Bitcoin Forum

Lets face it bitcoin/crypto's are the future and any kind of maneuvering against an unstoappable force will cause great damage to your economy
the confidence of its citizens and your nations standing in a world run by technology.

http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/50e4d990eab8eaa710000003/the-us-and-new-zealand-secretly-tested-the-first-tsunami-bomb.jpg

Norway always rejects anything new - nothing new under the sun there. Also most people there are very upstuck and brainwashed by the establishment.

The Norwegian state has already shown their cards by declaring that bitcoin is an electronic service, and thus you have to pay VAT when you do a bitcoin transaction. And not VAT on the exchange fee, no actually they say you have to pay VAT on the entire transaction, so if you buy a bitcoin, you have to pay what it costs in local currency + 25%. According to the taxman.

In addition to VAT on the purchase of BTC, you have to pay VAT on the item itself when you buy something for BTC in a store, and if you make any money investing or trading, you're hit with a 28% fee, in addition if you hold a lot of bitcoins, 1% belong to the state as an asset tax.

In reality people ignore this of course.

Better yet, the financial department has recently issued a statement essentially telling everybody that cares to listen that bitcoin is some scary shit and should best be avoided.

It's emphasized that not having a central issuer is a big problem, because then if you lose your private key, there's no central to reissue a key for you.

Having a personal wallet also means you stand a big chance of getting hacked, and at one time there was someone losing bitcoins worth a million, with little chance of getting it back. Just to emphasize how unsecure this new technology is.

And that's just a glimpse of this hillarious piece of information they've managed to make into a press release.

Nah, I don't think Norway will have any problems. They have so much oil that they won't have to care for a long time.

I guess you are just spreading fud but then again its not fud about bitcoin so it's ok  ::)
Btw the photo is photoshopped or real?

I am having nothing against Switzerland. They are considering granting the Bitcoin currency status.. they why we should think about them in a negative manner?

Are you seriously asking?????????

It 's photo of a tsunami not a photo of death star attacking new york.
In case that you don't know it already tsunamis can happen and have killed hundreds of people before.

yeah but that doesn't even look real, at least to me.

If a big wave was incoming then the water at the front/ on the shore , would be receding.

I know but that picture is clearly out of proportion (and clearly photoshopped)! A wave like that would travel inland for 100 miles!!

The wave in the picture is clearly a photoshopped wind wave and not a tsunami. Tsunamis have a much longer wavelength than a wind wave.

http://www.seismic.ca.gov/images/tsulg.jpg

All the Scandinavian countries are slaves to their respective masters. Nobody should expect to find a safe haven there.
In a bigger perspective, the Scandinavian countries would have been better off merging into one state, but that train is long gone.
Paper shuffeling bureaucrats have made sure of that.

That said, the Scandinavian countries is using the same broken economy as all the other capitalists, and hence will take the same hit.

Agreed, on the positive note, crime is not that present as it is many other places in the world.

That's true. The only question is, is it because it is so freaking cold?

photoshop.

I would not be surprised if that's the reason. ;)

Yup, I can confirm that! During 3/4 of the year it's so bloody cold and dark that everyone wants to spend as little time outside as possible! ;)

Maybe they are keenly aware of what happens when you challenge an authority that  has the means to protect itself, though not sure what

a government could do to to protect itself from Bitcoin besides sticking its head in the sand and suffering even further pain.

the economies are not going be receiving all the extra capital created by Crypto's plus many other tangible benefits like superfast seamless global transactions, proper wealth redistribution, elimination of money printing, other negative effects will be psychological imagine thinking your government is so dumb they cannot or will not try to comprehend crypto's, this can have very destabilizing effects an all assets classes as well as causing capital flight, which would be the penultimate effect

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_flight

Well, in norway, data is still distributed to doctors on floppy discs. (http://www.idg.no/computerworld/helse/article167098.ece)

They planned to build a secure 'health-net' to facilitate 'safe' exchange of information between different units. The probably never heard about strong crypto and locking down end devices, using the existing internet.. But the secure 'health-net' was too expensive for many doctors to get entry to, so then to deliver information 'safely', floppy discs are used.

Also, the voting system is all on paper and manual procedures. Not to mention that nearly all state IT-projects are complete disasters in terms of results and spending. But there is some light in the end of the tunnel, a lot of things that you need to do as a citizen you can now do online whereas before you had to snailmail schemes.

But forward thinking is not what the Norwegian state is famous for. Change is slow in Norway. If anything it is private companies that leads the development regarding new technologies.

There are know documented waves much bigger than that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Lituya_Bay_megatsunami

However if even a tiny wave like the one in that Photoshopped picture had hit a big city like the one in the picture, we'd all know.

