[eru]

Well, that and cash.

Btw, crypto (like bitcoin) is only an alternative because of convention.

The complete history of bitcoins is globally trackable, and people could all decide that they'll pay more for bitcoins that came from Satoshi's initial hoard, or that they'll refuse to accept bitcoins that were ever seized by the FBI.

(Yes, there are mixers. But you'd just refuse to accept any bitcoin that took part in the mixer transaction, if any FBI coins were in there.)

[em500]

Europe is clamping down on cash, with in some countries placing caps on cash transactions as low as €1000.

https://en.econostrum.info/europe-restricts-cash-paymentss-n...

https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/en/shopping-internet/cas...

[frollogaston]

In the US, cash purchases became a lot less common during the pandemic for obvious reasons, and it never really bounced back. Businesses were hardly ever credit-card-only before, now it's not that uncommon, and cash-only ones are way less common than before. Maybe related, several areas raised their sales tax beyond 10%.

[eru]

> Europe is clamping down on cash, with in some countries placing caps on cash transactions as low as €1000.

That cap is about as enforceable as a cap on bitcoin transactions. Ie only enforceable on law-abiding citizens.

[demosito666]

It is enforceable, it’s just that not all countries are there yet. It’s practically impossible to buy anything worth more than 1000 eur with cash in Scandinavia, ironically with the exception of drugs. Humanity is on a steady track to a world where authorities are controlling every penny, at which point non-sanctioned opposition is impossible.

[eru]

You can only enforce limits on cash transactions, if at least one of the two parties involved in the transaction is interested in enforcing the limit.

[demosito666]

Which is trivial to ensure when people effectively can’t deposit cash to their bank accounts and businesses don’t accept cash - nobody wants the headache. Which is exactly what happened here.

[jeffhuys]

We also can't have >500EUR in our homes

[pastage]

You are allowed to travel abroad with under 10 000 euros without declaring it. As far as I know we do not have the same problem with asset forfeit laws like the US. There are no laws limiting how much cash you can have at home and while travelling. Though if you hoard millions in gold that is discovered in a police raid I think your main concern will be why the raid happend.

[em500]

In the EU, laws differ by country, so I wouldn't categorically declare that it's legal everywhere to have any amount of cash at home or traveling. From incidental local news reports here in the Netherlands, I suspect that if I were found during routine checks to be traveling with multiple-10k cash in my backpack or in my car, it would be seized and be treated as illicit until I prove otherwise.

[Tijdreiziger]

Source?

[ru552]

say what?

[AnthonyMouse]

> Yes, there are mixers. But you'd just refuse to accept any bitcoin that took part in the mixer transaction, if any FBI coins were in there.

Intentional mixers aren't even the half of it. You have large exchange operators that use a single wallet. They file KYC paperwork with governments, but that's not in the blockchain. From the perspective of the blockchain their whole exchange is one big mixer. A billion dollars goes in, a hundred was tainted, a billion dollars comes back out. The only information to trace which $100 that went in is the $100 that came back out isn't in the blockchain, it's in the exchange's private accounting database.

But if you propose to taint every coin that has ever passed through a major exchange, that's pretty much all of them.

[eru]

> But if you propose to taint every coin that has ever passed through a major exchange, that's pretty much all of them.

All new ones. You can buy 'fresh coins' from miners directly.

You could also exempt some 'honourable' miners (ie a whitelist) from the taint.

All kinds of conventions are possible, depending on what people want to value.

The convention that all bitcoins are equally valuable is just that: a convention. And it's not even strictly adhered to, because some bitcoins are already more valuable than others.

[AnthonyMouse]

> All new ones. You can buy 'fresh coins' from miners directly.

Putting aside that there are a finite number of Bitcoins that will ever be mined, what good is that? You'd have "untainted" coins that you could hardly even spend without immediately tainting them because six degrees of Kevin Bacon means that everybody else's wallet has already interacted with the unclean.

