We're increasingly facing a situation where there are two Bitcoin networks: verified wallets versus unverified wallets.

Almost all _market-available_ Bitcoin is on the verified side. Unverified wallets interacting with verified wallets eventually become verified wallets, as auditors can track the verified-person's online and offline activities and figure out who they are interacting with. The burden of keeping a wallet completely unverified keeps climbing and will eventually become prohibitive, leaving the wallet owner stuck in a sort of financial darknet.

Bitcoin remains uncensorable (the transaction cannot be blocked), but it is slowly losing its remaining _deniability_ and _obscurity_, as the satoshis move around the network. Rather than stopping you from keeping or using your Bitcoin, they have realized that they can simply fine you or tax you, so that you are forced into selling it.

I suppose their next step is to demand you sell those Bitcoin to them, directly, for their national stack. Or they could enact a crypto tax, that simply lobs off a benchmark-currency equivalent of 2% of every transaction and sends it to the central bank, keeping it in crypto.

Another thing they could do is force you to pay those fines and taxes in their stablecoin, artificially expanding the market for those coins.

They have many interesting options, going forward. Unfortunately.

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(Small) Nation States that go zero bitcoin tax, no prohibition, zero censorship, bitcoin only policy......

will attract bitcoin capital in this environment.

Others have to follow.... Maybe naive.

The problem is that those states would become economic ghettos. Almost all financial transactions will happen elsewhere and it would be easy to simply sanction anyone in that ghetto.

Another option would be washing/mixing/reanonymizing utxos.

Plus striktly separating the registered & unregistered part of your wallet.

& Consciously picking coins/addresses for official transactions versus

"dark/parallel" economy.

People will just switch to Monero for the dark stuff. Anything else is too annoying and limiting.

Monero has the inflation/validation problem.

For anonymous uncensorable transacting it's cool. Store of long term value is the problem.

On the problem above : It's happening already (Jurisdictional arbitrage) Many German Bitcoiners travel to CzechR./Prague to insert Cash anonomously into BTC-ATMs. That's it.

If they need Euros back they go on Regional BTC-Meetups and Cash out again. All those models have "friction" of course (traveling, price premium compared to registered X-changes...)

But if the friction in the legacy system is way higher, it's worth it. And nothing beats beeing outside the collapsing system.

The costs for the legacy system (enforcement costs) are rising as well.

You see them charging every minor infringement (speeding, parking...) but aren't able to establish basic security (borders, neighborhoods, public transport).

Yes, this is the thing. Anarcho-tyranny, where they pester the peaceful and good-willed, while the violent criminals run wild and the infrastructure crumbles.

💯

In cheap hardware wallets like Trezor-One (~50EUR) there is always optional UTXO selection when spending.

Whilst receiving just use different addresses.

Not that hard technically.

Yes.

Good point.

At some point the moral of self-sovereignty needs to be adopted or fail. It’s probably utopian to think the technology alone is path-dependent.

I started to get some Monero on this concern, honestly !

I’m not super confident on the self custody side of Bitcoin since black rock and fidelity in the game !