Another Crackdown on Crypto Privacy
I woke up this morning to a red crypto market. I mean... really red, especially alts. Rektember finally arrived? No... this was different. It was an emotional response to something, it seemed.
So... I looked around. Canadian RCMP (part of law enforcement) seized 56m CAD (roughly 40m USD) from TradeOgre, a non-KYC platform.
Personally, I didn't know of TradeOgre until now, and thus, didn't use it. What I see is many emotional reactions coming after this seizure from the crypto side.
There is obviously a war on privacy, and crypto is fine as long as they don't hear about stuff like that. They need to know everything we (people in general) do, because... they need to know. Not your business, don't ask questions. They just need to know every thought you had, before you even had it. Not to mention actions... You are allowed to play house, go on vacations every once in a while (unless there is a lockdown), and work like a slave. Everything else is pretty much prohibited, unless you are selected or get really lucky.
Maybe that sounds too Orwellian, but if society hasn't gotten there yet in many places, it soon will. Maybe Orwell shouldn't have written 1984. He gave them a script to follow.
Back to the Canadian police, or whatever that is, and its crypto seizure.
Crypto-related voices say that RCMP said most people using TradeOgre are criminals. I have allergy to that word, particularly since I believe, like those vocal in crypto, that they are the criminals, and this is a theft.
Maybe there was some criminal activity going on at the cover of privacy on TradeOgre. Maybe a lot, I have no idea. Did they show any evidence? Nope, from what I read. Did they go targeted or conveniently assumed everyone using that exchange is a criminal? Everyone is a criminal: great detective work! Did they solve all the cases of money laundering with fiat going on through "legit" businesses, banks, cash, etc. that they needed to go a place which specifically didn't want to follow their KYC procedures? Nope. They wanted to send a message. You are an easy target and don't comply, you get rekt!
Let's remember Canada established precedents too, regarding crypto, at the truckers protests from a few years ago.
I said a have an "allergy" to the word "criminal". That is because I've been called "criminal" in passing (collectively, with many others), by law enforcement or prosecutors south of the border from the Canadians, when a digital payment website was closed, many years ago. I lost some money then, because the owners of that platform were crooks, or at least that's what the news said. Guess what? I wasn't a crook. I was only a user who only had that platform to use as a payment option on many websites. But hey, it's easy to generalize, isn't it? Particularly when you don't expect a fight back.
Since I'm writing this post on Inleo, I want to close with this screenshot:
Notice the green LEO? It would be nice if it were Inleo's LEO, but it isn't, even if Inleo's LEO is doing well. The problem I'm seeing here is that someone unfamiliar to the Hive or Thorchain or Arbitrum ecosystems and who sees it promoted, may mistake the two tokens, and buy the other one.
It happened and maybe still does for the name of Hive, where there is a crypto mining company that was called Hive Blockchain, or something like that (changed its name now, but still includes Hive in the name).
Posted Using INLEO
They want kyc because they want to know exactly how much money you have and how you use it AND tax you to death... I remember during covid in Canada they froze bank accounts of who protested...
Someone told me yesterday that in a different country (I won't say which, although it's a big one in Europe), they tax 60% of any cash you have at the bank at the end of every year, with the reasoning that if you have cash, you should invest it and not keep it as cash. That sounds ok at first hand to force investments which in turn produce more value in the economy, but why force such a tight deadline? What if the best investment on the short-to-medium term (in the fiat world) is cash on hand and you force me to invest at the worse possible moment? Plus, some cash holders are risk averse and are holding cash or similar products because they don't want to take risks in other types of investments. They lose on inflation, but they wouldn't get slashed 60%+inflation every year, as it is the case there.
60%??? That's crazy, it's a theft, I'm supposed to do what I want why my money (already taxed)
Yeah... I was perplexed too. The guy keeps buying apartments from what I've been told to avoid paying this tax or at least to not have much cash at the bank to be taxed.
I wonder if they would tax if you spend everything to buy gold
I don't know the specifics. There may be a threshold from where this kind of tax is applied, as this guy has high revenues and is not a big spender. While I know him personally and we meet occasionally, we never talked about such stuff directly.
It is nice to see LEO standing above among the rest
!BBH
That's not Inleo's LEO, it's a token/coin from Top 100 coins by market cap, related to Bitfinex exchange.
