I think the autor would argue that we are still in the era of "crypto is too small to fully regulate" stage. But if we take it to the extreme and 50% of all transactions are done with a crypto currency, why would governments _not_ apply all the traditional financial regulations to crypto? Moving money internationally is not hard due to technical reasons, but due to political reasons.
Easier said than done.
With crypto, you can move a billion dollars in 15 minutes to anywhere in the world for like $15, without giving away either source or destination. To do this, you need to send about 250 bytes of information to any node in the blockchain network, using any way possible, up to and including dictating these numbers by phone or writing them on a piece of paper and smuggling said piece to anybody with a non-censored internet connection.
Goverments can make this illegal, but it is impossible to enforce it. These 250 bytes are just another "illegal number", which can be written anywhere, sewn on your t-shirt, etched in stone, etc. There are many fully secure ways to transmit 250 bytes without anyone knowing about it (including governments). Therefore, there is a secure and bulletproof way to smuggle a billion dollars out of the country without getting stopped.
No one can do anything about it.
(Well, there is a crypto-sanctions mechanism which can taint some money on the blockchain and can make it difficult to sell on exchanges etc. But it just creates some inconvenience -- there are many ways to launder crypto, from mixers to bridges and coinjoin and anonymizing through fees arbitrage and whatever).
> No one can do anything about it
Maybe online, but with state actors the fear is what they can/will do to you IRL and how to avoid ever raising suspicion. And moving a billion dollars overnight is something that I think is impossible to do with raising eyebrows, regardless of the technical mechanism to move it.
If you observe the activity on blockchains, there are occasionally billion dollar-class transfers visible. Nobody knows who is behind them.
if you make it illegal to convert btc to cash (which a government can do trivially), my contention is that this will kill crypto. Most people simply don't want to break the law. Much of the liquidity in the system dries up. Yes you can break the law if you want, but that just goes to show that crypto's number one real world use case is to skirt regulations.
Regulations are not always a force of good to be observed all the time, particularly in non-democratic countries.
The whole point of crypto is that, assuming you stay fully on chain, it cannot be regulated the way banks are. When you have the right keys and a connection to a node, nothing can stop you from sending BTC to another wallet. Regulation of crypto is possible only at the blockchain-tradfi interface (e.g. US Govt could tell Coinbase to not interact with a particular wallet). However, if crypto gains the sort of traction where you can buy most items with purely on-chain transfer, regulation becomes close to impossible as we see with cash.
The government in question can easily pass a law making it illegal for traditional financial institutions to interact with crypto. In this scenario, most users will simply stop using it to follow the law. For the die hards fans they will still reduce the use of the currency. They need to pay for taxes in the national currency and thus need income in the national currency. You still owe taxes on illegal income. Businesses need to pay payroll, vendors, and all taxes in the national currency. All of this means that individuals and businesses need national currency backed transactions to get the national currency to pay the taxes.
I agree that if you made "using btc" illegal then you and I could still send each other BTC. But I believe that you would rapidly see the use of crypto die out if governments cut it off from trad-fi, which they could do trivially easily.
Posession of gold was banned in several leadimg economies such as US and UK in the 20th century [1]. Didnt really stop people from using gold as a store of value.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
If we take the logical extreme to mean that 50% of the transactions are carried out by 50% of the people, why would, at least where there are democratic governments, the people actively choose crypto because of its unregulated properties and then promptly undo it all with regulation?
But you're probably thinking of either cases where 50% of the transactions are carried out by a much smaller segment of the population or where there is a dictatorship?
Assuming full regulation is possible, would crypto still be useful? It seems a very large portion of its utility is in its semi-unregulated nature.
I would have agreed, but the US BTC ETF success shows that people care about the asset of BTC divorced from the promise of lack of regulation.
Or is the US BTC ETF just a convenient way to speculate on the rising value of BTC, when the rising value is driven by the illicit activity happening elsewhere?
That’s just gambling
I would agree