German parliament passes bill allowing banks to sell and store cryptocurrencies

This article is attempting to put an extremely positive spin (&quot;new law makes Germany &#x27;crypto[currency] heaven&#x27;&quot;, &quot;leads to institutional investors&quot;, &quot;major breakthrough&quot;, &quot;massive for adoption&quot;) on a government crackdown. To be expected given that decrypt.co is funded by ConsenSys, which was in turn founded by someone who had (in Feb 2018) an estimated &quot;net worth in cryptocurrency to be between one and five billion [US] dollars&quot;[0], so they have a vested interest in promoting cryptocurrencies. But why does this sort of advertising keep on cropping up on HN?<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Joseph_Lubin_(entrepreneur)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Joseph_Lubin_(entrepreneur)</a>

I read this and assumed crypto meant cryptography. I guess at this stage we should come up with a new short term for cryptography, since crypto has been subsumed.<p>Could this maybe be editorialised to cryptocurrency for clarity?

Seems they&#x27;re making all crypto exchanges not registered in Germany illegal for their citizens. I wonder what the punishment will be for a German who buys crypto from an unregistered exchange?

I wonder what this means regarding the transparency of transactions and the anonymity of user ids. Is anyone aware of the new law&#x27;s implications?

It appears to be a two-pronged law that permits banks to act as custodians, while at the same time requiring other custodians currently operating in Germany to obtain a special license and comply with other regulations.

The initial purpose of Bitcoin according to its creator was to abolish central banks. The fact that the state uses force to collect taxes in fiat currency means that you have no chance to escape fiat, this new regulation makes sure of that. It means nothing more than Bitcoin has utterly failed in its mission.

I don&#x27;t know, smells fishy

If they build up the infrastructure with that famous German engineering I&#x27;d just as soon stay away.