Does that mean that it also applies to crypto that appreciates without being converted to fiat? That is if someone holds 1 BTC and BTC appreciates from $100,000 to $110,000, then the holder will have to pay (110,000 -$100,000)*0.175 = 1,750  USD as taxes?

That is not really odd, but rather an expected development. Every government tries to increase its control over its citizens because it simplifies the lives of the government officials and as a whole makes the government more stable (or at least that is what they think).

Being able to control the citizens' payments is essentially the ultimate level of control that a government can exercise over its citizens. If the government wants to find out that a citizen thinks, it doesn't have to bug the citizen's phone, doesn't have to employ spies to track each step of the citizen. Instead the government can just check the list of websites that the citizen visits regularly and check the list of purchases that they make. And the latter can easily be obtained in a world without physical money, where all purchases are made solely through electronic government-controlled money.

That is why each government jumped at the opportunity to replace physical cash with CBDCs as soon as the technology matured enough to make that possible. There is no conspiracy, it's just that all governments are alike and think in the same way.

If I remember correctly, it started after the financial crisis of 2008. The US government needed money so they decided to get it from the so-called "fat cats" who had stashed their money abroad. The US government pressed the Swiss government and banks for information about the Americans who had bank accounts with them. The Swiss banks were not too happy about it, but in the end they decided to cooperate with the US government.

And then the EU governments followed suit and the Swiss banks started disclosing money with the EU as well.

While we don't know the exact date when the Swiss started cooperating virtually with everyone,  we can assume that it happened at some point after after 2008.

And in 2018 they started sharing that information automatically
https://www.blevinsfranks.com/switzerland-starts-automatic-exchange-of-information/

Long gone are the days when the Swiss banks had any banking secrecy. Nowadays they will readily give your personal and bank information to anyone who asks nicely.

The way they handle the crypto assets in pretty much in line with the way they handle the regular bank accounts of their customers. They don't care about the privacy of their customers.

I doubt that there is an easy way to solve this issue and the reason for that is simple, DEXes cannot operate with fiat money. CEXes have limited support for operations with fiat because they can receive and send wire transfers (SWIFT, IBAN, etc) in an automated or semi-automated matter.  CEXes comply w

DEXes on the other hand have no way of integration with the fiat system because no bank or government would ever do that willingly, at least not in the near future. And since DEXes they cannot send or receive fiat money, they cannot really do any conversion between crypto and fiat.

IMHO the best that a DEX could do in that respect is to provide a distributed version of LocalBitcoins/LocalCoinSwap/etc. That is it would allow users to communicate and choose a way of transferring fiat (f2f, wire transfer, cash by mail, etc.). The DEX would also provide an optional escrow service and some kind of reputation score for the users. The reputation would be updated by the users after doing a crypto <-> fiat trade.

So that is pretty much all I can think of with regard to crypto <-> fiat exchange. Actually I think that if someone develops a DEX that supports all these features plus all the features of existing DEXes, including the ability to make atomic crypto <-> crypto swaps, that would be a great system.

So, in Spain there is record money laundering using electronic money transfers and to combat that, the Spanish government decides to further limit physical cash and force everyone switch to electronic money?

Well, the real problem is that removing the privacy and enforcing government control on crypto, removes most reasons to use crypto. If there is no privacy in crypto then one might as well use electronic money issued by the banks in the form of bank debit/credit cards. This kind of money is faster and allows reversal of payments. The only thing electronic money lacks  is privacy, which was present until recently in crypto.

So essentially by removing the privacy from the crypto EU is killing it. I am pretty sure that they understand what is going to happen and they are doing it intentionally. They saw that they don't have the technical means to control the crypto, so they are trying to kill it with regulations.

The usual ways to detect Tor are

• 1. Monitoring the network traffic for connections to known Tor relays/bridges
• 2. Inspecting the SSL certificate(s) used by the suspected Tor clients
• 3. Portscanning suspected Tor relays for listening connections on standard Tor ports

1 can be fixed care by renting a VPS outside of EU and running a non-public bridge.
2 and 3 can be fixed too by modifying the Tor software and the VPS firewall.
There are quite a few other tricks that can be used to prevent the EU Gestapo from detecting that one is using Tor, but this forum and thread are not the best place to discuss this.

EU has always been leaning towards totalitarianism, but in the recent years things have really gone downhill. Frankly I don't care about China, Russia or any other other totalitarian states. Too bad EU takes example from them.

However I think that blocking Tor and VPN are not their main objectives. Most likely they will just remove physical cash (in fact they are already phasing it out), thus removing all crypto on/off ramps they don't control. Once the cash is gone the totalitarian state will be complete and we will be living in the Fourth Reich.

All totalitarian states so far have either crumbled under their own weight or have been destroyed from the outside. I think that will be the fate of EU as well.

The best CEXes for privacy are the ones that don't have a mandatory KYC procedure. In the past I have used Poloniex, MEXC, Latoken, DigiFinex. At the time when I used them they did not require a KYC procedure, although they allowed it optionally. There are a bunch of other CEXes that I have used in the past, which did not require KYC at the time, but they now either require KYC or are too small. However if you search online, you could probably find other no-KYC exchanges that will suit your needs.

If you decide to use a no-KYC exchange (or any other exchange for that matter), check and double check everything before you send your money there.

