Bitcoin Forum

No, it is not about your silly scaling issues or other internal politics. The battle I talk about is still far way, but it is inevitable. It is when bitcoin comes out of its darknet markets, its amusing mathematics, its online life and faces the real world of salary payments, utility bills, loan payments, school and college payments, buying home, car, groceries and gadgets. That's how a common man interacts with money and payments.

There is a spoilt, rebellious kid who was never taught any manners or real world skills, but extremely pampered and praised all along in his fortified play room, and then on one fine day he was pushed out to face the real world.

What's the issue here? The issue is deep enough to lie at the philosophy of the bitcoin. It hits right where all good things for bitcoin come from.

The little kid faces two strangers on the street - the tax man and the government. The little kid says "I don't need you. I don't need to show my money or transactions to you". Then a criminal emerges from shadows, points a gun at the kid, snatches his bitcoin wallet and disappears. The kid cries and blames government for not protecting him.

Then the kid finally learns some manners the hard way, and agrees to pay taxes on his bitcoin income. And agrees to show all his transactions. And wallet details. People are now forced to use a single bitcoin address per person and that address is linked to their passport and their other national identities. Every bitcoin transaction must go through a government verification for identifying the parties involved. All good.

All lived happily ever after.

Wait, the kid then wonders - why am I using bitcoin? with all the extra difficulty. Oh, that's because it is mathematically beautiful. isn't it? Those 64 hex letters with random beauty. Ah, I can keep looking at them admiring their beauty forever.

The human society has come a long way through the jungle life, cave life, tribal settlements, civilisations, cities, nations and governments. Bitcoin, while appearing to be ultra high-tech, full with mathematics and cryptography, it is essentially a throw back to jungle life as far as the social life and governance is concerned. Bitcoin abhors governance. It ignores the need to know each other. It rejects monitoring and traceability. It want to break the government and thereby it encourages the law of jungle.

So, you say that tax man need not be concerned about your bitcoin income. Okay, so how should we tax people? How should businesses pay tax? We need tax to support government and community development. And we need government.

Lack of tracking in money movement clashes with the very existence of government. Enforcing tracking in bitcoin shakes the very foundations of bitcoin. That's the battle I was talking about. The new kid on the block has no way of fighting it. Forget winning. I won't be surprised if all the bitcoin owners could be seen as criminals, and forced to do only darknet transactions forever.

Meanwhile, the kid will have lots of fun in his mathematical cradle, playing with his crypto toys, and musical noise and excitements blaring from online forums while a crowd of crypto coin babies sing and dance around him, and pooping everywhere. All this happening in a casino, where all the people amazed by their smartphone and internet magic, keep placing bets on which baby will poop next.

Cryptography and math are pure and invincible. Worshipping them, is no different from worshipping a rock, fire or the Sun. Humans are biological creatures. All value traces down to biological comfort and well-being. Meet the real world. Get real.

Physical cash is completely untraceable.  Bitcoin is not completely untraceable.  So supposedly not being traceable sure as fuck doesn't make Bitcoin unusable or mean that it's restricted to the "new kid on the block".

The point isn't anonymity.  Pseudonymity is just a helpful side effect which allows a transition to digital cash without letting governments have unlimited power over casual transactions.

The point is to remove the third parties.  The banks, the companies (Android Pay, Apple Pay, PayPal) - all of which charge you crazy fees for using their service.  It's also to remove the banks' monopoly over the money supply and their ability to conjure up intrinsically worthless fiat currency out of thin air.  This is something that can't be done with BTC.
Crypto has the advantage of people who join early having more crypto to spend later.  That's just a means of encouraging adoption, and while it's a speculative instrument as well, Bitcoin is still working just as it always has.
Rocks, fire and the Sun can't transfer billions of Big Macs worth of currency around the world with almost no transaction costs, within a few hours.

you are making two big wrong assumptions.
the first being bitcoin is only being used in darknet, which is wrong since that usage is very small and negligible. and instead the rest of the usages you listed has been growing.

the second assumption you made is that people are using bitcoin just because they don't want to pay taxes! first of all there is nothing wrong with paying taxes, if you have problems with that then you have problems with some fundamentals of society.
secondly there are a lot more to bitcoin than just "tax evasion"! there are lots more. things like removing third parties as @Xavofat mentioned. things such as reversing the "trust" part between merchants and customers as the white paper mentions. or the fact that you have 100% control over your money in the safest manner possible.

