Bitcoin Forum

It would appear, based on the news this week, that major world governments like the US and others are cracking down (https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/04/30/binance-founder-changpeng-cz-zhao-sentenced-to-4-months-in-prison-will-enter-as-countrys-richest-inmate/) on the notion of "government-proof privacy", and prosecuting companies and individuals who facilitate money transfer that cannot be potentially traced by a government. They are going after mixers and brokers who do not adequately engage in KYC.

In short, it would seem that governments are trying eliminate the very thing that Bitcoin--and blockchain generally--was originally designed to accomplish.

What does this mean for the long term prospects for cryptocurrencies? Will blockchain survive losing it's original purpose?

My own answer is: "yes", in the short term, and "maybe" for the longer term.

I have written before (https://medium.com/@stephen-r-thomas/the-anon-paradox-anonymity-big-small-1231a6a060e4) about different kinds of "privacy" that people might want, and most want privacy from other citizens, from companies, and from criminals: privacy from a targeted investigation from the government is a level that, in my estimation, a "nice to have" for most people, but not a dealbreaker.

Hence in the short term, cryptos missing their original purpose is not something most consumers care about. Most holders of Bitcoin these days do so in a centralized way, e.g. with an app or a broker that keeps their account under their name, in a centralized database.

As for the longer term, this brings up an important question: why use blockchain at all?

Blockchain is slow and expensive to transact in on purpose (https://medium.com/@stephen-r-thomas/blockchain-is-slow-and-expensive-by-design-c822e8a9465d) because of proof-of-work and decentralization. No cryptocurrency will ever come even close to scaling to the billions of transactions each day by people worldwide.

But a digital currency that is not blockchain-based can accomplish this and provide the same mechanism for speculation and value store that blockchain-based currencies provide. In my opinion, the long-term future of the actual blockchain architecture behind today's cryptocurrencies is... unclear.

In the first place — why would 'blockchain' not survive? Blockchains will work totally fine without mixers and coinjoins and stuff. I'm all for privacy, but everyone simply isn't interested in it whether we like it or not. Only a minority cares about self-custody and being self-sovereign; a lot of people just want to use it just as an investment/hedge.

And yes, even without privacy, Bitcoin and blockchains would still be useful, just as these are still very useful today despite privacy being very minimal.

What about the exchanges that do support and go for the use of KYC and they were being attacked, what can they do, it is better we understand the ploy of the governments, which is in their fight against a decentralized network and anything that gives us financial freedom and privacy, because they have no say over them, and as for the exchanges, they will continue the struggles together until we all realized the need to either stop using them or go for the decentralized ones. 

It is fine to know that what happens in the blockchain is not only about privacy and neither is it about the mixers only. I believe that the potential of blockchain is yet to be harnessed fully. There is no doubt that the government will continue to fight against privacy but then there is a limit to what they can do. For instance they keep compelling the centralized exchanges to delist privacy coins, this does not mean that they will in any way infiltrate the decentralized exchanges to also delist privacy coins.

There was when I was very much bothered about what is happening now. And as the time progresses my fears come to pass. Prepare your mind to see more regulations and shutdown of privacy enhancement systems in the cryptocurrency industry. But I am consoled by a singular phrase that says thus; necessity is the mother of invention. The more and more the government fight against decentralization and privacy, the more private and decentralized individuals will find ways to continue scaling through.

Blockchains work "fine", I agree. And as I wrote above, I don't see anything about them changing in the short term.

But long term, the entire reason you resort to the blockchain architecture is to make the system resistant to government subpoenas. If you didn't want that benefit, a centralized system is far better in every single way.

And here I am just talking about the backend architecture, not digital currency trading in general, which I very much am banking on--personally--to remain a very big part of consumer life :). You can absolutely have everything most consumers want out of cryptocurrencies without blockchain, but cheaper and faster and better.

So in the long run, if blockchain is just a useless addition to a product that makes it slower and more expensive, then that technology will eventually fall by the wayside.

Have you read the Satoshi's white paper? If not I suggest read them first from the link below

- https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Can you find or did you read that he said Bitcoin is government-resistant?

Bitcoin is still decentralized anyone can have their own full node and make it anonymous and private the only things that are not private are the transactions that come from exchanges and transactions we made but we still have services like non-KYC p2p exchanges. I  just don't know if these p2p exchanges will be seized by the government as I haven't heard yet.
and those mixers/coinjoin are just a 3rd party service Satoshi never plan about these services.

You're using bloclchain generally. Not all blockchains are decentralized or private, it's a technology that can be used and modified in different way, can even get more centralized than the financial system that is used by banks. If you narrow it down to Bitcoin which operates on a decentralized bloclchain, it will definitely survive the attack on pruvxcy through mixers and coinjoin services.

The authorities can only target and hurt Bitcoin indirectly by taking down services that allows privacy, but cannot regulate the Bitcoin network.

- Jay -

Exchanges that were complying with the law have not been "attacked". Binance broke some specific laws, and was charged accordingly.

It's perfectly legal to hold and trade Bitcoin in the United States. It's perfectly legal to have an exchange for USD or other negotiable currencies as long as KYC and other rules are followed.

The world is not out to get you :).



It's implied in the entire paper. It's the entire reason Bitcoin even exists. Otherwise, why not just use a credit card or a bank?

What the whitepaper did not anticipate is chain analysis which makes Bitcoin actually very very unprivate :). That's why follow-on products like mixers and Monera came about.



Using blockchain centrally is a complete waste of time and the dumbest thing ever. It's basically adding some code to a project that doesn't need it, and makes the project more expensive, slower, less secure, and more cumbersome to use. It would be like using an HTTPS/REST network layer to add two numbers together instead of just writing "a += b;". I mean, it's theoretically possible, but the only reason you'd do it would be to impress your boss that your project has some catchy buzzwords in it (and a good development manager would tell you to stop that and just get the project done :)).

Any transactions are in public not private but all identities who use this address or who made any transaction are private.
So do you think if you send BTC to me or other forum members here did they know your identity or mine? Did you find it on the blockchain?

What makes you think about Chain analysis do to you? What they can only do is to track a transaction but they don't know who owns it and I don't think ChainAnalysis will track you unless you did money laundering.

Identities per se are not on the blockchain, but chainanalysis allows people to "triangulate" where a transaction came from, or where it went. It's not exact, but I'm pretty sure it works well enough to make it so that criminals no longer use Bitcoin, or if they do, they use a mixer.

And while authorities won't go out of their way to track you down unless they have a reason to do so, criminals and marketers will use it to try to steal or sell something, or otherwise bother you :). In this context, using Bitcoin these days isn't very safe...

But this goes beyond mixers and coinjoins and stuff like that. The government is starting with this and soon enough they will start cracking down on other crypto related stuff. Right now they can still justify what they are doing in guise of concern over anonymity.

Next thing we know everyone is being checked and asked for their financial information.

I guess you can "imagine" absolutely anything, but the clear pattern since money laundering laws were first put on the books in the early 1970s is to go after criminals who cannot account for large amounts of money legally.

The US at least, millions of Americans are paid every day for their work in untraceable physical cash, and there are no laws against it all of these years later. The only time the authorities get involved is when it is a lot of money where it's clear the money wasn't obtained legally.

In Bitcoin we could always get some anonymization through Lightning or Liquid, they have not focused on that yet, luckily

Still useful, probably--if you do as the powers-that-be command.

Imagine living in Stalin's Soviet Union and only having crypto to transact with. They would obviously ban all private transactions. All your finances would be a matter of public record. This is not some theoretical scenario, but a real-life hazard that we will likely experience in the coming decades.

Efforts to eradicate it have been ongoing since its inception.  The current escalation indicates a concerted effort to suppress centralized privacy services.  Bitcoin was originally designed to create a currency outside the government's control; not to make centralized services invulnerable to governmental coercion.  The remedy lies not in abandoning Bitcoin, but in advancing our decentralized privacy solutions.


I think we've addressed this before.  Here is why: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page. 

Then in your argument t hat "Bitcoin is not safe", we can conclude that cryptocurrencies are not safe this Bitcoin is the prime mover of crypto? So there is a flaw in your argument already as crypto is safe, it's not there are a lot of bad people around us that uses it's weaknesses to their advantage.

So for me blockchain will survived and so are mixers.

There could be another layer, similar to bitcoin mixers in the future so it's going to be a cat-and-mouse game for authorities to de-anonymized transactions and "triangulate" where the transaction came from.

