Monero was blackballed in the US, and same with Monero conversion services like xmr.to. Coinbase refuses to support Monero.

Turns out that governments do not like anonymous cryptocurrency at all.

It doesn't need to be anonymous. Even if the state knows your public address, they can't confiscate your funds without you giving away your key. They can try to prevent people from accepting your funds but that's a lot harder to enforce

Why though? The transaction record is public in every possible way. You can trivially audit the origin of every single funds transfer in the history of Bitcoin. "Just use a tumbler" you say - except this is the government. They can just declare that they'll also be declaring that any tumbler accounts which receive blackballed currency are tainted and blackball everything which comes out of them too.

Cash is effectively a giant tumbler. All the privacy technologies in the cryptocurrency space are just trying to replicate the base privacy functionality of cash.

The reason why surveillance-state-centered interests cannot ban cash is that the public wouldn't stand for it. It's too ingrained in the culture and economy. The same needs to happen with private cryptocurrencies. We need MetaMask to adopt a confidential transaction standard the same way the major websites adopted HTTPS over a decade ago. We still have time as the financial mass-surveillance laws in place were designed for trusted third party financial intermediaries, and not peer-to-peer finance.

kraken.com? Just try a different exchange?

When I tried to sign up, I had to scan my driver's license, enter my SSN, take a picture of myself and attach a bank account. Doing all of that kind of goes against the anonymity aspect.

Oh I agree. BUT! Some good news, once you purchase bitcoin on it - then move it to XMR on it - you are off the grid.

> I think some form of cryptocurrency could serve this purpose and move us away from relying on banks that act on behalf of the state.

If such a crypto would exist, with enough stability, trust and ease to make transactions, the state would be so unhappy that day that it would make it illegal faster than light. Removing monopolies from the state are huge challenges.

And this is the problem that I see as well. One can buy crypto but how do you convert to fiat currency if the government controls all the off ramps? This is the flaw with bitcoin as far as I can tell. Maybe one day someone on the darkweb will start selling goods like an Amazon style store where you can get anything you could on Amazon, like a drop shipping store, sent to your house for bitcoin. If you can link it on the internet you can have an intermediary ship it to you for bitcoin. I think there is a real market for such a store in the future. How the person who is collecting all the bitcoins exchanges their bitcoins to cash I haven't figured that part out yet. Maybe they do it in a country like Venezuela but I am not sure if that is possible.

The idea of course is that eventually you would never need to convert back to fiat in the first place.

lol. I did some homework on this idea. Check this out: https://purse.io/earn/btc

That is actually pretty neat thank you for sharing. But I am a little confused after watching the video on it. It seems like you pay less for items with your bitcoin, do the people ordering hope that one day the bitcoin will increase in value and make money that way? Or is it just a way to buy bitcoin with items vs cash? Or a way to convert gift cards to bitcoin and that is the cost of business? I'm going to check it out farther but seems pretty neat. The only issue I see with this one is it is a site on the clear internet you would have to register to and they could be forced by governments to sanction accounts.

As a bitcoin holder you're getting yourself a discount on purchases through sites like that because the people doing the amazon purchases are using stolen cards or stolen accounts.

People who have bought through sites like these have often found amazon refuses to honour warranties etc on the purchased goods, and when they've dug a little deeper it's been because the real cardholder or account holder has flagged the transaction as fraudulent.