Any currency that grows fast always have a risk. Now, few countries are started accepting it. Might be, we are seeing some sort of tracking will be pushed. It remains to be seen, how well we bitcoiners stand against it.

The decentralization on bitcoin doesnt mean being independent from the government but it is a financial decentralization, a decentralization from the corrupt banking system. If bitcoin will be taxable, traceable by the government and must follow the rules and policies of the government then what is wrong with that. It is normal for a currency to be regulated by the state otherwise if it is not regulated it may be banned in the country and a great deal of damage will be brought upon to bitcoin. With the states interfering it means we have the support of the state that they recognize the value of bitcoin and its role on the economy and society but to bring order policies, taxation and regulation must be put in place.

Cash being untraceable is not a justification for bitcoin to be even more untraceable. World is trying to move away from cash, and bitcoin brings in even more un-traceability. Not acceptable. Did you read about Panama Papers and those AML activities? Bitcoin can increase such stuff by a thousand-fold. Does all this make governments admire the new crypto baby and hug it?

Low transaction fees alone (if it is possible at all), can't be worthy enough compensation for loosing all traceability.

Tax evasion is not the goal. But when it is possible, it becomes the goal for everyone. It is funny that bitcoin is built on lack of trust, and you folks tell me to trust people to pay their taxes? So funny.

For me, darknet meass, any payment that is made without traceability. All bitcoin transaction can potentially untrackable and hence fall into darknet category. Untraceable money movement is plain illegal for two reasons: it could be used for money laundering, or it could be used for bad things.

Society has trust problems. That is why bltcoin uses mining and blockchain. Now you are telling me to trust the society to pay their taxes, while they can easily evade them.

Or in other words, you don't know how to deal with it.

I think bitcoin is just a new idea that have emerged or a world that one can send someone from the other side of Earth some money in a matter of a moment. Bitcoin introduced digital currency as an idea. There is no need for banks or any other third parties watching over your money. With all these things that you have pointed out I can also see that bitcoin will have problems coming into the mainstream. Everyone here imagines how in ten years there will be no fiat and only bitcoin will survive and show everyone what it's worth, but I think that instead of fiat dollar we will end up with dollarcoin or other cryptocurrency or altcoin that will be hosted by the government so that they can easily take fees and taxes from our transactions and wallets. Because they need to do this, we can't create a world without taxes and with unknown amount of money in our digital wallets.

So how do you imagine regulation to be a possibility, if not defeating all the fundamental principles of bitcoin? Start with tracking wallets and addresses.

If the fees and taxes are unavoidable, and if bitcoin becomes yet another fiat currency, why should I use bitcoin? Speed? Banks can do better soon. More importantly we are back to trusting government. Do we still need a blockchain? Essentially, bitcoin has no utility advantage, except being used for speculation.

Op you bring some good points, but if a person thinks bitcoin is going to change to accommodate him or any other entity then they are mistaken, bitcoin is not going to change to accommodate governments or to allow chargebacks that is the whole point of bitcoin and those that don’t adapt to bitcoin will have to left bitcoin, this is going to stall adoption but the devs are firm about it, and if the government tries to regulate bitcoin then another crypto will emerge that will combat whatever measure they try to impose on bitcoin.

You don't even know how Bitcoin works.  It's not anonymous, it's pseudonymous, and blockchain analysis tools from governments are quite good.  If used properly people can sort of reach anonymity, but it's quite difficult.

It's important for you to understand that drug transactions happen with or without Bitcoin, and that even now the vast majority of illegal transactions are done offline. 
They can't "easily evade them".  What will happen if Bitcoin grows is that exchanges are regulated so that any transactions converting to fiat are subject to capital gains tax.  As for VAT, it wouldn't be affected very much.  People pay in cash at shops, but because the shops are regulated, they still pay VAT.
Deal with what?  Sovereignty of funds is the most important thing in a cash system.  Moving into a digital age, you need to have a system which doesn't rely on someone else to hold your funds for you.  You can hoard gold in your house and you should be able to do the same thing with digital money.

