I'm a foreigner living in the EU for many years, here's my 2 cents.
For over a year, I was locked out of financial services due to my inability to pass KYC. The reason was that I had already left one country, but was still in the process of getting a residency visa in another. During the process, I'm allowed to live in this country, but I have no ability to prove it to any financial institutions.
So, no wonder I'm bitter about KYC and AML.
Regarding privacy, I appreciate the EU's effort, but I also feel they focus too much on the legal side and not enough on the implementation side of it.
My ID was photocopied at almost every accommodation I visited in the last decade. I have no way to make private digital payments, and even offline cash is not being promoted.
At least once, my private financial record was accessed by a 3rd party that used it against me. But I'm not the kind of person who would go into a legal battle. I'm the kind of person who uses technology to protect his privacy. And the EU, with decisions like this, makes it very difficult for me.
I doubt banning Monero or Zcash would prevent criminals from tax evasion. They'll find other ways. So, as often happens, "Locks keep honest people honest".
scoofy · 37m ago
>I doubt banning Monero or Zcash would prevent criminals from tax evasion. They'll find other ways. So, as often happens, "Locks keep honest people honest".
You realize that "locks keep honest people honest" is a reason to have locks, right? The point is that honest people will commit tax fraud if we make it easy for them to do.
tpm · 5h ago
> I'm allowed to live in this country, but I have no ability to prove it to any financial institutions.
That is very strange, because you should be able to get a temporary residence certificate (whatever it's called in your respective country) and thus get an account with if not all then at least most banks.
splix · 4h ago
As someone who have been living in a couple of countries under a temporal residence I can say it's not that simple. In many cases the temporal residence is simply not accepted, or not in the list of standard docs, etc. Private companies don't really care about all those non standard cases, and they ask either for a passport of the country or a permanent residence at least.
So legally yes, you can pass a KYC, but in practice you're an edge case no one cares about
alexey-salmin · 4h ago
Not OP but in a similar situation. In online banks there's nowhere to upload these temporary certificates, they accept a limited number of options (passeport, residence card etc) and temporary certificate printed on an A4 paper isn't one of them. You can try sending it via email to customer support, I did it with around 8 different banks and Revolut was the only one to reply and open an account for me after the manual review. Another one was PCS that didn't even ask for residence permit but then it went bust, and it took around 6 months to get the money back.
Funnily enough this is still better compared to classic offline banks: none of them would have me even with the 4-year residence permit I have now. I come from a sanctioned country, I guess it raises some internal risk alarms. Only BNP did accept me at first but then after 3 months they froze my account with my salary on it.
neiman · 4h ago
You get a stamp in the passport that you're waiting for a decision regarding your stay, but it's meaningless to anyone besides the border control people.
egorfine · 5h ago
I'm in the same position as the GP. Impossible, because EU bureaucracy sometimes yield kafkaesque deadlocks. For example, some EU countries stated that their permits given to ukrainians are to be considered valid past the printed expiration date and thus stopped producing new plastic for them. Now, good luck finding any KYC provider that will accept that. Or any KYC provider that accepts printed Poland's TPS. Or any provider that doesn't chuckle on a set of documents, each of which is from a different country (like me). Etc, etc.
KYC is way, way more complex than it seems. Essentially, complete remote KYC is simply impossible.
tpm · 4h ago
Maybe this is a dumb question, but I am trying to understand this situation. There are still some physical bank branches and I assume at least some banks will open an account for you with that TPS if you visit a branch. Is that not correct? That way you would have access to at least some financial services, if not those where as you write (remote) KYC is needed.
neiman · 4h ago
I tried with one physical bank, and they refused; the expat forums said it's the same with all, though I didn't verify myself tbh.
The problem is that the only thing you get is a stamp in your passport saying you applied for a temporary residence permit (including the request number).
The border control people can then (I guess) use this number to verify that your case is still pending, so you're legal in the country. But since no one else can, you get no services.
[Edit: I should add that my main problem was with other financial services, not a bank, since I could use my existing bank accounts from another country. So maybe if I'd make enough effort, I would be able to open a physical bank account, but this was not the main problem for me]
alexey-salmin · 4h ago
Out of curiosity, which country is this? My experience is quite similar in France (except that I tried more than one physical bank).
neiman · 4h ago
Poland, and specifically Warsaw, since the process might be a little different in different parts of Poland.
tpm · 4h ago
Ah this sucks.
