Comment by tsimionescu

> Without mandatory KYC laws, this particular attack would be near pointless. No name tied to account, bookkeeping doesn't archive wire transaction details for the past 10 years.

But this attack is already fully pointless with traditional finance. You can't steal someone's bank account at gun point.

Conversely, even without KYC, blockchain based currencies paint a huge target on anyone who uses a small number of wallets to store a large amount of money. Dedicated criminals and even state actors can figure out who owns the wallets by tracking transaction patterns, getting information from vendors, etc. As long as you're actually using your crypto wallets (unlike, say, Satoshi), you can quite easily be tracked. Anyone who you order a pizza from in BTC knows the address of whoever has that wallet. Sure, you can take a lot of steps to protect yourself from it, but it's hard, and one slip-up is all it takes. Opsec is not for the careless.

Also, crypto's reliance on secrets instead of legal personhood to ascertain ownership fundamentally makes it prone to stealing money in this way. Since the money doesn't belong to a legal person, but to whoever knows some secret key, that key can be stolen from whoever has it through simple violence. Even if you're extremely careful not to leak details of your accounts, use XMR for untraceable payments, etc - someone who is physically close to you could see that you're rich and decide to attack just on the chance that you may have crypto, without knowing anything specific.