While many are busy watching their charts and hunting for the dip, regulations are slowly moving forward. This should be of concern to anyone wishing to protect their wealth and I'm pretty sure that's your case. That’s why it seems interesting to open the debate.
So here are some of these regulation policy:
No more privacy
Claiming to prevent illegal activities such as money laundering and terrorism financing, countries like France and Japan move to ban anonymous crypto accounts. Also the Department of Justice published its Cryptocurrency Enforcement Framework, which says that merely using privacy coins like Zcash and Monero is “indicative of possible criminal conduct”. The Framework also says that people operating mixers and tumblers, which make cryptocurrency transactions harder to trace, can be criminally liable for money laundering. Financial regulators apparently suspect that anyone attempting to protect their financial privacy is doing something illegal.
We’ve already seen Bittrex, Shapeshift, Huobi and Bithumb delisting the most used privacy coins (Monero, Dash and Zcash) without much explanation. On top of that, Russia and the US Homeland Security both claimed to have developed tools to trace privacy coins. Even if we don't know how effective these tools really are, it clearly demonstrates that privacy coins are not viewed favorably to say the least.
Wallets and transactions tracking
For the same motive, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde calls for global regulation of Bitcoin, saying the digital currency had been used for money laundering activities in some instances and that any loopholes needed to be closed.
“(Bitcoin) is a highly speculative asset, which has conducted some funny business and some interesting and totally reprehensible money laundering activity”
Which leads to the collection of identity data about people who transact cryptocurrencies and transactions tracking. The regulations could also make it significantly more difficult for self-hosted wallet users to seamlessly interact with other users who have wallets provided by a service subject to the regulations.
In summary, if you’ve traded and withdraw cryptocurrencies on a custodial exchange, your wallets are now identified to you via KYC data and you could soon be taxed on it or be arrested if you’re involved in some dirty business.
NYPD already explained its use of cryptocurrency transaction analysis in policy document.
Clean Mining
Two of the largest Bitcoin mining companies in North America, Marathon Patent Inc. and DMG Blockchain Solutions Inc., recently created the Digital Currency Miners of North America (DCMNA), the first North American mining pool with a legal entity. Together, they're pledging to only process transactions that comply with American laws.
The DCMNA is pioneering a technique it calls “clean mining”, meaning it selects which transactions to process based on wallet information instead of the most lucrative fee options. In other words, they're promising to only mine transactions that the government approves of, even if it means revenue takes a hit.
The idea is that it could become illegal to process transactions for blacklisted addresses or countries. For example BitGo was fined by the US Treasury in December for allowing customers to transact with wallets associated with prohibited countries (Iran, Cuba and Syria).
For now it’s hard to imagine how they can force miners worldwide to comply with this “clean mining” policy but the concept of blacklist is concerning as it opens the door to financial censorship by cutting off access to financial institutions.
Conclusion
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against regulations or saying that they’re not needed.
Some say they’re a necessary step toward mass adoption but we’re also slowly moving away from the original idea of decentralization and financial freedom. Sadly, at this pace anonymity will soon be very hard to find.
Image by herbinisaac from Pixabay