If I understand correctly, in our country the expats get a separate paper confirming they are here legally which for some uses (one of them is opening a bank account) has the same validity as an ID card.
egorfine · 4h ago
Local banks know the local quirks.
Global KYC provider couldn't possibly know. To get paid, they need to serve the majority of customers, not all of them.
soco · 6h ago
I assume there will never be any implementation side to focus on, if there's no legal side to push for it. Because as we can clearly see around us, the tech boys don't give a zit on your accesses and privacy and rights, so they have to be pushed to care.
neiman · 4h ago
There are plenty of civil organizations and hackerspaces in Europe that focus on such things, not to mention academic groups.
cedws · 6h ago
Monero in particular absolutely terrifies governments and financial institutions - you can tell because it's been banned and delisted practically everywhere. This gives me great confidence in it. Not as a speculative asset, but as a means of having truly private transactions.
lawn · 6h ago
In a way Monero is more a cryptocurrency than Bitcoin.
A fast, cheap, global, and private currency; in contrast to the speculative asset that is Bitcoin.
lordofgibbons · 6h ago
Bitcoin advocates pivoted on Bitcoin being a currency after it, to be brutally honest, failed to function as a currency. Last few times I transacted BTC, the fees were anywhere between $5 and $15 and the transaction times were more than 1hr. Not to mention the whole world can see all of your transactions.
So they pivoted the marketing to it being a "store of value".
sshine · 6h ago
The cost for a Bitcoin transaction today is $0.96.
The lowest daily average cost per transaction in the last month was $0.81, and the highest was $2.52.
beernet · 5h ago
Which is still quite a lot. Litecoin (among other alternatives) provides the exact same service for close to zero cost and at a better speed.
koonsolo · 4h ago
Nano offers sub-second transactions at 0 cost.
lawn · 4h ago
Nano has a completely different security model though, and isn't nearly as secure/decentralized as Bitcoin/Litecoin/Monero and other standard POW based cryptocurrencies.
golbez9 · 4h ago
Nano shills still exist?! LOL
Those bags must be heavy
lawn · 4h ago
That's still expensive for cheap things.
And what's worse is that it's impossible to reliably predict the correct fee to be able to get into the next block.
This means that at any time if you're unlucky your payment might get stuck for hours, days or even weeks.
longitudinal93 · 4h ago
My last Bitcoin transaction cost me $0.20 and took 30 minutes vs. $30 and 4 days with probing questions for a commensurate value wire .
kreetx · 4h ago
Today, Bitcoin is a scarce asset similar to gold and wants to become the global reserve currency (because it can't be devalued).
The fast-cheap-private part may or may not be fixed at some point, especially the fast-cheap, or other currencies may help with it.
xyzal · 5h ago
I wonder what benefit to society might having a shadow financial system bring? I can't think of any, except for financing entities operating outside lawful limits.
plsbenice34 · 4h ago
Hong Kong protestors were tracked by looking at their purchases of public transport tickets. Canada froze the bank accounts of those involved in protests also. Wikileaks had to rely on cryptocurrency for funding and donations could be tracked otherwise. From this I see a trend that shows it is critical for democracy, don't you?
alexey-salmin · 4h ago
> I can't think of any, except for financing entities operating outside lawful limits.
The idea is that "lawful limits", even if you wholeheartedly support them now, can change at a whim if a new government is elected or a war starts or some other major crisis happens. These things come and go every few decades, one is not improbable to occur within the frame of your lifetime and place of residence.
splix · 3h ago
Or anything that the government don't like. Like donation to an opposition, journalists, etc. That's why authoritarian governments are first to fight the financial privacy / independence.
93po · 5h ago
i think the whole point for many is freedom from tyranny. just because there are laws around how you're allowed to store and move around things that you own doesn't mean those laws are morally or ethically well-founded.
kreetx · 4h ago
"Tyranny" has a negative connotation to it, but cultures vary, laws are not universal, and also people have different values - if you live somewhere where you can't otherwise transact, a private cryptocurrency may be a way out for you.
bilekas · 6h ago
> Under the new Anti-Money Laundering Regulation (AMLR), credit institutions, financial institutions and crypto asset service providers (CASPs) will be prohibited from maintaining anonymous accounts or handling privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies, such as Monero
This isn't really an issue, AML exists for a reason, having had experience in countries where corruption was extremely bad, AML combined with solid privacy obligations of data from the exchanger is a net positive thing.
