Bitcoin Forum

Hi!
Everybody knows what US Federal Reserve is.
It`s a private company issuing US Dollar.
USD is a world currency. And now Bitcoin is going to be a new world currency. Does US Federal Reserve System let it be? Of course, not. Why Bitoinc is legal now? Because it is not yet a dollar    
competitor. Bitcoin is not popular. But in some years bitcoin will be popular more and more, and then US government denies it.
Of course, nobody can destroy btc network, but it will be illegal. So bitcoin is going to be unaccounted cash (black cash).
Do not even think, Bitcoin can be new world currency :)

And you just expect everybody to do what the US government tells them? As the dollar collapses, the power of the US government will dwindle and nobody will care what they say.

Well said.

+1 :)

But US got the strength (army guns knowlage)... Pretend you are in grade school and there is no teachers, who is the boss ? Biggest guys leads and if you dont want to follow them you get hit until you change your mind. Do not forget this

Who is in grade school? We are adults, we can act like adults. I am tired of the US gov acting like a child and bullying people around. They are the biggest right now, but how long can they keep spending like a drunken sailor before the debts catch up with them? Soldiers do not fight if they do not get paid; when arms manufacturers demand payment up front in bitcoins, your worthless paper is not going to help you any.

How many guns does it take to destroy the Bitcoin code?

How many wars has the US lost? Think a civil war against the government would be any prettier?

Government will only deny bitcoin if they do not find a way to tax it properly.

Which they won't, unless it becomes centralized.

This is the number one problem actually Gouvernements need to tax otherwise actually system cannot work.

Now you can buy pizza using btc, you can exchange btc to USD and etc.
If bitcoin is denied, the only way to use them is to pay to another person (not company, only person).
So bitcoin is going to be like cash now. Do you often use cash?

They'll find a way to force everybody to use a validated wallet (except themself). Welcome to brave new world of total financial surveillance.

(I hope this is just a nightmare)

Every one we have been in since WWII... :(

these threads.. gosh coulnd't they just use of the other 1000 that say the same thing over and over

I learned in kindergarten today that the U.S. is not the world.   :o

I've always like the saying that (basically) BTC is all about the OTHER 6 billion people in the world

Those who think it's all about America have never traveled...  It'll be a while (5 - 10 years) but I hope we can eventually see BTC as a currency and STOP comparing it to dollars...

I don't this the US government is that foolish (yeah I said it), making Bitcoin illegal will do nothing and they know this.  They would attack it with other means, this has been discussed thousands of times.

You got it backwards.  Big governments and banks being able to steal is the problem.  Bitcoin is the solution to that problem.

well, why are you so sure?
I understand where you're coming from, and I don't expect bitcoin to become the new WORLD currency, but it does have a bright future in my opinion.
maybe just vor 5 years, but whatever

Sorry to burst your patriotic bubble, but even though the US likes to claim victory in their wars, winning is very subjective..

Some questionable "victories" include the Korean War, Vietnam War and the most recent War in Iraq.

As for completely lost causes to anyone with a moderately open mind are the long War on Drugs and the more recent War on "Terror"

I am not scared of the US attacking the crypto currencies, being it on. As soon as they start fighting for real, they've already lost.

Ummm, I said we lost every war since WW2... but thanks? ???

That is a stretch to say the US lost every war. Nobody would say they lost when they fought to free Kuwait in the 90's.

The government may not like BTC, but what can they do against all it's users worldwide? How can one take over control? IT'S DECENTRALIZED!
Rather than the government, people should be worrying about the mining hardware race that's going on. That's something that could really end BTC for good.
But even in that case, not everything would be lost, we would still have litecoins (until they develop some ASIC for scrypt).

DECENTRALIZATION is what makes BTC what it is. Once we have fewer and fewer users in control of it, it's fundaments will have gone forgoten, and so it will become another history's footnote.

