Thom, you say this:
...or mistakenly believe that a highly regulated segment can coexist with an unregulated, so called "dark" segment.
and then when Permie asks you to back it up with some arguments it turns out you have none.
Well, he just asked me to elaborate, not respond with a lengthy dissertation. As you point out I was already on my way to hijacking the thread so cutting my answer short was appropriate. Now that this discussion has been relocated (good call folks), I can provide a better answer.
My answer was that compliance to regs and choosing not to comply to them are polar opposites and observations of the powerful financial elite lead me to conclude they will not be satisfied to coexist with those that want to maintain control over their financial affairs. I will not offer exhaustive proof of that here, but there are numerous examples of the tactics used by powerful incumbents to increase their power or, work to create and maintain monopolies of control. Not recognizing that fact is what I fear is going on right now, and we are giving them the rope that may hang us.
I recognize this response to the question is inadequate. In my mind there are so many examples of how the powerful elite manipulate and control the mainstream world I can't understand why people fail to see them. Yet, it is necessary upon making an assertion to provide supporting evidence. My skill in the rhetoric leg of The Trivium Method is lacking, at least in a venue like this. Some people write entire books on the machinations of "The Elite", such as G. Edward Griffin's
The Creature From Jekyll Island and that still isn't enough to satisfy some skeptics. I will give you one hypothetical example tho, and suggest you buy my book series,
The BitShares Saga when it is released, where I will elaborate in detail and provide examples of how diametrically opposed interests in a closed system lead to a domination of one or the other. Ever heard of the sayings, "Good money drives out the bad" or it's opposite, "Bad money drives out good money"?
Plausible HypotheticalRegulators tell a UIA issuer to confiscate / put on hold or remove someone from a whitelist (basically using the facilities we created for regulators to control participants of the UIA system). Response:
The targeted individual or company tries to protect themselves by moving assets or otherwise hiding them in a "dark side" account or some other ecosystem entirely, and that could be the excuse regulators use to whip up a false flag attack on "such financial terrorists that jeopardize crypto-currency or those that harbor them and give them refuge", like confidential accounts or accounts that employ the privacy measures BM spoke of
here.
The primary motivation for inventing blockchain technology was to eliminate the need to trust middle men, and the UIA control measures that have been built into BitShares turn that on it's head and enable them, facilitate them, provide the ability to create middle men, contrary to the principle of a trustless, peer to peer ecosystem that birthed the first blockchain.
And then you say this:
For those that don't share those ideals I say there's the door, go do your thing on some other playground.
That is how I feel about it. Granted, it was a blunt response.
But maybe this would sound much better:
"Welcome to BTS - Kingdom of Freedom. You can choose whatever you want and that even includes being a slave - if that's what you think is good for you".
Freedom is about being able to choose. People should be able to choose to be KYC/AML compliant (for whatever reasons) or not to be compliant. Luckily their choice doesn't affect yours.
I believe BTS will be much stronger if we can guarantee both attitudes to be able to coexist on the same blockchain.
(I'll stop here as this thread is supposed to be about BANX and we've already managed to hijack it to a completely unrelated topic.)
Nice spin, but I fear a less positive outcome than you appear to expect. As soothing as your positive spin is, I feel it will not help people in the long run to avoid the difficult issues that need addressing, and will lead to an ecosystem that will result in even more control over people's finances and corruption than already exists in the mainstream financial world.
Your first sentence, "Kingdom of Freedom" is kindof ironic, b/c I believe that allowing the choice of KYC / AML is a choice to be a slave. I also believe it will affect me, b/c it gives regulators power they didn't otherwise have here, and they will use it to my detriment whether I participate or not. It will have an indirect, spillover affect. Not right away, but over time. That's how they operate. Look how long it took them to raise taxes from "only on corporations and the wealthy" back in 1913-14 to what they were 50 years later. I'm sure lots of people were OK with it when "income taxes" were first enacted. Now look where we are.
Is that a "slippery slope" fallacy? It would be if I were not talking about historical fact, but since our "leaders" show they repeat this pattern it's not a fallacy but a warning, and I fear it will not be heeded.