Bitcoin Forum

Whilst the above could have been a good April fools' joke on 1 April - it's too late for April fools' jokes this time of year.  So the above might only be one of the numerous future scenario mainstream news headlines...

The fact is that a Bitcoin tax could very easily be implemented as a transaction tax percentage of the value of transfer.  This will in effect be a kind of turnover tax on the Bitcoin economy - allowing for the administrative easing of the burden of book keeping, etc., etc.

In its present form, the Bitcoin blockchain also allows for a legitimate, above board business, to easily prove non-involvement in money laundering activities - as a direct link can be proven of legitimately acquiring coins through sales / rendering of services and the expenditure of those coins leaving the business.

A Bitcoin tax will however have to be implemented in the client - and more than 50% of Bitcoin client users will have to democratically elect to the use of this client - all in the spirit of Bitcoin.  Social services should also make more use of Bitcoin donations - and the direct transfer it enables between the needy and the freely giving.

Why didn't we think of this earlier?

Edit: I am of course being sarcastic.

I vote no

The obvious difficulty of getting current users to agree to such a tax collection mechanism to be added to their clients aside.  Which government would this tax be collected for?  Any government entity that you could choose will 1) not have the jurisdiction to tax all bitcoin users and 2) will have citizens of other nations that would desire to actively undermine the collecting government's ability to collect any taxes.

Yeah, now govermetns can bomb each other or engage in foreign relations for this new resource - or bitcoin clients democratically elect which government to support on where they base their bitcoin client's ip in the cloud.  Better start lobbying those miners i'd say.

Pretty overcast over the us with cloud gathering over europe:  http://maps.google.com/maps?q=https://smsz.net/btcStats/bitcoin.kml

No questions on who will demand their share of the rain..

 
Just looked at this and it sunk in that bitcoins haven't even really hit Asia yet.  Can you imagine what will happen when all that purchasing power enters the market? 

I think it's rather 50% of bitcoin processing power, which is quite different.

Basically this client would reject all transactions that don't include a fee to some particular address belonging to the government.   Neat idea.

It'll never work, thank god. Any miner with half a brain will undercut the transaction fee. If anyone wants to collect transaction fees they'll have to compete in the free market.

No. I will not be voluntarily stolen from.

If we have to rely on brains, we are screwed.

How so?

The value of bitcoin would be 0 at that point. There would also be anarcho-bitcoin created the second your shitty tax was implemented.

You want charity? Theres plenty of them on the trade page or at http://witcoin.com/charities (http://witcoin.com/charities)  where you can freely choose whether to support as much or a s little as you like. Besides the only possible voluntary tax I would ever agree to have included is one that automatically donates to the faucet each time I transacted as well as the fee to pay for miners securing the system.

 

BOOM!
+1

It seems that Bitcoin will ultimately fork when Goverments steps in.  There will ultimately be the fully disclosing, trackable, legal, regularized, tax-paying Bitcoin client version, and the shadowy, illegal, pseudonymous, banned Bitcoin client version.  There will be seperate exchange rates for each (wonder which would be the most valuable?!?)  Coins across the fork will not be recognised by either of the other networks' nodes.

http://falkvinge.net/2011/05/19/the-information-policy-case-for-flat-tax-and-basic-income/

Taxing transactions is one of the most unfair and causeless method of collecting money by the governments. I hate the idea of taxing everything in the world so you can tell people health services, roads, education etc. are "free", because this system is completely based on lies. That's why I support the idea of everyone being responsible for his own future, and I vote for libertarians.

Maybe.
Governments could simply require that all one's salary be paid in GovCoins, with x% tax on initial pay and y% tax on transfers.  Simply ban laundering (as it's fairly detectable).  Since Government has the private keys, it could "bank" any amount over 999 GovCoins, to be used for investment by the state and require that more be withdrawn with reason.

Bitcoin has enormous potential to advance human freedom, but authoritarians can use tools too.

All they'd really have to do would be to set up and maintain a hashing fleet with enough power to monopolize the block generation stages, and then refuse to include transactions that don't have an appropriate fee.

Look at the amount of miners that mine for Deepbit regardless of the fact they are risking the health of the network. They don't care about Bitcoin, they care about a quick buck. And they aren't even doing that well, regardless of the health of the network, Deepbit charges the highest fees and low variance and paying for invalid blocks doesn't even it out.

So, everyone is jumping in the biggest pool (needlessly risking the health of the network) with the highest fees (earning less), and you expect them to make the right decisions when it comes transaction fees! Hah...!

That doesn't change the fact that the market is free and that the transaction fees would have to be competitive. Anyone who charged a transaction fee that's big enough to pay for public services will be undercut by miners who cover their costs and make a modest profit.

The transaction fee and the hashing power of those who charge it would have to be competitive.

Most of the miners aren't solo. They will do what the pool they are in does. If the big pools wants to charge a high fee on transactions, it might be that lower fee transactions take much longer to process. A huge percentage of miners don't seem to want to go solo (or switch pools even) to make more money now, why would they go solo (or switch pools) to make more money in the future?

Hmm.  I wonder how that can be expedited.

Right now people are willing to pay these transaction fees to get a transfer confirmed quickly, but there'll be an upper limit. You're right that lower transaction fees will take longer to process. And you're probably right that most miners in a pool aren't going to go solo. But if Deepbit was to increase their transaction fees to over x amount, pools will hopefully break off.

If blocks end up only being created by an organisation that can afford to violently enforce its opinion (ie a government), then bitcoin will have been a failure in my opinion.

The Bitcoin client rules may be looked at like a Governments laws.  Just like the nodes that does not obey the majority elected Client will get kicked out, perceived strays of societal law and order will eventually not be accepted into the mainstream.

Bitcoin offers opportunities to both the fringe and the mainstream, but it will be a fork - as the two will not be able to co-exist under the same umbrella economy.

As a thought, Bitcoin is foreign to all the nations but communicable with all nations.

Actually the Public Relations post for Bitcoin sums it up quite nicely http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=8940.0;all