I just want to make some comments on this piece of news:
http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoins-affected-new-yorks-bitlicense-may-trade-discount/Here's a little backgrounder. Anyone paying attention to capital flows is aware that the sovereign debt crisis is getting worse. The proposed NY law in the article is not a cause but a symptom. Governments worldwide are cracking down on financial privacy because almost every country, state, county, and municipality is wallowing in debt. Nobody is talking seriously about reducing governments' spending (which is the problem), and when an official does speak of it they get mauled by public-sector workers who fear their benefits being cut. And so they should fear. Reducing government spending means reducing the pay and or number of government staff. Government officials are notorious for creating bureaucracies/hiring-programs that are vastly bloated and filled with golden promises that are, frankly, impossible to pay for, in the long term if not the short. It is easy to make a promise of payment when the actual implosion happens on the watch of a future official.
This proposed law is about tracking money for tax purposes as much as eliminating financial privacy. And in about a year, this crisis will become far worse as government debt becomes the ugliest, most risky investment, and capital flows out of public and into private markets. Even if the law does not pass, expect more governments in the near future to restrict cryptocoin capital flows using some method like this. This public to private swap is merely a repeat of a cycle that has gone on for thousands of years, as governments imploded. It is time once again for governments who spend with profiglacy to be shunned by investors. That will make governments incapable of borrowing (at reasonable rates), and for revenue they will pass all sorts of laws restricting capital movement and penalizing investors and financial privacy. That is why the USA has even infected the time-honoured swiss banking privacy system with legal threats and retributions, so as to track and tax wealth. And not the super-rich, but everyone else gets caught in the net. Laws like that are often touted as "getting the rich" and those laws always define the "rich" as everyone who isn't eating catfood to survive. Ironically, it is the super-rich who always manage to squirm out of the net, mainly because these laws are almost always income-based, and the rich often have much more investment income, which isn't "earned income".
What does this mean for anonymity? As the article suggests, the law intends to attack from the exchange perspective. That is a government's first answer to everything like this: attack the exchanges. That's basically what China's government did. I have heatedly argued with others that the governments of the world don't have to outlaw cryptocurrency. All they have to do is outlaw exchanges, or at least regulate them. If you require mintpal to report the actual identity of every transaction, then mintpal - rather than be forced out of business by noncompliance - will require all users to provide a copy of their identifying docs, thus making anonymity in crypto unimportant. Whether or not an exchange could survive with that regulation in the crypto space remains to be seen. Who cares if coins are anonymous if selling them or buying them means laying your identity bare?
Meanwhile, NY is trying to get others onboard this experiment by waving the arbitrage flag in front of them. I am seldom amazed at what ppl will do to their own freedom, in exchange for a chance to make money. These regulations are privacy and freedom-killers, plain and simple.
The last line of the article is spot-on:
At the end of the day these regulations will do nothing but push more trading off exchange and make it more expensive for honest people to obtain financial privacy.
That part about pushing trading off exchanges is the critical part for Ora. Why do we even need exchanges at all? Let me get this straight: We create decentralized currencies, and then centralize them in order to buy and sell? Why not have a decentralized exchange for decentralized currency? I seriously doubt that any government could successfully restrict p2p software that operates in a truly decentralized manner. It's only when we cross centralized boundaries that we are subjected to proctology exams. So perhaps we should never cross those boundaries, and build that into the product?Am I the only one who thinks that exchanges will be regulated out of existence?
kind regards,
nio