Trudeau bans Canadian banks from transacting with list of 34 wallets.
https://ift.tt/QhksoWR
This is literally what I said would happen in a couple other threads where people were suggesting publishing public addresses to circumvent funding sites and go direct to the truckers.
The well-trod argument about wallets not being accounts or individuals isn’t applicable here, for a few reasons. Tl;dr that argument comes down to quantity (which doesn’t matter for the government) and quality (just a wallet, not me, and I can create another one, but then it’s tainted too, and in fact your identity gets leaked bit by bit the more you link them):
1. It’s incredibly easy to simply increase the blacklist size – the government has inexhaustible resources compared to a trucker convoy, who would need to create and spend (offramp) faster than the government could blacklist. Maybe some of us in the subreddit could outpace them, but the truckers have other things to worry about
2. It’s incredibly easy to find the addresses to blacklist – if an address is published on FB or wherever so a donor can find it, so too can the government
3. Blacklist is an umbrella term and conjures up an idea of a list given to people, so needs distributing. This is not how it is used, as that leaks the contents of the list to 3rd parties like exchanges. Rather, many times we’re talking about verification services – if you try to offramp or sell your BTC, an exchange will ask the service provided by the gov if the address is suspicious. Ditto onramping. So using the BTC you receive becomes troublesome quite quickly. Sending it P2P to another wallet of yours can poison that wallet. Do this too many times and then you have an extreme polar situation — either you got away with it clean, or every single hop along the way is now tainted **and** traced to the same wallet, and this increases the surface of attack for identifying who the individual associated with those wallets is.
I don’t know what technical solutions there are, as even coinjoin/tumbling services cause flags in some chainalysis tools. But Canadians should be up in arms over this and try for the non-technical, grassroots solution of voting in people who don’t do this.
Cryptocurrency
