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A large number of nations and US states make some official recognition of bitcoin as money.
That's a good one. I think relatively small number of other governmental entities legitimizing btc would go quite a long way for a host of reasons.
I could imagine them creating some sort of "clean" credential to certify that certain sats have not been used in criminal activity.
I'm not a lawyer because I have a modicum of a moral compass (j/k @siggy47, mostly) but scenarios like this kind of make me wish that I was, bc I have so many questions. I literally have no idea if such a thing is 2/10 difficulty, or 7/10 difficulty. It would be nice to have actual knowledge about what it would entail.
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I’m also not a lawyer, but libertarians have been sounding the alarm about civil asset forfeiture for quite a while.
The state can seize anything that is claimed to be suspected of being involved in a crime and the burden is on the owner to demonstrate that it wasn’t.
Considering how many potentially taxable events have gone unreported with bitcoin, it would probably be easy to go after a lot of it on those grounds alone.
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That would move a large portion of the economy to the gray zone. No compliance, no taxes, no nonsense. But also no legal protection.
Of course not everything can move there. You can't buy a house or a car outside of the purview of the state, as those things need to be registered with the thugs.
Bitcoin would split into clean and dirty UTXOs. Dirty bitcoin would be cheaper as clean bitcoin can be used in the gray economy, but dirty bitcoin costs sats to clean and make it spendable in the compliant economy.
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That's very much the scenario I'm imagining.
The reason I'm concerned about it is that it creates two adoption hurdles for us: 1) getting people to use bitcoin at all and 2) getting them to use dirty bitcoin.
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"Dirty bitcoin" is nothing but a human construct that creates problems where there are none; there is no "dirty" or "clean" bitcoin, there's simply bitcoin.
They [the gov] isn't burning or destroying money or other assets they seize, things that could be labeled as "dirty" just as well, no, they use those assets to improve the police, for example, by acquiring more and better police cars, uniforms, guns, training, et cetera---and there's nothing wrong with that.
Why should it be different with bitcoin?
They [the gov] isn't burning any seized ("dirty") bitcoin either, no, they auction it FFS, they profit off of it, FFS.
Hypocrisy is running wild on the upper levels.
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I get all that. My concern is essentially that they can create a barrier to adoption by incentivizing merchants to only accept "clean" bitcoin. If adoption develops along those lines, it'll be a huge setback for "freedom money".
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People need to start being rational and think for themselves, not simply do as told by big daddy gov.
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Sure, but they're not going to.
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One of the reasons why I'm an outspoken misanthrope.
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What outcome are you hoping for out of your misanthropy? Serious question. It's not clear to me what perpetual scolding is good for. Maybe it's fun? Hopefully that's enough for you, because that's all I think you (or anyone) are achieving with that strategy.
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