Mark Lara - posted on March 3, 2019 8:09 pm

Why?

RL P - posted on March 3, 2019 8:36 pm

+Mark Lara The problem with many of these privacy tokens (i.e. Monero and Dash) is the simple fact that while it’s ok for transactions on these networks to be private P2P, B2B, or P2B and vice versa, it’s not ok for them to be private from Big Brother. This is the simplest way of putting it. While I did dabble in privacy coins for a couple of years, I sold for a profit during the last bull run and never got back into them. I believe that it is naive to think that govts were going to ever allow complete and anonymous transactions without any oversight from them. I think those invested in many of these types of coins should take heed the Bank of Thailand’s list of approved tokens (https://www.sec.or.th/en/Pages/News/Detail_News.aspx?tg=NEWS&lg=en&news_no=23&news_yy=2019) because I think this will be a common theme that will play out globally regarding regulating many of these tokens.

I just never understood this “Pomp and Circumstance” that many in the Monero camp display when they say, “the government can’t stop us” or “the government can’t track us.” I can almost guarantee you that once regulations are put into place, all crypto transactions will have to comply with AML/KYC/CFT regulations and these anonymous tokens will be banned if they don’t comply. Every day I hear the constant chorus of Monero supporters echoing how they are like BitTorrent, you can always get some Monero from someone in a different country, you can always exchange it P2P with someone, every Monero transaction, by default, disguises the sending and receiving addresses as well as transacted amounts, it doesn’t use selective transparency like ZCash, and the new Kovri Project, once activated, will use I2p invisible internet Project nodes to hide the transacting party’s IP address encrypt etc. I know the argument here is that “governments can’t truly enforce a ban.” To do so they would have to completely shut down the internet in order to prevent these types of transactions from occurring. These things are all true, however, the argument that I’m making is what the banning of these anonymous coins by governments would entail. While it wouldn’t be feasible or economical for government to prevent P2P transfers, they could, however, prevent all retail services, money provider (i.e. exchanges, FIs, etc.), corporate trades, etc. from trading and processing these coins. Then what would be the point of holding Monero, ZCash, or Dash? If you can’t buy or purchase goods and services with these coins or exchange them for other cryptos or fiat currencies, they become useless. In this case, P2P becomes futile and relegated to a game of Monopoly.