If the government steps in to "de-anonymize" bitcoin, then people will simply begin using tumbling services. People don't use those services right now because there's no impetus to. But as soon as the trust inherent to the public ledger is violated by creating a large-scale effort to track the flow of bitcoin, then people will counter that action with tumblers.
If everyone launders their money in a deliberate attempt to circumvent government regulation, they'll simply impose broader and harsher regulations. If crypto currencies are going to take over the future, then Bitcoin is a huge win for governments because of this. Your anonymity depends on your actions as in the real world, except the paper trail is significantly improved. Central banks may be perturbed by all this but the IRS certainly won't be. The only way to get past this in the long run is either to A) be on the other side of the law or B) use an implementation that forces anonymity, in which case there is still the threat of it becoming illegal once it's considered to be a large enough target.
Yes, because tumbling services aren't designed to launder money or anything...
Just using Bitcoin for transactions doesn't eliminate legal obligations. I imagine that if they ever got popular, tumbling services would be the first things that would be regulated (or shutdown by the gov't).
...except that anyone can set up a tumbling service in any political jurisdiction. It is not practically possible for the US to shut them down; the best they could do is try to police domestic users of tumbling services, which is a much harder problem.
It is also difficult to tell the difference between a tumlbler service, and some other various more legitimate uses.
The level of regulation it would take to actually trace lots of tiny transactions between pseudonymous parties is next to impossible. How is me paying a friend back for half the pizza we shared to a new address of his going to be handled?
It's pretty straightforward for the Government to come up with a scheme to defeat tumbling services. Just make it mandatory to only accept payments from whitelisted addresses. Banks and your average business are not going to go all cypherpunk and circumvent such laws.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but zerocoin is essentially a formal, decentralised tumbling service, right? It runs parallel to bitcoin and people on bitcoin can choose to use it or not.
Under my scenario, if you used zerocoin, and anybody else using the service wasn't whitelisted, you would be blacklisted, since there would be a chain of coins being sent from non whitelisted addresses to yours. So it would just be up to you not to use it.
The key is at what stage the Government becomes involved. If they implemented this sort of proposal right now, they would just say "if you're using zerocoin, you'll likely be blacklisted- tough luck". If everyone starts using zerocoin, including all legitimate businesses, and then they try to regulate it- then people would have more power.
