Privacy in crypto is basically reallowing tax havens in the "digital" world where we spent years to try to curtain them in the "real" world.
A good friend of us happens to be working at a high level at the EU commission. Discussing about Bitcoin/Crypto, his answer was simple: "We will ban all crypto as soon as we consider it to create problems with taxes".
Coinbase would win the case, it would be one more step in the direction of a ban in the EU.
Cash can and is used to buy/sell on the black market and also to buy/sell privately without leaving traces. But it is very difficult to move large amounts of money with cash. It means, it provides privacy with an acceptable level of freedom to do illegal stuff.
Privacy in crypto enables the same but it also allows bad actors to move extreme large amounts of money. The risks for the government are here so big, they cannot accept it.
Well they sanctioned the use of that software.
I don't really see why this is seen as such a problem. Banks that are used primarily for criminal activity get sanctioned frequently.
It's pretty clear judging by the amount of money going though Tornado cash and the amount that was from publicly known hacks known to be flowing through it that the majority of the money was from illegal activity.
> Imagine if they sanctioned Tor Browser or Signal, both of which are used for privacy and can be used for illegal activity.
But they didn't.
But forums that are focused on illegal activities get shutdown all the time.
Singapore and Hong Kong have all been tax havens for virtually the entire history of their existence as nations. Nevis has corporate secrecy protected as a right in its Constitution. There has been no attempt to address any of these jurisdictions. Being low empathy for crypto is being low empathy for the middle class, which thanks to RingCT and zk-Snarks has the ability to have the same level of financial privacy as megamillionaires who can afford to spend a thousand dollars or more setting up a trust in Nevis. Ten percent of all the world's wealth is run out of tax havens -- an amount that has gone up, not down, the opposite of curtains.
Common people should be allowed the same level of financial privacy as the rich -- that is to say complete and total. It is a basic human right. If governments ban crypto, we should start banning governments.
Note I used "would" not "should", the latter is ideology, the former acknowledgement of reality.
'Banning all crypto' is just as realistic as banning all use of end-to-end-encryption (E2EE) in apps, tools, etc because it allows criminals, terrorists and scammers to hide their communications for doing illegal activities.
The fact is, a total 100% ban on either of them is an unrealistic and hopelessly utopian request beyond delusional.
Surely you were not discussing those things with the Great Dictator of EU, not accountable in their decisions to citizens and courts?
The only questionable thing here is that you cannot vote for politicians of other EU nations and that there is literally only one EU wide party called Volt.
There's also a coincenter lawsuit on purely constitutional grounds (https://www.coincenter.org/analysis-what-is-and-what-is-not-...).
Infinite public money will be spent to bat down these lawsuits until it’s set in stone.
Widespread privacy in crypto == end of civilisation. This sounds ridiculous but logically one has to follow the other in a few very short steps.
That does sound ridiculous. What are the steps?
Crypto and digital assets should be free from regulation, even if it brings side effects (e.g. laundering). The moment we centralize crypto by state, we lose the war against corrupted states and centralization.
While I don't support bad actors that use crypto in any way, I still believe having them is a side effect that we need to accept for a better world without government survelliance.
The upside still outweighs the downsides.
It's far from clear to me why on earth crypto should be free from regulation at all.
The regulators are supposed to be protecting who from what exactly? And at whose expense?
So far I've seen two lines of reasoning:
1) Regulators are needed to protect me from myself. I can't assess if these dog-coins have long-term investment potential or not, so I want the government in the loop somehow. If I can purchase something on the internet, I assume it's safe, or the government wouldn't let it be sold.
2) Regulators need to protect the government from the effects of money laundering. I must give up privacy for the greater good, as the money laundered by North Korean hackers will be used against my country. Giving up all privacy in exchange for a small reduction in the funding of our enemies is always a good trade.
Even if I buy one of these arguments wholeheartedly, the practical matter is that we're trying to prevent math from being done here, and it's just not going to work. It's sort of like preventing piracy.
But public sentiment has become very anti-crypto, so I suspect we'll land in a war-on-drugs type situation where the crypto never really goes away and you can still transact it anonymously, but we mostly just don't talk about it except for the occasional bust to ensure more enforcement budget next year.
Also, Ethereum could adopt privacy by default some day, via their proposal process.
It's fascinating to watch regulators talk about "bitcoin" and "ethereum" as if they're "gold" and "oil", unchanging commodities that just need to be categorized and dealt with appropriately.
Ethereum is totally publicly visible today, but it does not need to be that way tomorrow. These are living projects.
But kudos where kudos are due! I hope this goes the way
Liberty or death: it is not death of the individual but death of society. The resilience of our social structure is dependent on our freedoms.
I cant say how saddening it is to have lived through the crypto wars in the 90s that were so well defended by tech workers, to now see HACKER news commentators fine with massive government overreach in the name of "safety". lol.
