“Your Bitcoin is no good here.” — why Anonymity Matters
Imagine sending a Bitcoin payment and receiving this response from the recipient…
“Your Bitcoin is no good here.”
They’ve determined that the Bitcoin you sent them used to belong to somebody unfavorable. Not wanting to get their hands dirty, they tell you that your Bitcoin payment isn’t any good.
Worse, you might never get your Bitcoin payment back.
(Remember, with Bitcoin, there is no way to reverse your own transaction, so you have to rely on the recipient to refund you.)
Instead, your Bitcoin is gone forever… rerouted to a third party central authority for “safe keeping”.
Think it can’t happen? It can… and it probably will. With 195 countries around the globe, it’s only a matter of time before one country decides to create a Bitcoin address “blacklist”.
What would a Bitcoin “blacklist” look like?
Imagine your country decides to regulate Bitcoin. What could that look like?
The most common scenario talked about is a centralized list of blacklisted Bitcoin addresses.
Any company accepting Bitcoin within the borders of your country must refer to the list.
If Bitcoin is received by them from one of these “dark” addresses, by law, it must be rerouted to a central (government regulated) authority.
Make no mistake. Regulation like this is coming to crypto.
Know Your Token (KYT) Laws Coming Soon?
Most investors are familiar with know your customer (KYC) laws.
These require financial institutions to know who they are transacting fiat money with.
With Bitcoin you can trace transactions. Which is unlike cash, where you don’t know what each dollar bill was used for before you got your hands on it. Indeed, ownership trails of Bitcoin are transparent — and under KYT-type laws, merchants will have every reason to make it their business to view them.
If a given Bitcoin’s past use or ownership doesn’t pass a given country’s KYT test, it could very well become worthless. This causes problems with Bitcoin’s fungibility. That is, one Bitcoin may not be worth the same as another Bitcoin just because of its past.
And it’s not just Bitcoin…
KYT can be expanded to include all but a handful of the over 1,500 cryptocurrencies that exist today.
The Problem with Third Parties
Satoshi Nakomoto, in part, created Bitcoin to cut out third parties, lamenting…
Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments.
And, while he (or she or they) probably foresaw the potential for centralization and blacklisting…
Everyone’s definition of a “trusted” third party is different.
It depends on your economic and political views.
It depends on the country you live in.
But we think that everyone can agree that the end goal of crypto is a freer world…
And Laser is working towards that.
Laser Makes Bitcoin, Ethereum and Other Cryptos Better
Laser makes any supported cryptocurrency anonymous and untraceable.
Using our “Join” service, multiple transactions can be bundled together into a multi-signature “ghost wallet” that shuffles the coins around and disburses them to pre-determined recipients. This obfuscates a coin’s history, and prevents that history from coming back to bite you, or whoever holds that coin next.
We’ll support Bitcoin on launch. After that, Ethereum. And, after that, EOS, Neo, Ripple and more.
We also have plans to support the top market-cap coins and tokens, including high-profile projects like Salt, Tron, VeChain, OmiseGO, Icon, Binance, Zillqa, 0x, Golem, Augur, Kyber Network and several others.
Even if these currencies aren’t natively anonymous, Laser’s “Join” service makes them that way. That’s anonymous blockchain without borders.
For the technical details you can read our introduction here… and then consult our whitepaper for an in-depth discussion.
