Bitcoin Forum

Hi guys,


First of all, I love Bitcoin and I want nothing more than BTC to succeed.

But I think BTC ( or any cryptocurrency ) will overcome all it' hurdles, but one :
governments.

Because let's face it, governments can lose their income and lots of power
to bitcoin, and they can easily just say "no" to BTC.

Yes they could legalize it, but ,in that case, very likely Bitcon will be taxed and regulated to death anyway.
The current financial world will also lose a lot of business to BTC, and they won't sit back and do nothing.
Keep in mind they have loads of political power.

The only scenario where I ever see BTC to succeed, would be if gov's go on to ignore BTC for years and years...
In the mean time BTC would need to become so mainstream, that banning it would mean economic shutdown
for a country. But I don't see govs waiting that long..

Every other issue like, volatility, ease of use, hot wallet vulnerability,... I is gonna get solved as time goes on
but that's not enough...

what does Bitcointalk think ?

As a free human being you're the only one who can subject yourself to them.

Bitcoin is protected in the United States by the First Amendment. Bitcoin is a ledger; a digital book of accounting. You're using this book of account with permission from the creator who made this an open source project.

If the United States adopts Bitcoin (not just accepts it but actually adopts it) and opens a professional exchange in New York with partners being banks, corporations, and other large entities; the UK and then eventually the rest of the world will do the same. It's like anything else in business, you can't just sit back and watch your competitor making money without attempting to do so yourself.

If the USA just said, "no Bitcion" it would be viewed as a blatant infringement on Constitutional rights regarding the First and Fifth Amendments.

Fck the financial system and what they want. You cant stop evolution. It is the same with the media business -  they are loaded and have been lobbying so hard to undercut digital media. Have they succeeded ? Netflix,Spotify etc are getting bigger and bigger and that is the way it's gonna be in the future and there nothing the media companies can do about it. That is what is going to happen to digital currencies as well.
As for the goverments and regulation - Obviously it will have to be regulated and taxed. For most people bitcoin isnt a way to avoid taxes and launder money so I really dont mind. There is so much more about bitcoin than that.
Tax the shit out of it ? You paying the same taxes as with any other currency/commodity ;)

@ pungopete468

yeah am really hoping that NY exchange will happen

I'm on the zeroblock iphone app, and whenever i see a thread title like this, i always know it is someone brand new here. No offense

Cheers alround, You've won the prize, am new on btctalk.org  ;D
However I've been trading on bitcoin.de for a few months now

The net is full of believers that are exited and enthusiastic about BTC ( and thank god for that ) .
Many will tell you that gov wont kill BTC

However none can give a solid argument why gov. won't kill BTC


When the US has quite a few exchanges that are partnered up with major banks,
(and more of them in WEST-Europe in stead of Eastern-Euro )

my skepticism will go down significantly !

The strategy in the near term isnt to say no to bitcoin. It's to:

A) relegate it to the utility of beanie babies and tulips by making it illegal or at least massively difficult to do any business exchanging btc to and from fiat currencies.

B) hunting down and making very public dramatic arrests of two-bit drug dealers, child pr0n sickos, wanna be money launderers (the pros use dollars and black pesos, or go to HSBC), freedom fighters/terrorists and any and all other "undesirables" they can find that have ever touched a satoshi.

C) Using the global threat of BTC to strengthen the cooperation and information sharing between the legacy banking system. Total financial surveillance is the goal and btc is a great scapegoat.

They seem to be winning big in these areas.

We seem to be bashing our heads against this "last mile" issue of converting btc to and from fiat. I wonder, could we shift some of the attention from btc as a currency and instead focus on btc as a means of exchange. I suspect not. I suspect greed and the general weakness of the human condition will win out. But...

Could we barter services from each other for btc? E-lance/Stack Exchange paid solely in btc?

What if a small cooperative of people doing anything really, but say growing food locally or trying to get their kids to and from school and looked after while parents endure their hours long commute, agreed to use a fixed pool (a fork) of btc to trade responsibilities for duties?

Could some btc philanthropist/early adopter start a volunteer program where by people get paid in btc for doing community service type work? You do some work, earn some btc from that fork, then can pay for stuff you need done with your earnings. Alt coins show that it is almost trivial to create your own fork and then you can use that as a public ledger for any closed community doing just about anything.

Sure, this is all easily dismissed as wishful hippie bullshit. But really, absent something dramatic and probably undesirable like JP Morgan opening an exchange, so much focus on converting to and from fiat is really missing the point and power of btc, IMHO.

Government will not ignore bitcoin. It will tax it like everything else. Other then that I don't think they care much about it. Those who care about it are bankers, they will first get a sizable part of bitcoins in their hands, or if they can't they will make government involved so that it is regulated a lot. I don't see something else happening.

I am not afraid of regulation of bitcoin since it is nearly impossible. Taxation of bitcoin, what already appear in money transfer tax and income tax, would be much bigger problem. Besides it is international currency. It would require cooperation of many countrys, large variety of international law changes.

wow, just realised how many people actually fear the government.