• Search online for reviews of the exchange.
• Search forums for feedback about the exchange.
• Search for the current state of the exchange. See if it is working, if it has had any techincal problems recently, if it has been hacked recently, if they have the habit of blocking user funds and demanding KYC/AML information.
• Read the online FAQ and other documentation provided by the exchange. Check their deposit and withdrawal limits, check if users from your geographical area and/or network are allowed. Check anything else that you can think of.

OK, I see. Thanks for the clarification. Relying on legal action for protection means that one has to provide KYC information beforehand, otherwise he would have no way to prove that it was actually him that lost the money.

I don't use KYC exchanges, so I don't really have reasons to prefer local exchanges to foreign ones. Moreover, I actually prefer foreign ones, as in my case the local exchanges have mandatory KYC.

Why do you need a local cryptoexchange, though? Can't you just use any CEX located anywhere in the world as long as you trust it? Or do you mean that you need the CEX in order to convert your crypto to fiat?

Probably. If the country where the company owner resides has extradition treaties with EU, USA, UK or other western countries, they will probably request the extradition of the owner. Otherwise (no extradition treaties), they will probably just stay silent and wait for him to travel abroad and try to arrest him there. That is if they know who is the owner of the service.

Not sure if you are asking just z-tight or everyone in this thread, but I am strongly for privacy. But nowadays things are quite different from what they were 30 years ago and privacy is pretty much non-existent as of now. No more bank secrecy, cash is being phased out and we are moving real fast towards the introduction of CBDCs which will put everyone under total government control.

They cannot (or rather should not) get in legal trouble in the country A where the business is registered. However if they travel to the country B, where their service is illegal they can be detained and put on trial for violating the laws of B. That could happen if the citizens or companies of B used the service of the cryptoexchange that is registered in A.

In the past that happened with at least one online casino allowed US citizens to play in that casino. The casino owner traveled to South America by air, then the airplane landed in a US airport for refueling and the casino owner was arrested while the plane was refueling.

A similar incident happened recently with Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram. His company was registered in UAE and provided services that were legal in UAE, but when he landed in France, he was immediately arrested because his company was violating the EU laws.

Also keep in mind that the country A, where the exchange is registered could have extradition treaties with EU or USA, so they can demand your extradition. If A is small, insignificant country it will easily bend over and extradite you to EU or USA, even if you are a citizen of A.

So yeah, you can get in trouble if you run a non-KYC exchange. If you decide to start such an exchange you should be careful and do your due diligence.

EU is governed by bureaucrats and for bureaucrats it is only natural to stifle innovation and growth, because innovations cause changes and changes are what bureaucrats hate most.

So they will continue to kill cryptocurrencies by overregulating them to the point where it is easier to use fiat instead of crypto.

For expensive token sales most of the associates costs are the platform fees. For OpenSea it is pretty much the sales fee which starts from 2.5%, regardless of whether it is a new token or an existing one. For an existing token there is also the gas fee, but it is negligible compared to the sales fee, especially if the token is placed on a cheap network.

An existing NFT already has a market price which in this case should be low (e.g. $10). So there is a sudden jump in the price that will look suspicious. It would be even more suspicious if it is a cheap token that is mass-produced (and cheap tokens are mass-produced quite often), because in this case there is an established low market price for this token.

A new NFT on the other hand does not have a price, so there is no need to explain any big price change.

Then again, in most cases the government would just take the taxes and not bother to ask for too many questions. As long as it is money earned through legal means (not from drugs, arms traffic, or any other crimes) and the person just wants to pay the taxes and put the money in his bank account, it would probably be OK, regardless of the NFT type.

Making your own NFT tokens is not illegal. Nor is selling a new token for 10,000 more suspicious than selling a 10-dollar token for 10000 dollars.

Cruptocurrencies are regulated in the sense that most governments that recognize their existence attach all kinds of strings to their usage. Just to name a few that come to mind

• In USA crypto owners are required by law to keep track of all crypto transactions, even if these transactions don't invove fiat. Users are required to report these transactions to the tax authorities
• Some countries like France apply a weath tax to crypto assets. Users are required to pay this tax even if their crypto stays in their wallets without being used in any way
• Many countries treat crypto payments as taxable events. Essentially crypto is treated as an asset and when the user buys a product/service with crypto, the government assumes that the product/service buyer has converted his crypto to fiat and then used the fiat to buy the product/service. That is why the buyer is required to pay capital gains tax on the converted crypto.
• EU governments prohibit financial institutions to accept or make payments using privacy coins (the MiCA regulations)

Sure, not all of these limitations can be enforced effectively by the governments, but if one is caught breaking the law, he gets fines and/or jail time. And as time goes by, governments get better at catching offenders. So my guess is that currently things are not quite as Satoshi expected them to be.

Or create a new one from scratch.

There should be no regulation of crypto at all.

When used as a currency, regulated crypto has fewer benefits than fiat money, so regulated crypto won't gain wide adoption for buying/selling products/services.

On the other hand when traded on the stock markets, regulated crypto is pretty much the same as the regular stocks.

In a nutshell, regulating the cryptocurrencies will turn them into yet other market tickers that are only meaningful on the stock markets, but barely anyone uses them outside of these stock markets.