In order to get to the bullet points you list, a government would first have to acknowledge BTC as legal tender, which seems like a huge step for most of the larger economies (including the US) at this stage. I can't reasonable see it happening in the next five years. And in the meantime, BTC's global power just grows, which will make cracking down on it harder.
But I also can't imagine them legalizing it without also having a reasonably fast payment system in place, either lightning or some new thing they come up with, and once those sats are on L2, they're a lot harder to KYC. So they could make demands (and might be able to enforce them on businesses, though I'd bet some start keeping two sets of books), but person-to-person BTC transfers could continue to happen just like they do now.
IMO they (the state) have no legal standing in declaring tender of: 1) an open-source software, 2) that software being used globally. Regardless of words on paper, they only have the power we concede to them on this matter. Pick your hill.
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why does it need to be legal tender first?
about lightning - third party hosted lightning wallets have zero privacy. Blink or Wallet of Satoshi know all your transactions. Others know your payment comes from Blink - so the government knows where to get all the data it needs.
Selfhosted lightning is different - but a pain in the ass, no normie wants to manage their channel liquidity, even most bitcoiners dont want to. Thats why most use third party hosted lightning.
Which gives them: no privacy and no control over their coins. Third party lighning wallets are like paypal for bitcoin.
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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @om 27 Mar
Perhaps the term "legal tender" means different things to Americans and Europeans. Maybe it's best to avoid it altogether.
Take Turkey for example. You can legally buy and sell Bitcoin (with KYC), but the only legal means of payment is the Turkish Lira.
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stackers have outlawed this. turn on wild west mode in your /settings to see outlawed content.
If it's not legal tender, they can't regulate businesses accepting it via KYC-only. It would be like things currently are, where business would have to convert anything they took to fiat for tax reporting purposes. They could still ban it outright, but that in and of itself is easy enough to get around.
Yeah, selfhosted lightning isn't something Joe Average is ready for, but I'm assuming that things will get easier on that front in the next few years (possibly a bad assumption).
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stackers have outlawed this. turn on wild west mode in your /settings to see outlawed content.