Remember all those people from back in the day who used to try to see how long they could "live off of Bitcoin"? You know who I'm talking about. Those diehards that try to buy good/services directly with Bitcoin without using fiat.

I always thought these people were ridiculous. Yes, of course you can live off of Bitcoin. Turn the Bitcoin into fiat and spend the fiat wherever you want. Why would you hamstring yourself on purpose just to prove a point? No one ever said turning Bitcoin into USD was against the rules. Bitcoin's liquidity and interchangeability is one of its primary functions and attributes.

This is especially true today considering the obscene fees associated with the Bitcoin network. At this point if you try to "live off Bitcoin" with direct transactions that appear on chain you're just a fool wasting money for no reason.

Catch Me If You Can is an oldish movie (true story; proclaimed 80-90% accurate) from 2002 about Frank Abagnale, a master of identity and check fraud. His most notable achievements include posing as a Pan American World Airways pilot, a doctor, and even a lawyer (might have even legitimately passed the bar after faking a degree from Harvard).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch_Me_If_You_Can

The film is based on the life of Frank Abagnale, who, before his 19th birthday, successfully performed cons worth millions of dollars by posing as a Pan American World Airways pilot, a Georgia doctor and a Louisiana parish prosecutor. His foremost crime was check fraud; he became so highly skilled that the FBI later turned to him for help catching other check forgers.

Starts 1:15

You know you're at the top of your field when the cops cut you a deal to work for them in order to catch your lessers.

Apparently the real Frank Abagnale told his story on this TED Talk thing.

Bitcoin is already a privacy coin

So why bring up Frank Abagnale? Well I see some hard times on the horizon, and I think the scamming has just begun, with crypto being the easiest way to scam people going forward.

Dropping off the grid

But I don't want to talk about all that scamming that goes on and continues going on. Rather what happens when it no longer even makes sense to be a citizen of the country one resides in? What happens when people realize they don't really need a bank account or even an identity issued by their government captors?

And this thought experiment probably doesn't even apply to me personally, as I've already done the research and determined that I can likely pay 0% capital gains tax as long as I cash out less than $39,000 a year. However, that still leaves all the other weird tax situations hanging out there. Like airdrops and blog rewards counting as income, and micro-cap coins that you can't actually sell without affecting the price. How could the IRS possibly tax someone in USD if the asset in question isn't connected to USD? So many weird situations are going to be popping up.

Thought experiment.

So say the IRS is after you for whatever reason. You've secured your crypto correctly so they can't even freeze or confiscate your accounts. You're out on bail because it's a white collar victimless crime. You say "fuck this noise" and decide the roll those dice and skip town. Now there's a bail bonds bounty hunter named Marcus after you! Good luck, Marcus!

Can you pull it off?

It would be pretty hard to pull it off in the old legacy economy. How are you going to open a bank account, buy a car, or pay rent without some kind of fake identity? However, given a crypto economy everything changes.

We're already being pushed into a "work from home" era. Crypto is going to be a big part of that I imagine. Even with Bitcoin, you could buy mining equipment and have your mining pool send the money to any address you choose. At best, this income is traced to an IP address which is then traced to a real address.

Is it really that hard to access WiFi anonymously or using a connection in someone else's name? Not really. On top of that, how would the IRS even know these funds should be traced in the first place? They are entering random Bitcoin addresses and being kicked out to wherever when they get spent. How does that connect to you?

In this situation you're already a Bitcoin millionaire. How hard would it be to find some random person willing to give you cash for a discount on Bitcoin? This person knows you by a fake first name. Can that connection come back to haunt you? Not likely.

IRS

As stated earlier this week, the IRS is already known to be underfunded and incompetent by design. Rich people would not accept a scenario where the powerful three-letter agencies were after them for low-level crime. Yeah, the NSA and the CIA probably have access to the microphone in your pocket. The IRS does not. Big difference. Don't piss off the wrong people. Easy as that.

FBI

FBI will only go after you if the white collar crime is very serious.

The FBI focuses its financial crimes investigations on such criminal activities as corporate fraud, health care fraud, mortgage fraud, identity theft, insurance fraud, and money laundering. These are the identified priority crime problem areas of the Financial Crimes Section (FCS) of the FBI.

So what about money laundering?

Federal law enforcement agencies will investigate a crime only if there is reason to believe that the crime violated federal law. ... For example, the Secret Service is responsible for investigating counterfeiting of currency, and the FBI is the lead federal agency for terrorism cases.

So even though cases like Frank Abagnale get prosecuted by the FBI this is because money is being stolen from others. Simple tax evasion is not going to set off any alarms.

https://www.aclu.org/other/more-about-fbi-spying

Data Mining. The FBI is sweeping up incredible amounts of information about innocent Americans through unchecked data collection and data mining programs. According to documents obtained by Wired magazine in 2009, an arm of the FBI called the National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) has collected 1.5 billion records from public and private sources in a massive data mining operation. The records collected by the FBI include financial records from corporate databases, such as hotel and rental car company transactions; millions of "suspicious activity reports" from financial institutions; millions of records from commercial data aggregators; a multitude of law enforcement and non-law enforcement government databases; and public information gleaned from telephone books and news articles. The NSAC records include data from the FBI's Investigative Data Warehouse, which was identified in a Department of Justice Inspector General reports as the depository for information collected by the FBI through National Security Letters (NSLs) and illegal exigent letters.

The FBI has also established a new database called eGuardian to collect and share suspicious activity reports with the federal intelligence agencies, the Department of Homeland Security, fusion centers, the military and state and local law enforcement.

Are we seeing a pattern here?

Can we see why KYC is so important? Because spying on the public depends on it. Profiting on the public depends on it as well. If you can't identify who is doing what all of this information is TOTALLY USELESS. The pseudo-anonymity of crypto is going to start messing with a lot of these data-collection tactics, especially when crypto actually starts being used as currency and the connections between transfers becomes less and less obvious.

Monopoly scam

This was actually a pretty interesting documentary about the FBI cracking a case regarding low level mafia rigging the McDonald's monopoly game. Watching stuff like this really puts the real world into perspective. Collecting evidence is not easy. Most murders go unsolved. The world is chaos hanging on by a tiny thread of order that can unravel in an instant.

When the crime becomes dropping off the grid because you don't want to deal with all this archaic bullshit, guess who's on the case? No one. It's assumed that people are fully reliant on the grid. That's how they maintain control. Crypto stands to disrupt that reality greatly.

Conclusion

Bitcoin is already anonymous. It's simply on us to build a future were people can live without having to provide a government issued ID for the basic necessities of life. Cash makes this a lot easier, and we can see that there may be a push to eliminate it eventually. I imagine privacy coins will have there day when that time arrives.

Of course this kind of privacy issued to citizens will breed many scams and other crimes, but that doesn't matter. The gains created by this explosive technology will far outweigh the negatives.

Hard times are coming. Technology is moving so quickly and government is so outdated & slow that it will likely soon be impossible to even comply with the law if we wanted to. Explosive disruption and hardship is on the horizon. Life is only going to get weirder, I guarantee it.

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