True, but I still view all of the wars in the Middle East as a pretty big failure.  Shield and Storm happened when I was in grade school, so I don't have much of an opinion on them.  OIF/OEF/OND were all failures in my eyes, though.  Korea and Vietnam were obviously failures as was the Cold "War".

In fact, to say that the US lost any war is not true either.  They just haven't won many lately, probably because we are fighting wars for other countries.  

Lol, sorry misread it xD. Never mind then <3

Almost all of them... and by some measure, absolutely all of them  :D

I've heard it said that the conflict began when the US cajoled the Kuwaitis into draining Iraqi oilfields covertly from just across the border. Difficult to prove, but let's get real from now on: there is so much evidence that Western governments provoke conflicts, then propagandise whichever version of "who started it" to suit their agenda.

Guys, I do not understand this thing and I keep on reading it here over and over again. So many people celebrating the fact that the State cannot tax bitcoins and shouting proudly "They cannot tax it, it's anonymous!!"

.. Let's imagine for a second that all the different currencies disappear and there is only BTC..

If a Government is not able to tax your earnings (which will be in BTC, remember, it's the only currency you have), how is anything going to work? Who's paying for any public service, for your roads, water, trash, schools, etc.?

If by any means anyone want BTC to succeed and become mainstream, it MUST be taxed as any other currency.
Which could be difficult or not, but that's another topic...

If it were to be taxed just like any other currency, then it would be just another currency. It would loose it's purpose entirely.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=How+to+pay+for+roads+without+a+government#
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=How+to+pay+for+water+without+a+government#
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=How+to+pay+for+trash+without+a+government#
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=How+to+pay+for+education+without+a+government#

Ok, still you have not replied to my question! I don't understand the assumption taxes=evil ... For sure there are detestable and often unfair taxes, I agree on this, still I cannot imagine a world where citizens don't agree on giving something for the common good.
The bottom line is, the more mainstream bitcoins become, the more obvious it is that we should pay taxes on them.
And going back to the example I made, in that case it wouldn't be just another currency, it would be the only (or the main) currency.

People need to stop repeating that the Fed is a private company. It is just another government department, like the hundreds of others which are semi-autonomous.

It pays 100% of its profits to the US Treasury.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/15/federal-reserve-record-profit_n_2884366.html

In January 2011 the Fed amended its accounting practices so that it can never become bankrupt. 100% of its losses will get dumped onto the US treasury as well. Losses which will occur on its long bond exit strategy.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/creative-accounting-makes-fed-insolvency-impossible

Have you ever wondered how taxes worked back before we had electronic currencies, back when everybody used cash? How could that possibly work? The answer is that taxes do not derive from people using USD, they are derived from people REPORTING their own tax liabilities. People can fill out tax forms for earnings in bitcoins just like the filled out tax forms for earnings in dollars.

Is trash a public service? Seems perfectly reasonable to expect people to pay a company to come take their trash away (at my previous residence I used this setup, my current residence has city-run trash pickup (but you can look at a city as just a company which provides services within a geographical region)).

Is water a public service? I pay the water company, they make water available to me, so no need for taxes.

I understand what you mean and I tend to agree in principle. Maybe I didn't explain properly what I meant: what I don't agree with, is hearing people seeing bitcoins as a way not to pay taxes. And they think this is a smart move, not understanding that by not paying taxes, they penalise the honest ones.

I love bitcoins because I can store my money, pay for goods, transfer money to other people WITHOUT making banks reacher (along with other good and ethic reasons), not because by using them I could potentially avoid to pay taxes thus forcing someone else to pay more..

I use only cash (except for online purchase) but I might be abnormal. I withdraw like 500-1000$ from the ATM at a time so my spending habit stay private.

It's quite simple. Who do you trust to spend the money in your pocket better, you or the government?

Governments are inefficient. The bigger they are the more inefficient they are. I'll list three quick examples from the top of my head. The DMV. Do you think the DMV could be run more efficiently by government or private companies? I'm not saying private companies should do it, I'm asking about efficiency.

