The Next Decade, Part 4: Actual Predictions

By Finance News On Feb 20, 2025

Think back through Bitcoin’s history. I guarantee you a handful of events just popped into your mind first, like landmarks. If you kept thinking your mind probably started filling in from there with those landmark events as anchors.

Don’t take these as hard predictions, ignore the coating of hyperbole I can’t stop myself from adding everywhere, and note these don’t come with dates. I’m going to run through a list of “watershed moments” or macro-scale shifts in things that I think are practically guaranteed to happen or begin in the next decade.

— A Visit To The US Supreme Court —

Bitcoin creates an inherent contradiction within the current regulatory and legal framework, at least in the US and everywhere the US effectively dictates things, relating to how Bitcoin itself inherently works and two major themes in regulations and law.

KYC/AML Laws: These exist to ensure that financial institutions know the individuals they are dealing with for the purposes of preventing criminal operations, money laundering, or terrorist financing occurs through the use of their services. This requires incredibly invasive information collection, tracking, and communication of said information between different institutions. It requires throwing privacy out the window. Or does it?
Financial Privacy Laws: The reason things like KYC/AML exist in a country like the United States with the 4th Amendment to our Constitution is because of things like the Right to Financial Privacy Act. There are laws that restrict the situations and conditions under which the government can obtain financial records on its citizens. These laws were implemented after a Supreme Court case challenging KYC/AML law (ironically called the Bank Secrecy Act) held that financial records are the property of the institution and not customer.

See the contradiction? All of this is based on the notion that the record of financial activity is privately held in privileged silos not visible to the general public. That the government access doesn’t equate to the public’s access. That is not how Bitcoin works. Everything is right there on the blockchain for everyone to see. So while financial institutions are required to enforce KYC/AML laws and identify their customers, are they also not required to protect the privacy of their customers financial activity short a legal order to divulge it?

We’re at the point where privacy tools are actually starting to make real developments in the Bitcoin ecosystem, and we’re already starting to see behavior indicating a trend of this being marked as “bad behavior” by Bitcoin exchanges that leads to account scrutiny(and possible closure and/or seizure down the line) in response to use of privacy tools. Now, I don’t see anything in the near future in the United States smashing down all KYC/AML laws in the land, but I do see an incredibly strong argument to make against this type of reaction by exchanges and institutions to their customers using…