Once Bitcoin takes off, the government will sound find themselves stuffed deep inside the pages of history.

Do we really need to be governed in 2014?... Do we still need to pay illogical taxes?... the answer is no

Bitcoin will finally make the masses realize that they really can do it all themselves

as long as governments keep their legal tender laws and minimum wage laws. they will still keep the FIAT circulating. also when people buy bitcoin, someone else equally sells theirs. so again FIAT does not disapear, it simple changes accounts (again circulating)


bitcoin is not the property of any government. governments can only tax their own property. that being FIAT and fossil fuels they purchase.

when people buy bitcoin there is a equal person selling (yes im repeating myself) same goes for merchants. when they cash out their bitcoin back to fiat. somewhere along the line someone has cashed in. thus there is a balance.


you seem to be under the delusion that bitcoin needs to take over and replace FIAT. bitcoin can work along side different countries FIAT. even if in the future there was just a 2% population uptake of bitcoin. this alone would be far far far higher then the numbers today and the usefulness would be soooooo much greater. it does not require 100% uptake to be mainstream.


i think your stretching the issues far beyond exaduration, i think your worrying about things that need not be worried about and i think that bitcoin has no reason or potential to die. users will come and go. but bitcoin will live on

Regulated to death?
I'm getting tired of this.
http://bitlegal.net/

That regulation to death, it burns.

I hope you do realize that 95% of the green country's on that chart are just ignoring bitcoin right now

government = irrelevant to BTC

they only control the money they had printed for us, on their grounds

BTC = electrons, represented as numbers... No govt controls electrons or numbers.

Government is a poor hurdle. Govts fall easy. War-toys or not... If no-one is willing to do what you say, your toys are useless. If you say, kill our people... What would you actually have left to govern, if that did happen... Nothing but a few timid people who couldn't afford to keep paying for your war-toys.

WE OWN THE GOVT. THE GOVT DOES NOT OWN US. (If you still believe that they own you, when they tell you to believe that they own you, you have failed as a human.)

The big scare is that banks own the govt toys, by loans and debt... and they are losing this war... (Have lost, they just don't realize it yet.)

The gov can easily tax the use of bitcoin (transaction, the buying / selling of BTC ..). It can easily be regulated in a way that you can only legally own a known BTC account, that account could easily be taxed

your income, isn't really the gov.s property either, yet where I live it's heavily taxed, along with your savings, any money you inherent, bank transactions, ...
there's even been discussion on taxing profits you've made from the stock markerts 



If BTC should ever be as stable or more stable even than the $ and €, is't more a question of "do current fiats still have reason to exist alongside BTC"

but, you know what my view is, governments will provide regulations that restrict the use of BTC, so that the fiat that's under their control,
can't disappear



yet again
I think it's fair to say no real answer has been given on this issue

I do think this is a hurdle, although I don't see government killing it.

why?

because nothing about it is inherently illegal.  people can use it in illegal ways, and they're busting those that do.  governments can, of course, pass laws to make it illegal, but they can do that for just about anything, if you adjust the dials on your conspiracy TV just right.  

beyond that, it makes no sense to outlaw something that can make money in the form of taxes, jobs, new innovations etc.  It is also obvious, by the rumblings at Chase, and by listening to PayPal and the rest talk about launching their own digital wallets and or currencies, that these people don't think it's illegal either, rather they also see it as a possible wave of the future.

some people are scared as hell of it, but that's the way with anything new that they do not understand and are therefore threatened by.  as it becomes more widely used people will chill the hell out, including Big Brother.  

the difference is that bitcoin undermines the gov when it becomes to stable and widespread

they will get interested some day !

right now big brother isn't interested and likely they wouldn't even know what to do with it if they were
witch is not a comferting thought

Doge coin and Lite Coin

Which government will stop Bitcoin?

How the hell governments lose income and power to bitcoin.
Do they lose income and power to gold?

If people pay their taxes like they do when they make purchases with cash then
what's the problem for governments.

holy shit, these comment !


google it, dollars are backed by a big reserve of federal gold

for in case of a crash

the economy can be controlled to a large extent, because fiat is not decentralized

even do the banks caused the recession, they also allow a lot of control,
that the gov. can't afford to loose

it's pretty clear that a lot of the people that are shouting that bitcoin wont get regulated to death
just don't know anything

I actually don't see the government thing as an "ultimate" hurdle.

The only way to kill Bitcoin is if all governments ban Bitcoin, and I really don't see that happening.

Heck even in the U.S. things can be jumbled up.

If one state decided to adopt Bitcoin, the U.S. government wouldn't be able to prevent that state from using BTC (violation of the 10th Amendment). Sure the financial and regulatory issues would be convoluted, but from an overarching perspective the state could still allow people to transact in it, as long the state transacts with the federal government in USD.

