If this will be implemented as described, I'm interested to see the bookkeeping required to enforce it.
Just Bitcoin is currently doing roughly 250,000 transactions per day, and they will have to somewhat manually go through all of them to check for 'illicit activities' and that all of them are somehow linked to a real-world identity of someone. Right? Then add on top of this all the 'fast blockchains' such as Ethereum.
It comes down to this: If the bill passes, each centralized service provider in the EU (exchanges, casinos, payment processors) will have to perform stricter KYC on their customers. Solution: Stop using centralized third-party services. It's that simple, but for many people the alternatives aren't going to be that attractive. How do you trade P2P in a place where almost no one uses Bitcoin and you need fiat? Bisq? Maybe.
What I find interesting is that Kraken recently implemented Lightning. I am not saying that LN is 100% untraceable, but it does make things a lot harder. Sure, this bill is a legal thing that stands above anything that we can implement on the technical side, since it can basically state 'we won't accept your deposit (LN or not) if you don't provide full KYC and believable origin of fudns'. But on the other hand, there is no 'KYUTXO' because LN has no notion of UTXOs. Also I don't get how they want to handle Monero, since the transactions aren't public. Will they just ban it? Many open questions.
It's in human nature to take the easy route. Hopefully, there will be some resistance.
I really hope that as well!
Correct me if I am wrong P2P would still work even if the ban is in place, like in my country where there is a ban on crypto-currency transaction, and P2P has been a route for many.
This is very interesting. I assume Bitcoin wasn't banned from the start; so did you experience major changes in how cryptocurrency is perceived, used and handled in every-day life after the ban? Was P2P popular in your country before and how did the ban affect it? Which platform is preferred go-to choice for those P2P trades?
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Obviously, the latter sounds more like what Satoshi said, but in many cases an invention ends up being different in several ways from the original idea of its creator.
Today we have reached the current number of users and the current price among other things because of centralized exchanges, demand from companies and government regulations. How many people would use Bitcoin today if it were banned worldwide? And what would the price be? I think it would have a much smaller number of users and a much lower price.
If Bitcoin were used exclusively P2P, it would be a thing of a few cyberpunks, and events like, for example, legalization as a currency in El Salvador, would not have happened.
I'd agree that centralized entities have helped people to get into Bitcoin more easily than having to find users P2P who'd sell them some of this good stuff. But for one, a worldwide ban is completely off the books here, right? This is a EU thing to fully be able to track payments, not a ban. And even if; honestly, Bitcoin is P2P money. It's
not meant to be in the same system as banks and similar service providers. I like to compare Bitcoin to P2P file sharing through Bittorrent. No matter how much centralized hosting providers, movie rentals and software vendors hate it, it continues to work and chug along.
I don't know if only cypherpunks would use Bitcoin if it were to get back to its P2P roots; that remains to be seen, but I don't think so.
Coins are used for paying and being paid
This is the critical step. Storing your own keys, running your own node, using open source software, mixing your coins, etc., are all trivial. Being able to spend your bitcoin without going through the fiat system is that hard part. I don't want to sell my bitcoin for fiat and then spend the fiat, I don't want bitcoin debit cards which sell your bitcoin for fiat at point of sale, I don't want to have to buy gift cards first, I don't want to have to go through some third party processor which swaps my bitcoin for fiat at the point of sale. Although I do some of these things to let me spend my bitcoin, what I really want are merchants which accept bitcoin directly. Give me enough of those, and avoiding the fiat system entirely becomes easy.
Couldn't have said it better, that's the spirit! What we can do is let merchants that we frequently use, know that we'd like them to accept Bitcoin payments directly. It starts with companies selling 'Bitcoin products' such as hardware wallets.
Personally, I've always considered moving to a place with better privacy laws in general if when the current place gets too bad.
