Bitcoin Forum

The U.S. government doesn't like competition, and for what I know you will say.. blah blah balh international this and that, the U.S. government has power of ICANN and therefore power over all the internet so no hiding from it. As bitcoin continues to gain popularity it will just be a bigger target to get squashed and someone will more than likely go to jail over it..

http://visiontoamerica.org/story/nc-man-convicted-for-making-and-selling-his-own-silver-coins.html

prime example, and he was minting real silver, not digital calculations.

I read a ton about bitcoin I love the concept, I just don't see away around this crazy gov..

According to the Department of Justice press release (http://charlotte.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel11/ce031811.htm), the Liberty Dollar far too similar to the US dollar, to the point that the US mint had to issue warning that LDs were not official currency.

Bitcoins have zero similarities with US dollars.

Let's add this to the FAQ:  the Liberty Dollar case is not relevant to bitcoin.

Since no-one owns BitCoin as such, who are they going to put in prison?

The worst they could do is outlaw it in the US I guess, but if it then takes off in other countries, it's going to be kind of hard to stop it. Even in the US people would probably VPN into another country to continue transacting.

I guess it would hurt the overall BitCoin economy however.

ICANN has very limited power over the internet.

Telecoms companies and ISPs have ultimate power over the internet.

Nobody can force those entities to use ICANN's addressing system.  It's a purely voluntary agreement.

If ICANN starts screwing up the internet too much, those entities will stop using ICANN and find an alternative address assignment organisation.

In the worst case it might lead to a fragmentation of the internet with several independent IP address spaces and domain name spaces.       

ICANN knows this too and will be careful to prevent this from happening.

I live in the UK, why would the US government interfere with something I use? (Not saying they wouldn't, just curious as to why one government would take exception to an international currency).

Incidentally, the US dollar already gets a lot of competition - GBP, EUR, JPY, CHF, CAD, AUD, XAU, XAG ... etc :-)

On a related note.
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Reserve (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Reserve)

Fortunately, Liberty Reserve isn't going to go away just because it no longer has a wikipedia article.  Just like Bitcoin didn't go away when it got deleted (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=652.0).

The preservation of history is important to understanding why things happen now in the present. What is Bitcoin but a history of transactions giving rise to the understanding of what transactions occur now? If no one remembers what LR was or did, how will they understand why Bitcoin came into existence? If we focus on teaching the real past, the use of Bitcoin becomes obvious to those who learn.

Although the US Fed usually has the internet spotlight, don't forget that your own country has a national reserve authority as well.

Sure, but the same applies to the UK treasury/Bank of England/whatever as well - why interfere with an international currency? All the UK can do is prohibit me from using bitcoins - non-UK residents it can't touch. One government is a problem only to a subset of bitcoin users, and bitcoin is not directly analogous to national currencies anyway.