Bitcoin's original goal was being p2p digital cash. Nothing that the governments did in the past changed that. Some mixers got closed? That only means they were the weak link because they were centralized. This means that privacy enthusiasts will focus on developing decentralized anonymization.

And blockchains goal was always making the devs rich by selling pre-mined coins. So far governments are not going after this investment scam scheme.

you being known to the authorities because of the KYC done by exchanges means you are vulnerable to them and they could visit your home address and chain you for having transactions they couldn't trace. that's crazy but it could actually happen.

developers also may be visited by the authorities to see whether they can tag wallet addresses. and this is how blockchains of some coins may not survive. if it's what OP means? if they could do this to mixers why not to the developers? they could just find faults in these developers and if they are resistant, they could just jail them.

Yes, and the reason you need p2p cash--or p2p anything, for that matter--is to evade government subpoenas. If you don't need that, centralized architectures are far more efficient, secure and convenient.

Bitcoin's original purpose was to create a method of transacting that could not be traced by governments, and could not be stopped by them.



No, what I meant was that governments are getting good at cracking down on "absolutely anonymous" transactions that the government cannot trace. It's clear that kind of "privacy" (as opposed to privacy from criminals and marketers and other citizens) is going to be much harder to obtain, and will probably be reduced to very small networks and very obscure coins--which will necessarily be very risky since they will be such so small. This could effectively kill the entire ability of people to transact in a way that cannot be traced.

But yet the only reason to use blockchain in the first place is to create these kinds of transactions. So why use it?

Given the recent regulatory crackdown on privacy-focused aspects of cryptocurrencies, do you think blockchain's original purpose is becoming obsolete? How might this impact the long-term viability of cryptocurrencies as governments ramp up efforts to enforce KYC regulations and eliminate anonymous transactions?

Since the blockchain is public, then i am sure anyone using BTC should know that there is a possibility of their coins being traced if they do not adopt privacy solutions. The orginal purpose of BTC was instead to be a p2p electronic cash that is censorship resistant and permissionless, and it is still that, if you do not use custodial and centralized services, you cannot be censored and your coins cannot be confiscated.

I don't know where you are going with your arguments, but what makes you think that now BTC can be stopped by the government, i don't see any single point of failure.

When did Proof Of Work is the only one consensus in blockchain? ???

POW and decentralization is the reason why Bitcoin transactions are slow and expensive compared to other coins, but it's not make the whole blockchain is slow and expensive! check Stellar and Nano.

Blockchain is just a ledger that contains data, a public blockchain is actually make anyone can trace it. If US crackdown on privacy, only private blockchain are in danger.

Bitcoin is no longer "censorship resistant", by which we mean something that can be safely used by those breaking the laws of their government. It hasn't been for years. (No Bitcoin user values "permissionless" and they don't know what that means or care).

You can see what most consumers want by observing that almost all Bitcoin user use centralized wallets, which are no different than bank accounts.


I never said that BTC can be stopped by the government--no world government wants to do that because there would be no point.

When I say "blockchain" here, I mean the blockchain architecture and I mean it's use in new projects going forward. There's no reason to use blockchain to create the next Bitcoin.

The main purpose of Bitcoin is not to hide anything from governments. That turned out to be a possibility. At the same time, Bitcoin is global and for example, only a few governments are putting pressure on privacy on the Bitcoin network, and many are still not interested in it. Just as you have neutral and independent countries when it comes to fiat, so will it be for Bitcoin.

The whole thing will only move most of all services and businesses from restricted countries to crypto-friendly ones. Mixers will no longer be called mixers, they will have a new name, and their founders will do it much more carefully and with more anonymity.

Blockchains will survive. But only if they remain decentralized and censorship-resistant. Mixers and privacy/anonymization techniques are completely different things. Governments have only been able to shut down centralized mixers, but they'll never be able to stop decentralized ones. Consider how Tornado.Cash survived despite being sanctioned by the US. These actions are not surprising to me, especially when governments don't want people to achieve true financial freedom and privacy.

It will be a long war between crypto (especially Bitcoin) and mainstream governments. I'd say there's nothing to be worried about. Hopefully, crypto will live alongside Fiat for generations. :)

Then you are misunderstanding the basis of Bitcoin, and thus the blockchain architecture.

If you didn't care about the government, then why not just use a plain old bank? Without the ability to evade government subpoenas, what actual added value does Bitcoin have? What can it do that other means of transfer cannot do? Trillions of dollars in payments go across borders every single day. This is not something that is unique to Bitcoin.



Well, it looks like Bitcoin is no longer decentralized because almost all of its holders use it through a broker or an app, and with chain analysis it's not very "censorship-resistant" either, and they are being cracked down on.

To be clear, Bitcoin is absolutely, positively going to "survive". Nobody is questioning that. The only thing to question is whether it's going to stay in the hearts and minds of millions of consumers such that it's market cap remains over one trillion US dollars.

And the other question is whether other digital currencies, which are not based on blockchain and not decentralized, will become more popular among millions of people than Bitcoin is today.

Personally I think the products that are built for a mainstream audience tend to win out in the marketplace in the long run :).

Yes Blockchain will survive its original purpose, irrespective of the fact that the governments are planning on introducing their own centralized Blockchain but the true qualities of Bitcoin Blockchain will still survive. Bitcoin can survive with or without mixers, Bitcoin was active before the mixer so it is not that Bitcoin need them but they're the ones that needs Bitcoin to have a service to render. Using Bitcoin as it was intended brings anonymity with it but it's just the privacy that is missing although there will be other ways which we can use Bitcoin and increase our privacy without making use of mixers. We have the option of using a different address for each transaction we want to carry out  either spending or receiving Bitcoin and our privacy isn't exposed.


Blockchain is transparent, it's decentralized and trustworthy. It might be slow and costly for now but it won't stay this way forever. There are strong believers of the Bitcoin Blockchain and they're developer too that'll bring out a more acceptable solution in the future and all this will be a thing of the past, we just have to exercise patience and give Bitcoin time. We're still new so the challenges are what we should be expecting because after we have a triumph over this setbacks, only God knows how explosive Bitcoin adoption will get.

I believe Bitcoin is not actually created to make transactions with complete anonymity nor either traceable by the government, it's just to eliminate the middle man and still Bitcoin is capable of doing that. Governments are targetting the mixers because they believe these services were used to mix the coins from scams and hacks and laundered it to their customers by taking good money as commission.

Agree with you, what the government is doing is cracking down on anonymous services because they think it makes it difficult for them to track criminals and manage their citizens. The government has no intention of attacking bitcoin or blockchain as the OP is mentioning. If they really want to ban bitcoin and hinder the development of cryptocurrency, why did they accept bitcoin ETFs and introduce a series of regulations for the cryptocurrency market? What they want is to control the market, to control us, they have no intention of stopping the development of blockchain technology or the cryptocurrency industry.

Privacy and anonymity weren't the "first thing Bitcoin was originally designed to accomplish". Bitcoin was supposed to be peer-to-peer electronic cash, which can be used without the need of banks and third parties. Just read the whitepaper again. Does it mention anything about privacy and anonymity?
The BTC blockchain was never designed to be anonymous and private. Actually, the BTC blockchain is pretty transparent and transparency is a good thing, because it creates trust.
BTC mixers weren't a thing when the BTC blockchain was created. Why would the BTC blockchain be dependent on the existence of centralized third party services like BTC mixers?

1. "Transparent" is a bad thing when it comes to preserving privacy.

2. "Decentralized" is just an implementation detail that is supposed to accomplish a benefit. But it's a waste of time if that benefit does not materialize.

3. "Trustworthy" does not describe thousands of blockchain projects, and in fact they are the opposite. Bitcoin is trustworthy because it is carefully governed, supported by many, and has been around for a while. But that all has nothing to do with the blockchain architecture per se.


Yes it will, and in fact it will most likely get slower and more expensive over time. Blockchain was designed to be intentionally slow and expensive. This is a feature and not a bug. As such, it will not be "fixed".


Bitcoin has been around for 14 years now. It's not going to be fixed.



Almost any digital currency architecture will "eliminate the middle man". Services like PayPal have been around for 15 years before Bitcoin--and PayPal is today far cheaper and faster than Bitcoin for a transaction.

Blockchain was a complicated solution to a very complicated problem--but it's a problem not many people actually have.



Using banks/third parties is faster, cheaper and easier. Why would you go to all of this trouble to make a digital currency that is slow, expensive, and complicated, as Bitcoin is? It was because Bitcoin was designed to solve a problem the existing services could not solve, which is resistance to government subpoenas.

