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Comment by baobolus | Hacker News Reader

It's impossible to make coinjoins ("bitcoin laundry service") illegal as they can be run p2p and over tor. EDIT: you can of course make them illegal, however it's impossible to enforce that.

You could however make "accepting" coinjoined UTXO's illegal, but the lightning network fixes this (you can use coinjoined coins to open channels, lightning payments do not know the payer).

If a government decides you need to do full kyc to buy a coffee, then it might be time to emigrate :D

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>If a government decides you need to do full kyc to buy a coffee, then it might be time to emigrate :D

The more likely scenario would be that it's treated like cash. You're not going to be questioned for using it to buy coffee, but if you decide to buy a house with a sack of cash they'll start asking questions.

Precisely. They would be able to look into any transactions or series of transactions trivially. However in most cases won't care.

It’s trivial to require all businesses not to touch transactions involving a list of addresses. Once that happens, all these games fall apart because trying to obscure the identity means that people will only participate in them if they intend to break the law and after the first busts they’ll learn that it’s a bad idea to publish that intention to a public ledger.

You can't say "don't touch coins from these addresses" because it would be trivial to DoS people by sending dust from a blacklisted address to other people's wallets.

If they sent more than infinitesimal amounts, it’s unsustainable; if they don’t, it’s easily filtered — and that’s assuming that they didn’t just direct you to send the amount to some dump address if you wanted to disavow it. Simply telling a few large exchanges to do that automatically would take care of the majority of users.

You have to be loaded to consider DoSing with current transaction fees anywhere near practical.

And it's not like the government couldn't fine the businesses equal to say, 1.5x the amount transferred from the blacklisted address.

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