People can complain about "I want fully private transactions" - Okay then use cash.
Otherwise force your exchange provider to keep your data secure.
giancarlostoro · 6h ago
> People can complain about "I want fully private transactions" - Okay then use cash.
I want fully private transactions over the internet, cant use cash with someone a continent away.
sshine · 6h ago
> I want fully private transactions over the internet
The big problem seems to be that then you allow for arbitrary speculation, causing high volatility, and scarcity of reliable ways to exchange the money, because no organisation that could otherwise stabilise the exchange rate can put their name to fully private transactions.
bilekas · 5h ago
> I want fully private transactions over the internet
And you can still do this, the AML is related to the using the Exchanges themselves ?
soco · 6h ago
I wonder, how private is hawala? Anyone knowing it enough to chime in?
alexey-salmin · 5h ago
> People can complain about "I want fully private transactions" - Okay then use cash.
Cash too is becoming more and more restricted over time. Large denominations are removed from circulation, transactions above certain threshold are made illegal, limits are put on cash withdrawals per day and per month.
Realistically the current trajectory of the EU is "less and less private transactions until there are none in a couple of decades".
OutOfHere · 4h ago
Moreover, cash is subject to both physical seizure and substantial monetary inflation.
perlgeek · 6h ago
I wonder what the impact will be on ransomware attacks.
It'll probably make it harder for people who aren't in "bullet-proof" countries (i.e. without good cooperation with to receive ransom payment, which sounds like a good thing. It could also cause some decidedly negative effects during the transition, when companies that really want to pay a ransom (because they cannot recover otherwise) are unable to.
amarcheschi · 6h ago
As of now paying for a ransomware in btc is still quite hard, at least in europe.
A person i know works in an art/craft company - so not tech - and the boss faced a hard time to pay 40k€ in btc for a ransomware a few months ago, since many of the transfers were blocked and had to pass through a middle man. the backup they had was last done months earlier, i don't know if its their fault or their security company's fault but i guess in the future they'll gladly pay more for working backups
reginald78 · 6h ago
My understanding is most ransoms are already paid in bitcoin. (or some other public ledger coin?) Privacy coins would probably be preferable for criminals to receive but they aren't as easy to purchase as bitcoin which I'd imagine significantly reduces the likelihood they get paid at all. Since most of these ransomware groups are hosted in countries with uncooperative governments the public ledger isn't really an impediment anyway.
BobaFloutist · 2h ago
)
karel-3d · 7h ago
...on exchanges.
They don't ban the coins and their private usages, they ban them on exchanges.
crimsoneer · 7h ago
Wasn't this essentially illegal already due to KYC regulations?
omeid2 · 6h ago
No, because KYC is about the customer, not product. In the same way that you're not required to sell only trackable microcontrollers for example, only that you can show who you sold them to, not where they went onwards.
Based on all the other comments it seems like nobody else understands this. Funny.
People will just (legally) use decentalised exchanges to convert between monero and bitcoin so it won't have much impact
out_of_protocol · 5h ago
How do you do that on DEX?
plsbenice34 · 5h ago
There are several models.
Haveno already works by providing p2p multisignature escrow. With this design, you need to match with an individual and do a direct exchange. There is a Tor-based application
BasicSwap has another model with noncustodial atomic swaps and some sort of decentralised orderbook.
I expect that Serai will be much more effective than those. It will launch soon with a liquidity pool design, similar to Uniswap for Ethereum. With this model, other people can profit by providing liquidity for pools. It will be very easy for anyone to initiate a trade and do an exchange for a different currency from the pool. It will be incorporated into the most popular mobile app Cakewallet, so it should be accessible even for non-technical users and quickly gain adoption. I think this has the potential to provide an even more convenient, generally superior experience compared to centralised exchanges.
JSR_FDED · 7h ago
What are the implications of that?
