It looks like the EU are making it harder to use crypto because they want to be able to control everyone with their own CBDC instead? So make it harder to use crypto.

Do I need a tinfoil hat, or is this just governments doing what governments do, and trying to get more control?

Also, it's going to be really hard for them to enforce this.

Lets see, there are two main uses for crypto currencies.

1. as a traded "asset" (ho ho ho, no it isn't, it's a tulip bubble with no tulips.)

2. as a means of moving money around for criminal transactions.

In the case of 1, anonymity is worthless, because if you're trying to hide your transactions from a government, there's not a lot of point, because you need to report any monetary gains from the transaction on your tax return when you convert it to a real currency.

In the case of 2, well, there's no argument that can justify anonymity there....

"Nothing to hide, nothing to fear."

What anonymity? The idea of the blockchain is that everyone can see every transaction. Anyone who believes cryptocurrency is anonymous might be interested in buying a bridge I've recently heard is going for sale over in New York - Brooklyn, to be precise.

Just goes to prove that when you're stupid, there's nothing to help you except a kind soul in a whit lab coat holding your hand all the way.

And that's not included in blockchain.

Right. The transactions are visible & validated on the public block chain.

Tying those transactions back to an individual would require information from an individual. Ooops, I forgot my seed phrase. Try to prove me wrong.

I would imagine that the EUs control of its citizenry will probably be done with mind control chips in your breakfast cereal or something in the drinking water.

It's not at all clear that CBDCs are going to work. Most everyone is looking at them, but not that many have actually been rolled out and its not clear that merchants in places where they are available are all that keen on accepting them. My guess is that they might be subject to many of the problems of credit cards and probably a few other glitches that no one has thought of but will be obvious once they are encountered. Time will tell if they are actually practical.

Even if they are a success, they will probably operate in parallel with physical currency and other financial media for many, many decades. Maybe forever.

Good point, governments always have and always will prioritise the safety, privacy and comfort of innocent ordinary citizens over being able to exert control. Anything else is just an insane conspiracy theory.

It's not at all clear that CBDCs are going to work. Most everyone is looking at them, but not that many have actually been rolled out and its not clear that merchants in places where they are available are all that keen on accepting them.

There's no real reason why they shouldn't work given the majority of currency and transactions are digital already. Our bank accounts are already stocked with e-Pounds, Dollars or Euros and we swipe cards to move bits from our accounts to someone elses. It's only when we convert bits to bits of paper that the governments really lose sight of how we're spending their money. Hence the nudges to remove cash from economies. The main challenge is working in all the social and carbon credit bollix politicians want to introduce to regulate society.

One (potential) problem would appear to be counterfitting. Governments go to rather extreme lengths to make their paper currencies hard to fake. Special fabrics and dyes, hidden signatures, etc. And even then a small (but tolerable) number of fakes are created. It may be that there is simply no way to prevent folks from "printing" and somehow circulating their own digital "coinage". Unlike fake paper money, imanufacturing fake digital notes probably won't take any special skills beyond pressing/clicking ENTER on the right app. Getting the fake money into circulation without getting caught looks to be a lot harder. But we won't know for sure until we have some hands on experience with the stuff.

There may be some other problems. Does your digital paycheck vanish forever if your cellphone battery dies? How do I pay for an ice cream cone or a beer in an areas with no digital services? If the Central bank finds 27 copies of the same digital note, how does it know which, if any, is the original? Are there common, necessary, activities that allow easy injection of fake currency into the financial system. Or that allow theft of someone else's money?

Probably dozens of other things. Maybe all are tractable. Maybe not. Time will tell.

Always need cash as an option.

Digital transactions are fine until systems go down - several times I have had fun in shops when external systems have gone down (so card payments not possible / cash machines down) - shoppers stuck either waiting for system to get back online or dumping their shopping and going home) but I have had a cash stash with me (always do) and so have been able to pay and go.

Lets also play tinfoil hat mode - in a digital only system linked to some form of person specific digital id or key then nothing to stop the government revoking the id / key of "undesirables" - and we will not just be talking dangerous terrorists, as we can see with the massively over the top sentences given to some stop oil protesters in the UK recently, state systems like disproportionate punishments as an attempt to control the pesky populace.

I always tip in cash - know from friends who do / have worked in the service industry that many places that supposedly take tips on card payments do not share it out fairly between the staff (often total amount given out between staff is a far smaller amount than all the customers "tipped" on the cards and the owners just naughtily creaming a bit more profit at expense of (poorly paid) staff who really need all their tips to make their pay decent)

More likely staff prefers tips in cash as it allows them to not declare it as part of their income.

If it shows up on the credit card balance they can't really hide it from the taxman.

