My response to Jerry Banfield on quantum computing cracking cryptocurrencies as an IT expert

You can see Jerry Banfield's original post here. He seems to think that the shadow government already has the ability to wipe out everyone's cryptocurrency holdings with the flip of a switch. I don't think that's very likely at all (assuming your coins are not on an exchange). For one thing, governments are in fact attacking crypto including the USA. The IRS subpoenaed Coinbase and are writing regulations right now, so if there is a shadow government that has significantly more power than the visible government that apparently hasn't gotten the message yet not to worry, given human corruption, how long do you think that secret can last before some selfish person "in the know" from area 51 uses it and exposes the secret in the process?

Andreas Antonopoulos on Governments Seizing Exchanges

I don't want to attack Jerry Banfield personally. I'm a follower of his blog and like most of what he writes and some of what he said there actually is accurate. His argument is an excellent reason why nobody should keep their coins on an exchange long term unless you want to get goxxed. As Andreas Antonopoulos says, "there's only two types of exchanges, those that have been goxxed and those that will be goxxed".

Central exchanges violate the decentralization principles of Satoshi Nakamoto. Another simple rule of Andreas, "your keys, your coins, not your keys, not your coins". If you don't have a 12 - 24 word seed, then someone else controls your coins.

Area 51 can't be proven against. All I can say is that the decentralized tech using encumbrances on the public blockchain as it stands now is pseudonymous and has been creating headaches for the IRS. Some wallets such as paper wallets have never been connected to the internet. They've gone to the extent of declaring an address change = transaction which is false because information about who has which address was not collected by those who never used an exchange. They had to do this because they couldn't tell which addresses belonged to which individuals. Since hardware wallets are capable of approximately 2 billion addresses, if one never reuses these, then the trail becomes much more difficult to establish.

Exchanges have KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti Money Laundering) laws precisely because the visible government doesn't have these superior powers Jerry alludes to.

However this is only in relation to bitcoin. There are other types of currencies such as Monero, Dash and ZCash that use coin tumblers and provide anonymity. Where the argument falls apart, is when information is never collected in the first place about who has what because some never went to an exchange.

This is the case with the worlds 2+ billion completely unbanked population. They will never know nor need a bank account because hardware wallets turn each individual who has one into their own banker.

Of course, there's an internet kill switch, but if they use it, the governments who do threaten their own survival because it's already the case that the banking system is using these networks. Kill the banks and you also kill the government.