Bitcoin Forum

Will 2013 finally be the year that statists take bitcoins seriously?

Are you talking about the US or the whole world? I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen anyways. At the moment there's nothing extraordinary you can buy with bitcoins that you can't with various offshore payment systems like Liberty Reserve.

I can't really think of a way to make BTC illegal. Unless everything related to computers become illegal as well.

The question applies to any state in the world.

It's trivial to make illegal. It might be hard to enforce such a law, but that doesn't matter -- just like copyright laws, all one wants is the majority to be scared shitless and to stay in line.

Yes, it will. So will be stupidity.

The story from yesterday where a programmer was charged with illegal gambling because the asian guy who bought his software had american customers. So philosophical assumptions about Bitcoin is borderless, immaterial. no different from cash, does not matter. Bitcoin can be made illegal for no sane reason at all that's how it works.

One thing to consider, is that if exchanging USD for BTC is made illegal, is that Bitcoin might fulfill it's true purpose: Not as a vehicle for currency speculation, but a medium for the exchange of goods.

If such a black market future scares you, don't worry, gold has worked like that for ages. And no government would consider it illegal gold is to big to fail, Bitcoin maybe also.

Not exactly "a way" per se, but the US gov technically "owns" the sha2 encryption algo, and can disallow the use of it. Still, the enforcement would be tricky.

IMO that would be pretty stupid for any government to try making illegal  something international (http://blockchain.info/nodes-globe?series=48hrs) as bitcoin. That would be way more profitable for them to find a way to tax it instead of fighting it.

Yes! Even to invest in it, then support it and realize huge gains.

so all stupid ppls are executed? finally! :D

Well, it's obvious that the large majority of Bitcoin usage goes toward illegal activities. I would say it's going to be frowned upon always, but it will never be completely outlawed. I could see in the distant future controversy over this topic once BTC become more widespread and popular and also stable out. If businesses were to accept BTC, I think it would help the name out. Even if they accepted them for 65% of their value, it's still a start, and look their making that much more profit.

The problem with any state attempting to forbid bitcoins is that as soon as they do, it is incentivized for other states not to do so.

Let's say for example the US, UK, Canada, Eurozone, Australia, and New Zealand all decided to work together to crack down on "The new way that terrorism is funded." They would most likely go after the miners, rather than the users - miners are easy to detect with that pattern of power usage. These states also are the ones with fiat currencies that have been sufficiently debased to cause bitcoin to be a serious risk to them, so a black market for bitcoin will continue to exist among people in the US, much like black markets for "hard currency" in places like Cuba and the Soviet Union.

So, we have a spike in demand and a drop in supply. This means that foreign miners will have a huge profit incentive, and mining will move to countries where there is no prohibition on bitcoin.

But wait, you say! Those states will just fall in line and ban it!

Except these are smaller states that have basically been required to maintain sound monetary policy because they are too small to sustain insane amounts of debt. For instance, much of Latin America isn't being hurt badly in this "World Financial Crisis." They're booming, and rightly so - they have adopted policies that attract investment. If there is a market for bitcoin mining, and there is profit to be derived, the smaller states who are poorer and do not derive their wealth from abusive monetary policy, but by legitimate trade will have an incentive to allow bitcoin mining within their borders. It would bring in profit and cashflow to poor parts of the world, and so if the US were to try to treat bitcoin like, say, marijuana...it would fail miserably. There's no customs and border patrol on the Internet, and lots of incentive for other competitors to enter the market.

There are two areas I see as a vulnerability to Bitcoin from a major state who decides that bitcoins are a risk. Firstly, the next-gen mining rigs, which I expect will soon come to be the driving force in the market are "Export-controlled munitions." If the "first world" states decided bitcoins were a risk, the vast majority of the processing power would be located within their borders because the processing power that was obtainable outside of them was no longer competitive against the new mining rigs. This means that an attack against the miners would have a much higher risk of legitimately crippling the network, or weakening it to the point of vulnerability against a 50%+1 attack.

Secondly, if a major state wanted to attack bitcoins, they would be better suited to do it via a Stuxnet type virus. If they could successfully infect several of the large mining pools with a state-funded virus distribution, they could pull off a 50%+1 attack and take the network down that way.