In other words, this problem did not exist, Bitcoin would have never been invented.

Technically PayPal is holding the money not by yourself so it's no different from the traditional banking system but it was the beginning of digital payment era when people found that it's easy to make payments with PayPal than going through the banks and their complicated processing for every transactions.

Here you use the blockchain which is not just limited to cryptos so better use the term crypto.

Cash is traceable because the dollar notes have serial numbers on them. That's how they track down gun and drug sales for instance. Foreign currency though.... can't be traced by the local government by itself.

Most people who try to hide their fiat money without using crypto do so with offshore banks, as these cannot be investigated for the funds as they are in some secret jurisdiction like Panama or something.

Government policy in this regard is very clear - anonymity and confidentiality will be eliminated

This is precisely what governments disliked most.

Blockchain as a technology will certainly survive, because this technology will become widespread due to its advantages. Governments are also attracted to the same benefits. In the future, blockchain as a technology cannot be eliminated, but in the future, it will undergo some changes to please governments.

If we talk about bitcoin, then it has never been completely anonymous (pseudo-anonymous) and with the imposition of KYC, this, of course, will deal a blow to confidentiality, but anonymity on the BTC-network has never been 100%.

In current realities, privacy is primarily needed from government banditry (imagine blockchain in the hands of totalitarian governments).

Most users have already voluntarily given up privacy for the sake of the convenience of centralized exchanges, which require verification and KYC.

Blockchain is well suited in conditions where “transparency” of any activity between all market participants is valued and respected.

Are you suggesting we abandon this and take a step back? You can't put the jinnee back in the bottle.

I don't think Bitcoin and blockchain were originally created to provide privacy or anonymity. While there is a degree of privacy and anonymity offered by Bitcoin, they aren't its main goal. Bitcoin is more or less sufficiently private for ordinary people and their ordinary transactions.

If one day mixers, wallets, blockchains, and others which primarily focus on privacy and anonymity will all be gone, it doesn't mean that Bitcoin and blockchain have already lost their original purpose. They aren't made for people to hide their purchases and other transactions.

On the other hand, it's always a race. Governments will always try to decipher those innovations for privacy and anonymity. In return, innovators would also continue their development. Sometimes they're a step ahead; sometimes the government catches up. It will always remain to be like that.

I agree with the notion that it can be perceived as a race, however given the fact that Bitcoin Core is very slow to add new features, these new advancements on the Bitcoin side have to come in the form of stand-alone solutions, and this makes it very vulnerable against three letter agencies who do not like said advancements and would like to prevent them from being used. So the governments have a bit of an advantage here.

 ::) ::)

Mixers are here to stay but probably not at current scale. There are not as much people who need them.
Anonymization is here to stay while non custodial solution avaliable

It's actually exciting to ponder on this race. Maybe for now the governments are at an advantage. Privacy-oriented platforms are biting the dust one after another. But this can't go on forever. Innovators are learning from all this. The next wave of privacy-focused innovations might be much harder to stifle. There are no failures, only lessons. Sites could easily be seized for now and developers easily arrested. But the tide will eventually turn.

I'm not monitoring what Bitcoin Core developers and other contributors are cooking up and whether they're actually slow or not, but there must be a certain amount of slowness as regards adding new features because of the decentralized nature of Bitcoin. It's probably a necessity. But it's a cheap price to pay. Features could have otherwise easily been introduced and implemented if we were in a centralized setup, but this isn't what we prefer. I'd like to believe it's slow but sure.

You have a bad habit of presenting your views on what Bitcoin and blockchain are and for what they were designed for like you are Satoshi!
Well, I don't have to tell you but just to make sure, you're not!

The blockchain was not designed to
- be slow
- evade governments
-  as a competition with banks
- and the proof of work algorithm has nothing to do with the utility of it

Satoshi designed a p2p currency, nothing else, he never mentioned it should be slow because why would he, he didn't think of a way to evade anything other than a third party, and most importantly he never spoke about it as some sort of investment or focused on the money part.

All you try to portray bitcoin as is your interpretation, if you knew how bitcoin was designed and for what we wouldn't have had satoshi we would have gad legitum as the inventor.
Satoshi mentioned the government only once, and you're not going to like it:

My point was that there was "digital cash" before Bitcoin, and millions of people happily used it. In that context, Bitcoin had to offer something PayPal did not have, which is the ability to thwart government subpoenas into transactions. If Bitcoin was just a slow, expensive, clunky and risky version of PayPal, then nobody would want it and Satoshi would certainly have known that.


If you are talking about "most people" then you definitely aren't talking about rich people who have the money and the wherewithal to use offshore banks. Millions of Americans get paid physical cash every day for things like tips and service jobs. And the US government doesn't go after them because they don't have a specific reason (which they would need to take to court) and it's not worth their while to go to this trouble just to tax some hard worker person's... tips.




But this is very specific: they want anonymity and confidentiality from valid court-ordered government subpoenas. The US government is actually supporting privacy against criminals, marketers and fellow citizens through various privacy laws.



I certainly agree that a system that allows people to evade the terrible effects of oppressive regimes is a very useful thing: but this is a very narrow audience of a few thousand people across the world, and not a problem most people have. Most people don't need to or want to go against their government--and most in the democratic world are happy its there to protect them from criminals.



Maybe, but Venmo originally touted an option to share every transaction you made with your friends, and this feature was very unpopular.

And you can create transparency much easier/faster/cheaper/better without blockchain.



Abandon? No. Did we "abandon" IBM mainframes designed in the 1980s? Not really: they are still in use today. But as a mainstream consumer phenomenon, I am predicting that the blockchain architecture will fade away.  People will still use digital currencies more and more, but they won't be based on blockchain.

Mhan, what are you talking about? Bitcoin wasn't originally made with some sort of maneuvers like mixers and conjoin as you may have it, these services came in after several years of yearning/struggle for privacy.  Not until several other mixers were introduced with a different motive, this time, to collect dirty coins, swap, mix and release cleans ones.. It's somewhat impossible for the government to investigate where and how those coins were traded, since the mixers are anonymously rooted.
They got butt-hurt for getting censored by the governments... Why didn't they decide to keep their services a secret?

That is what I am trying to explain, digital cash is different from decentralized monetary system and that's what bitcoin is offering. And Paypal transactions are reversible while bitcoin transactions aren't, Paypal transactions are faster but the 180 days for chargeback is big red flag while bitcoin on an avg TX gets confirmed in 10 minutes and I feel it's worth the fee to pay what we get.

First of all, blockchain has nothing to do with mixing and anonymization. A blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of records (blocks) that are securely linked together via cryptographic hashes. [Source ¹] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain). Blockchain technology alone (also) is very interesting and beneficial for everyone, for governments too. Some governments and companies invest into development of blockchain technologies in their countries, in different niche.

If privacy was important for people, Monero would be number 1 cryptocurrency on coinmarketcap instead of being placed at 47th place right now (with 24h volume - 136th.

With just a few updates and modernizations countering every plot of the government wanting to have full control of it, I'm sure it's just a matter of time before they scratch their head again. I don't think those people who are behind this great financial revolution will only sit and watch what the SEC is going to do to close the gap between anonymity and transparency in the crypto industry, I'm sure they are also cooking something in order to counter whatever the government plan on taking out anonymization from us. That's why Satoshi didn't show himself because he knows something like this might happen in the future and if he is alive and his team, I'm sure they are making some plan to close any possibility of taking out everything that leads to hide our identity when holding crypto.

Huh? Bitcoin transactions are reversible in the same way PayPal transactions are, or any other transaction system: you create a new transaction to counteract the value of the one you want to reverse. As for charge-backs, refunds, etc., the technical mechanism of the value transfer is an implementation detail. All of those things happen on top of whatever transfer mechanism you are using.

(And ten minutes for a transaction is an absolutely unthinkable amount of time for 99.99% of the world's transactions on any given day. Bitcoin transactions are only viable for extremely specialized purposes e.g. large-scale transfers. This is why it will never be "digital cash" as so many here keep saying Bitcoin was originally designed to be).

As for calling Bitcoin a "monetary system", well, I would... need you to define exactly what you mean by that before commenting on it :).


Yes, but that's like saying a car has nothing to do with transportation. Clearly blockchain was meant to provide a means of transactions for entities who could not use the means they had at the time.