RalfWausE · 7h ago
If you stay within the crypto-economy (e.g. buy stuff with coins from places who also only deal with coins) nothing prevents you from doing so.
alexey-salmin · 4h ago
Right, and laws like this slowly severe the ties between the crypto-economy and the real world.
In the end you'll be able to exchange coins for other coins but by itself it's meaningless.
93po · 5h ago
soooo we need blockchain based exchanges now? haha
bgwalter · 6h ago
The fact that Bitcoin itself has never been banned strongly suggests that it was government approved from the beginning or even developed at the NSA.
The tracking is a feature, and many governments want a CBDC.
What does the CIA think? The CIA thinks Bitcoin is great:
Have you read the article ? The currencies are not being BANNED, simply anonymous accounts are, this is standard practice in financial institutions where you're required to Know Your Customer (KYC) and provide Anti Money Laundering (AML) provisions.
bgwalter · 6h ago
I have. Handling Monero, presumably for real currency conversions, is banned. If that were done for Bitcoin worldwide, the price would collapse, because it is no longer useful for, e.g., sanctions evasion.
By the way, the article itself claims:
"The European Union is set to impose sweeping Anti-Money Laundering (AML) rules that will ban privacy-preserving tokens and anonymous cryptocurrency accounts from 2027."
This statement is walked back later.
plsbenice34 · 4h ago
Cointelegraph very often exaggerates and writes in an inaccurate way, it should never be used as a reliable source of information. You can see the real information here which makes it clear that it only applies to exchanges: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
_ink_ · 7h ago
What does this mean for cold or hardware wallets?
braiamp · 6h ago
Less than nothing. Only applies on exchanges. If you manage to transfer such things in the public ledger, then there's no problem.
pshirshov · 6h ago
Both Monero and ZCash do not support any advanced smart contracts, so probably there won't be a way to stick with defi.
OutOfHere · 5h ago
Swaps work quite fine for them even if not atomically.
jmcgough · 7h ago
[flagged]
JoshTriplett · 7h ago
The EU's legislation has been decidedly mixed, and not an unalloyed good. Makes me wish there was a functional mechanism by which different jurisdictions could have an overall collaborative framework and experiment with different approaches without eventually deciding to force others to comply. I had some hope of the EU being that, but both the US and the EU have trended towards homogenization. I wonder if, in a hundred years, the EU government will claim as much power at the EU-wide level as the US federal government.
So much harm has been done in the name of AML/KYC. Money laundering is auxiliary to some other activity that governments define as "evil". Laundering the proceeds of some activity a government does not approve of is exactly as good or evil as whatever the activity itself is, and as always, law and morality are two different things. When passing such provisions, governments will always cite the worst possible activity whose proceeds might be laundered, but the resulting powers are far too easy to abuse.
tremon · 5h ago
by which different jurisdictions could have an overall collaborative framework and experiment with different approaches
Is that like different countries inside the EU implementing their own laws and drawing from that experience to influence the shape of EU laws? Or how neighbouring countries (like DACH, Benelux, Scandinavia or the Iberian peninsula) use regular international cooperation to shape cluster-local policies without involving the entire Union?
No, we don't have any of that here.
JoshTriplett · 2h ago
That's very much the hope. I'm observing that the EU seems to be doing a lot more legislating of its own and removing variation in undesirable ways.
pjc50 · 6h ago
So the thing about physical cash is that handling it gets (roughly) linearly harder with the amount. Whether that's coins, notes, silver, gold or whatever. It is relatively easy to hand over $100 for private purposes, but it is seriously difficult to move $100,000,000 without attracting attention.
Digital money flattens that out. With cryptocurrency you can move either of those values equally easy. A few times people have done so by mistake!
This presents a new kind of risk, because suddenly a completely invisible empire of organized crime, bribery, or enough money to destabilize a government is possible. The EU is choosing the "high trust, high transparency, high enforcement" path. The US is now choosing the "open bribery of the President through his personal cryptocurrency" approach. Let's see how that works out.
(meanwhile, all the "police/courts rob person of their life savings in cash" asset forfeiture stories I hear about are from the US? Doesn't this happen in Europe? Or could it be that the different legal structure doesn't facilitate this?)
delusional · 6h ago
Do you have any example of when these powers were abused?
