So, the European Union is gearing up to roll out some major Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations that will completely ban privacy coins and anonymous crypto accounts by 2027.
According to the new Anti-Money Laundering Regulation (AMLR), banks, financial institutions, and crypto asset service providers (CASPs) won’t be allowed to have anonymous accounts or deal with privacy-focused cryptocurrencies like Monero (XMR) and Zcash (ZEC).
The AML Handbook from the European Crypto Initiative (EUCI) states clearly that Article 79 of the AMLR puts tight restrictions on anonymous accounts. Basically, banks and other financial entities can’t keep or manage any anonymous accounts at all.
I guess Singapore will welcome the CASPs with arms wide open! Companies will quickly separate out their international businesses from the EU business and keep on functioning like normal. I am sure the process has already started in the background and we will start seeing these incidents happening from next year.
What EU is doing, is a part of the large money laundering prevention drive, which is fair from their perspective. But many businesses will be moved to outside countries with friendly regulations.
In fact, due to the large number of laws and regulations issued by the European Union regarding cryptocurrencies (MiCA, AML, AMLD5, Travel Rule, KYC, and now AMLR), I was confused. So I did some searching online, hoping to find a list of all the laws issued by the European Union. I found this:
https://sumsub.com/blog/eu-crypto-regulations/
I think it would be a good idea to create a topic here in this section that includes all the European Union laws and their subsequent amendments.
I don't think the EU will stop attacking crypto through regulations, i understand that they say it is to prevent money laundering and terrrorism financing, but it is also an attack on privacy and very soon it will be almost impossible to use BTC or crypto privately in the EU. The funny thing is that this is happening at a time when countries in many other regions are gradually accepting BTC in some form or degree, i believe we are safe to say it cannot happen in the EU.
This happens at the same time that in USA chains such as Stake N Shake announce that they will accept bitcoin payments, probably through LN as it is the most practical, and in Europe this war against privacy also entails the future ban of LN.
This is a forum, not an encyclopedia. If you want to create it, that's up to you, but good luck with it. The EU is a mastodontic bureaucratic structure that feeds back on itself, and its infinitude of regulations a way of self-justifying, while crushing innovation, merit, privacy and freedom. I think we don't need an encyclopedia to know that.
I agree with you that the European Union stifles innovation, but what I meant in my previous post was that due to the sheer number of laws and regulations the EU has issued regarding crypto, We can no longer distinguish between them. That's why I suggested creating a topic that encompasses all these laws, but I'm not really interested in creating such an encyclopedia.
It is unfortunate that while the United States is moving toward more open and supportive crypto laws, the European Union is taking the opposite approach and stifling the industry.
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.
Theyve lost their mind completely at this point. Sad I guess it is time to stock up on the privacy coins while we still can because when they go full retard, it will be impossible to get these coins. But most importantly, it will be illegal to do so.
It is already hard to acquire monero unless you use bisq or semi-decentralized exchanges but it is still possible. When the ban goes live, those semi-decentralized exchanges will probably delist monero as well.
Then, they will go after the bisq devs unless they also delist monero.
We are fucked.
Not only innovation. It also pushes the money out of the EU. What is attracting the most capital and will continue to do so in the coming years are cryptocurrencies and AI. What is the EU doing? Crushing them. Well, that's just it.
Monero doesn't care about regulations and laws.
The only issue are on off ramps but it's very hard to stop p2p exchanges so the only thing they can do is go after the devs but it's open source and devs can be anonymous so they are safe as well.
That's the entire point of privacy coins, it's unstoppable and can't be regulated.
They can make it illegal all they want but they can't do anything to stop us from using it.
Then we must do everything we can to fight this, if only to protect crypto at large from being harmed.
How? I don't know. Maybe tell your friends and colleagues. But I'm starting to sound like a grassroots activist in this post (lol), so maybe just copy them at this point.
And how are you planning to use monero when no legit business accept it? No centralized exchange lists it, no business accepts it. What are you gonna do with it? Buy weed from the dark web? Youll be such an easy target for the police.
We all can see that monero network wont die off just because they banned monero but its user adoption will and thats equally important. (Id say it is even more important since a network which nobody can use has no use.)
There are many shitcoins in the shitcoin graveyard that still has a functioning network and zero transactions in the blocks.
Yes more adoption is better but you don't get from 0% to 100% in 1 step.
Most businesses don't accept bitcoin, they are using payment middleman which lets the customer exchange bitcoin to fiat and then the business received fiat not bitcoin.
And bitcoin is shit for money anyway. There is no privacy with bitcoin. Bitcoin is only an investment and I think it will be temporary. Bitcoin is easily controlled and regulated, that's why governments aren't as opposed to bitcoin as they are against monero. They can't control monero but they can control bitcoin.
People who want a censorship resistant digital money with privacy will use monero. Adoption starts small but will grow with time. It's just a matter of time until we all of a sudden see in the news "monero beach" somewhere in latin america.