And I have asked here and elsewhere, in numerous times (with dedicated threads) for certified non-cryptocurrency non-NFT design wins for the blockchain architecture and thus far the answer has been zero. There's lots of hype around the technology, but nobody has actually delivered a clear customer benefit with the architecture outside of the realm of public crypto. (And why is that? Because blockchain's only unique benefit is that it thwarts government subpoenas into transactions, and that is by definition a problem that known entities cannot possibly have since they are... known). Hiding something from yourself is a pointless waste of time, which is why nobody uses blockchain inside of companies or governments.



I've been saying this as well. And given that most people own hold Bitcoin and other cryptos through a broker or an app, almost nobody actually cares about decentralization either.

Bitcoin is, in actual reality today, a meme investment instrument. There's nothing wrong with that, though.




The US dealt with this problem in the early 1970s with physical cash, and their solution was to put a dollar limit on transactions of $10,000. Anything under 10k cash and basically the government doesn't care about it. This handles most people's needs for cash, and aligns with the principles of the Anon Paradox (https://medium.com/@stephen-r-thomas/the-anon-paradox-anonymity-big-small-1231a6a060e4), which states the most people want anonymity for "small" money and known identity for "big" money.

It depends on the amount.  When transferring a thousand dollars, using Bitcoin is less expensive compared to traditional bank-to-bank transactions.  If the banks involved are in different countries, the process becomes even pricier and takes longer for the transaction to be confirmed. 


Satoshi mentioned the government quite a lot of times.  "Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own".  The genesis block message.  I believe he also discussed government in the introduction post on the p2pfoundation forum.

The original intent, as Satoshi suggested, for Bitcoin was to function as peer-to-peer cash, but it is rarely used like this nowadays.  No significant concern there. 

That's a bold statement. You can't possibly know that. We're not talking about the next 10 years, but ever. How do you know what people will use for currency in 2050, or 2150?
IMO it's not going to be fiat currency and if not that then what? Maybe we'll be mostly extinct and back to trading seashells and amber, but if not we'll not use currency printed by FED. There will not be any FED, I'm pretty sure of that.

I don't think that there's any danger to bitcoin. The only danger is that there will be no anonymity, but for that to happen they'll first need to ban cash.

When crypto was born, there weren't any kind of mixers or privacy tools. But crypto hasn't only survived; it has also gained mass popularity. Crypto wasn't created for privacy reasons when all the data is public on the blockchain. Crypto was created to make borderless decentralised money transfers, which have been going on. No government can prevent us from using blockchain that is available publicly. So mixers or privacy tools don't have any relation to the blockchain. Privacy tools can just mix or break transactions; they can't change or modify blockchain data. So I don't see any reason why blockchain should be affected when mixers and privacy tools break down. 

The laws haven't changed in the last 14 years and they aren't going to change in the next 140 :). Bitcoin was designed intentionally to be slow and expensive e.g. PoW. If it was easy/fast/cheap to create a node and certify transactions, the paradigm would fail.


I think the world will almost entirely stop using physical paper and metal currencies in the next 20 years. I think they be replaced by digital currencies. I think those currencies will not be powered by a blockchain-based architecture.


The FED will be just fine. They don't care how the money is transmitted, they just trade in value. Maybe you are thinking about the US Mint and the Bureau of Engraving? Those departments probably will shrink to almost nothing.

And as we discussed in another thread, I think the USD will stay around forever in the same way that the English language and the Metric System will stay around forever, e.g. as a measurement mechanism for value. People will stop holding physical paper and metal coins, and people will not store their savings in actual USD as much, and people will use various digital currencies to trade, but the USD as a concept will stay around forever, more or less. Even if we're trading seashells and amber, the value of those things will be translated to USD so people know how much value it is.

Quite the contrary, my 100 year prediction is that all other sovereign currencies fall by the wayside and only USD stays around, and only then as a measurement device so you'd pay for everything the world denominated in USD, and all digital currencies will have a USD exchange rate which most people won't even see because it's hidden from them by the software.


I don't think so either, and I've needed to qualify my original OP to say that by "survive" I mean "still be the biggest thing in digital currency". I think it will "survive" in the same way IBM mainframes have "survived". There's no reason people won't be trading Bitcoin forever. It's just that the ubiquitous means of digital transfer e.g. a digital currency that everybody uses on a daily basis will be some other non-blockchain-based thing.

I beg to disagree that Bitcoin works the same as Paypal transaction. Once confirmed on the network Bitcoin transaction is irreversible, for Bitcoin transaction to be reversed, it needs to be double spend before the network confirms it.  So it does not work like the Paypal way of reversing transactions.  I wonder why you think that Bitcoin and PayPal can be reverse in the same way.


But there are people who are able to transfer funds on a small scale, and it is not only specialized for a large-scale transfer else if it is then there will be a very high lower amount limit for Bitcoin transactions and we can even transfer as small as 1 satoshi, can't we?

This explains why that Trump crypto support video clip is making headlines on the internet!

You know what,from one angle I believe the US government has the best interest of its people and are trying to protect them but on the other hand we all know that these regulations will leave a mark on crypto and this ripple effect will be felt by everyone no doubt about that as markets will be negatively affected.. probably already happening :'(.

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Btw, I think there is a typo in title which probably was to read>>> Will blockchain "Bitcoin" survive...

Because you can't reverse a PayPal transaction, either. The transaction is always there in their database no matter what. From anybody using either means of transacting, the usage is exactly the same. You can get into which database is "safer" but you'd get into a very long conversation about information security, and you'd need to know a lot about how PayPal manages its infrastructure, etc.

My company's transactions are written to distributed WORM drives that cannot be erased, so every transaction stays around forever. I don't know if PayPal does, but it might be similar.



You can, in the same way you can take an airline flight from JFK to LGA (10.4 miles), but... why would you? That would obviously be a massive waste of resources and you can get there a lot easier in other ways. In the case of Bitcoin, transactions can cost up to 30 US dollars, so unless you are moving at least hundreds of dollars around, the transfer cost as a percentage will be prohibitively expensive.




Anything he lies about on any given day makes headlines--he's the candidate for president this year.




No, I very specifically meant blockchain as an architecture to support a digital currency. I think future popular digital currencies will not be based on blockchain.

If you are been asked the most successful consensus blockchain today, I bet you will first mention Bitcoin and would probably not mention any other blockchain because Bitcoin remain the best and others are insignificant, people don't mix with other coins like Bitcoin, Ethereum was closer but now take down and it's not even proof of work anymore.


I'm not sure if decentralization was the reason why Bitcoin transaction was slow, Ethereum chain is not as decentralized as it was during the days of proof of work but does that increases the speed now in proof of stake, no. Block space doesn't have deep relationship with decentralization but on the protocol level. If it was about fully decentralization, the developers wouldn't have discarded block increased proposal all this while.

At this point, it seems like you're simply trolling.  The fact that laws haven't changed over the past decade doesn't mean they won't change in the next decade, or even in the next century... By the way, Proof-of-Work does not relate to the network's speed. 


Absolutely not true.  Paypal transactions are reversible:  https://www.paypal.com/us/brc/article/bank-reversals-guide.

they lose a lot of value if your tx can be blocked and frozen.

I am in country x it is invaded by country y I flee  go to country e.

the winning invading country (y) asks for the tx to move my coins be frozen.

my only crime was living in a losing country (x)

I don't know about "trolling", but do you think the speed of light will change in the future? I'm personally banking on that staying the same for as long I am alive, at least :).

And by "network" here I mean the infrastructure supporting Bitcoin, not the interconnect specifically.


Yes, but it's not reversible within their infrastructure. Another payment service using blockchain would have the same exact thing. In other words, if you paid in Bitcoin for something you bought from an online retailer and they were unable to deliver it, they would have a procedure for "reversing the transaction" which would entail another Bitcoin transaction. This is not functionally different than PayPal, a credit card, or anything else.

And again, if you want to switch the topic to the internal infrastructure, PayPal is absolutely not "erasing the transaction from existence" when they refund a transaction, the data is absolutely there, stored approximately forever, just like a block in the Bitcoin blockchain is. There are many other ways to securely ensure the permanence of data besides the way Bitcoin does it, or with a blockchain architecture. Indeed, a centralized blockchain or one with relatively few nodes would be far more dangerous than any typical regulated US financial institution.

And of course Bitcoin itself could potentially (however unlikely) be taken over by China (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5495214.0) so I would surmise that Bitcoin is significantly less safe than say PayPal as well (although for my own purposes I would easily trust them both).

It's because it is transparent and can't be altered. That's the reason why blockchain has a better integrity if you're for that and projects that are into it aren't just for crypto but also for main use cases like voting.