Where I am, we have seen massive money laundering scandals, and I have yet to hear of anyone abusing it. My read is that the abuse currently comes from not applying it enough to stuff you want to make money from, not over applying it to things you disagree with.
JoshTriplett · 6h ago
It's a component of pervasive surveillance.
But, as one of many examples, consider the many stories of someone going around with a larger than commonly carried amount of cash, such as the deposits of a business that accepts cash or the savings of someone who is underbanked, and is presumed to be up to something and that pretense is used to seize the cash with no recourse or reasonable legal proceeding or likely hope of timely recovery.
pjc50 · 6h ago
> consider the many stories of someone going around with a larger than commonly carried amount of cash, such as the deposits of a business that accepts cash or the savings of someone who is underbanked, and is presumed to be up to something and that pretense is used to seize the cash with no recourse or reasonable legal proceeding or likely hope of timely recovery.
.. in the US. I'm sure there must be examples of this happening in Europe, but it seems much less of a thing?
7bit · 6h ago
> Makes me wish there was a functional mechanism by which different jurisdictions could have an overall collaborative framework and experiment with different approaches without eventually deciding to force others to comply.
ROFL! Are you suggesting there is no framework? Do the basic research before spouting your propaganda!
And there are directives, that leave a lot of room how to the EU countries on how to implement them.
soulofmischief · 6h ago
Oh like Chat Control? Don't be mistaken, most countries in the EU ultimately do not respect your privacy and wish to have access to your private correspondence, in addition to preventing you from carrying out private digital transactions, just as we have been doing with physical money for thousands of years.
rightbyte · 7h ago
In the sense "important privacy laws" does not imply pro-privacy?
7bit · 6h ago
No, it means that privacy on cryptocurrency is the major driver of corruptions and tax fraud, and it's important to remove any privacy around these topics.
Want to stay private, there always FIAT currency, which protects your privacy (until you reach certain amounts of transactions).
rightbyte · 3h ago
No matter the justifications banning anonymous accounts is not pro-privacy.
Also, Chat control has almost been passed twice by now.
7bit · 1h ago
He said it's an important privacy law. Not that it's a pro-privacy law. Only you said that.
preisschild · 6h ago
This is an anti-privacy law, though. Anonymous cryptocurrencies like Monero allow you to truly privately transfer money.
dist-epoch · 7h ago
Like the cookie-law. An amazing success, I'm reminded daily about it.
nagisa · 6h ago
I mildly recall them looking to do something about the sort of malicious compliance that cookie banners are, but I haven't been following that work too closely.
delusional · 6h ago
The banners are not mandated by law. That's an implementation choice. Websites chose to show you annoying banners to make you annoyed with the law. They could just not track you.
glimshe · 6h ago
Yes, the vast majority of the websites are just being annoying because they are childish. It has nothing to do with the law.
The medium-large company I used to work in the US hired a full-time senior director to address GDPR. He had a team and the effort took years and touched every corner of the company.
omeid2 · 6h ago
The Cookie law works great. Every time you click "Essentials only" you're denying to be tracked.
lordofgibbons · 6h ago
These are the real Cypherpunk coins. Specially Monero. The premise behind Cryptocurrencies, (before crypto-bros joined), were all about distributed control, privacy, and censorship avoidance.
If there's a single company or "foundation" that is in charge of development decisions, then it's not a distributed currency. That's no different from Paypal.
If a random country (that you don't even live in) can block your wallet-address/transactions then what you have is not a cryptocurrency worthy of its name (they can force miners and exchanges to not accept any funds that can easily be traced to your wallet address). Just use Venmo or Paypal at that point they have lower fees and faster transactions.
amriksohata · 2h ago
US innovates
CH replicates
EU regulates
On a side note good luck in regulating Crypto that doesn't require KYC when most people transfer to an anonymous wallet using a wallet address.
delusional · 6h ago
Finally. It's a failed experiment by grifters and suckers. It had it's chance at being useful, time to get it out of public conscience so we can work on actual issues.
soulofmischief · 6h ago
What is, exactly? Decentralized currency?
denkmoon · 6h ago
Monero does -exactly- what it is designed to do and is used by plenty of people for real transactions not just speculation. Grifters always gonna grift.
