News EU Plans to Restrict Private Crypto Wallets

spongiemaster

Admirable
Dec 12, 2019
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Would be much better if they just banned Crypto but still this could be the beginning of the end. Fingers crossed.
You have to be delusional to think crime is the driving force behind crypto currencies. Bitcoin's market cap alone is over $600 billion US. That's not all child pornographers and Russian hackers. If anything, this move by the EU will help legitimize crypto currencies and make it more appealing to businesses and individual investors. Gov't oversight isn't going to take down crypto, in the long run, it will stabilize it and bring it into the mainstream.
 

husker

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Oct 2, 2009
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I know nothin' about nothin' but common sense is telling me this: Crypto is legal in the U.S. as long as it is not used to avoid taxes. If the government has no way to verify what is in a crypto wallet, then is can (and eventually will) either make crypto illegal or have a way to look at everyone's wallet just like a bank account. Once that happens, then the security of crypto is compromised and there will be backdoor hacks to get at wallets and crypto will become worthless because the trust factor will be gone. I'm open to be educated on this matter if I'm dead wrong.
 

TJ Hooker

Titan
Ambassador
I know nothin' about nothin' but common sense is telling me this: Crypto is legal in the U.S. as long as it is not used to avoid taxes. If the government has no way to verify what is in a crypto wallet, then is can (and eventually will) either make crypto illegal or have a way to look at everyone's wallet just like a bank account. Once that happens, then the security of crypto is compromised and there will be backdoor hacks to get at wallets and crypto will become worthless because the trust factor will be gone. I'm open to be educated on this matter if I'm dead wrong.
To clarify, for most cryptocurrencies the contents of every address (wallet) is publicly viewable, as is the record of where (which address) those contents came from. The issue is determining the real world identity of who the wallet belongs to. For high profile cases, law enforcement can do some investigation to trace the transactions to a point where they can be linked to an individual, but I'm guessing that's costly/time consuming (and there are steps people can take to try to obfuscate their blockchain paper trail). That level of investigation probably doesn't make sense for catching Joe Blow for tax evasion. That being said, many crypto investors probably have a pretty simple transaction history, involving a single address and only transactions from/to an exchange (assuming they didn't just leave it in their exchange account, which many do). In that case, if you have the exchange's records, it'd be pretty easy to identify the owners of addresses (and their gains/losses).
 
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You have to be delusional to think crime is the driving force behind crypto currencies. Bitcoin's market cap alone is over $600 billion US. That's not all child pornographers and Russian hackers. If anything, this move by the EU will help legitimize crypto currencies and make it more appealing to businesses and individual investors. Gov't oversight isn't going to take down crypto, in the long run, it will stabilize it and bring it into the mainstream.
Which to me seems like the opposite goal of what the pioneers of crypto wanted.