You bet? many of those billion of transactions aren't that much I guess so if it's about quantity over quality, you have the point in there.

A blockchain-based architecture does not have "better integrity" than other approaches per se--just ask one of the thousands of people who have lost billions of dollars on failed blockchain projects. Blockchain can fail just like any other computer system can fail.

And no country is actually using blockchain for voting, which would be extremely stupid if they even tried it.

Why its stupid? It addreses vote tampering which is known in any election (fraud/cheating) although there's no country uses it for national election yet. But there already some "stupid" of them uses already in small scale voting for pivot testing^[1] in city, organization, etc. in different countries already.


[1] https://hackernoon.com/which-countries-are-casting-voting-using-blockchain-s33j34ab

Mixers aren't mentioned in the whitepaper. But the fact that Bitcoin was created by a cypherpunk with libertarian ideals, says it all. In the early days, many believed BTC to be truly-anonymous. It's just that the rise of centralized exchanges and surveillance/analytics tools defeated Bitcoin's original purpose. Mixers were created as a solution to this problem. But they're still far from perfect. Centralized mixers may've been taken down by mainstream governments, but that won't stop developers from making non-custodial (decentralized) ones.

The failures of mixers won't affect the core Bitcoin blockchain because they aren't directly part of the network. Just like L2 scaling solutions (eg: Lightning Network). Rest assured that Bitcoin will continue to carry on as usual because of the way it was designed (decentralized and censorship-resistant). As long as it stays that way, we should have nothing to worry about. ;)

It's stupid because it wouldn't do anything except make the system slow, expensive, and error prone because it would be brand new untested systems.

Like lots of blockchain "projects" that had happened a few years ago, people blindly put the words, "blockchain" on anything because the price of Bitcoin went to a half trillion dollars and that convinced them at anything made with "this blockchain thingy" must be awesome. But blockchain doesn't solve any problems that voting systems actually have since it makes the system inherently less secure, slower, and more expensive to create (can you imagine every vote taking 15 minutes to cast?).

And voting is quite necessarily not anonymous, which is the very opposite of what a blockchain system does. If all votes were anonymous and not connected to an actual person but rather just a private key, then tampering and vote rigging would actually be easier than ever before.

You just exposed yourself as a person that doesn't know anything about blockchain. Dude, blockchain is perfect for creating a voting system that's tamper proof. If you don't know, blockchain works in a way where once you put in the data on the block and it's confirmed, there's no going back on that, it would only be stupid in a government setting when they don't do any kind of blockchain technology on what they claim to be a blockchain voting system and the fact that this system will never pass in Congress because they know how powerful that system would be once it's implemented but other than that, it's the best way to prevent fraud.

LOL, "tamper proof". Tell that to the thousands of people who have lost billions of dollars on blockchain projects. The data structure of the blockchain is only as secure as the system holding it.

Believe it or not, understanding computer systems is a little harder than reading the financial papers telling you to buy more Bitcoin.

You're defining failed projects compared to the working projects. Talking in general about the function of blockchain, the integrity is there. Of course, you'd look at the failure of blockchain when you're defining the specific projects that have failed. Blockchain isn't just all about crypto nowadays, there's the actual use case in different fields aside from crypto.

It's just one of the many use cases there but I've found this for that specific and many others did actually used it.

Existing voting systems are more expensive, slow and can be cheated. Untested is outdated term check the article i provided on ehat countries and city uses this kind of voting. It's true that it still in fancy stage yet it is still developing.

Those are not connected and does not make any sense to a voting system, investments on blockchain projects are different to a blockchain system only for a single usecase - cast a vote.

I assume that this 15 mins you're talking is the confirmation time to verify a transaction. That problems can be easily solved by changing the confirmation time in the code, is it not? Change it to at least 1 minute, no need to follow what bitcoin blockchain did and having a mutiple nodes will secure it's network. I don't think it's expensive to do such thing, elections cost whereas countries have millions of $ budget in every elections that happens once in 3-6 years.

Obviously, you don't need to be anonymous in blockchain voting system no explaination needed.

But wait, if the project includes blockchain, how can it possibly fail, since, as you said above, it automatically make a system secure, right? As opposed to other technologies that have been around for decades (say what your bank account is stored in) that are somehow "insecure"?

True: in the proper context (e.g. with thousands of servers like Bitcoin has), and with good governance, a blockchain architecture can be made to be secure.

Also true: you can make any software system secure with good governance and careful testing.

The only difference is that using the blockchain architecture adds unnecessary layers of software that make the system more complicated (which makes it inherently less secure), and adds unnecessary costs (thousands of servers), and still involves a risk of a network overthrow, which could even happen to Bitcoin from a nation-state like China.


It's just one of the many use cases there but I've found this for that specific and many others did actually used it.

[/quote]

Maybe actually read the content of the link before you cite it? Here you go:

"Voatz recently has come under fire for their application security. A team of MIT researchers published a paper that outlined numerous issues, specifically highlighting their vulnerability to third party attacks. The paper specifically advised the Department of Homeland Security to abandon the use of the app in high-stakes elections. Since then, West Virginia has paused use of the app while Utah county will continue to do so because of its popularity"

This is exactly my problem with people who think just saying the word, "blockchain" will magically make a system more secure. While it's technically possible to make a secure blockchain system, it is harder to make it secure with blockchain than without it.

And using a decentralized architecture for a centralized problem like voting (viz. votes must necessarily be connected to a real human identity not an anonymous public key), is really (sorry), pretty dumb :).

---

Every new technology architecture that comes along in the IT world always has "case studies" that document increased customer value, reduced costs, and other benefits. Tools sellers like Microsoft and Amazon love these things, and you will see all of the technology architectures have these studies to show proven customer benefit from the architecture.

They don't have anything like that for blockchain. Nobody does. That's because IT projects are all done by known entities who are by definition centralized in their governance, so using an architecture that makes the system slower, more expensive and more complicated makes no sense.

Blockchain's only unique benefit is that it thwarts government subpoenas into transactions. That's it. That's all it does that other architectures don't do. And to solve that specific problem a very complicated and expensive and less secure architecture was invented to solve the problem.

But if you don't have that problem, then you are just wasting your time using the architecture and probably making your project less secure.

Thousands of "manager types" have probably instructed their engineers to "create xyz using blockchain" because it was the hottest buzzword for a while. This was driven mostly by the market cap of BTC and nothing else.

But when engineers go to actually implement a blockchain system, they learn the actual reality here, which is that buzzwords don't solve problems (but they sure can create a whole bunch you otherwise never would have had).

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Yep, I did. See the above comment about that experiment. Hint: it was a failed one.



You should really understand the technology you are talking about before commenting on it :). The time it takes to verify a Bitcoin transaction is not some variable in the program that determines how long they want to make a user wait. That time is spent doing calculations that are slow on purpose based on the architecture.



If you aren't anonymous, then why use is blockchain? If you just want to keep a database of every known person's vote, why not... just keep a database of every known person's vote? This can be done very securely and has been done like this for billions and billions of votes worldwide.

It is different, because the cost of mediation increases the transaction cost, unlike Bitcoin where there is no mediation.  Are you aware of the chargeback fees imposed by Paypal?  


It's not necessarily foolish, but the majority of people wouldn't place their trust in it, which seems quite reasonable.  I am not sure if I would prefer it over the traditional voting system.  

Looking at the problem, they only talk about negative issues that appear through crypto, while other positive aspects that do exist are not mentioned or ignored. That is always the way of operation of those who want to manipulate and show influence to make certain areas easy to control.

I see positive/negative aspects of cryptocurrencies or some services that do not share data, and before blocking something, please raise the awareness of each user to guide them to fair use.

Anyway, the debate on this issue will always last along the journey of existence and development of blockchain. It cannot inherently be governed in a centralized manner, but will also go through a period where we find a way to to accept it.

Bitcoin transactions can cost 30 US dollars. PayPal charges a buck or two for small transactions. What are you talking about?

Are you seriously trying to say that Bitcoin is superior to every other from of value transfer because... it's cheaper? ???

Alright, firstly, that only occurs during serious network congestion, which is rare phenomenon.  Secondly, as a vendor, you're not obligated to exclusively accept Bitcoin.  I don't use Bitcoin for low-value transactions.  Monero, for instance, is significantly more cost-effective. 

Currently, Paypal imposes a $20 chargeback fee in the majority of countries, excluding the extra cost that's included if the situation escalates into a dispute. 

