Quote from: Poker Player on April 09, 2022, 03:11:54 PM

-snip-

This is a very interesting analogy, but perhaps it gives some hope rather than just a bleak picture of the future. Once poker started getting clamped down on, then your options (correct me if I'm wrong) seemed to be either suck it up and accept the overly aggressive authorities, or stop playing, with many players choosing the latter. The same is not true of bitcoin. With centralized exchanges and other centralized services are being clamped down on, the alternative option remains to trade peer to peer, hold your own coins, spend bitcoin directly with merchants, and avoid centralized exchanges. In fact, the more people who do this, then the more bitcoin functions more like what it was designed to be - a peer to peer currency free from third party control.

Yes, I abhor the crazy privacy invasion and mass surveillance that is steadily progressing through this space, but the more authoritarian they become then (hopefully) the more people start using bitcoin as bitcoin was intended to be used.

Quote from: malevolent on Today at 08:51:14 AM

And they often started as less restrictive; many users will (sometimes happily, sometimes grudgingly) provide whatever is asked of them to continue using a give service. The requirements are also lower for people who try to buy/sell small amounts, so there's sunk cost to be taken into account, especially with services happy to accept money before freezing them and requiring verification.

Absolutely agree, and services know this too. Let people sign up with a non-KYC account or minimal-KYC account and access some basic functions. Then, once they have started to use your service, confiscate their coins and hit them with more KYC demands.. Options are then to give up your information or give up your coins. Most will choose the former. It's a particularly scummy and borderline criminal behavior that all the big exchanges do regularly, and it never fails to surprise me that people will continue to use services which pull this crap on them.