For over a year, I was locked out of financial services due to my inability to pass KYC. The reason was that I had already left one country, but was still in the process of getting a residency visa in another. During the process, I'm allowed to live in this country, but I have no ability to prove it to any financial institutions.
So, no wonder I'm bitter about KYC and AML.
Regarding privacy, I appreciate the EU's effort, but I also feel they focus too much on the legal side and not enough on the implementation side of it.
My ID was photocopied at almost every accommodation I visited in the last decade. I have no way to make private digital payments, and even offline cash is not being promoted.
At least once, my private financial record was accessed by a 3rd party that used it against me. But I'm not the kind of person who would go into a legal battle. I'm the kind of person who uses technology to protect his privacy. And the EU, with decisions like this, makes it very difficult for me.
I doubt banning Monero or Zcash would prevent criminals from tax evasion. They'll find other ways. So, as often happens, "Locks keep honest people honest".
You realize that "locks keep honest people honest" is a reason to have locks, right? The point is that honest people will commit tax fraud if we make it easy for them to do.
That is very strange, because you should be able to get a temporary residence certificate (whatever it's called in your respective country) and thus get an account with if not all then at least most banks.
So legally yes, you can pass a KYC, but in practice you're an edge case no one cares about
Funnily enough this is still better compared to classic offline banks: none of them would have me even with the 4-year residence permit I have now. I come from a sanctioned country, I guess it raises some internal risk alarms. Only BNP did accept me at first but then after 3 months they froze my account with my salary on it.
KYC is way, way more complex than it seems. Essentially, complete remote KYC is simply impossible.
The problem is that the only thing you get is a stamp in your passport saying you applied for a temporary residence permit (including the request number).
The border control people can then (I guess) use this number to verify that your case is still pending, so you're legal in the country. But since no one else can, you get no services.
[Edit: I should add that my main problem was with other financial services, not a bank, since I could use my existing bank accounts from another country. So maybe if I'd make enough effort, I would be able to open a physical bank account, but this was not the main problem for me]
Global KYC provider couldn't possibly know. To get paid, they need to serve the majority of customers, not all of them.
A fast, cheap, global, and private currency; in contrast to the speculative asset that is Bitcoin.
So they pivoted the marketing to it being a "store of value".
The lowest daily average cost per transaction in the last month was $0.81, and the highest was $2.52.
And what's worse is that it's impossible to reliably predict the correct fee to be able to get into the next block.
This means that at any time if you're unlucky your payment might get stuck for hours, days or even weeks.
The fast-cheap-private part may or may not be fixed at some point, especially the fast-cheap, or other currencies may help with it.
The idea is that "lawful limits", even if you wholeheartedly support them now, can change at a whim if a new government is elected or a war starts or some other major crisis happens. These things come and go every few decades, one is not improbable to occur within the frame of your lifetime and place of residence.
This isn't really an issue, AML exists for a reason, having had experience in countries where corruption was extremely bad, AML combined with solid privacy obligations of data from the exchanger is a net positive thing.
People can complain about "I want fully private transactions" - Okay then use cash.
Otherwise force your exchange provider to keep your data secure.
I want fully private transactions over the internet, cant use cash with someone a continent away.
The big problem seems to be that then you allow for arbitrary speculation, causing high volatility, and scarcity of reliable ways to exchange the money, because no organisation that could otherwise stabilise the exchange rate can put their name to fully private transactions.
And you can still do this, the AML is related to the using the Exchanges themselves ?
Cash too is becoming more and more restricted over time. Large denominations are removed from circulation, transactions above certain threshold are made illegal, limits are put on cash withdrawals per day and per month.
Realistically the current trajectory of the EU is "less and less private transactions until there are none in a couple of decades".
It'll probably make it harder for people who aren't in "bullet-proof" countries (i.e. without good cooperation with to receive ransom payment, which sounds like a good thing. It could also cause some decidedly negative effects during the transition, when companies that really want to pay a ransom (because they cannot recover otherwise) are unable to.
A person i know works in an art/craft company - so not tech - and the boss faced a hard time to pay 40k€ in btc for a ransomware a few months ago, since many of the transfers were blocked and had to pass through a middle man. the backup they had was last done months earlier, i don't know if its their fault or their security company's fault but i guess in the future they'll gladly pay more for working backups
They don't ban the coins and their private usages, they ban them on exchanges.