That $20 chargeback fee is still cheaper than what you'd pay for the necessary Bitcoin transaction to send the money back in that situation. And of course for that $20 you are mostly paying for administrative time, which would be the same amount of work regardless of the technical means of the transaction. That means that in a Bitcoin scenario, you'd probably pay the $30 for the Bitcoin transaction and pay some company another $15 to mess around with the legal/contractual situation around the chargeback.

And through all of this, we've been talking about the old, slow, outdated system known as "PayPal'. The future is pure digital currencies that are not based on blockchain. My company's transaction fee is baked into the name of the company: one haypenny (https://haypenny.net/), or $0.005, or one half of a cent. That's the price of all transactions, no matter how big or small, and transactions are completed in under 10 milliseconds, and credibly scaling to handle every daily transaction the occurs by the human race on a daily basis.

Blockchain-based currencies are simply non-viable for mainstream transactions. That's why nobody has made this happen, despite billions and billions of dollars in hype that has been lavished on the idea. Blockchain will stay around forever as a means of providing investment instruments, but consumer transactions are quite another story.

In Paypal, you're paying for administrative time and the legal situation around the chargeback.  In Bitcoin, you're paying for the legal situation only, if there is any.  If a chargeback for a low-value item is requested, the merchant is encouraged to accept it. 


Could you clarify the distinction between a centralized digital currency and Paypal?  From what I understand, they appear to be essentially identical, just labeled differently.


I agree.  They are predominantly useful for situations requiring privacy or when transferring funds internationally. 

Again, the situation is exactly the same whether the means of transaction was PayPal, Bitcoin, a credit card, or an envelope with some paper bills. Some actual humans need to be involved in a merchandise return situation, which costs a business money to deal with.

There are probably other services that deal with this cheaper, but in any case you are not paying for the price of PayPal's servers to move a few rows in their database around, you are paying for human beings to deal with a customer service problem.


A digital currency is a... digital currency, e.g. like Bitcoin, or Ether, or Haypenny. Digital currencies are digital tokens that maintain their value by virtue of one's possession of it, as opposed to one's identity like as in a bank or credit card or PayPal etc. Digital currencies allow value transfer without an exchange of personal information. For instance, here is 1M USDE (non-negotiable) in DollHairs: gmBe00H5TVgD1XiA6tOEPR. Put that into your Haypenny wallet (which requires no identity), and you have the Doll Hairs (see how fun this is? :) ).

It's worth noting that lots of blockchain-based digital currencies (aka cryptocurrencies) are defacto centralized since they don't have a broad dispersal of servers, or don't have very many servers. Indeed, probably most cryptos could be taken over fairly easily by a central entity, which makes them only "temporarily" decentralized. And there's lots of debate over whether Ether and others are "really" decentralized since there is so much control over these systems by a single company.

(And I'll be wondering how long before somebody claims those Doll Hairs :)).

Regardless, transaction costs increase due to mediation.  Paypal is compelled by regulations to verify the parties involved when facilitating a transaction; this increases the cost.  People need to work so that your transaction finalizes.  How is this "exactly the same"? 


So, your digital currency operates similarly to PayPal but without the need for identification, correct?  What happens when authorities demand client identification from you?  Sooner or later, you may be classified as a money transmitting business. 

Haypenny is a digital currency, just like Bitcoin is. You could also say, "Bitcoin operates similarly to PayPal but without the need for identification". I guess that's one way to look at it...

Anyhow, Haypenny is just the transaction mechanism. Like with Bitcoin, the businesses who are compelled to deal KYC and so forth are the ones who take in and send out sovereign currencies e.g. US dollars and so forth. The Haypenny platform itself doesn't do that. We rely on brokers just like blockchain-based digital currencies do.

Of course, authorities can "demand" all they want--the platform simply doesn't have any identity inside of it. The only personal information we collect is an email address, and that's only for those wanted to create their own currency. You can have a client-side wallet with no identity at all if you want.

Except for one major distinction: in Haypenny, a state-level entity could potentially dismantle the system by targeting you, the central figure of Haypenny.  In Bitcoin, there is no individual or collective entity that, if attacked, could result in the shutdown of the entire system. 


...because there isn't a central authority that controls Bitcoin?  If such an entity existed, it's likely governments would enforce Know Your Customer policies on it or even threaten it if it resisted compliance. 


No disrespect, but were you just born yesterday?  Your company operates under the jurisdiction of a country's laws.  If those laws mandate the collection of personal information, you have to comply, or else you're breaking the law.  And just so you know, this puts your users' funds at risk because you're a single point of failure, in case you haven't realized it yet. 

As we've discussed in another thread this week, a major nation-state like China could easily take over Bitcoin if it wanted to by controlling 51% of the hashrate. In our discussions most agreed that it was completely possible, although people questioned why they (or any other big country) would want to do that, which I agree with.

And by the same token, I don't know why some state-level actor would want to attack Haypenny either. Or PayPal, or Visa, or Citibank, or a corner grocery store?

I agree Haypenny can be attacked, but so could anything.


Have governments gone after the many blockchain-based currencies that are defacto centralized (e.g. Ether)? I don't see why they would since these entities have public ledgers like Bitcoin does, and as such they can be tracked by anybody, including criminals, marketers, and... governments.

Haypenny, like any company, will respond to valid government subpoenas, and we make that very clear to our customers. But unlike cryptocurrencies with public ledgers, your transactions aren't out in the public for all to see. This makes Haypenny far more private that most blockchain-based currencies.

And this brings us right back to the beginning of this thread: blockchain's sole advantage is resisting government subpoenas into transaction activity. Then they figured out that Bitcoin couldn't really do that because of chain analysis, so mixers were invented. Now governments are cracking down on mixers. If they are successful, one wonders what utility Bitcoin has at all, since net-net it's less private than non-blockchain-based currencies like Haypenny.


Of course we follow the law. There's no demand for an entity to do KYC who does not take in or give out tradable money. We are regulated exactly as any cryptocurrency is regulated.

As for our transaction integrity, every Haypenny transaction is written to three geographically separate locations before the transaction is marked as completed. And then, within about 10 seconds, transactions are written to military/financial-compliant distributed WORM system, meaning transactions cannot be erased no matter what, forever. This treatment of data is similar, or generally exceeds that of any major financial institution like a bank or a broker. (And as such, 95% of Bitcoin investors probably do not have this level of transaction integrity since their broker of choice is probably not this diligent with their transactions, and they may not even be with their own direct Bitcoin transactions).

Yeah, at the end of the day bitcoin is money first and anonymous payment method secondly.

Nowadays most investors see the anonymization aspect of bitcoin as an afterthought anyway, with most of them really in it for the technology, the decentralization, or of course, the profits. Add to this the fact that we're getting Centralized Cryptocurrencies nowadays, and influencers/celebrities outing themselves as avid crypto investors and enthusiasts which are clear cut evidence that people are becoming more interested about bitcoin's other aspects and not because it makes you private and anonymous.

In the near future I envision even more people joining bitcoin for such reasons, and mixers becoming an even more obscure and "niche" necessity to many people. I don't see it dying off, as well as anonymization for that matter, no aspect of the crypto industry dies after all, but its following will definitely shrink towards the remaining day 1s and avid fans which is healthy if I do say so myself. It also makes it easier for retrieval of lost and stolen cryptocurrencies altogether, so in my book, it's a win-win.

Perhaps it's because they find it easier to shut down companies?  Lol.  Are you seriously asking why they'd target a company instead of Bitcoin, which is like a billion times more challenging to shut down?


Why should I use bricks to build my house instead of just wood?  After all, you can break both.   ::)


That's why they are cracking down mixers and other privacy services: they are central points that can be shutdown easily.  What actions have governments taken against Monero?  Despite being infinitely superior to any mixer, it continues to operate smoothly.  Here's a hint: Monero operates in a decentralized manner.  


Therefore, Haypenny functions as long as it complies with the laws of its country.  The difference with cryptocurrencies is that they operate independently of any country's laws.  

It doesn't matter in the end. Monero will never get adopted as widely as any other semi-anonymous crypto as long as the exchanges keep delisting it. Only a few people will be using it and its trading volume will tank. That's as good as being dead for a crypto currency.

In the real world the gov know everything about any of the citizens. That will happen in the virutal world too and nobody's strong enough to fight that. Monero will survive the way torrent trackers survived... on life support.

