The liberal exchange of currency (arguably money in this case) is not a "black market." It's only a black market in the context that a government thinks it has the right to regulate private transactions to the extent that the physical address of a recipient needs to be on record. Is it a black market when I pay the neighbor kid to mow my lawn and don't report their address? Nonsense.
> Is it black market when I pay the neighbor kid to mow my lawn and don't report their address? Nonsense.
No, but it is illegal for financial institutions (and many industries) to provide services without knowing who they are serving. Not sure how anyone is surprised that KYC requirements are coming for crypto..
Probably because banking stuff is cryptic and KYC sounds like something that is dredged in flour and 21 seasonings before being fried crisp instead of a very real obligation.
And they are right to assert that, because the alternative is all sorts of bad actors using this alternative currency to do all sorts of things we don't want as a society (money laundering, drug trade, human trafficking).
No they don't, at least not in the United States. The Government has no rights. It has privileges given to it by the people. Only individuals and corporations have rights. Corruption may have been subverting that principle since time immemorial, but that does not change the fact.
The federal government, if it was motivated enough, has the capability to bust your door down and hold you in a cell indefinitely with no trial if it wanted to. That doesn't mean they have a right to do so. It only means the people have allowed them to do it.
> all sorts of things we don't want as a society (money laundering, drug trade, human trafficking).
Oh, you mean the eternal bogeyman that can be used to justify any conceivable invasion of your privacy by government? Right.
What do you say to The Government requiring that your home and all new homes contain cameras and microphones to detect bad actors doing all sorts of things we don't want as a society, like money laundering, drug trade, and human trafficking?
Somehow I doubt you'd be on board with that, which is the entire point. You would draw a line in the sand because The Government does not have a right to do that, and those unsavory things that could possibly happen in your home are not a good enough excuse for them to subvert your rights.
Detailing discussions by questioning definitions doesn’t help advance your point. A black market is a market that is illegal, not just a market that you personally don’t approve of. Governments are doing what their laws say they can, trying to disambiguate between “right” and “privilege” doesn’t change this.
Your point seems to be “they can’t do that because I don’t like it”, which is the basis of a political movement, not a discussion of what can actually legally be done right now.
KYC laws are pretty universal, they’re not going away because you say they shouldn’t be real.
You are not obligated to follow a law purely because it exists. I realise you will immediately jump to the alternative here but you should take a step back and consider the implications of being obligated to follow any harebrained, harmful and sometimes downright evil law that has ever existed.
Legal and ethical are not the same thing. If a law is any of the above things plus unenforceable I would argue it makes zero sense to obey it.
You're obligated to follow a law because if you don't someone will hit you with you a stick, kidnap you, and lock you in a tiny room. You're right that governments don't have "rights." They have abilities.
Exactly. Which is why I also added unenforceable. The government can make idiotic evil and harmful laws till the cows come home, and history shows that indeed they do.
The value in innovations like cryptocurrency are about making a particular class of the above idiotic laws unenforceable, to the extent they are successful. Other similar products exist which make other forms of law similarly unenforceable, for example Tor for dissidents in totalitarian regimes looking to smuggle information into or out of their open air prison camps, etc.
The harder agencies try that produce and attempt to enforce these fundamentally unenforceable laws, over time, the less able they will be to do so, because the nature of cryptography is that the mathematics massively favours the defender to such an extent that even the lumbering behemoths we have in nation states are inadequate to breach it if done correctly. The best they can do is breach supporting infrastructure around it, which just ends up as an evolutionary fitness function for the removal of such vulnerable supporting infrastructure, until they end up creating the monster they simply can't kill.
Which is fortunate, because I dread to imagine a world they actually had the absolute power they so desperately covet.
You mean if you remove Bitcoin/Cryptocurrency, the drug trade and human trafficking will stop? The only thing that I can, kind off, agree on is Cyber Crime (Cryptolocker and friends).
Also, you can't launder money with Bitcoin. Bitcoin financial network is strictly separated from the main stream "legitimate" network where you need to launder your money. Hide your money? maybe, if you can bear the volatility; but not launder money.
The US federal government does not have this right. Policing powers belong to the states. Federal government economic concerns are limited to international borders and keeping interstate commerce moving.
If you want to make an argument that the federal government can stop states from adopting cryptocurrency as money you would be right. The Constitution explicitly says they can't.
> If you made a payment during the calendar year as a small business or self-employed (individual), you are most likely required to file an information return to the IRS.
I don’t think that covers a homeowner paying for services. I’ve paid an appliance repair person more than that this year. I’m thinking about updating my home’s HVAC and that’s going to be way more than that. I hired a plumber earlier this year and spent about that. None of these things require a 1099 to be filed and I don’t wee why landscaping would be different.