> And it's not even strictly adhered to, because some bitcoins are already more valuable than others.

Is it the tainted ones that are the more valuable ones because you can still exchange them for the same number of dollars but they also have additional value for trolling people by sending trivial amounts of them to their untainted wallets without their permission?

[eru]

> Putting aside that there are a finite number of Bitcoins that will ever be mined, what good is that? You'd have "untainted" coins that you could hardly even spend without immediately tainting them because six degrees of Kevin Bacon means that everybody else's wallet has already interacted with the unclean.

You can make an arbitrary number of new wallets. Some people even suggest making new wallets for each transaction.

[lawn]

You can't send cash digitally, hence crypto.

I'd like to introduce you to Monero, which isn't globally trackable and also properly fungible so you can't refuse mixed transactions (since all transactions are protected).

[immibis]

Apparently "Liberty Reserve" was a (now defunct) digital cash service. As in you'd mail them cash and they'd add it to your account, and you could withdraw and they'd mail it back, minus a fee. And you could log in and transfer it.

Apparently it powered online drug marketplaces before Bitcoin existed.

[Ozarkian]

You're not wrong. But Liberty Reserve was able to be shut down because it was centralized. Banking regulators in various western countries leaned on the Costa Rican authorities to shut it down.

Try doing that with crypto. Who are you going to arrest?

[tpxl]

> Who are you going to arrest?

Every on- and off-ramp provider. EU legislation has basically created a database of real person to wallet mappings (for some subset of wallets). You can't take money from a wallet if you don't know who it belongs to (if you're an exchange anyways). The checks are a bit soft (ie. self attestation and stuff), but the public ledger part of crypto makes tracking far-far easier than with traditional banks.

The end game for this is that people in the West (and whoever they can pressure) won't be able to buy crypto to buy drugs or sell it when selling drugs, making it useless on a big scale.

[DaSHacka]

> Every on- and off-ramp provider.

This is essentially the purpose of localmonero and similar offerings. Trading cash for Monero in a p2p manner is going to be extraordinarily difficult to halt.

[bluGill]

The transaction is traced and and eventualy it goes to someone with a real bank accont and the tainted money is refused.

[immibis]

Didn't they already shut down localmonero?

[eru]

> The end game for this is that people in the West (and whoever they can pressure) won't be able to buy crypto to buy drugs or sell it when selling drugs, making it useless on a big scale.

I agree with you on targeting the on- and off-ramps. But I think you got your use cases wrong.

Crypto has two major use cases these days:

- speculation (aka gambling)

- ransomware payments

Buying drugs is pretty far down the list. And so are pretty much all purchases of normal goods and services.

[jagged-chisel]

If law enforcement started arresting larger actors (traders, managers of exchanges, etc) and continued working their way down the list, it wouldn’t take long to have a chilling effect on crypto.

[lawn]

The difference is that with actual cash you give cash directly to someone. With "Liberty Reserve" you introduced a third-party that did this for you. These things aren't the same.

With crypto you don't hand over your coins to a third-party for safe keeping, you instead send coins directly to one another, just like with cash.

[eru]

> I'd like to introduce you to Monero, [...]

Hence my restriction to crypto that is 'like bitcoin'. Yes, you can use some tricks like zero knowledge proofs to make untrackable crypto-currencies. But as far as I can tell, they aren't all that popular. For currencies that offer both stealthy and 'regular' transactions (I think like zcash), the vast majority of transactions are of the latter kind.

[jack_pp]

How would you even price it? Have special markets based on coin origin?

[eru]

That's already the case. Some collectors already pay more for specific coins. While some other people buy their coins for investment only directly from miners, so they don't have to worry about who else might have held a coin.

[phendrenad2]

Basically any physical object with resilient demand is an alternative. Gold coins. Pokemon cards. Rich people stockpile art and classic cars.

[eru]

Art and classic cars aren't very fungible, alas.