Trump’s Plan to Build a Wall, and How Bitcoin Foils It
So Trump plans to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. Well OK, he might manage to get the wall built, but the plan to make Mexico pay for it has a fatal flaw. The plan hinges on cutting off access to millions of “illegal” migrants to Western Union, the service most used to send money back to their families back home, and using that as a bargaining chip to “convince” Mexico to pay for the wall.
>> Trump's Plan (donaldjtrump.com)
This is possible, oddly enough, because of financial regulations imposed by the Patriot Act, which subjects financial institutions to “know-your-customer” (KYC) requirements. Trump’s plan is to redefine “financial institution” and “account” to include Western Union, and wire transfers, respectively… basically producing a burden to present verifiable identification as a prerequisite for using these money transfer services.
If Trump manages to do that — to bring Western Union under regulatory control and institute KYC requirements, essentially making it a “citizens only” service — all that will happen is that illegals will switch from Western Union to Bitcoin, which provides a far better service anyway, and is effectively unregulatable. This will have two interesting side effects:
(1) The increased demand for bitcoin will cause the value of bitcoin to skyrocket (yay!), and,
(2) It will, in effect, train an entire population of “illegal” residents, and those who employ them, in how to use a private, distributed, cryptographically secured and essentially untouchable and unregulatable currency, producing an entire industry sector that no longer depends on the U.S. Dollar, potentially ending the dominance of the Federal Reserve on the global economy, and quite possibly weakening or ending U.S. hegemony. …and THAT would be an interesting result indeed.
I have to agree, you are probably right about the bitcoin part. That is good thing though, the people making money off money transfers are leeches and need to be run out of business.
The wall will fix other big problems too. It will reduce human\gun\drug trafficking into the US and take away profits from those cartels, and will reduce the amount of criminals\terrorists that can simply walk across the border right now.
This seems like a win-win to me, with a bonus of more bitcoin users.
I can't help but think of Ron Paul's comment, though, that a wall that can be used to keep people out can also be used to keep people in...
Fine with me. If I leave I'll be taking a plane or a cruise ship and using my passport...
I didn't think he was going to cut them off from WU. I thought he was going to tax outbound money transfers to Mexico regardless of their citizen status for the wall.
Maybe he'll do that as well, but in Trump's first bullet point, he says: "Also include in the proposed rule a requirement that no alien may wire money outside of the United States unless the alien first provides a document establishing his lawful presence in the United States."
That sounds like completely cutting them off to me. (Barring the use of forged documents, anyway.)
Congratulations @malacandrahyoi! You have completed the following achievement on Steemit and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
Click on the badge to view your Board of Honor.
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOPDo not miss the last post from @steemitboard:
SteemitBoard World Cup Contest - The results, the winners and the prizes