As fast as the "they" are trying to take freedom down, the "we" are finding out new ways to be free. Bitcoin is gradually working its kinks out and finding more and more acceptance. Lyndon LaRouche is in the process of setting up impeachment of Obama - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/impeach-obama-campaign - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWb3AKKfme0.

There is a lot of trouble governments can make for people, but if they take the people down, they destroy themselves. After all, it is the people that support them, physically, through their labor. If governments try to make the people THINK that hey have more freedom than they have... the people are starting to see through it.

NSA spying is mostly there to keep an eye on the people so that the Super-rich Elite can try to figure out what kinds of moves to make to keep the people in bondage to them.

If Bitcoin dies, it will be because it is replaced by something a whole lot better, and a whole lot freer, if you can imagine something like that.

:)

good point.. It will never die completely

however for bitcoin to mean something in the future,
I think everything stands on what the US does...

If the US takes a positive stand on BTC

western euro countries, I think are likely to follow

in Belgium and the Netherlands, Finland and Norway, there are some positive voices already ( along with negative warnings )
but no decisions are being made... and few politicians understand BTC

once USA and western euro countries embraced BTC, ( not regulating it to death )
BTC will take off

I have, as have others.  Have you?  The US came of the gold standard decades ago. US Dollars are NOT backed by gold.  

Wait, you think we are going to stop using BTC because someone says so? Haha, that's a good one man!

It definitely would be nice if the US somehow adopted Bitcoin.

That said, even if the US doesn't, it's very likely that would cause a bunch of other countries to adopt it (you know, good old politics and hate towards the US). It'd kinda be like a fun balancing scale. Some country is going to act contrary to another country's politics and fiscal policy at some point.

The one hurdle that will kill Bitcoin: Public perception as an insecure currency. You know a nice thing about regulated banks is that I give them my money and I don't have to worry about never getting it back. I don't have to worry about an inept/crooked/anonymous CEO robbing it, losing a paper wallet, or a virus stealing my savings.

It takes more than a protocol to make a secure currency. It takes human systems too.


P.S. "Federal Reserve notes have not been redeemable in gold since January 30, 1934" - http://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12770.htm. Keep up.

I think they will tax and regulate it, and that won't kill Bitcoin. Why should it? It doesn't kill cash. When a company pays in bitcoin, that payment will be on their books and available to auditors. Salaries paid in bitcoin will be taxed at source. It'll no more evade tax than perks like company cars do.

We'll have bitcoin credit cards, and that will be an improvement because it will be more secure. Currently to pay with a CC the information you give to the merchant is the same info they could use to steal from you. With bitcoin, making a payment does not involve giving the merchant your private key. It's better.

We'll see things like payment processors and charge backs layered on top of the core protocol. I think they'll be optional. If you want the extra consumer protection that the CC charge back system gives you, it should be you who pays for it, not the merchant.

It will be interesting to see which of the benefits of bitcoin turn out to be due to "cutting corners" on things like consumer protection, which are due to efficiencies such as re-using the internet infrastructure, and which are due to avoiding fat-cat monopolistic self-serving policies of credit card companies and banks.

the governments can only do whatever the hell they want because we allow them to. If we stop allowing the governments to control us, they can't do stuff to ban things like bitcoin, or other things to keep us under their control.

U.S. is only backed by "In God we Trust" -- in 1971 President Nixon officially ended the gold standard of backing currency by gold.

Simply astonishing how many get this simple fact backwards.

"Freedom in our lifetime", really? This is going to be exciting...

Freedom is a personal choice, not an empty statement, or guarantee... You can make the choice in your lifetime if you choose to. There's never such a thing as "free" freedom, the cost of freedom is the risk of where you will end up should you lose it, and also the risk of what your offspring will suffer should you let it fade away quietly... Either way, it's worth the risk in my opinion.

This is how you become free: Define freedom, and then pledge yourself to honor it.

I am free because I made a personal choice in favor of death before involuntary servitude. I would rather die resisting than suffer life with the knowledge that I'm not living free. What I do is by choice, my own choice, for whatever reason.

I'm a husband and a father and I would die fighting before I could allow myself even the logical thought that my family, all the way down to my future descendants, might suffer the torment that I was too afraid or wasn't willing to fight against. I would stand up in defense of another person if they were unable to defend themselves. I'm not religious but I live by moral code; logically I understand that there is a bigger picture, and I wish well on others. I don't cheat, steal, or infringe on the rights of others. I follow laws which I agree with, or laws which serve to benefit the public in a comprehensible way. I follow laws not as a follower, rather a supporter. I will choose to disobey laws that I don't support, I'm not a drug user but if I wanted to be, the law would be the last point on my list of reservations about it...

I don't believe that people are as bad as the television propaganda would have us believe, nor do I feel the desire to be protected from them. I don't trust anybody unless they earn it first, and I don't offer my respect to anybody who doesn't reciprocate the gesture.

That's who I am. Free, by my own definition. That's as good as it will ever get in this world...

OP = clueless

/thread

ha ha. :D