Nobody knows which coins will be listed on Binance US and which ones won't. Until then, the market can play dumb. Binance definitely likes to skirt the law and if there is any legal grey area, they will exploit it. They may end up listing lots of coins that will surprise us.


That's a real possibility. However, I have a feeling Binance plans to make a much bigger splash with their US launch. I don't think it'll be as limited as Binance Jersey.

Sounds nice, but the only countries still considered "high risk" by the FATF and who are wholly refusing to implement its AML guidelines, are North Korea and Iran. Think about that. The rest of the world is falling in line, and the only holdouts are the world pariah states who are constantly the victims of economic sanctions and political threats from world superpowers.

I'm guessing you've never been on the wrong side of government agencies before. You have it backwards. The IRS is happy to have a long drawn out process -- they will add financial penalties all along the way and even threaten you with criminal proceedings and prison time. You can't just drop endless undecipherable papers on the IRS. If you don't provide exactly what they want in the format they require, they will ignore you, say your company is noncompliant, and move forward with enforcement actions against you.

Hopefully services can take the full year before fully implementing this. In fact, they'll probably need to because this is quite an onerous undertaking for exchanges. This scope of information sharing requires a big infrastructure that needs to be built from scratch. I'm not sure if lawmakers will understand that.


It's not just the US. In fact, all the G20 countries already publicly affirmed their commitment to implementing these rules. The FATF blacklist has been a very effective tool in forcing countries into compliance. This works because local governments will heavily pressure exchanges to comply, for fear of being blacklisted by the global financial system.

Cryptocurrency doesn't have to be direct "competition" for retail and investment banks. Maybe it is for central banks who issue their own currency, but not so much for depository institutions like Bank of America. They don't care what currency you use; they just want to find a way to monetize it. People wanted Venmo, so the banks created Zelle. If people start using cryptocurrency, they'll create depository accounts and an internal network for instant payments that cuts out fees. There will always be a niche for this because people want convenience and ease of use -- even if it is antithetical to what Bitcoin is.

Legacy banks want no part of it. Libra only threatens their market share for international remittances, as customers will move away from bank wires and towards the cheaper payments offered by Libra. Companies like Stripe and PayPal might be along for the ride, but legacy banks will probably be pushing their own competing products.

Ordinarily, I would ignore this news since Russia never follows through on these rumors. This time, Russian lawmakers revised the bill in response to an "order" from the FATF to clarify and expand the scope of the bill:


Governments seem to be taking these FATF guidelines extremely seriously. I wonder what services like Bitmex are going to do.

This actually highlights Bitcoin's strengths over centrally issued currencies like Facebook's Libra coin. There's no central choke point where governments can target Bitcoin and force changes upon it. Facebook, on the other hand, can easily be pressured to the whims of governments.

It was always the norm to treat money transmission -- like fiat wire transfers to and from exchanges -- that way. It was never the norm to treat trading and cryptocurrency transactions which don't involve fiat that way. The €1,000 threshold is also by far the lowest AML threshold I've ever seen in any law before.

Clearly, KYC and reporting requirements vis-a-vis cryptocurrency are being drastically expanded. These standards are not being equally applied to other forms of payment, so we can't just write it off as "the same old AML laws as always."

Bitstamp and Kraken don't offer many assets that could be deemed securities. That's the major distinction to make here. Binance has a much longer list of markets, including dozens of such tokens. The SEC doesn't want US investors accessing these markets.

Bittrex has segregated US and international users onto different platforms -- and removed US investor access to lots of tokens -- for the same reason. It's not just about KYC requirements, although I'm pretty sure that'll be mandatory on the new US site as well.

This is old news. Sherman introduced the bill over a month ago. He also has a very long history of trying to lambast Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in Congress -- and he's been very unsuccessful at convincing anyone.

I wouldn't worry about this bill, especially since many legislators at the state level are taking the opposite approach. This far more favorable cryptocurrency/token bill is more likely to pass, although I wouldn't get my hopes up for that, either.

They aren't competitors. Libra is just a stablecoin launched on its own private/federated blockchain. Tether and USD Coin aren't competing with Bitcoin and neither is Libra. This is just Facebook's entry point into the global remittance market.

Anyone who uses or values Bitcoin for its monetary properties, speculative value, censorship resistant and irreversible qualities, pseudonymous privacy, etc. will continue to prefer Bitcoin. Libra doesn't address those use cases at all.

I wouldn't say that. Binance is still allowing daily withdrawal limits up to 2 BTC from unverified accounts. At current prices, that's over $18,000. The new FATF rules (according to earlier drafts) will require KYC reporting at $1,000/€1,000. Sadly, Malta -- Binance's regulator -- is very unlikely to allow Binance to continue operating in this manner. We're already seeing governments enact the FATF draft rules before they are officially released. Lithuania just enacted regulations reflecting the new rules.

This is obviously in response to the upcoming FATF rules. The rules specify a $1,000 or €1,000 threshold which triggers stringent KYC requirements on both sender and receiver. That's why the Lithuanian regulations set a €1,000 threshold for reporting. The OP is probably correct that most countries will do the same thing in the near future.

There's always going to be a big niche for privacy-oriented people who want to avoid KYC. I strongly believe that's one of the reasons Binance became as big as it did. After Bittrex began implementing mandatory KYC during summer 2017, most of their volume went to Binance.

The main problem right now is usability. Decentralized trading will never compare to the efficiency, liquidity, order types, etc. that centralized exchanges can offer, but the gap between the two can be bridged somewhat.

Democrats won't save us. It was a Democrat -- Congressman Brad Sherman -- who introduced a bill last month to ban people from using Bitcoin.

Don't be fooled into thinking any regulation is good regulation. I doubt Sherman's bill will go anywhere, but whatever legislation is passed, we can expect cryptocurrency users and investors to experience increasing restrictions and reporting requirements.

For one thing, it's a breach of privacy. What's next, AML reporting every time someone spends $100? Where does it end?

For another thing, data security is a major problem. Major companies are compromised everyday, losing customer data left and right. The more companies that have your KYC data, the more likely you are to have your data breached and your identity stolen. I know someone who had their identity stolen. He's been struggling with the fallout for several years now. His credit was ruined because of it. I would never wish that on anybody.

Miners would withdraw their hashpower from the attacking pools fairly quickly. Is such an attack theoretically possible? Yes, but it would be short-lived and wouldn't have lasting effects.

There's probably still lots of lower hanging fruit they can go after. Proving cases with wallet analysis and non-KYC services is going to be much more challenging in a jury trial than Coinbase users who made 5-7 figure profits trading over years and never paid their taxes. From the statistics the IRS released about Bitcoin capital gain reporting vs. the number of high volume Coinbase users, there are lots of people relying on the notion that the IRS won't audit them.

About six hours ago, there was a huge spike in transactions on the network. 15+ MB in transactions have been added to the mempool since then. You can check the network stats here.

Is the transaction RBF-enabled? If so, you can bump the fee up. It'll probably confirm eventually as is, but the network is really congested right until you get above the 50 satoshi/byte level.