How about FEMA... For Hurricane Katrina FEMA eventually decided to melt thousands of pounds of ice stored at a cost of $12.5 million (http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-201_162-3058982.html) after trucking it thousands of miles south then back north finding that much wasn't needed.

What about the VA? I'm not a veteran but I've heard terrible things about the service there. Wouldn't more be expected of a First World country that holds the world's reserve currency and a multi-trillion dollar economy?

Another example is the government paying $16 per muffin (http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/09/audit-finds-16-muffins-at-justice-department-conferences/) for conferences.

Last, Detroit has some of the highest property taxes in the country. How are they doing? I could go on and on.

This is what happens when costs are not tied to actual market values and the natural regulators of free market forces. If people are free to pay only for what they deem valuable then those items will be up to scratch or not exist at all.

Have you ever wondered how taxes worked back before we had people REPORTING their own tax "liabilities"?

The answer is that taxes were derived from people using USD, they were derived from sales taxes only. Direct taxation was CONSTITUTIONALLY FORBIDDEN. For IDEOLOGICAL REASONS. Lord give me strength.

Simpler version: audit the money. The taxes overwhelmingly get spent on maintaining the national debt. Government BORROWS the part that pays for the public services. They hide all of this skillfully when talking about it, but the overall numbers don't lie.

Ah, but somebody has to tell the government what amount of sales there were, USD does not report that, the people had to do the reporting. You can report your sales in bitcoin just as easily as you can report your sales in USD (actually bitcoin is even better, since the record is open for everybody to see).

A decentralized cryptocurrency becoming international standard will indeed be against the interest of the US and some other governments. They'll find some reasons to suppress it's adoption.

That's one of the reasons why I'm pessimistic about the future of cryptocurrencies.

It's true, but the reasons for optimism are much greater than the pessimistic ones. The more they act towards Bitcoin users like they are towards whistleblowers right now ("drone them, cage them, trans-gender them"), then we know they're truly scared. The UK government said they arrested David Miranda under Anti-Terror legislation to "protect the public from terrorist threats", and they can use that form of very indirect causality logic to arrest, well, just about anyone doing anything. Arrest dogs for being potential suicide bomb mules, arrest restaurant waitresses for "providing a means of sustenance to a suspicious Sikh", arrest the parents of fracking protesters for "failing to prevent or report an act of terror". Take your pick.

These people are shit scared that the public will start scratching their heads en masse.

Hey Carlton, remember when you and Will got pulled over for appearing identical to some car thieves, and the cops told you they pulled you over "because you were driving too slow", and then you played the race card?   I hate that episode, because I'm white and I was pulled over once for driving too slow.  They even did a drug search on my vehicle.  The cops were white.  I'm white.

This is the only Fresh Prince episode I didn't like, other than that, carlton, ILU MAN

I'm also a fan of your dance moves, Carlton. 

I think greed and power are the stronger motivators here.  Governments are made of legislators and legislators want to "steer the ship".  If we can give them some illusion of control, bitcoin will get a huge boost.

I think that's a good attitude, I do the same.  Although it may be a bit more "normal" where I live than it is in the US, where credit cards seem to be far more abundant than here.

