I feel like people make getting an offshore account sound easier than it is. I live in the US, and when I opened my US accounts, I needed to give them my SSN. Canadians don't have SSNs.
Just now I tried opening an account at a few random Canadian banks, and they all say I need to be living in Canada. How is an average joe supposed to work around those requirements?
I'm not saying it should be easier either. When you're dealing with state-issued currencies there are reasons for those restrictions. But the draw of bitcoin is that it's politically neutral and you don't need to jump through the hoops of any particular country, or hire a lawyer to navigate foreign laws. Just download an open source app and you're ready to go.
Wise, formerly Transferwise, fulfills this niche pretty well. They give actual bank accounts in many of the other countries, in your name.
Really solved a Euro banking issue I had for legitimate incoming SEPA transfers
I even used a US LLC and got a Euro bank account that European clients felt familiar and comfortable with
A lot of banks stopped servicing Americans due to the paperwork with FATCA treaty, but that was 12 years ago and some have stepped in to fulfill the niche
We can debate the relative conveniences of either, but my broader point remains, which I may have poorly stated, is that anything that reduces a governments, ability to apply financial pressure to the residence whether it be bitcoin, offshore, bank, accounts, or cash, can be used for legitimate purposes, or nefarious ones
> You call it more user freedom, but more freedom to do what, exactly? What’s your pitch for those who are hesitant?
Nothing will change for you if you don't want it to change. This is only an option for people who want additional functionality. Nobody is forcing freedom or change on you by adding one more hard-to-find option buried in a menu somewhere for people who really want it.
> This is only an option for people who want additional functionality.
The common concern is that critical software that users depend on will only be released in a way that circumvents the safety mechanisms that Apple employs to prevent the execution of malicious code. Is that fear unfounded?
Even setting aside the malicious code concern, many users don’t want to have to track several different app stores to find functional software. What prevents this from becoming the case?
The official app store will surely have 99.9%+ market share, just like the Play Store does on Android. Not many companies will want to give up 99.9% of their total addressable market. And Google has the same sort of review process Apple does. Are there any examples of critical software that users depend on only being released in a way that circumvents Google's safety mechanisms?
Looks like a direct cause and effect relationship. So to avoid the same outcome, you'll just need to buy your phone in a country where Apple makes the App Store available. That seems reasonable to me.
I don't think there's a danger Apple will discontinue the App Store in any region as a result of these rulings.
> Nothing will change for you if you don't want it to change.
That's not true. There's always cost, even for a feature that you personally never use. Sideloading opens tons of new security attack vectors and dark patterns, that it's going to affect absolutely everybody eventually.
> One more data point supports this contention: At the federal level, at least, "the vast majority of forfeiture victims are never convicted or charged with a crime," according to Carpenter. Using data obtained via FOIA requests, Carpenter found that 87 percent of federal forfeiture proceedings were civil cases, not criminal ones. "It's troubling that 87% of the time the conviction appears to be irrelevant," co-author Lisa Knepper said.
And, of course, if you -do- agree to just let the money go, they won't actually charge you.
So the people who can afford to lose the money (criminals) get to avoid a charge just by bribing the cops, and the people who did nothing wrong have to pay the cops.
I didn't downvote, but it's probably because of the lack of understanding and/or fear-mongering around privacy/anonymity.
Yes, he'll have to report the donation and pay his taxes. Yes, someone may "take a close look". No, there is no chance he'll be legally prevented from accepting the donation, unless he lives in an authoritarian country like China/North Korea where owning crypto at all is illegal.
Crypto has been used for anonymous donations as long as it's existed and afaik nobody has ever faced any legal problems from accepting an anonymous donation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineapple_Fund
If you live in Austria, the very least the Finanzamt will demand is that you pay 16.7% of the amount as VAT, since you can't prove that the payment is VAT exempt. If you don't declare it correctly from the beginning (eg. because you assume it is a payment from a non-EU country that would be tax exempt) you will face a fine on top of it.
If you get caught up in criminal investigations, eg. because you previously worked for a company that was caught paying people under the table, you will have no way to prove that the donation was legal.
I wouldn't worry about anonymous donations of a few hundred Euros, but a 100k anonymous donation will definitely invite a close look from authorities. In my experience tax audits are stressful enough even if you did everything correctly and have documentation for all payments.
I like to call these "coin-operated comments". Someone sees an input phrase "cryptocurrency", a neuron fires, and they respond with an output phrase "money laundering". The pattern recognition is good enough to be able to emit a relevant predetermined opinion from ROM, but there's no higher-level ability to adapt to the flow of conversation or absorb any new information.
> it can add the equivalent of C’s noalias all over the place
There's an open proposal to do this in Zig as well, with the ability to opt out at the individual parameter level (and with safety checks in debug builds).
Either way we can definitely thank Rust for blazing the trail. noalias in LLVM had never been stress-tested to that degree, and they were finding and fixing noalias-related optimizer bugs for years
Just now I tried opening an account at a few random Canadian banks, and they all say I need to be living in Canada. How is an average joe supposed to work around those requirements?
I'm not saying it should be easier either. When you're dealing with state-issued currencies there are reasons for those restrictions. But the draw of bitcoin is that it's politically neutral and you don't need to jump through the hoops of any particular country, or hire a lawyer to navigate foreign laws. Just download an open source app and you're ready to go.