I just read that Coinbase is declining transactions from Tor users. This isn't surprising, and just another example of the steady and relentless capture of the Bitcoin space by governments and regulators. It is pretty obvious to me that Monero (and other privacy enhancing coins) will become illegal in most places, and governments will try to prevent the transfer of funds between Monero and the legal economy. I guess it will be pretty easy for them to block fiat transfer, either in exchanges or in something like localmonero. It also seems plausible that pure crypro exchanges will be regulated, and prevent trade in privacy coins.
I'm not writing this as FUD or pointless rant, I'm a developer and have some free time, and would really like to hear any ideas on how can we mitigate this probable future..
Pretty simple answer - if you want privacy and anonymity, don't use coinbase. Quite honestly, coinbase & Tor aren't really compatible since the former requires full KYC information from customers buying or selling BTC.
Will anonymous coin transactions become illegal? Under certain conditions in certain countries, almost definitely. However, like leaks in a dam, capital flows find the cracks. Short term, there's no way that authorities will shut down all of the crypto to crypto exchanges, especially considering that many are hosted in places where authorities don't consider crypto-tokens money or even property and thusly don't regulate it.
Longer term, crypto to crypto decentralized exchanges will be needed as will cash fiat to crypto exchanges - that will eliminate the ability for authorities to stop flows. They can still do standard policing, but we've seen how well that works to stop protocols like BitTorrent.
Decentralization is the answer.