My take is that fiat systems launder magnitudes more money than crypto ever has and they still become legit
That's a fact! But they've been doing it for so long that they've become experts at breaking the law and looking legit, while (some) crypto people say outright they want their privacy back. Why try to catch the bigger fish, when there are easy targets ready to be fried? Job well done, what can I say?
totally get your point about the green LEO ticker. for anyone skimming a market page, that overlap can trigger a wrong buy, and the lessons are expensive :/ my accountant brain likes neat labels, so ticker collisions are a headache and it don't help newcomers. a small note in promos or clearer wording would defintely reduce mixups, especially since we already had that old confusion with the mining company name. nice catch :)
Especially nowadays when LEO is going up and is being pushed outward, the possibility of confusion is very high, since I suspect many newcomers would check CMC or Coingecko and the first one they find is the one from Bitfinex. Since it's very high on the market cap, that will inspire trust too and they will buy, likely from an exchange where it's the only one listed (so, they won't even see there is another LEO token).
Yeah, this is defintely the risk right now, Bitfinex’s LEO ranks high so CMC or CoinGecko shows it first and newcomers assume that’s the one.
Given there market cap and brand, it looks legit and they’ll buy on an exchange where it’s the only LEO, never seeing the Hive one.
For promos we should spell out Hive LEO in the title, add the Hive icon, and link the exact token page on Hive Engine or LeoDex, so people knows they’re in the right place :).
Worth adding a tiny disclaimer too, like not the Bitfinex token.
You think that keeps most folks safe?
Tbh, I'm not sure how many people read into the details so much. Hivers pretty much know it's LEO on HE. Non-Hivers would probably find it easier a link to LeoDex, since they have many options to connect there with their own wallet.
yeah, a direct LeoDex link is the win, and write Hive LEO in the title so scanners do not mix it with Bitfinex.
That also helps non Hivers since they can connect with their own wallet there'.
Add a tiny note not the Bitfinex LEO plus the exact ticker LEO on HE, and you kill most confuison :)
Can we standardize that across posts and promo pages?
It's just a crazy world that we live in... I used TradeOgre in the past (didn't know I'm a criminal either 😃), to get some privacy coins, and it was a cute small exchange... I have never deposited or withdrawn fiat, and I didn't even know it was possible to do it there... Don't know if owners live in Canada (I suppose yes), but they should have seen that coming... especially after those protests and seizing truckers' money...
On the other hand, speaking about taxes, banning crypto, etc., I recall that around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, I wanted to buy more BTC after the huge drop, but I wasn't able to deposit fiat on any exchange because my bank didn't allow it. Now, if you put all that in perspective, they limited me from earning more money for future taxes (and keeping me "poor", thereby limiting my possibilities) at the place where I live... Isn't that shooting yourself in the foot?! Utterly stupid, conservative, look at the future...
Rant over... 😃
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I don't know if fiat was involved on that exchange, but that 56m CAD they seized could be crypto worth, and not fiat. It's more likely to be crypto, rather than fiat, too.
It has happened to me once too, when a SWIFT transfer to a crypto-linked business was denied and I received a phone call from the bank advising me to look for alternatives for doing that, because they don't allow transfers of fiat to crypto businesses. That was back when there was a crackdown on crypto (or maybe even before, I don't remember exactly). Haven't tried that route again, so I have no idea if now they reconsidered.
I think enough governments are still like that when it comes to crypto, or in general, when applying correct economic policies that would allow more people or small businesses to grow rather than hindering their activity.
Bureaucrats and law enforcers are lazy. They prefer to use one method and apply it indiscriminately. By hunting money launderers, they resort to the usual government overreach, which, to my eye, is weaponizing the law while violating private property; that is legal theft.
That means they are hunting potentially weaker links in the middle (along with plenty of innocents as collateral casualties, as we keep seeing), rather than go for the hard-to-crack ends that generate the real issues.
It's annoying to see, but the governments obviously don't like non-KYC platforms. I think it will continue being like this, but I think its a war on privacy. Sure, criminals may use it, but criminals also use normal banks too.
And the less sophisticated ones can use various public or private locked storage places to keep and exchange value. It is not about the infrastructure they use, because they can jump from one to another if one is no longer available. It is about hunting real criminals instead of attempting to police their potential routes, treating everyone like criminals, in the hopes of catching the few that really are criminals, and which likely get away with it.