Shutting down Bitcoin would be a simply matter of throwing some money at the problem. Shutting down Citibank would require a legal fight. I think both of these scenarios are very, very far-fetched, but based on the track record, I would believe my money to be safer at Citibank than in Bitcoin (and of course that's assuming I have round-the-clock armed guards protecting my keys--the reality is that most rely on an institution that is smaller and far less safe than Citibank to hold their keys).


Why should I use bricks to build my house instead of just wood?  After all, you can break both.   ::)

[/quote]

As I said above, Bitcoin is, as a whole, probably easier to attack than a large American bank. And in the average reality of a typical holder of Bitcoin, mostly a LOT easier since it could be some sketchy broker--or worse, somebody doing something stupid with their private keys like putting them on their iPhone with a password.


Yeah, getting into a direct fight with the world's governments doesn't sound like a good long range strategy to me. I would never invest in Monera for that reason. Even a medium-sized government could shut them off if they wanted to, and they wouldn't need a court order to do it and in fact nobody could do anything about it.


The minute you trade Bitcoin for anything actually tangible or for a sovereign currency, you are in the same position.


Here's a handy chart:

Haypenny currencies: Protected from criminals, marketers, your snooping friends, and hackers; not protected from a valid government subpoena.

Monera: Protected from everybody.

Bitcoin: Open to criminals, marketers, your snooping friends, hackers AND governments even without a subpoena.

If you fear government prosecution you have to use Monera or something like it. You basically have no choice.

You are far better off using a Haypenny currency from a privacy perspective than you are with Bitcoin in either case.

A legal fight is a matter of legislation.  Should the laws shift within a nation, it becomes easier to shut them down, contrary to Bitcoin, which adheres to the immutable laws of mathematics and physics.  Regardless of its legal status in any given country, Bitcoin persists as a force that requires billions of dollars to suppress. 


I believe the comparison to an American bank is flawed.  Unlike a bank, which readily shares identifiable information with the government upon request, you operate as a company issuing custom currencies.  If these currencies facilitate anonymous transactions beyond your tracking capabilities, you're essentially conducting operations beyond the government's oversight.  Eventually, you'll be viewed as enemy to them, and if that happens... bye-bye Haypenny.   

What "immutable laws of math and physics" is stopping the CCP from ordering some of its people to take over the hashrate of Bitcoin and thus take control of it? That's all it would take to annihilate Bitcoin and every block it stores. 


I believe the comparison to an American bank is flawed.  Unlike a bank, which readily shares identifiable information with the government upon request, you operate as a company issuing custom currencies.  If these currencies facilitate anonymous transactions beyond your tracking capabilities, you're essentially conducting operations beyond the government's oversight.  Eventually, you'll be viewed as enemy to them, and if that happens... bye-bye Haypenny.   
[/quote]

Correct. Haypenny is analogous to a cryptocurrency in this regard since we merely supply the transaction mechanism and we don't take in US dollars etc.

And we offer the government tracking of transactions from point A to point B, similar (and probably much more precisely) than what you'd get using chain analysis on Bitcoin. If the government wanted to track a transactions, there would be two end points we would supply them and then they would subpoena those endpoints and have their suspect.

Overall, using Haypenny to do a crime would be about as smart as using GMail to discuss a crime with your fellow criminals with pseudonyms. Maybe some are stupid enough to use GMail like that, but they'd be caught pretty quick. (And Haypenny also tracks IPs and VPN companies are in the same boat we are in e.g. they can be subpoenaed to find the real IPs etc. so again, criminals would be really stupid to try to use Haypenny to do crime).

Right now there's a heated debate about miners needing to pay an extra tax in another thread here. Who are these miners? Oh that's right, they are readily identifiable individuals. If the government could target them they could target any blockchain network. I think we're talking about relative doomsday scenarios--governments aren't going to shut down either of us--but ultimately there's nothing especially "government-proof" about Bitcoin or any human invention. Fighting governments will always be a losing proposition no matter what--the only way to keep yourself safe is to vote (and support democracies over dictatorships).

Take a look at my statement.  It demands an investment of billions of dollars.  It's feasible, even without considering the expenses and any unforeseen costs that may arise post-attack.  What I meant is, achieving this goal requires a certain amount of electricity; there's no way around it.  A mere court order isn't sufficient to shut it down, unlike with Haypenny. 


Haypenny operates without requiring identification from its users, yet they can still be identified through a subpoena.  Now that's confusing. 

Yep. A court order could also shut down Citibank, Apple, and McDonald's. It's the world we live in, I guess.

But a rogue state with billions of dollars couldn't shut down any of those.

Both have different risks. I've kept my money at a major bank since I was a teenager and they were never shut down by the government, and their database never lost my account information. I guess I trust it.

I'd trust Bitcoin too, don't get me wrong. I think both will be fine.



Haypenny operates without requiring identification from its users, yet they can still be identified through a subpoena.  Now that's confusing. 
[/quote]

It's the same situation as Bitcoin: Bitcoin's public ledger itself doesn't tell you anything, but you can do chain analysis to essentially triangulate where transactions came from and went. At the end of the transaction chain there's some broker who does KYC, etc.

Put it another way, Haypenny currencies are like Bitcoin but without mixers (and you need a valid court ordered subpoena to look at somebody's private transactions vs. with Bitcoin any criminal with a web browser can do it).

That's certainly true, mate. Attacking Bitcoin would require hefty sums of money in order to be carried out with success. It's not really worth the cost. The bigger the network hashrate, the more money governments would need to spend to disrupt the Bitcoin blockchain.

At this point, I think it's safe to say that Bitcoin is "immortal". What governments will be able to do is shut down centralized mixers and exchanges alike. But the core Blockchain network will remain alive for the foreseeable future. This is is only the beginning. Who knows what will happen in the long run?  :D

I agree that Bitcoin won't die, but rather it will go the way of the IBM mainframe: still a big business, but not the "mainstream" thing like it was.

Bitcoin not the last word in digital currencies, it's just the beginning.

IBM is a bad example for this. They used to be innovators but then they became satisfied with what they already had, which resulted in competitors overtaking them in new advancements and technologies, and now they play catch-ups.

Bitcoin was never an innovation platform, in fact devs doesn't really pay attention to what other chains are doing.

That sounds... exactly like the old IBM to me :). Also, IBM was the most valuable company in the world for a while and absolutely everybody thought they would stay that way forever. :)

I'd argue that their value has diminished, akin to a scenario where some of them are lost, much like a bank losing a portion of its deposits. 


You haven't persuaded me yet about the potential outcome if your government mandates KYC collection or imposes closure, a scenario highly likely in today's world. 

Can you cite a recent (viz. the last 20 years) example of where an American bank lost somebody's money? I simply haven't ever heard of such a thing.

Of course even if there were sparse issues, you'd have to compare that to the relative safety of people keeping their wealth on their own person. I can absolutely give you thousands of examples of people losing their cash, commodities, crypto, and everything else through theft, misplacement, and so on.

On a theoretical level, absolutely no store of wealth is "absolutely safe", and there's some identifiable risk no matter what you do.

But keeping your money in a typical American bank (just keeping this domestic as an example) is, statistically speaking, thousands of times safer than the alternatives.

And again--I'm a broken record on this--but almost all holders of Bitcoin do so through a broker or an app. Most consumers don't want to hold their major assets (as opposed to minor cash) in their own person.



Well, we are in the exact same boat as Ether and all of the other non-decentralized cryptos, and in the same boat as the identifiable Bitcoin mining companies (e.g. almost all of them). I guess some governments could come after all of us, but they are thus far focusing on the brokerage endpoints, which is very effective and gives them everything they need. There's simply no reason for them to shut down the transfer mechanism insofar as they can get at the graph in the middle, which they can.

I mean, sure, "anything is possible", but the focus on mixers tells me that they are only worried about the transfer graph being hidden from them because with that they can figure out the rest. And again, for Haypenny currencies, the graph is not hidden from governments with valid subpoenas, but only hidden from criminals and marketers and the public.

Maybe it's because developers don't want to sacrifice Bitcoin's decentralization? By being conservative, BTC can remain the most secure and reliable cryptocurrency in the world. If you want to try out new features, use an altcoin instead. Adding new features into Bitcoin, will only make the network more complex. And this will make it less-secure over time.

I'd say Bitcoin will remain the "Linux" of crypto forever. ETH and the likes are the Windows/Mac of crypto. They will get shiny-new features, but will often experience "hiccups" along the way. As long as people are able to obtain true financial freedom, there should be nothing to worry about. :D

Apologies for the delayed response.  I wasn't referring to losing deposits entirely.  I meant losing them gradually over time due to decrease in purchasing power. 


