I agree with the premise but in practice something like Bitcoin would be perfect for a police state. Easily trackable, just have to block the endpoints to repress people, forever history.

There are several ways to obfuscate transaction history on origins, such as coinjoins or simply opening a few private Lightning Network channels and pushing sats a couple of hops through them to unidentified end addresses.

Most blockchain money is pseudonymous and very easy to track. Eg bitcoin has a globally readable track of each transaction ever.

You can use enough cryptography to make blockchain transactions anonymous. But I think you can use the same cryptography to make non-blockchain electronic money anonymous, too.

Easy to track but not easy for a government to prevent transactions

It’s hell of easy to prevent transaction. You publish a wallet blacklist and prohibit all exchange services from processing tainted bitcoins.

That's not transacting on the Bitcoin blockchain though.

Once you have access to Bitcoin on-chain and have other people willing to transact directly through Bitcoin, with no fiat intermediaries like exchanges... yeah, there's literally nothing anyone can do to stop the transaction from going through (eventually).

The end goal with Bitcoin is to bypass all the permissioned fiat rails eventually.

> with no fiat intermediaries like exchanges

What's the volume of Bitcoin traded outside of exchanges? 0.0001%?

Just because you don't like it, doesn't make it wrong :-)

>What's the volume of Bitcoin traded outside of exchanges

How could you ever know? A group of people could trade paper wallets with 1000s of Bitcoin trillions of times and no record of it would show up on chain.

Well, that's off-chain and requires trust. So it's arguably not bitcoin.

(It requires trust, because how do you prevent double spending attacks? Someone can just print out the same paper wallet twice.

You need to move the funds to an address you control to be sure.)

>So it's arguably not bitcoin.

It's always Bitcoin in any scenario we can think of since value never ever leaves the chain, only the person with control of the on-chain value changes.

>Someone can just print out the same paper wallet twice.

I used "paper wallet" as a simple place holder, many tamper resistant one time use solutions exist, like Opendime.

Why do people always want to talk about the old bitcoin technology? Try to do the same with Monero, good luck.

OK. All Monero addresses are banned. Done.

> banned

...from KYC exchanges. There's already tons of non-KYC darknet exchanges that will happily take your btc and give you xmr, at which point you're off to the races. Any attempt to extend requirements at KYC exchanges would spur further developments in non-KYC/decentralized swappers, as we've seen so far.

It’s not just about exchanges it’s about taxation. So long as governments can enforce taxation (e.g. income, sales, VAT). They maintain the power to restrict mediums of payment.

The world your proposing isn’t just about upending financial plumbing. It’s predicated upon uprooting government financial regulation. That would send us back to the dark ages of finance. That’s not something I support.

Sorry, completely forgot about this thread.

> It’s predicated upon uprooting government financial regulation.

Imo this is a positive, but that's a little besides the point - it is inevitable in the same way that encrypted communications are inevitable and don't care whether Australia decides its laws trump the laws of math. If you care about the ability to maintain taxation, etc, then riding the wave is vastly preferable to being crushed by it.

Banned from what? The internet? LOL

Instead of giving an example that doesn't work, maybe give an example that does work: Monero.

Nobody here has addressed the actual issue of Blockchain in a cashless society. You need internet for using crypto, your internet company accepts only legal currency (card, cash, etc) and since there's no chash and you have been cut off from using cards you can't pay for your internet bill and that means it'll eventually get cut and you won't be able to use crypto. Crypto needs cash to work, because people need cash or card for utilities, those companies won't accept your make believe money like the little shop in the corner does.