‘boon for surveillance’, says former CIA dir... by jmnicolas on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @02:10AM (#26803514)
But with cash you'd have an inflation tax on everything you earn.

And depending on where you live you wouldn't be able to make big purchases in cash (in France I think the maximum cash transaction allowed is about 3000€).

BTC or cash you would have to launder your money to make it look like legit and be able to buy a house etc

Of course the other problem of BTC is that transactions are stored forever (as long as the BTC network operates) so it might bite you decades later.

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Re:Bitcoin is a ‘boon for surveillance’, says former CIA dir... by arcticbull on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @02:14AM (#26803540)
> But with cash you'd have an inflation tax on everything you earn.

This has to be the worst reason a drug dealer would avoid dealing in cash ever. Inflation is literally 2% per annum. Drug dealers pay 20%-50% to launder their money. C'mon now.

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Re:Bitcoin is a ‘boon for surveillance’, says former CIA dir... by vinay427 on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @04:03AM (#26804291)
With BTC you would need to pay transaction fees, and in practice, anonymization fees (e.g. for mixing services, tunneling through a private cryptocurrency) for many transactions. These would amount to far more than inflation for USD, EUR, etc.
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Re:Bitcoin is a ‘boon for surveillance’, says former CIA dir... by Tenoke on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @05:39AM (#26804837)
Switching to monero would incur you, what? 0.1% fee total even when you add all the transaction fees? Doesn't seem like much of a problem.
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Re:Bitcoin is a ‘boon for surveillance’, says former CIA dir... by vinay427 on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @08:13AM (#26806003)
The problem isn't just the transaction fees but markups by exchanges (BTC -> XMR, XMR -> BTC) that each take a cut. Last time I calculated this, even after shopping around for cheaper exchanges it was well over 1% in total fees and probably something closer to 3%, but I'll have to double-check.
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Re:Bitcoin is a ‘boon for surveillance’, says former CIA dir... by fomine3 on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @10:04PM (#26815429)
I'm beginner, but if both ExchangeA and ExchangeB is investigated by law enforcement, ExA knows sent address and ExB knows received address. So it's not perfect unless you add intermediate private XMR wallet between A and B, isn't it?
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Re:Bitcoin is a ‘boon for surveillance’, says former CIA dir... by Tenoke on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @08:25AM (#26806107)
Why would you buy BTC at all in this scenario? If you are going to an exchange you can just buy fiat-XMR and XMR-fiat.

Deposit money to Binance, covert to XMR, withdraw XMR is well under 0.1% total in fees.

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Re:Bitcoin is a ‘boon for surveillance’, says former CIA dir... by vinay427 on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @08:42AM (#26806254)
I wouldn't. As you mentioned, I would just find an exchange that supports fiat <-> XMR. I'm just responding to the top-level comment that specifically referred to Bitcoin as the preferred currency for these transactions.
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Re:Bitcoin is a ‘boon for surveillance’, says former CIA dir... by toss1 on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @07:42AM (#26805700)
Sure, at small scale, not much of a problem. But start moving $$millions, and you'll simultaneously move the market, paying more as you buy and receiving less as you sell.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

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Re:Bitcoin is a ‘boon for surveillance’, says former CIA dir... by merdadicapra on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @04:43AM (#26804504)
> But with cash you'd have an inflation tax on everything you earn.

Yes, there are risks involved in doing criminal business, inflation is not one of them

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