The Promise of Bitcoin is Dying in the USA

The noose and threat of KCY and institutional capture in the US has pushed me to start keeping tabs on developments outside the US now, for what the rest of the world is doing with adoption.

As it stands, the rest of the world is going to have pull adoption and create the incentives for US-based entities to follow suit (or they get left behind- this will be a push and pull process, but I feel like basic human incentives for gain will win out and the US won’t be too far behind the rest of the world. Blockchain operations based in the US won’t fall too far behind the rest of the world, but it will have to fight that much harder to take the lead.

With the current situation, US residents have to ask themselves, “what levels of privacy need to be employed?” We’re not getting future guidance from legislative and regulatory agencies- I think if they could have 100% surveillance and control over our assets, they’d do it — and not out of malevolence as much as it would be for mission-fulfillment of monitoring crime and ensuring tax compliance. Regardless, the tradeoff is between that outcome on the one end and total privacy on the other. Where does the balance get drawn? It’s difficutlt to say. It’d be like trying to predict where a raindrop will land while it’s still falling from the sky.

For privacy, we can use tools like coinjoins, which differ in operation from mixers, but will those be labeled as “illegal” because of the obfuscation factor? Would connected wallets be blackbooked or will the users be penalized for failure of disclosure? As of this date, these are real threats, the probability of which I rank as higher until they are defined by law, in black and white ( in my estimation.) What good is owning an asset of with the decentralized benefits built into the very protocol if the users cannot utilize them?

It is very disheartening that we must begin leaning on others outside of our nation for salvation (people, regulators, innovators and legislators in other nations,) but we are in a situation where by consequence of mission creep and fulfillment, agencies and rule-compliant financial organizations (banks, investment funds, hedge funds and their ilk) are by their actions creating this immediate outcome.

So what does this mean if you live in the US? It means you have extra layers of political risk to factor into the equation. How you manage it is purely up to you.