Andreas Antonopoulos, a Bitcoin supporter and the author of Mastering Bitcoin, talked about Bitcoin (BTC), the crypto space and how government regulations could affect the entire system.

During a Q&A session on YouTube, he spoke about the announcement made by the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) regarding the blacklisting of Bitcoin addresses. The OFAC announced that two Bitcoin addresses related to Iranian nationals have been blocked. The BTC addresses are the following:

The owners of these addresses are Ali Khorashadizaden and Mohammad Ghorbaniyan. Apparently, these addresses handled more than 7000 transactions and received close to 6000 Bitcoin. These individuals have also been transacting funds with cryptocurrency platforms located in the United States.

Because of this reason, the OFAC announced that it is blocking these addresses from operating with U.S.-based crypto platforms and entities. Antonopoulos believes that the concept of banning specific addresses is ‘ludicrous.’

Users can simply generate new addresses in case they consider it necessary. Computers are able to generate millions of addresses per second. The decision taken by the OFAC would not have any effect on the BTC network.

The decision to start banning and blacklisting specific addresses is something that shows how the United States wants to impose its power on the crypto market. However, cryptocurrencies do not work in the same way as the traditional financial system.

About it, Antonopoulos commented:

“They will start small, but this will clearly escalate. This game of whack-a-mole cannot be won by technical means, so they will try political means, by applying pressure to any regulated entities that dare not to enforce the blacklist.”

According to Antonopoulos, there is going to be a group of entities (centralized and regulated exchanges) that will have to be compliant with strict rules from governments around the world if they want to keep operating.

In the future, there might be not just two addresses blocked, but instead, two-hundred thousand or just millions of them. And indeed, this list of blacklisted addresses could be actualized every a few seconds. But it will ultimately fail to achieve its goal.

Indeed, these regulations imposed by governments and regulatory agencies are not going to stop terrorism financing or criminal activities. Indeed, the will just increase the power and their authority over citizens but fail to protect them.

There are several governments all over the world that are trying to get involved in the market. The intention is to regulate the space and avoid scams and other fraudulent activities to happen.

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