What Do the Proposed New Wallet Rules Mean for You?

Update: In 2021 the US government proposed new rules for crypto wallets. However, these plans were quickly scrapped.

Experts issue warnings that cryptocurrency users’ privacy could be jeopardized by new proposals aimed at ensuring crypto exchanges reveal information about people using crypto wallets.

Controversial proposals in the US could mean cryptocurrency exchanges are forced to collect identity data about people who use ‘self-hosted’ crypto wallets.

The proposals – announced by the US Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network – have caused considerable concern with many concerned about the potential for serious problems including millions of Americans having their privacy compromised.

In addition, it has been claimed that the proposed regulation could affect the ability of law enforcement to do its job effectively as well as the competitiveness of US companies in what is an emerging technology sector.

The proposed regulation would require cryptocurrency exchanges to collect identity data about transactions involving self-hosted cryptocurrency wallets or foreign exchanges. It would also require them to keep that data and turn it over to the government in some circumstances, for example, when the dollar amount of transactions in a day exceeds a certain threshold. 

The EFF speaks out

An article published on The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says the proposal “appears designed to be a midnight regulation pushed through before the end of the current presidential administration, as its 15-day comment period is unusually short and coincides with the winter holiday.”

It added: “The regulation’s authors write that this abbreviated comment period is required to deal with the ‘threats to United States national interests’ posed by these technologies, but they provide no factual basis for this claim.” 

The EFF has expressed a number of initial concerns about the proposed regulation:

• People who store cryptocurrency in their own wallets (rather than using a “hosted” wallet service) would be unable to transact anonymously with people who store their cryptocurrency with a money service business.
• For some cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, transaction data—including users’ Bitcoin addresses—is permanently recorded on a public blockchain. Therefore, if you know the name of the user associated with a particular Bitcoin address, you can glean information about all of their Bitcoin transactions. Thus, the proposed regulation’s requirement means the government may have access to a massive amount of data beyond what the regulation purports to cover.
• It will be more difficult for self-hosted wallet users to seamlessly interact with other users who have wallets provided by a service subject to the regulations. Under the proposed rules, these hosted wallet services would have to collect information about self-hosted wallet users who transact with their customers in some circumstances. That may complicate certain automated transactions, such as smart contracts.
• Although the proposed rules purport to simply apply pre-existing regulations involving cash transactions to cryptocurrencies, they ignore that these digital financial tools exist in part to afford financial privacy and anonymity equal to and perhaps beyond that of traditional cash. In this respect, the proposed regulations are part of a troubling trend of the US government extending the financial surveillance of the traditional banking system to cryptocurrencies.

According to a report by Coindesk, under the proposals, users who want to send cryptocurrencies from centralized exchanges to a private wallet would need to provide personal information about the wallet owner if the amount sent is greater than $10,000 in one day. The report added: “The exchanges would also need to submit and store records involving such transactions with a total value over $10,000 in a given reporting period, or just maintain records for transactions over $3,000.”

In a press release, the US Treasury said the rule would close “loopholes” around virtual currency transaction reporting. 

Applying banking surveillance to crypto

Marta Belcher, a civil liberties and technology attorney, has said that “one of the most important things about cryptocurrency is that it imports the civil liberties benefits of cash into the digital sphere by allowing for anonymous transactions.”

Entrepreneur Ben Davenport, who co-founded BitGo, the first non-custodial multi-sig wallet provider, wrote an open letter to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network  (FinCEN) criticizing the proposals. Davenport claims the proposals pose serious risks to Americans for the following reasons:

•  The traceability of cryptocurrency means permanent privacy loss for Americans. The proposal would mean that once FinCEN has a database of every major withdrawal by any customer, they not only know the fact of that withdrawal, but they can watch and trace, in real-time, the flow of all of those funds on the blockchain.
•  The massive aggregation of data puts Americans in real, physical danger. While a traditional CTR [currency transaction report] record for cash is not that valuable to an attacker, since the cash is usually long gone, a CTR for cryptocurrency can be extremely valuable. The record would contain the subject’s name and physical address and the address and amount of cryptocurrency. The attacker can even see on the public blockchain whether the coins have moved or not, guiding them to the most vulnerable victims to extort. 
• Large cryptocurrency deposits & withdrawals are far more common than with cash. With cryptocurrencies, which are predominantly held as investments, larger transactions are simply an everyday occurrence. And it is common wisdom in the community that trusting exchanges to hold one’s coins for the long term is a very bad idea due to the risks of cybercrime and/or fraud. Because of this fact, any signal of bad actors received by FinCEN will be totally buried in the noise of completely normal large withdrawals and deposits. 

In addition, Davenport said law enforcement efforts are “actively harmed” by the proposed rules. He added that the more hoops that US exchange users must jump through, the more the likelihood that those users think twice before using those exchanges to do their illicit activity. And it is exactly the use of these regulated exchanges that “allows law enforcement to make arrests and successfully prosecute bad actors”, Davenport claimed. He concluded by saying the proposed regulation would jeopardize the competitiveness of US companies in an “important emerging technology sector”.

As the news of the proposed rules continues to be digested, now is a better time than ever to consider the type of wallet you use to store your cryptocurrency. Here at Xcoins, our recommendation remains that you should choose to store your cryptocurrency in a wallet that only you own the private keys to. If you fail to do this, you don’t truly own your cryptocurrency and you run the risk of losing access to it if the company or organization responsible for your wallet runs into trouble. Here at Xcoins, we’ll be watching the developments closely and keeping you informed every step of the way. 

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