"Everything they need" refers to Know Your Customer, which you don't require currently.  If governments could somehow enforce this requirement on cryptocurrencies, rest assured they would have done so.  It's just that cryptocurrencies are decentralized and thus beyond their reach, unlike Haypenny, which is precisely the point I'm emphasizing.  You can be easily shut down, whereas cryptocurrencies cannot.  It's as straightforward as that. 

Uh, that is an... entirely different subject. :)

Bitcoin lost investors billions and billions about two years ago... then it made them money. Maybe it will make them more money in the future, or maybe they will lose. Who knows.



"Everything they need" refers to Know Your Customer, which you don't require currently.  If governments could somehow enforce this requirement on cryptocurrencies, rest assured they would have done so.  It's just that cryptocurrencies are decentralized and thus beyond their reach, unlike Haypenny, which is precisely the point I'm emphasizing.  You can be easily shut down, whereas cryptocurrencies cannot.  It's as straightforward as that. 
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Bitcoin (itself) doesn't require KYC either. Neither does any crypto or digital currency. They are only going after mixers and things like Monera. Why? Because with Bitcoin they have everything they need to track transactions.

It would be just as easy for the US to effectively shut down Bitcoin by making it illegal, which would drop the price of Bitcoin by about 99%. And the US could absolutely take over the hashrate of Bitcoin if it wanted to as well, as could any major world government.

We are in the same boat as any other digital currency, decentralized cryptos, centralized cryptos, and centralized digital currencies.

It's as straightforward as that.  :)

We're talking about theory here, since there's no evidence "the government" is planning on shutting anybody down. Bitcoin just got it's ETF approved for chrissakes :). If anything, governments are going in the opposite direction.

The fight is not against Bitcoin or Blockchain but against privacy because the authorities want to see everything and everyone clearly in regards to what they have and how they are moving it. Mixers and every other thing that makes this task difficult for them is an enemy that must be taken down. As expected, they will not take them down without making them look evil to gain public sympathy that is why they link all manner of crimes to privacy systems just to take them down. After mixers and other privacy systems have been taken out, this will be like there was never a crackdown because they would have succeed in getting every information they needed to establish full regulation. 

It depends on what you mean by, "privacy".

If you mean privacy from criminals, from companies, from marketers, and from other citizens, then most governments aren't against that, and many governments are putting more and more privacy protections for consumers on the books e.g. Europe's GDPR and recent US regulations.

If you mean "privacy" from valid government subpoenas, then yes, governments are against that since that kind of "privacy" enables terrorism, cyber-extortion, and all kinds of very bad things.

And yes, they make these people "look evil" because they are, well, evil :). Ask any victim of cyber-extortion how it felt to have their money, privacy, hospital care, and so on stolen from them. There are, unfortunately, some very bad people in the world, and governments need to do things to protect citizens from those people.

They are targeting mixers (not Monero) because they represent centralized points of failure that can be easily shut down.  Monero, being decentralized, is what distinguishes it yet again.  They are delisting it from major exchanges.  The price only goes down a little bit, but the network keeps on going strong. 


No, you're not.  You're similar to a mixer, with the key difference that you would cooperate with authorities if they ask.  Your customers can use Haypenny anonymously (through Tor), but it may not be long before authorities request you to enforce Know Your Customer (KYC) during user registration. 


Lmao.  It's no surprise you're not into Bitcoin. 

Last I checked a bunch of governments are going after Monera in various ways.

And I surely wouldn't use market price to determine an actual fact about something :). The bottom could fall out of Monera at any minute (I sure as heck wouldn't invest in it!).


No, you're not.  You're similar to a mixer, with the key difference that you would cooperate with authorities if they ask.  Your customers can use Haypenny anonymously (through Tor), but it may not be long before authorities request you to enforce Know Your Customer (KYC) during user registration.  
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How are we different than a centralized crypto like Ether? There are just a few entities who necessarily (PoS model) create the product. The government hasn't decided to shut them down even though they could very easily.

And of course, major governments could shut down Bitcoin too, and even effectively so, by reducing the price of Bitcoin by 99% by a simple government decree (we discussed in another thread how just a few words of threat for Donald Trump could absolutely sink the price of Bitcoin).

Of course if they went after Ether and the other centralized cryptos, the Ethereum lawyers would probably point out how unfair it is to target them exclusively, and not all of the other cryptos including Bitcoin. It would be selected prosecution (and pointless since there are other products that criminals are using instead).


Because I don't love criminals? Seriously?

Also, what makes you think I'm "not into Bitcoin"? Just because I have a product that's better doesn't mean I hate the old one or something. Would you say that Elon Musk "hated Toyotas" when he started Tesla?

And the more you associate Bitcoin with criminality, like you did above, the lower it's prospects are for long-term survival. You've clearly never been hit by a cyber-extortion attack, or some other crypto-enabled crime, or know somebody who has, but if you did you sentiments would definitely change. And people are hit by these crimes every single day now. Fighting for the rights of criminals to do crime is a losing battle in the long run, because criminals will just get worse and worse.

Sure, you would never do that:  :D



You're quite similar to Ethereum, especially considering Ethereum's centralized nature.  There have been instances of frozen accounts in the past, and now it operates on a Proof-of-Stake system, which is inherently centralized. 

The government doesn't require Ethereum developers to enforce KYC because it's not practically feasible, and also because there's a level of decentralization preventing such actions.  However, in your situation, it's entirely feasible to implement KYC measures.  I think you even fall under the category of a money transmitting business according to the current laws. 


No.  It's because you fail to acknowledge that the real criminals are the ones sitting in government offices, dressed in fine suits, making decisions that can affect the entire economy.

You're probably leaning towards a statist viewpoint, that's why you don't understand it. 

Um, I guarantee Ethereum has far more programmers than Haypenny does :). They could require KYC much easier than Haypenny could. And Ethereum could do whatever it wanted with Ether. Our servers are "decentralized" too in multiple geographical locations, but that's just a technical detail that doesn't matter. Ether is in the exact same boat.

Haypenny does not gather any personal information of any kind, not even an email address, for transactions themselves. The model doesn't allow that, which is why it is so easy to use (much easier than a crypto wallet in fact).


So anybody who is against criminals robbing children's hospitals is a "statist". Maybe go back and read your Ayn Rand some more because she made it clear that's not what it means :).

If you think you can live your life without the protection of the police, then more power to you, but you don't get to call anybody when somebody parks their car on your lawn :).

There's no such thing as "shutting down" Bitcoin. Especially with how distributed and decentralized it is. The US government might prevent Americans from purchasing or selling Bitcoin. But that won't stop the core Blockchain network from running. People will just find a way around the government-imposed restrictions (either through a DEX, a P2P exchange, or meeting F2F).

The mixers' drama is just an attempt to scare away people from obfuscating their BTC transaction info. Governments will be able to shut down centralized mixers with ease, but not decentralized/non-custodial ones. Take a look at Tornado.Cash mixer. It was sanctioned by the US government, but the smart contract is still running on the ETH blockchain. Tech-savvy people can run their own instance of the mixer (frontend) to use it if they wish. The code is open source, after all. So no matter how hard governments try, they will never be able to take down the revolution. Either they join it or get left behind in the dust. :)

Well, as we've discussed on another thread at length, it's absolutely possible for the US, China or some other major country to take over 51% of the hashrate and thus control the network, thereby controlling Bitcoin. There's no evidence any country wants to do this, but they absolutely could.



If the US did that, something much worse would happen: the price of Bitcoin would plummet by 99% or more :).


Like money laundering in general, governments will never be able to shut it down completely, but they can certainly make it something only serious criminals would want to do. Few would risk federal prison just as a hobby.

Almost all holders of Bitcoin do so in a centralized way with a broker or an app that does KYC. Most average consumers don't want go to all of this trouble just to evade the government, they just want a safe investment that gives them a profit.

Exactly. No one wants to get in trouble with the government. People won't mind giving their away their privacy as long as they're able to invest into BTC and make money in the long run. For true believers of the revolution, it's going to be hard (if not difficult) to obtain privacy without raising suspicion from the government. With recent crackdowns from the US, don't expect developers to continue working on privacy solutions (mixers, anonymization techniques, etc) anytime soon. Those who do, are at risk of getting caught by the government (like the ones working on Monero). Totally not worth it, imo.

At least we know crypto/Blockchain tech won't disappear that easily. The industry will experience tighter regulations in the future. That's for sure. As long as decentralization wins, nothing else matters. :D