[IIAOPSW]

You still don't get it.

To bust sanctions is to go against the Washington consensus. But why did bitcoin become popular with American's in the first place?

The answer is that the Washington consensus has evolved to be just as opposed to the interest of every day American's as it is to the interests of states like Russia and Iran. Civil liberties have been eroded in the name of terrorism and pedophiles for a long time now. No amount of voting seems to fix these problems.

The founding fathers put gun rights in the constitution under the belief that the final protection of personal freedoms is the ability to defend it for yourself. Cryptography is the guns of the 21st century.

If bitcoin is being used to bust sanctions, its a problem that could have been avoided if the plutocrats in Washington hadn't prosecuted the endless drug war, engaged in civil forfeiture, used taxes to pursue unpopular bailouts, and just generally gave people a reason to want to exit their financial system.

[acdha]

Again, my point isn’t that the state of executive powers is great but rather that magical thinking about technology won’t solve them.

Moving real money into Bitcoin will leave a paper trail, as does moving it out. If you don’t disclose that or surrender control when required by law, they’re not going to just give up — that’s more like jail time until you cooperate (money laundering is an obvious lever), and most other countries will go along with that. Similarly, companies which are trying to be legit aren’t going to touch tainted bitcoins since they don’t want to be pulled in as accomplices.

[IIAOPSW]

>If you don’t disclose that or surrender control when required by law, they’re not going to just give up.

But its trivial to manage several separate financial persona's (wallets) and generally amortize yourself against losing/revealing everything.

>and most other countries will go along with that.

Countries within the Western sphere of influence sure. Just look at how the US got that BTC-E Russian on holiday in Greece. But consider the fact that some countries have more to gain by destroying US financial hegemony than they stand to lose by their own citizens petty crime. Russia makes bitcoin completely unregulated. So you try to contain the problem by blocking Ruble/USD exchange. Then China follows Russia's lead. Now you contain the problem by blocking RMB/USD exchange? Pretty soon you've locked so much of the world out that really all you've done is lock yourself in.

In the near future there will be so many leaks that the US and the West in general doesn't have enough fingers to plug every hole.

>aren’t going to touch tainted bitcoins

Monero

[acdha]

> But its trivial to manage several separate financial persona's (wallets) and generally amortize yourself against losing/revealing everything.

How does money enter or leave those accounts? If you started with real money, converting it into Bitcoin leaves a paper trail and it’s on you to show where it went for any non-trivial amount.

If you received Bitcoin, attempting to spend it has the same problem – if you didn’t disclose it, that alone has hefty penalties.

The other point to remember is that everything people describe looks really bad if there’s any hint to clue an investigator in. Most people are going to have some slip and this will all be used as proof of intent.

[mycall]

> Moving real money into Bitcoin will leave a paper trail, as does moving it out.

That will change with the Lighting Network.

[acdha]

If I have $50k in USD, how can anything avoid leaving a paper trail when you convert that to something else?

[vageli]

In person transactions have no paper trail if you don't want them to.

[acdha]

At that point, why not use cash? You’re already restricting yourself to small amounts and avoiding major purchases, so what does adding a cryptocurrency give you?

[Frogolocalypse]

> why not use cash?

As as been repeatedly demonstrated to you, holding cash is unsafe, because it can be seized by the government without you ever having committed a crime.

> what does adding a cryptocurrency give you?

As has been repeatedly demonstrated to you, you have protection from it being seized through the insidious civil asset forfeiture procedure.

[Kadin]

> But why did bitcoin become popular with American's in the first place?

Because it looked like a get-rich-quick scheme, and Americans like those as much as anyone else. More, in some cases, because there is a lot of cultural baggage in the US around the idea of becoming not just comfortable, but fantastically, fuck-you wealthy, from nothing, by getting in on the ground floor of some expanding industry or company.

People went crazy for canal stocks in the 1790s, railroads in the 1840s, industrials and utilities in the 1920s, Nifty Fifty in the 70s... and more recently, of course, dot-com stocks and then real estate. Lot of people out there looking for the Next Big Thing.

Most people in the market don't give a shit about Bitcoin as anything other than a vehicle for speculation.