And then ironically when America banned gold, it was too expensive to enforce at scale. They didn’t go door to door. Many families just hodled for decades until it became legal again. Few people were ever prosecuted because that’s embarrassing and expensive for the government. It was threat over action. It was like banning marijuana.
Discussion
It will most probably happen to Bitcoin too, at other scale with different methods
It would mot matter in the end, it will be just a bump to a more just, decentralized and independent society
Criminalization is upstream of normalization.
Hi Lyn, I think about this topics quite some time. And I think they don't have to go door to door. In todays interconnected world for example crypto exchanges can correspond with financial institutions and vice versa. Just a scenario: In most european contries your tax id is linked to your exchange account. To make it easy for itself as the ministry of finance they just impose a 100 % tax on bitcoin with your next tax assesment notice. And then go on from there. It will force people out of there position. Is this a potential risk in you opinion regarding a nation state ban?
And that was for gold, which was harder to hide, transport and trade because of its physical properties.
Now it's even harder to enforce because we can just travel to another country easier if we want to exchange it still in a legal setting.
You know how politicians work : they will react accordingly only if ..
- You’re a threat and have a lot of voters with you
- You’re a threat and can send them to jail
- you really have a lot of money !
All the rest is noise 😋🔥
One word.
Biiiiiitconnnnnnnect
Even then there was exemption for certain collectible and numismatic gold and silver coins. I suspect there would have been a big backlash amongst wealthy collectors so FDR didn’t want to go there.
Yes, I can recommend the book “The Great Depression: A Diary”
by Benjamin Roth … it’s written by a lawyer who lived through the 1930s and he makes observations about the markets and politics. Very interesting!
And bitcoin ban is even less enforceable, equivalent to banning math – good luck with that.
Not really. Why should it? Making it illegal would make it illegal for any national company to accept bitcoin for paiment. And no exchanges could be maintained in the country. But yeah. Holding and exchanging bitcoin might not be possible.
It'll create friction for exchange use for sure, but if you're holding in cold storage you can just either wait it out or leave the country. And keeping 12-24 words hidden is easier than a gold.
Yes this for sure is possible. But temporally it can lower the price of cryptocurrencies, when some marketplaces stop working.
The question is this: will enforcement at scale be possible now that we live in a digital society? The toolkit of government has widened.