It depends on the acceptance of the currency and I think Bitcoin has been well accepted globally but it hasn't aged well yet that's why people are skeptical and attach some amount of fear to it.

yes you are right and I do agree with you that every currency that will enlarge your money will have some risk that it will make you loss somehow but it will give you benefit and will let you earn after the time of the high price that will be the best time you will be able to earn good income now as you said that a lot of countries are accepting bitcoin and it made bitcoin more value able

"No, it is not about your silly scaling issues or other internal politics. The battle I talk about is still far way, but it is inevitable. It is when bitcoin comes out of its darknet markets, its amusing mathematics, its online life and faces the real world of salary payments, utility bills, loan payments, school and college payments, buying home, car, groceries and gadgets. That's how a common man interacts with money and payments."

if you can replace bitcoin with something else in this argument and it can still be used, it's not valid. Also, bitcoin wasn't created and designed SPECIALLY for deep web, they've adopted it because they've seen the opportunity to do so. Now, you see there actually is a school in my country where you can pay the scholarship in bitcoin, a restaurant where you can pay in bitcoin, lamborghini started accepting bitcoin and pretty sure all of the rest are soon to come. So.. kind of wrong from the start.

If lamborghini accepts bitcoin payments, isn't it same as accepting cash? How does government track it for sales tax?

I'm talking about the situation where you don't need to cashout bitcoin into fiat currency, and you can pay for everything with bitcoin. How do you define income for tax purposes? A business pays fo raw material and labour in bitcoins and sells goods and services for bitcoins. Do you think government can track the offline wallets and addresses in them?

Due to its design, there is no middle path or negotiation. Either bitcoin gets crushed or it will replace fiat currency. The second option is feasible only when the government doesn't need tax money and doesn't need to monitor money movements. When govt can't track money, they don't know why the payments are being made. Governance fails due to lack of tracking and lack of funds.

It's your right to defend the government and taxes if you believe it, the point is that here many people don't want it and don't believe on it anymore, as the past experiences weren't good (people pay tax to have low quality services back, people have difficulty to open their businesses as they need to pay lots of fees, people fund dictatorships without their own wish).

Sorry, but the little kid in my opinion is you who believes on this wonderful world of regulamentations and corruption from an elite who created a modern way to "enslave" people. However I agree many people on this decentralized world think only on themselves and don't have any compassion and empathy for each other.

many people think bitcoin has to within 2 years become the "gigabytes by midnight" concept of replacing all fiat/visa transactions of the world.
over throwing governments etc.

the reality should be that bitcoin should remain outside of government jurisdiction and be more of the 'travellers cheques' replacement. where anyone can access and use them in any country freely without all the tax government bureaucracy.

it doesnt require jumping to 7billion people storing their entire lifetimes wealth on bitcoin. but instead treated as a new separate currency working outside/alongside fiat as a optional choice. something that allows people to privately own without control and works across borders

First, it is going to get really interesting once Bitcoin is at a level of adoption that one doesn't really ever need to exchange to fiat. As it is, when I send a remittance to someone in another country they almost always have to exchange it to fiat in order to use it. That exposes them to third parties and the associated fees. Once they can just use the bitcoin itself to buy food then things will change dramatically. Second, decentralized exchanges will eventually exist for exchanging to other crypto currencies. This will make it so that everyone can keep hold of their funds and never have to deposit them at a centralized third party. Once these two things occur the economic landscape will change dramatically. Power may shift from governments and those who wish to control things to the people.

They have adopted it ONLY BECAUSE it is untrackable. There is NO other value to bitcoin. Do you see where it is going?? Basically when you buy bitcoin, you are betting on flourishing of darknet and drug trade and even helping it.

Okay, you don't believe in taxes and guv and many people don't either. Alright so what do we do? Get rid of them? I called it a kid, because there is no thought of consequences. How does bitcoin help these issues? By making the money movement even more untrackable?? You are living in utopia thinking that most bitcoiners have better intentions and ethics than governments and bank. Most people are bad if they are allowed to be. Get it?

