Crypto and Digital Currencies – Nine Research Priorities

> Miners should be encouraged through regulation and incentives to add transactions to the next block on the basis of the timestamp and not the fee.

Fees, or rather fee-rates (fee per byte) are the only incentive miners have for including transactions, and no amount of regulation can or should change that. Miners do not care how long ago a transaction arrived in the mempool.

There is no evidence that laws instituted ostensibly to stop money laundering, like the warrantless financial mass-surveillance mandates of AML regulations, have done anything to reduce crime:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...

All these laws do is concentrate power in the hands of the regulated financial sector, which acts as the deputized agent of the state's AML apparatus, along with financial surveillance agencies, who together are privy to the enormous amounts of private financial information gathered via AML mass-surveillance.

>>it’s been estimated that up to half of bitcoin transactions could support illegal activities4.

The methodology for this study is absolutely absurd:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E6H8ue6X0AorZB5?format=jpg&name=...

"For example, we measure the extent to which individual take actions to conceal their identity and trading records, which predicts involvement in criminal activity"

Taking actions to protect one's privacy is NOT an indication of criminality.

Moreover, this study collected data in 2017 and was published in 2019. I'm a bit puzzled why the authors of this article didn't look at the much more recent Chainanalysis study, which estimates that 0.64% of cryptocurrency transactions are associated with illegal activity:

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/cryptocurrency-crime-2021...

>>CBDCs have the opposite problem. They could allow central banks and governments to track everyone’s transactions — a digital panopticon. However, if implications for privacy and rights were addressed, such transparency might deter and expose crime, as well as increasing tax revenues and diminishing black-market trade.

This is completely absurd. "Transparency" is the opposite of "privacy". You cannot have transparency in private financial interactions, without tautologically invading privacy.