Bitcoin Forum

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxT7QjlvDqM

The nature of the political process (in the U.S. at least) probably precludes any chance of the scenario you describe. Any politician worth his salt would be very loud about the inclusion of bitcoin into a bill. Do you have some reason to think otherwise?

Here are two examples of specific bad bills that OSTA would have prevented from becoming laws . . .

EXAMPLE #1:

The REAL ID Act did something Americans have always rejected. It created a national identification system. This idea had so little support it couldn't even be brought to a vote in the Senate. But Congressional leaders got it passed anyway. They attached it to a bill Senators were afraid to oppose — the "Emergency, Supplemental Appropriations Act for Defense, the Global War on Terror, and Tsunami Relief." (May, 2005)

Senators were scared to defeat a bill that funded the troops, so the REAL ID Act became the law of the land.

Is this how you want to be governed? Will you submit to it or fight it?...

EXAMPLE #2:

The Senate Majority Leader believed that gambling was immoral. So he promoted a bill to outlaw online poker. But he lacked the votes to get it passed, so, mere hours before the vote, he attached his unwanted legislation to a Port Security bill that most in Congress favored. The result . . .

Online gambling was outlawed, and a whole industry was destroyed in the blink of an eye!

OSTA would prevent such outrages by requiring that . . .

    Each bill must be only one subject.
   
The courts must view any legislation passed in violation of this requirement to be null and void. This makes OSTA uniquely powerful, because most laws and rules that aim to control Congress, including the Constitution, have no enforcement mechanism. But OSTA has an enforcement mechanism!

Rant about the political process.

I posed the following inquiry: Do you have some reason to believe that a politician would not be vocal about including "bitcoin related [language]" in a bill?

And to answer your original question regarding whether or not "we" have people reading "new bills"... no.

And this is a problem because... blah blah blah

Why do you always reply with two posts?

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

How is Bitcoin like any of the bills you cite? Or, to be more precise, how is Bitcoin like the generalities you cite (e.g. "gambling legislation", "tons of other hidden laws", as to the "Affordable Healthcare Act [sic]", what was slipped in and not vocalized or publicized? The bill was publicly available for a substantial period of time prior to being passed.)?


Yeah, this is a problem just like the federal government enforcing federal drug laws in California, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington.

By the way Nevada is working on making online gambling legal.  There is nothing public yet but industry and the political efforts are moving that way behind the scenes.

And this is a problem because Bitcoin could be made illegal overnight and we won't even realize it until the feds come to enforce the law.

By the way Nevada is working on making online gambling legal.  There is nothing public yet but industry and the political efforts are moving that way behind the scenes.

Yeah, this agrees with the recent observations made at the CES'12 in LV.

In the past both NGCB and LVMPD would both follow the leads on some small-time payments being directed (or diverted) to the online games of chance.

This year officers of both NGCB and LVMPD closed small-time investigations immediately upon confirming that the payments are (or could be) used for non-gaming related transactions.

So apparently the winds in Nevada had changed direction.