What do you think of the single transactions running into millions of dollars in a single payment and untraceable? Are these like traveller's cheques? Are YOU going to define and enforce such light-weight usage of bitcoins? Why should they use bitcoin for such large payments, instead of using fiat currency? Can you think of reasons behind these "great-minded" ethical bitcoiners?

yep. but allowing people an open option to move away from the dam(fiat) to dry land(bitcoin) while the dam exists...is the easier option..
 as oppose to throwing dynamite at the dam before the dry land can cope ..

let the dam crack and break all by itself over years to decades. rather than trying to break the dam tonight and then cry that bitcoin(dry land) cant cope because the infrastructure has not been built yet

I am in agreement with this. Keeping Bitcoin outside of what the government has jurisdiction over and making sure that, while it can be used anywhere, it keeps value for people outside of the system and somewhere where that value is safe; not exposed to the potential shortcomings or collapses of the typical fiat system. Bitcoin made its debut in 2009, after the financial crisis rocked the United States and some of the rest of the world. Having Bitcoin simply be something that can't be touched by such events would be a lot better than having Bitcoin be at risk for the same events it was designed to defend against.

get your mind out of "gigabytes by midnight"

we dont need to be 7billion people buying chewing gum by tomorrow.. bitcoin was suppose to have bumped up to 2mb by 2011 and then bumped up again a couple times more by now.

w also should not have got into the tx fee war which has pushed out the normal spending utility either. for the same reasons of the last paragraph i just mentioned.

yet even now even with segwit. all that is being promised is the same HOPE of 7tx/s as 8 years ago.(no progress at all)
scare stories of "gigabytes by midnight" are not used to prove 8mb is bad. but used to scare people into thinking anything above 1mb is bad... which is foolish and been debunked.

knowing natural growth of incremental changes over time allows (obviously) natural growth and capability.. is how we should be thinking.
so please dont use extreme circumstances of small or large. and instead think of natural growth over time. then you will see there are no problems

too many people want to scream kill government tonight and get everyone over to bitcoin before sunrise.. which i facepalm.
we need to think grow naturally over time and let people freely move across while governments naturally fail their people and crumble ovr the next few years/decades.

If fiat currency is traceable then why can't this so called banks can't track thr robbers that stole from the bank. Everyday there are reported hacks or data breach from this centralized banks but only few of this cases has been resolve. Clearly you dont even know how bitcoin works yes it's secured cause it has a pseudoanonymous function but it that doesn't mean that it's completely untraceable. The reason people prefer using bitcoin is they dont want governments to always in control with their transactions and to prevent third party services like paypal, Andro pay from stalking you and charging from unreasonable fees.

remember what you say here. because with LN you have to join your funds with another party. and that other party can decide not to sign their half unless you pay X. they can blackmail you into wanting to exit the contract by you broadcasting a tx, which they can then broadcast their revoke and take it back (much like chargebacks). so dont think of LN as a solution, it is simply joint bank accounting where the other party can affect you..

plus the way the LN 'routes' are found via LN dns seeds means that in many cases the DNS owners will prefer to send peoples channels via the dns seed owners prefered hub to generate more fee's for that group.

LN is banking/paypal2.0 so please keep your mindset you hav in the quotation above and dont end up being like the other BScartel sheep hoping for LN to be the sole solution for bitcoin

I believe there should be places in the world for all kinds of people. Those who believe in Communism should regroup them all and live together, those who believe in Anarchy, should have their place, those who believe in an economical decentralized society the same...

So each group couldn't bother others who don't want to live in the same way. The same for who wants to pay taxes and have public services back and for who doesn't want.


I called it a kid because the government lies to you like adults lie to kids.  :D

Bitcoin isn't untraceable. Most people surely don't have good intentions, but they can operate with any currency: Dollar, Ruble, Euro... Bitcoin isn't an exclusivity. Since much time ago there are criminals and until now (even without Bitcoin existence) they weren't finished. So, Bitcoin has nothing to do with it.

And Bitcoin usage doesn't mean Anarchy where people are allowed to do anything/everything...

Bitcoin will never become a normal payment system, until it is so radically changed that Satoshi wouldn't recognize it as bitcoin.

Its economic model is that of a highly speculative gambling token, not as an ideal money.  It is perfect to speculate with, but it cannot stabilize, because of its huge initial seigniorage which has created immensely rich whales that can do anything with the market, and because of its hard issue limit.  That's a disaster as a monetary system ; Satoshi was simply a naive dude who didn't even understand the motivations of sound money doctrine, and applied it in a case where it couldn't work (namely with a NEWLY ISSUED money).

Its proof of wasted economic value also makes it entirely centralized, expensive and wasteful, and highly vulnerable to state control.


