The U.S. Government Can Nationalize the Bitcoin Network at Any Time
This seems highly inefficient - why give money to random people (many of them non-US citizens) when you don’t have to? Here is a much cheaper plan which grants US a lot of control over bitcoins:<p>- Some US government agency publishes “bad bitcoin address” list - this is initially a list of addresses of clearly evil people, like ransomware attackers.<p>- The new law is passed, requiring all US-based bitcoin firms to refuse any transactions that derive, in whole or in part, from “bad bitcoin” list. And KYC laws require passing identities of people who use “bad bitcoins” to FBI. All exchanges have to follow that rule or be fined.<p>- This will kill things like mixers (who wants a part of “bad bitcoin”), anonymous exchanges (if you receive money from stranger and it was “bad bitcoin”, FBI will visit you if it ever touches a legal exchange. Not a very pleasant situation).<p>- This will be US only, but it will propagate to other countries. Let’s say you are in Russia, and you are accepting bitcoins. At some moment in the future, you may want to buy a new iPhone using all those coins. But if they are on “bad bitcoin” list, you won’t be able to do so! So it makes a fill economic sense to refuse bad bitcoins, or maybe accept them at a heavy discount.<p>- Big players, such as investment funds or major payment processors, are almost unaffected. After all, only 0.001% of bitcoins are bad, and losing a few potential customers due to regulations is common in financial industry.<p>- Eventually everyone gets used to “bad bitcoin” system, and the US starts putting more addresses in it. “Terrorist activities”, “embargoed countries” and so on.<p>And that’s how US can get a fair amount of control over bitcoins, and without having to buy entire thing out!