Bitcoin's Big Secret: How Cryptocurrency Became Law Enforcement's Secret Weapon

IRS or CRA is getting their cut, so it's the regulator or the FBI's problem

and using these makes no sense, since it's readily noticeable that you've used one, and using them is basically always illegal. The crypto currency ecosystem keeps reminding me of https://xkcd.com/1494/ .

I am not opposed to the existence of more privacy coins and features. Anything that loosens the grip of surveillance is good.

Besides default privacy, one other thing that Monero has is constant emissions, making it sustainable for transactions in the long term beyond the next century. To my understanding, both Bitcoin and Zcash will in contrast shift toward pretty high transaction fees, keeping them relevant as a store of value, but irrelevant for small transactions. Bitcoin will survive via an efficient layer 2, e.g. Lightning, but will Zcash? Switching to PoS and other such gimmicks won't fix the core issue.

Even if zcash is technologicially superior, why not just fork it exactly and start over from genesis? Zcash is not the next bitcoin, but the next bytecoin.

Cryptocurrency needs to be a community-led project like bitcoin or monero.

Some exchanges and banks to trace lets say the last 20 hops, and if these are OK, then they accept the coin. I know also about institutions which trace ALL hops, meaning: At their desk you cant ever sell a coin that has been in the dark only one day since its existance.

Most have a relaxed approach, like "if the coin wasnt in dirty hands for the last 5 or 6, its OK for us"

As long as this information balance exists, they are worth equal value

US dollars are certainly worth less if they have a shady transaction history. That's why money laundering exists - I will pay you $100,000 in dirty money if you give me $95,000 in clean money.

Also, US dollars are non-fungible in a collectibles sense because certain id numbers on bills are valuable, older years are valuable (and condition matters). With coins there's a lot more, too - misprints and the like.

So I reject your idea. Either they are both fungible, or neither are.

I get that specialized communities use specialized jargon, but it seems like it would be less confusing to use the word "tracable" here.

Legal and or financial liability by association?

[] https://rns.id/app/palauidinfo

There's 0 real world cases for them except some extremely far fetched ones.

https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0057

And if you have to go to north korea to cash out, then the convenience is much lower.

You can (and people often do especially with banknotes) do crime and tax evasion with them, but you can't transport them across borders in large quantities easily.

Something like monero has the potential to be almost as fast and convenient as a fiat bank transfer but able to be done in any size and be untraceable - that's a combination that doesn't win you many friends in western governments