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Comment by dale_glass | Hacker News Reader

Technically, you don't need an exchange. Practically, you do at some point in the chain.

Say this Sargon guy or some other personality with a rep takes payments/donations in BTC. Okay, and what then? You can't pay your rent with that, unless you're renting from some crypto fan, and they also can't pay for their taxes/groceries/gas/etc with crypto. At some point, if crypto is used as money there has to be an exchange.

And since crypto is very traceable it's very possible you won't be able to exchange coins with some sort of murky history to them. If you'd have a problem, then your landlord likely also has a problem. And you probably don't want to be on the wrong side of your landlord.

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> Practically, you do at some point in the chain.

Except you don't - they can be sold and bought entirely without a digital middleman. You can buy goods for them. It's not a weird thought to keep them entirely as themselves, forever.

As for the "crypto is very traceable" angle, it's honestly kind of tired and wrong. If it's something you care about, you have solutions available. Arguing about it as if it's some sort of absolute is disingenuous.

> Except you don't - they can be sold and bought entirely without a digital middleman. You can buy goods for them. It's not a weird thought to keep them entirely as themselves, forever.

Where do you pay rent and pay for groceries with crypto?

> As for the "crypto is very traceable" angle, it's honestly kind of tired and wrong. If it's something you care about, you have solutions available. Arguing about it as if it's some sort of absolute is disingenuous.

I know mixers exist. And a lot of exchanges ban their use, which is detectable.

You can always use a privacy coin. Even if they get banned from exchanges, you can transact within the coin, then use an atomic cross-chain swap to cash out to bitcoin.

Alternately, there's decentralized mixing algorithms like CoinJoin that are indistinguishable from normal transactions with multiple inputs and outputs. Bitcoin's Wasabi wallet and Ethereum's Tornado cash do this.

Privacy is really a solved problem for anyone who wants to solve it.

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