Yes.  You are right.  This is because bitcoin was invented based upon a ridiculous conspiration theory, that "bankers are evil".  Not understanding that monetary things have evolved over time and adapted to human society, and that a naive system like bitcoin misses a lot of what those systems have built into them.  Bitcoin is an brilliant technical implementation of a very naive idea concerning the complexities of payment systems.  And as such, it will live, but not as what it was meant to be, but rather as a gambling token.  Which is what it has been for the last 8 years or so, and will remain.  Which will not mean that it will not be adopted a lot: people will gamble a lot with it.  Some will win, and an equal amount (somewhat more in fact) will lose, and it will waste a lot of value on proof of wasted value.

That said, I liked bitcoin exactly because of its anarchist idea, but it has lost this charm.  My idea was indeed, a subversive payment system that could entirely pervert and subvert all state operation, by bribing politicians, having a fluid murder market on which it would be possible to raise armies in a totally invisible and anonymous way, by financing invisibly the development of new weapons (like biological weapons) all over the earth without anyone noticing in a distributed way and so on.  THIS is why I loved bitcoin in the beginning, because I saw it as a way to ultimately overthrow all forms of publicly organized society.  But bitcoin will not do that.  And within an organized society, it doesn't mean anything else but a gambling token.


That was my inception from the start: that a dark market would grow so big, that it would overtake and outperform the normal economy, like happened during WWII in Europe.  When most economic activity is actually undercover.  This is the thing I saw for bitcoin.  But it is not anonymous enough.  This is why my interest got later ported to things like monero and other anonymous coins, because only those could have a chance of doing so. 

Outside of anarchy, bitcoin has only a future in gambling.

It has already been regulated with KYC and AML regulations at all points where fiat gets involved. You cannot convert to fiat, through third party services, without being identified or linked to your wallet. The solution : Do not convert to fiat and use Bitcoin as a Peer2Peer payment network, with no third parties. ^smile^

I do not really understand the bitcoin in a bright and dark future, because as I see it, the change has happened in the last 3 years, and whether it will be profitable in the future, it is very difficult to predict it.

I don't agree that this is a problem, OP.

I don't think that a centralized government is the only way for citizens to be protected, and don't think that the metaphorical "teenager" will ever turn back to a centralized congress to sort out their thievery problems

The kid didn't return to congress to solve his thievery problems. He was forced to come to congress due to myriad of reasons, the same ones which resulted in people having a congress and obey it.

All have risks in the eyes of growing money faster, but now many countries have received it. No matter what happens so there is a new impetus.

I get the '64 hex' . but the 'random beauty' ..

It is not the risk of a currency, it is the risk of the crypto market. Here, everything is not official, but when they are popular, they become expensive. However, the risks are gradually being minimized. Because humans are accepting it.

Yes that's true you can take an example of Digibyte before it was 50sat> per DBG then it went to 2000 sat but sadly now it's 400 sat.
Also, i don't think Bitcoin is a traceable currency unless you use same Address for all your transactions.

Of course, government acceptance is the source of bitcoin appreciation, with each government adopting bitcoin as an energy ball, which pushes bitcoin to higher values even though it is experiencing problems.

Silly, what makes you think it will break? It will not break; on the contrary, it will grow strongly thanks to the government, they will make it a popular currency, and it can be used in life.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2518724/Now-buy-cars-Bitcoin-Lamborghini-adds-list-companies-accepts-digital-currency.html (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2518724/Now-buy-cars-Bitcoin-Lamborghini-adds-list-companies-accepts-digital-currency.html)

Well it's probably regulated when they sell those bitcoins for their currency, so that's when they get deductions for taxes. The most important thing is that, yes you can buy cars with bitcoin.

We can see that this is a civil war, however, there is no true winner here. Bitcoin will be split, and it will drop in value, both.

Foolish thought from you. If there is fork and bump you have to think why its happening. Compare that with the other potential movement in market or adoption. Then only you will able to understand what is going to happen in future. Some time it is may be false according to judgement but most of time assumption you see like that will allow learn the truth.

The war is not coming. While the major currencies do not feel a real threat coming from bitcoin, but it seems to me that such a war is inevitable. I very much doubt that such monsters like America or the EU legalized ever bitcoin. But it doesn't matter. Bitcoin will live.

In fact there is a middle path, bitcoin coexist with fiat, like what we are seeing now, I do not think it will come the point where there is no fiat, governments will keep printing their useless sheets of paper without any value and people are going to keep falling for that.