my response -- 'Cool bro, but is it enforceable?'
for the vast majority of the population who is/would buy digital currencies, this would be no problem. But for anyone who either wants/needs/desires private transactions, 15 minutes of research would yield countless methods of obfuscating transactions.
this will be a scenario of 'squeezing harder makes things slip through your fingers'. if they can't do it in china, i don't know how they would do it here without some NSA-tier implementations that would rile people up
My take here is that the US government is acknowledging that banning Bitcoin is useless. It is better to put in some regulations for the regular folks so it can go mainstream than to let criminals be the only ones to use it.
It is like when they banned alcohol. Prohibition proved to be unenforceable. Criminals took over the distribution and serving of alcohol. When they repealed the Prohibition, it generated taxes for the government and weaken the base of organized crime
I'm in china. I was not affected when they stopped RMB withdrawals on the Chinese exchanges or all the restrictions they imposed. I simply used Localbitcoin and bought all my BTC from there
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/10/bitcoin-drops-by-100-as-chinas-central-bank-corrals-the-market.html
Good points. Thanks for chiming in.