People will just (legally) use decentalised exchanges to convert between monero and bitcoin so it won't have much impact
Haveno already works by providing p2p multisignature escrow. With this design, you need to match with an individual and do a direct exchange. There is a Tor-based application
BasicSwap has another model with noncustodial atomic swaps and some sort of decentralised orderbook.
I expect that Serai will be much more effective than those. It will launch soon with a liquidity pool design, similar to Uniswap for Ethereum. With this model, other people can profit by providing liquidity for pools. It will be very easy for anyone to initiate a trade and do an exchange for a different currency from the pool. It will be incorporated into the most popular mobile app Cakewallet, so it should be accessible even for non-technical users and quickly gain adoption. I think this has the potential to provide an even more convenient, generally superior experience compared to centralised exchanges.
In the end you'll be able to exchange coins for other coins but by itself it's meaningless.
The tracking is a feature, and many governments want a CBDC.
What does the CIA think? The CIA thinks Bitcoin is great:
https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/bitcoin-price-million-cia...
By the way, the article itself claims:
"The European Union is set to impose sweeping Anti-Money Laundering (AML) rules that will ban privacy-preserving tokens and anonymous cryptocurrency accounts from 2027."
This statement is walked back later.
So much harm has been done in the name of AML/KYC. Money laundering is auxiliary to some other activity that governments define as "evil". Laundering the proceeds of some activity a government does not approve of is exactly as good or evil as whatever the activity itself is, and as always, law and morality are two different things. When passing such provisions, governments will always cite the worst possible activity whose proceeds might be laundered, but the resulting powers are far too easy to abuse.
Is that like different countries inside the EU implementing their own laws and drawing from that experience to influence the shape of EU laws? Or how neighbouring countries (like DACH, Benelux, Scandinavia or the Iberian peninsula) use regular international cooperation to shape cluster-local policies without involving the entire Union?
No, we don't have any of that here.
Digital money flattens that out. With cryptocurrency you can move either of those values equally easy. A few times people have done so by mistake!
This presents a new kind of risk, because suddenly a completely invisible empire of organized crime, bribery, or enough money to destabilize a government is possible. The EU is choosing the "high trust, high transparency, high enforcement" path. The US is now choosing the "open bribery of the President through his personal cryptocurrency" approach. Let's see how that works out.
(meanwhile, all the "police/courts rob person of their life savings in cash" asset forfeiture stories I hear about are from the US? Doesn't this happen in Europe? Or could it be that the different legal structure doesn't facilitate this?)
Where I am, we have seen massive money laundering scandals, and I have yet to hear of anyone abusing it. My read is that the abuse currently comes from not applying it enough to stuff you want to make money from, not over applying it to things you disagree with.
But, as one of many examples, consider the many stories of someone going around with a larger than commonly carried amount of cash, such as the deposits of a business that accepts cash or the savings of someone who is underbanked, and is presumed to be up to something and that pretense is used to seize the cash with no recourse or reasonable legal proceeding or likely hope of timely recovery.
.. in the US. I'm sure there must be examples of this happening in Europe, but it seems much less of a thing?
ROFL! Are you suggesting there is no framework? Do the basic research before spouting your propaganda!
There's your framework:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/infographic/legislative-proce...
And there are directives, that leave a lot of room how to the EU countries on how to implement them.
Want to stay private, there always FIAT currency, which protects your privacy (until you reach certain amounts of transactions).
Also, Chat control has almost been passed twice by now.
The medium-large company I used to work in the US hired a full-time senior director to address GDPR. He had a team and the effort took years and touched every corner of the company.
If there's a single company or "foundation" that is in charge of development decisions, then it's not a distributed currency. That's no different from Paypal.
If a random country (that you don't even live in) can block your wallet-address/transactions then what you have is not a cryptocurrency worthy of its name (they can force miners and exchanges to not accept any funds that can easily be traced to your wallet address). Just use Venmo or Paypal at that point they have lower fees and faster transactions.
On a side note good luck in regulating Crypto that doesn't require KYC when most people transfer to an anonymous wallet using a wallet address.