You're right and I cannot agree with you more, I'm not from the US but I'm pretty sure you're right and I can tell you that in my country it is exactly the same, like probably everywhere else..BUT..the fact that our taxes are often misused and sometimes our money is literally thrown away by idiots doesn't make taxes evil..
It's like if you live, like I do, in a condominium with your lovely neighbors, and you pay a fee every month for the elevator, cleaning of the common parts, electricity, repairing of broken stuff, etc. Now you have an administrator who collects the money and manages it . Now you can often have an idiot as administrator who maybe buys stupid things for the condo or maybe steals some money. The good thing in a condo is that, being a small environment, you can easily detect his misbehavior and kick him out. But you wouldn't say "I hope I had bitcoins so I can avoid paying my monthly fee, because you will be against all your neighbors.
A State is much bigger and the problem is that you cannot easily kick our politicians out but this doesn't mean that collecting taxes for the common good is bad. Have a look at the scandinavian countries where their taxes are sooooo huge, they don't usually complain because their money is used very efficiently and they receive in return great services..
So, even in a perfect world where BTC is the only currency, don't you think there should be a way to let everyone pay their taxes? Then HOW, that's the tricky part! Directly - you pay depending on what you earn - this could be done by your employer OR indirectly -you pay when you consume - like VAT? Dunno... :)     

Why do taxes have to depend on what you earn? Why not just have a simple system where everybody owes the same amount of money every year, wouldn't that be more fair?

The how of paying taxes with bitcoins is really easy: the government sends each citizen a bitcoin payment address, they send the bitcoins owed to that address.

Yes, they must depend on what you earn.. How can you ask a citizen earning 10 to pay 5 and also ask another citizen who earns 5.5 to pay the same amount. What about a person unemployed? How can he pay 5? That's the principle of progressive taxation, the one earning 10 will pay more than the one earning 5, so that the unemployed can still receive some services even if he cannot pay taxes.

so I'm gonna use a non-validated wallet inside a VPN hosted offshore?

Actually it is you that looks like he hasn't travelled much. Or if he has he has done so in typical american fashion lecturing the natives about how they should live their lives and not listening one bit to what they have to say.

The US controls the world financial system. They can even make an oil rich country like Iran an outcast that can't legally sell its oil to the world because a) sanctions b) it is blocked from receiving payments via SWIFT which is the standard for international wire transfers. Iran has to resort to barter to sell its oil. Can you imagine barter for billions of dollars of oil? In this day and age?!!

The US can destroy bitcoin if it chooses to do so. But I don't think it wants to do that for a number of reasons:

1) Bitcoin will spur innovation in finance and that is good for the US economy.

2) Bitcoin transactions are all public so its a rich source of data for the government including the taxmen. It just needs some clever algorithms to mine that data.

So let's hope that I am right and the US isn't out to destroy bitcoin and just wants to regulate i.e. control it.

In other words, "In America, we punish success."  And then we wonder why there aren't any jobs...

A flat tax rate would force government to tax the poorest of people at a rate which they can still live reasonably well; this would decrease taxation by a huge amount, and force government to be smart about where they allocate tax money (such as what we pay them to do, like roads and bridges and a REASONABLE military to STOP INVASIONS, not big enough wage war against every other nation and blow the planet to smithereens.)

Instead, we throw more money at government, beg them to help us and to tax the rich to shit until they leave (and take their capital, and jobs, with them, to other nations), and cry that we can't support ourselves and need welfare as a staple of our lives, since we threw more of our money at government, and begged them to help us,...

You're right Mike, although I'm not from US and I am not talking about US, but the same principle applies basically to every country.
You raised very good points about taxation, but I guess we're going well out of the topic. What I was trying to say is that if we want to go mainstream with Bitcoin, they should be taxed as any other currency, otherwise I believe the system cannot grow enough to replace established currencies.

Sorry to use the US specifically; I live here and it's the only place I know, so I can't speak for any other country.

This is why Bitcoin is so disruptive; we know we cannot continue our lives as we know it and just as well expect Bitcoin to succeed.  Either Bitcoin will need to change to accommodate government, or government will need to change to accommodate Bitcoin.  No technology is more disruptive than that which threatens a government's lifeline.  I have no doubt that Bitcoin will reach the masses, in time, and I have every expectation that there will be conflict.  But it seems, in the future, government is going to have a lot less power, the more Bitcoin spreads.  The complexities of the tax system we have today rely on a controlled currency; with Bitcoin, a flat tax seems to be the only method of taxation left; the age where we taxed money every time it moved is closing.

