So many ppl in BTC get this wrong, if BTC was untraceable like Monero it could never become a world reserve currency. Money laundering is one of the best ways governments catch criminals, and society will not accept a world without that power.
Even if 'the people' were able to entirely circumvent the government into making an untraceable currency like Monero the world reserve currency, I think that would make crime too easy and would not be a stable equilibrium. The right answer is always a balance, and you want some AML capacity built into money.
The difference between BTC and fiat or CBDCs is that the latter are way too easy to scale surveillance for, it can easily become mass surveillance of everyone. With BTC you have to put in a lot of targeted effort, so it's not scalable to the masses, and is only practical for targeted cases, which is exactly the balance you want.
In a world where BTC is widely accepted as payment, another key difference is that the government would have to go through the court of law to freeze money, unlike the fiat system where they can just command banks to do it extralegally.
Also there would be no single jurisdictional monopoly on which UTXOs can be spent bc you say there are some sanctioned addresses in the US, you could just go abroad and spend.
Finally, if there is some government mass oppression event the public can resist by organizing massive coinjoins to the point where it doesn't make sense to sanction the entire coinjoined group, and traceability is severely damaged.
No.
So many ppl in BTC get this wrong, if BTC was untraceable like Monero it could never become a world reserve currency. Money laundering is one of the best ways governments catch criminals, and society will not accept a world without that power.
Even if 'the people' were able to entirely circumvent the government into making an untraceable currency like Monero the world reserve currency, I think that would make crime too easy and would not be a stable equilibrium. The right answer is always a balance, and you want some AML capacity built into money.
The difference between BTC and fiat or CBDCs is that the latter are way too easy to scale surveillance for, it can easily become mass surveillance of everyone. With BTC you have to put in a lot of targeted effort, so it's not scalable to the masses, and is only practical for targeted cases, which is exactly the balance you want.
In a world where BTC is widely accepted as payment, another key difference is that the government would have to go through the court of law to freeze money, unlike the fiat system where they can just command banks to do it extralegally.
Also there would be no single jurisdictional monopoly on which UTXOs can be spent bc you say there are some sanctioned addresses in the US, you could just go abroad and spend.
Finally, if there is some government mass oppression event the public can resist by organizing massive coinjoins to the point where it doesn't make sense to sanction the entire coinjoined group, and traceability is severely damaged.