It's one of the major risk for the U.S. east coast btw: there's a mountain in some Canary island (it's in non-continental Europe) that could see a gigantic landslide one of these days. If it happens, a 300 meters high wave would reach and destroy New-York in eight hours and pretty much the entire east coast of the U.S  :o

It is photoshopped. The real picture has Godzilla eating some buildings too, but it was removed to prevent panic.

Wow! I thought tsunamis only killed dozens of people, not hundreds.  ::)

Wow! I thought you just failed both on trolling and on sarcasm  ::)

Yet Breivik shot over 70 people...

The entire Western world has a low crime rate compared with the globe's rougher regions.

that is actually a good thing

I believe there will be a divided planet soon. States Crypto and BTC Friendly and those against. I think we will see a huge influx of populations incoming to the Crypto Friendly countries. Maybe we will see a migration of Europeans tricking into the African Subcontinent to set up business like days of old?

That's quite the interesting thought!



You may want to put forth arguments supporting that view. I assume you're looking into it from a data security viewpoint?

I'm more looking into it from a viewpoint of society and use of resources.

Today there are hundreds if not thousands of public buldings that welcome the voters. Very many voters go by car, doing a trip they otherwise would not do. This makes for lost leisure time and increased emissions. At the same time, there's a lot of man hours wasted, and probably also lots of money wasted, that a team of a few highly skilled programmers could solve.

A system with strong cryptography and high security where people could vote from their homes, that's what should be the ideal, if you ask me. Today there exist a page called norge.no where people can do a lot of stuff online. They have to log in, and they only get access through proving their identity. So there's nothing wrong about voting taking place at the same place.

Electronic voting would save a lot of time for everybody, and is the only right thing to do in such a modern age as we're in today. Still in my opinion.

It is actually a non-trivial problem.  If you login with your strong identity to vote then the government would know exactly who you voted for.  That is kinda a bad thing in secret elections.   There are potential solutions but understand that if it was that easy it would be already be done.

Electronic voting if done wrong is very easy to manipulate and honestly governments are about the worst entities when it comes to making secure public systems.

A good electronic voting system would
a) only allow authorized persons to vote and only vote once
b) not link the vote to any persons
c) allow any person to validate their vote was counted (crowd sourced auditing)
d) in the event a persons vote isn't counted provide a method to definitively prove or disprove the claim of voting irregularity.

Until governments get it right, there is nothing wrong with good ole paper.

Very good point. I didn't think of that when I wrote my previous post. But please do not underestimate the Norwegian govt. when it comes to getting things done, it usually takes a very very very long time to get anything done, and when it is first done, it usually goes over budget and have a lot of issues in the beginning.



Yes, you would have to trust the people running the system. But if you had several independent experts, perhaps with various political associations, it would be hard to have them collude without it being detected, would it not? I do not see anything wrong in having the system open sourced either, so a lot of eyes could look at it.


Haven't there been some systems discussed where a system similar to bitcoin could be used for voting? Votecoin? Each party could set up their own receiving address. This would be public for everyone to see. Then each voter was given a coin. And voting took place by sending the votecoin to the address of the party the voter wanted to support. When the election was finished, you could simply check the balance of the public address of the party, and this was available for everyone to see. Of course there would be the need for some scheme to deliver the coins to voters eligible to receive it.

And at the very least, there could be voting machines in the buildings were voting takes place. It must be a night mare to count all the votes manually.

And regarding rigging, I've heard of countries where entire vans transporting votes gets changed for another van with the 'right' votes. So I guess cheating is something that could be present both with electronic and paper voting.

I think a system where you have auditors, even several layers of them, and safeguards in place could work well.

Hm.. regarding the votecoin system again, I had an idea.

What about the voter logging in to a centralized portal, getting an authorization code. This authcode could be inputted in to an open source client, and the code would allow for the creation of a privkey with corresponding votecoinaddress. and loading the address with 1 votecoin. The address would be generated randomly so it could not be tracked back to a particular user. Of course this is far too complicated for the average user, but it's interesting as an intellectual exercise.

Anyway, I recently read about Triangular trade (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangular_trade) and how Norwegians and other europeans participated in this in the old age. First Textiles, rum and manufactured goods were shipped by boat to Africa, then slaves were brought from Africa to America, and from the return trip from America, Sugar, tobacco and cotton were brought to Europe.

So lots of exploitation by the Europeans to enrich themselves. How ironic would it not be if bitcoin businesses started to emigrate to Africa to avoid the chains of their slave masters?



True. But still very old fashioned, and a lot of waste imo.