Crypto may not be quite as secure as we were led to believe.
I'd be damned interested to hear your thoughts about the government's newfound ability to selectively shut off "bad people's" crypto accounts.
The light that burns twice as bright, burns half as long. - Dr. Eldon Tyrell
Godfrey Smith: Mike, I wouldn't worry. Prosperity is just around the corner. Mike Flaherty: Yeah, it's been there a long time. I wish I knew which corner. My Man Godfrey (1936)
I'd be damned interested to hear your thoughts about the government's newfound ability to selectively shut off "bad people's" crypto accounts.
They have no such innate ability. Their enforcement on crypto ban is not unlike a ban on drugs, though far harder. If they don't know you got it, then they can't touch you, and unlike drugs, crypto can't be sniffed out by dogs.
Besides that, no one actually "has" crypto because all crypto is on the internet. What we call crypto "wallets" are actually not "wallets" in the conventional sense. Real wallets hold currency and if you destroy the wallet you destroy any currency it contains.
But crypto wallets only hold "keys" to what can be considered a safe on the internet, and it is that safe that holds the currency, not the wallet. So when they say they want to ban a particular crypto, what they would be banning is, effectively, a private digital key (information) that can be defined as a twelve word passphrase that opens the blockchain "safe". And like any key, crypto keys can be duplicated, so if you destroy one key and still have a spare, you destroy nothing.
And how can a gov ban something like that?
What govs can do is block brick & mortar merchants from selling products in exchange for crypto, but the leverage there is through the merchants having to have their paperwork and finances available for gov scrutiny, and potentially by gov agents attempting to make entrapment crypto transactions with those merchants.
They could also potentially ban any mining of particular cryptos in Canada as China has done, but that will have zero impact in conducting transactions in Canada as mining is done globally. So long as one has internet access, one can conduct transactions. And not all cryptos do mining anyway. Mining is only for "proof of work" cryptos, but "proof of stake" cryptos don't even do any mining.
So it's basically political fanfare to declare they are banning crypto transactions. I see it as a sign of the gov panicking.