[marsouin]

"it would be fairly trivial for the United States government to thus acquire a quite complete inventory of all of the blockchain assets of anyone using MetaMask" It would be for anyone: it's fairly trivial for any individual to spin up an Ethereum node and establish which wallet owns what at any given time, considering all of that information is public anyway. What Metamask does not have, is the ability to match wallet addresses with people, which in the end is the whole point.

[curtisblaine]

But wouldn't it be fairly trivial for the State to make crypto exchanges illegal and just forbid banks to work with them? You would still have the Ethereum network, but exchanging eth for $ would be illegal and a couple orders of magnitude more difficult (from mundane operation to mafia-level money laundry operation). Given that almost every commercial establishment in the world still operates on meatspace currency (and it would be trivial for the State to make illegal to operate with any other currency), would it really be important to still have an Ethereum network if it can't be used by ordinary people in practice?

[gostsamo]

Yes, but if you want to get money, you need to announce your address somehow and the government can forbid dealing with addresses that haven't announced themselves.

So, you can try to have an btc address, but you cannot announce it publically, nobody will be able to deal with you, and you won't be able to getthe money out. This will default to imperson dealings and understanding of trust just like before the blockchain.

[marsouin]

Right, but that has nothing to do with Metamask. Second, I think at some point the question of "getting the money" out isn't right one. If you are a proponent of crypto and decentralized finance, it isn't necessarily to spend it in "meatspace" or convert it in fiat.