You may be surprised; in my experience especially the last few years, I get the best feedback and interest in Bitcoin when I bring up the issues that fiat has (like frozen bank accounts etc.) and ask people if they experienced similar problems with banks. Then I explain them how Bitcoin fixes that and it really sparks much more interest than trying to explain how good of an investment it is. Especially since that's not its original goal anyway.
I don't (personally) know anyone who had their bank account frozen. I know the stories, and from those it looks like it's (Amsterdam) coffee shops and prostitutes (those are legal businesses) who have a hard time keeping a bank account. But "normal" people here don't lose access to their account. The only questions I got from my bank were relating to Bitcoin trades.
While I do know of such cases, there are other easy questions you can ask that in most people spark a 'Yes! I've experienced that and it was super annoying [or something worse than annoying].'
These days, when speaking to absolute Bitcoin newbies, I try to gauge whether they've got any issues with the current system. And it turns out most do! Most people have experienced account closures, chargebacks, cards not accepted globally when travelling and high monthly fees.
If it turns out they do see issues with the money being centrally controlled, not internationally usable, with outrageous fees for international bank transfers and it losing value each and every year; then I can proceed to present them how Bitcoin is different in all of those aspects.
You do NOT want "tainted" banknotes in your hands... the police will ask where you found them.
With Bitcoin, the same powerful institutions would like to see Bitcoin fail.
It's such a hypocritical situation. No vendor ever worries about the history of the bills they receive, despite it being perfectly possible to
exactly identify individual bills which were involved in robbery, theft, scam, etc., due to their serial numbers. And yet large fiat institutions advance the concept of bitcoin taint, despite it (usually) being
completely impossible to identify individual bitcoin or satoshi which were involved in a robbery, theft, scam, etc., due to the very nature of UTXOs being joined and split.
In fiat we can be 100% sure which bills are tainted, but no one cares.
In bitcoin we can only poorly guess at which outputs are tainted, but apparently it has to underpin the entire ecosystem.
Buying in to this nonsense is an active attack on bitcoin.
That's the one thing I've got to hold against the
'The only solution is to make it cryptographically impossible to link UTXOs and deduce their history' argument that nullius brought up lately. That it
'works' (mostly) with cash, too, even though taint
could be proclaimed, enforced and normalized. Heck, how hard can it be to build and code a paper money serial number scanner?
~snip~
I would really appreciate if you could avoid double-posting, resize images and write more compact.
And of course, stay on topic..
Straying away a bit is kind of normal on this forum, but I'd prefer to keep talking about taint and exchanges in here.