Basically, the case you're making is: they might have actively aided and abetted nuclear proliferation - but they're technologists, so their actions are sacrosanct and cannot be subject to the usual penalities because we've been ultra smart and managed to create an industry where free speech and money laundering can be switched out at will like in a shell game.
So the argument that we should never use "the terrorists" or "the children" to make policy decisions is overly simplistic. I believe the sort of reasoning is actually counterproductive. Even here on HN many believe a restriction on crypto currencies is justified if it curbs tax evasion, in other words they believe the trade-off between right restriction and societal benefit is worth it. So arguing that we should never use "the terrorists" to argue for restricting rights is very obviously contradicting how we are implementing laws, so it is not convincing. Instead we should argue why the trade-off is such that the argument does not hold in this case.
This is not really about crypto, or tornado cash. I think it's more about ownership and surveillance. The only solution is to innovate in the area of evasion. Since there is no middle ground amenable to the ones who make the laws in their own interests.
We can just look at wikileaks, panama papers and so on. Money laundering and embezzlement is much more pervasive and rapaciously damaging in the highest levels of "power". Wealth "inequality" is an oligopoly of concentrated power and wealth.
The reason we don't have privacy is because technology has been centralized and it's easy to pressure providers to give up user's privacy.
The idea that parties have financial privacy between each other is actually the default. I can hand you physical cash. This is normal.
That's not because of some special provision that "allows" for cash to be private. That's just how it's always been done.
If you do work for me, and I hand you a gold coin, you don't have to do something special to make sure the government can track the item of value. You just mark it down on your taxes as income.
This is how things had been done until maybe the last 20 years or so, when 9/11 greatly expanded the government surveillance requirements on financial businesses.
There's a mountain of law to support private property transfer.
I’m genuinely unsure what your point is?
Are you saying that because the rich and powerful are destroying society by evading taxes and weakening the fundamental infrastructure of our civilization, the rest of us should have crypto so we can be in on the loot?
Big claim there.
However, I am much more hesitant with privacy in money transfers. It is not obvious to me at all that we should have unlimited unregulated money transfers. In fact, I fear that unreflected support for the latter might erode the (already tenuous) support for the former:
Currently, we might still be in a position to regulate and disrupt cryptocurrencies (for example, Bitcoin needs on- and off-ramps tied to tradFi, and Bitcoin traffic is unencrypted and can be detected (and censored), AFAIK). If that whole ecosystem were to succeed in ensuring encryption and anonymity in money transfers, we might get to a point where there is overwhelming political pressure to prohibit any encrypted communication, even more so than already.
TL;DR: Cryptocurrencies might jeopardise Signal et al. Yet another reason to oppose Crypto: to protect encryption.
There is always room for “good honest police work”, though.
There are many roadblocks governments could use to slow progress, but I’m not sure this is truly preventable any more than PGP or BitTorrent could have been.
If income tax becomes logistically problematic, there are many other types of taxes that may then need to fill the void.
Also despite crypto allowing for pure privacy already with coins like Monero, this hasn't stopped tax revenue. It's not a black-or-white issue, because only a tiny fraction of people will utilise this privacy due to technical hurdles and other limitations compared to paying with cash or card.
This way, I would have guaranteed and auditable privacy that the government cannot surreptitiously break, but there is an route to find identifying information with a noisy and court approved process. This would involve both a technological side and an organizational one - brokers would have to setup some type of clearing house that processes legal documents and requests for unblinding, approve new brokers and terminate those that do not follow relevant KYC practices, etc. A middle option between banks (no privacy, 100% agents of the government) and crypto (anonymous brokers, untraceable in competent hands, excellent for money laundry).
We cannot continue to pretend that the current crypto crop "is just like cash". I most certainly cannot teleport 1 billion dollars in cash across borders, completely untraceable. If you cannot see a problem with this feature of crypto and the bad types of people it would attract and enable, then you might be suffering from a case of sociopathy.
Law enforcement is subject to laws too, there is no problem with having laws and enforcing them, unless you live in North Korea. What we should object to is extra-legal surveillance, not court orders.
https://tornado-cash.medium.com/tornado-cash-compliance-9abb...
That's just a digital timestamp service, only a small part of what I'm talking about.
Mind you, I don't claim any novelty in the process I sketched above - just professing the need to have it implemented before we can treat crypto-assets as anything other than a money laundry tool.
They have to do that and it is a good thing, like standing up against overreaching regulations in this case.
If it would not be "crypto", HN would stand unanimously with the privacy fight. Banning open source software which has legitimate use cases, such as anonimizing donations to Ukraine in fear of retaliations, paying for abortion in States in the US where it is legally restricted, etc. is a no brainer to me as it sets a grave precedent.
