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619 sats \ 2 replies \ @optimism 15h \ parent \ on: What do you consider a fair premium to pay for no-kyc bitcoin? AskSN
Doesn't it come down to your threat model?
Of course, and it's always better to avoid any KYC.
But be wary about the counterparty and the exchanged good. Bank transfers are fully traceable and you don't have sender or receiver obfuscation so your counterparty knows who you are. For example, it's trivial to infiltrate robosats with high penetration rate at current volumes and you're often exposing KYC-linked accounts. In-person cash exchange make you traceable. Your friends can be rubber hosed... the possibilities are endless and I don't think there's a catch-all protection.
Also, if your coin comes up in an investigation 1 then, for sufficient amounts, you're still tagged and could be worth exploring, doesn't matter if this is LE or (another form of) organized crime.
the state
The protection Bitcoin offers against the state is hardening against confiscation 2, not avoidance of accountability. On the contrary; the open ledger design ensures accountability and obfuscation only helps against unsophisticated attackers. If you're a big fish, I don't think you can avoid it at all. The only way you could get away with laundring is because you're too small a fish for anyone to care about.
So what you can (and imho should) do is spread risk. You don't want all your coin to be flowing through the same channels.
Coinjoins are more useful if you'd like the people you spend with to not know about your stack.
Similarly for the people that you traded with, as long as you're consistent and do the coin control post-mix too. Coinjoin without post-mix coin control is pointless.
What is the threat model where you buy kyc-free and mix/coinjoin/swap chains?
The counterparty and the traceability of whatever you're trading for.

Footnotes

  1. note that it can simply be that your coin's "history" causes this - thanks to the utxo tainting theories that law enforcement uses. ↩
  2. If a state, with their monopoly on violence, truly is committed to getting your coin then they have means to compel you. But they can't do it Justin Trudeau style by ordering a third party to execute a freeze or seizure. ↩
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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby 14h
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
So what you can (and imho should) do is spread risk. You don't want all your coin to be flowing through the same channels.
This is very good advice.
And it seems to me that, as you say, the fair premium for non-kyc is probably zero, or close to it. Kyc-free reduces your attack surface, but I'm unsure by how much.
Imagine what you could do if you dedicated 8% of your stack on personal security. It is, at least, a trade off worth considering.
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102 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 14h
the fair premium for non-kyc is probably zero
Yes, or close to it. Also because that's what it should be - privacy is the greatest good we don't have.
Kyc-free reduces your attack surface, but I'm unsure by how much.
The only reason why I don't want to argue against tether-on-taro much is because long-term it could enable a proper chain into tether-as-ecash, which is useful for the majority of unfree people that need to DCA:
  1. "buy" USDT for cheap on an exchange for USD
  2. withdraw to taro
  3. LN bridge taro-USDT into an ecash USDT mint of choice
  4. nutswap for sats on robosats
Theoretically we could do this today by backing the dollar ecash with sats, but it would be risky to guarantee that peg and hard to get the rails in place to an ecash mint from a CEX. The mint would need a lot of liquidity for that.
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