Consider:
You know the bills are serialized, yes?  Maybe you are getting them from a machine with a camera in it that can see/photograph you (and knows you from your card as well) and it may be possible for that machine to read the serial numbers too...
Maybe pseudo-private?  How many years that information is retained...

Bitcoin is also serialized in its own way though.

For the purely fungible money you won't find it in paper, but at least there is the pocket change, and the commodities.

But if they do, it's even more against their interest. As long as Bitcoin is treated as some
weird foreign currency, governments can control all merchants and exchanges but if Bitcoin is only used
in black market/"System D" part of the world economy there will be no taxes at all, and no control.
Governments aren't rational, of course.

You are sort of missing the big picture here.  Bitcoin is transformative in the realm of public works expenses.

Bitcoin would be MUCH better for taxes/community purchasing.  A community could very easily use highly granular micropayments for services used, and provide greater transparency for costs and payments for those.  
It could entirely obsolete the very stupid broad-brush taxation schemes currently used like VAT, Income tax, inheritance tax and the rest by making fee for service more pervasive.  These census based headcount taxations are thousands of years old and very obsolete with the diverse tapestry of humanity today.
It would also allow for better transparency into the government accounting if we forced non-anonymity on the government money uses and required our governments to use cryptocurrencies.

We are at the very early days yet, but the potentials are truly amazing.

There is another way.  Take a look at http://www.fairtax.org/

Nobody wins wars.  The US has only created more enemies for themselves.

Although those that fight always lose, the private central banks usually win them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hfEBupAeo4

In other words:
1. Governments already arrest & abuse their citizenry without showing reasonable cause or bothering with convincing logic.
2. They might arrest dogs, by claiming they're suicide bombers.
3.  ? ? ?
4.  They must be running scared, we win!!1!

Lawd have mercy, what would those yeller-bellied bastard do if they weren't scared :o

Don't forget:
3) The US government owns all the ISP data through its surveillance network and can match your ISP to your IP to your wallet trivially.

No amount of guns / soldiers will destroy Bitcoin (or any, for that matter) code.
Even in a completely totalitarian state, you still can't guarantee that there isn't a single copy of some code (or some writing/some data generally) in existence.

You can murder people, harass them, blackmail them, terrorize them - none of these things work. And it has been already tried many times thorough the history.

I hope this is the kind of answer you expected.

OBAMA! GTFO OUR FORUM!

I can imagine a world where the main organization of people would be local (like a county now). The people could vote through the internet in matters concerning them (even the spending of their local organization).

That way, 100% transparency could be reached and the government would be obsolete. There wouldn't be politicians only experts and scientists and a nice protocol (of course bitcoin would be implemented :) ).

As I see the current system is inefficient, easily played and malicious on all levels. We need a shift in thinking as well not just a new currency.

Dear desired_username,

We've been talking about this transparency thing and heck, i suppose you deserve it.  Besides, our obfuscation campaign is getting frayed around the edges, and intrepid fellows like yourself have already poked it full of holes. 
I guess i might as well come out and say it:  You, citizens, are being raised as feed and chew toys.  For our statist lap poodle, Fifi.
Missis Obama, softhearted as she is, though it best for you not to know, so's you could frolic happily until your number came up (it's 1730867037422, desired_username, we're on 1730257033827, you got plenty of time), but heck, since you asked...
Yes, the chemtrails are real -- we're dispersing an average of 3.7 kilotonnes of MDMA-B into the atmosphere to make your life seem bearable and worth living.  You were right, the fiat currencies of the world are but another vector of distribution for that stuff -- that's why the rich are so darn happy. 
So now you know.

Love,
  The Government.

If the US Government is actually concerned about their "national security" and they realize that Bitcoin can't be stopped, then trying to exclude US miners from mining will only hurt themselves as China & Russia will gobble up most of the coins.