"The Covid shot is entirely voluntary, you are not required to take it. However, as you are a risk to society for not being vaccinated, your ability to conduct CBDC transactions in any public establishments will be disabled."

Take Covid out and put in any other controversial topic.

"You made a post on The Register which was unsupportive of excessive government control. To reset your thinking, we are blocking your ability to buy groceries for the next 30 days."

CBDC is all about control. Don't think it won't happen.

But that is the entire point.

I haven't had use of coins or bills since the beginning of COVID. Please explain to me why I would need a so-called digital money scheme when my official money is already digital and works fine.

Of course, I live in Europe, which has an efficient banking system.

Not like some other so-called first-world countries which actually live in the 1800s when it comes to managing money.

Well, mandating the "connected car" has now sorted out all those pesky counter-revolutionary recidivists who won't use public transport and thus spend hours beyond the reach of the Eye Of Sauron.

Transport looks favourite to me.

Well I guess that offshores everything to the Cayman Islands or somewhere, or it's back to the suitcases of cash folks.

"In other words, say goodbye to the so-called anonymity of cryptocurrencies."

Curious statement!

- Cryptocurrencies are anyway not exactly anonymous, they are at least pseudonymous (since each wallet ID is public). Also, analysis of transactions to/from certain wallet accounts can be used to de-anonymise (identify the actual account holder)

- EU citizens / residents wishing to stay pseudonymous can anyway buy crypto on a foreign-based exchange

- EU citizens / residents wishing to not disclose any crypto holdings can still hold them in an offline wallet

I don't really understand the workings of cryptocurrencies very well, but with a VPN, yeah, surely exchanges can be accessed and local Govts won't know by whom, so while I think regulation is a good idea, if they are unregulated somewhere, that's where the exchanges will end up. Who knows, maybe Britain will add EU law exempt Crypto Exchanges to it's portfolio in it's offshore tax havens / former colonies.

Essentially these days cryptocurrencies support criminal activity more than anything else. Cryptocurrencies were designed to make payments easy but the creators never thought that this would make criminal activity so much easier and so much more profitable. Cryptoanything is bad these days.

" EU citizens / residents wishing to stay pseudonymous can anyway buy crypto on a foreign-based exchange"

Well, not exactly, if the crypto was bought with real money, and then sold for real money at a profit, it doesn't matter where in the world the crypto is, it's still subject to local tax laws where the crypto trader lives. Keeping the transactions and monetary gains anonymous and not declaring them is *already* breaking the law. The new EU regulation is just making it easier for the authorities to track down missing taxable income.

If you don't like the law, campaign to get it changed, don't just break the law.

If they launch their own and call it the "E-uro", I'm going to petition Mad Vlad to nuke Brussels[1].

Good taste demands it.

[1] Although the incompetent git would probably do it while the eurocrats were all "working from Strasbourg"[2].

[2] Like "working from home" only not at home and with less work.

The money laundering excuse again, the only thing it accomplishes is the to make it harder to move legal money around.

I recently moved 300k euros from an Asian country to a European country, legal , taxed money. One of the banks where I’ve been a customer for 50 years flat out refused to do it, didn’t even wanted to tell me what their requirements to allow is. My other bank required a lot of paperwork including a personal letter from the manager of my Asian bank, with a verified translation and the complete transaction history. I bet if I was a billionaire drug runner it would have been much easier…

I managed to move around the same amount of money from one EU country to another with no problem at all...... what can I say?

Is this really some kind of world-first by the EU? I was under the impression that Japan, for example, already regulated cyptocurrencies, including requiring registration of exchanges with their financial services authorities, compliance with AML regulations, the identification of senders and beneficiaries, etc. Indeed, I seem to remember it being noted here in an article on the FTX debacle, that in Japan the regulations on cryptocurrencies meant that there was a great deal more protection than was the case elsewhere.

My first thought is that these rules will just give these "assets" a veneer of respectability as an investment, when it would be better to just point out that they're nothing but speculation, intrinsically worthless, regularly subject to scams and a really bad idea to put your money into.

Unfortunately this does nothing to solve the criminality and money laundering issues, but if enough people stop foolishly putting their money into them they will collapse as a store of "value" anyway, which ultimately would be the only way they stop being used for these purposes.

Will they ban that anonymous cash stuff, coins and notes etc. too? Obviously it's mostly criminals that use that.

Sure, unlike the proles, ministers have nothing to fear from a brown envelope full of CBDCs. Indeed, the very senior ones will just be able to stuff their own envelopes.

Nope.

Grab your wallet. Pick any bill. I'll bet it already has a serial number on it. Trivial to convert that to CBDC. Deposit it at any time and you are free to spend it with CBDC wherever you want. Just don't ask for the printed bill to be ever returned.