Cryptocurrency anonymity under attack -- EU to require mapping of wallets to IDs

[joelkatz]

Anonymity is under attack. The EU is considering building government databases to map wallets to individual identities:

Here's the draft proposal from May of 2015:
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A32015L0849

And now it seems they're adopting it:
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-2380_en.htm

It looks like they may only be targetting wallets that interact with exchanges:

Tackling terrorist financing risks linked to virtual currencies: to prevent misuse of
virtual currencies for money laundering and terrorist financing purposes, the
Commission proposes to bring virtual currency exchange platforms and custodian
wallet providers under the scope of the Anti-Money Laundering Directive. These
entities will have to apply customer due diligence controls when exchanging
virtual for real currencies, ending the anonymity associated with such exchanges[.]

But I fear it won't be too long before they decide that wallets not associated with exchanges are a "loophole" and regulate users directly.

Comments

[sisterholics]

I understand this to a certain extent, but our personal privacy has been eroded so much over the last few years, people should have a choice

[joelkatz]

Any idea why I can't get blockquote to work? It looks correct in preview, but when I submit, I get an "<" and no blockquote.

[dcsignals]

I can see a wave of people getting their exchange accounts frozen and money seized in the future, because maybe at some point in the past they took a couple of payments from somebody who used a deep web market and now that person's activity gets associated with them.

The main problem with these sorts of surveillance measures is not so much that they exist, its that people think they are more reliable and accurate than they really are.

[joelkatz]

Definitely. When you argue with many people about issues like this, they imagine the program is perfectly implemented, the government database is totally secure and free from errors, and nobody ever gets into a bureaucratic snafu where they can't get to their money for some stupid reason.

It's fine to imagine such a system if you want to argue strictly about some of the principles involved. But don't pretend that your arguments have much relevance to how actual systems really work in the world.

For example, consider these two questions:

1. Should America prohibit people on the no fly list from buying guns?
2. If the Federal government had a well-curated list of people the government had good reasons to think posed a threat of violence (even though they had committed no crime) and provided people with fair opportunities to hear the evidence that placed them on the list and challenge their inclusion on that list through reasonable administrative processes and ultimately in a court of law, would it be reasonable to prohibit people on that list from buying guns?

Both questions are interesting, but they are two very different questions.

[mongoosefist]

There is no way they would be able to regulate users directly. Even if they required all wallets that interact with exchanges to be associated with an ID, it's so easy to create new wallets to obfuscate the money trail they would essentially always be playing catch up.

[hrottie]

Bullshit.
There is no way we will need to connect our ID to every wallet we are going to make, this is not going to happen in modern days. It would be just fucking stupid...