If they were smart, miners would be protected.  Subsidized even.

All this talk about "Fair Tax" when the American people themselves are not appalled at the simple fact they have formed themselves into a voting block to pass all their debt onto future generations who, of course, don't vote.

This country's motto during the Revolution was "No Taxation Without Representation!". Few of the politicians today represent anyone other than private interest groups yet alone the unborn who can't kick them out of office because ummmm, well, they aren't born yet :-).

The American people have stood idly by while THEIR representatives upped the debt ceiling every year for the last 60 years and passed it on to the children.

Bitcoin will be the currency of the next generation which have every right, in my opinion, to simply refuse to pay the tax bill for that which they were charged when they were minors. You couldn't legally hold a minor to a contract for a magazine subscription so where is the moral ground for taxing them for something they didn't have representation for?

Well said.  Thanks to Bitcoin, the next revolution isn't going to require the use of force.

I notice a lot of people have this misconception that because the government can't control Bitcoin, it can't tax us and therefore we will no longer have roads, water, food, medicine, safety, or whatever other social goods they believe can somehow only possibly be provided through coercion.

Let's assume for a moment that every single person has converted to Bitcoins. And let's assume that it's completely impossible to tax people's Bitcoin transactions or confiscate people's Bitcoin wealth.

Okay, so the government will instead tax:  oil, gas, land, imports, exports, copper mining, silver mining, retail purchases at big retailers like WalMart and Amazon, etc etc etc. Amazon still has warehouses full of products, which men with guns can confiscate or lock down in the event that Amazon doesn't pay their tax. FedEx and UPS still have a fleet of vehicles that can be frozen with guns if "shipping tax" isn't paid. Electricity can still be taxed. Etc.

So we may very well be approaching the day that people's individual savings cannot be confiscated (directly or through inflation), nor can their individual revenues be taxed. And that's a very good thing. But that doesn't mean taxes are impossible -- it only means taxes will have to become (slightly) more moral. There are still many physical bottlenecks where taxes can and will be collected.

So for those of you who honestly believe a government monopoly on violence is a "necessary evil" -- who believe coercion must be employed against innocent people for us to have "the roads" -- who believe that having the IRS pick on helpless old widows is the only thing preventing modern society from slipping back into the stone ages: Don't worry, slave, taxation in general will not cease just because individuals have obtained a bit more power over their own personal finances. Your State will continue providing roads and shitty schools.

It's amazing to me how people get deceived in such a statist mindset. If you were to topple the North Korean government, perhaps the people there would ask, "But who will provide tree bark for us to eat, and pots and pans with which to cook our own children?"

---------------------------------------------------------------------

P.S.:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Letter_Mail_Company

The American Letter Mail Company was started by Lysander Spooner in 1844, competing with the legal monopoly of the United States Post Office (USPO, now the USPS) in violation of the Private Express Statutes. It succeeded in delivering mail for lower prices, but the U.S. Government challenged Spooner with legal measures, eventually forcing him to cease operations in 1851.

The American Letter Mail Company was able to reduce the price of its stamps significantly and even offered free local delivery, significantly undercutting the 12-cent stamp being sold by the Post Office Department. The federal government treated this as a criminal act.

Although the business was forced by the U.S. Government to close shop after only a few years, it succeeded in temporarily driving down the cost of government-delivered mail.

So you're suggesting that they wait until it has substantial adoption and general acceptability in the US and then they ban it? Yeah, that won't stir up a pot of any kind.

Government = RIAA
Bitcoin = Thepiratebay/BitTorrent


That's pretty much how it'll play out.

QFT

+1
As long as they can get their cut, it should all work out. Somehow.

I'm no conspiracy buff, but isn't there something interesting with the BrainMind Study proposal as well?
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/04/02/brain-initiative-challenges-researchers-unlock-mysteries-human-mind
Perhaps sometimes the medium is the massage after all?

this