I don't think it will be a simple case of people taking sides here, I think there will be many different reactions to Bitcoin, much like with the collapse of the Euro which will be happening soon, I suspect though because it directly threatens them a lot of the super powers will be predictable and try to make it illegal and stamp it out but smaller countries may take a different view and actually use it to boost their economy, perhaps they'll even increase currency competition within their own country.

money isn't illegal but items and services people buy with it can be same concept im thinking with bitcoins. If some1 buys a pound of crack 4 100btc they still breaking the law buying crack lol

Well its more likly they will get bans for sure mostly because the growth is exponential

I think the U.S will ban it definitely, don't know about the other countries though but Bitcoin is a direct threat to a lot of country's sovereignty however you look at it.

What would a law banning bitcoin look like?

Hilarious :D

Banning? As long as someone's brain is alive, they can access their BTC, or tell someone how to. Summary execution of the bitcoin user, and use of extreme prejudice to prevent transfer upon death by any dead-man switch type services or estate lawyers.

If the object was merely to regulate and tax the living fuck out of it, forced brain scans to reveal private key/brainwallet access. As long as the rights enumerated in the 4th Amendment are infringed out of existence anyway...

Care to prove that statement? Most of the Bitcoin trading I've done here, or even seen here on the forums, has been pretty legal.

The forums are just one place BTC are used. For one, gambling here is illegal for the majority of the site, and that's one of the most profitable areas. Illegal gambling, drugs, guns, stolen items, hitmen (not for sure on this), and illegal services are all examples of what Bitcoins are used for. If you go to the Deepweb, the only currency people take are BTC. It's only common sense that a payment method that can be used like BTC is, and stay completely anonymous, would be used for illegal activity, right?

I think that people here are missing the point.  While they can't eliminate bitcoins themselves because of the peer-to-peer network and blockchain/wallet system, if the government (for the sake of argument let's say the US govt.) wants to stop the spread of Bitcoin they can "ban" them, and then prosecute any businesses that accept bitcoins and freeze their USD funds (like WordPress).

Then they go after Dwolla, BitInstant, etc..

They don't have to wipe Bitcoin out of existence, but if they are able to stop what is currently some decent momentum towards wider acceptance/adoption by forcing large scale legitimate businesses out of the market, then the value of BTC will drop, demand will fall, and it will go back to being something that hackers play with on Tor.

I'm not saying that this is about to happen, or that they have a huge interest in stamping out Bitcoin right now, but it is very naive to think that they can't do it.  If they provide a strong enough financial disincentive for merchants to accept bitcoins, they can strangle the movement in its cradle, so to speak.

I agree. Miners need fiat for juice and hardware. Sellers of illegal good need fiat for food, clothing and shelter. It's far from obvious that a majority of bitcoin trades are for illegal goods.

No.

True, only a few key services would have to be disabled to make paying with BTC much more harder.
Say the US govt. would make up some money laundering excuses and shutdown exchanges or just disable payment for them (Mt.Gox, BitInstant etc).
Suddenly the most important nodes and all bootstrap nodes would disappear from the network (DDOS).
Mining pools wouldn't work anymore because the domains will be seized (seems like all important ones have US domains).
Users couldn't communicate anymore efficiently since the biggest forum would be shutdown.
Seems scary...

A better question might be whether or not Bitcoin (and crypto currenty in general) would be the subject of any enacted legislation in 2013. "Illegalized" is almost a non sequitur. Legalization is the process of legislating a statute or ordinance into the standing record. AFAIK there is no standing legislation surrounding Bitcoin or other crypto currency (with the exception of crytpography export laws). So, if any legislation, regardless of how it is interpreted (good or bad) is made part of the standing record then Bitcoin will be legalized (yes, even if the spirit and intent is to prevent you or I from having and using it).

Governments can't even keep heroin out of prisons, good luck on making bitcoins illegal.

Private ownership of gold was illegal in the US for several decades. But it did not stop people from stacking it.

Those who claimed, that it would be unlikely for statists to organize any coordinated effort to control Bitcoin because it would be profitable for a country to not partake...

Example:
International Opium Convention and successors. Tell me one modern country where the partaking in opium consumption is as legal as the consumption of alcohol is. Same with cannabis, because it was on the same lists. Those kind of international contracts are also usually bound to other contracts in about the same way as the US federal government coerces states to enforce seatbelt laws by making the flow of various funds to the state depend on enforcing said bollock laws.

There's a lot more illegal activity that Bitcoins are used for than you may think. If you explore the DeepWeb you'll see what I'm talking about. The people doing illegal activities are usually the ones making the most money, because, well, for one they're taking the most risk. They're taking advantage of risky services without the risk involved. It all comes back to the anonymity Bitcoin provides. If somebody wanted to sell 100M's worth of guns and drugs, there best option would be to use BTC, because it offers absolutely no paper trail whatsoever.

Except that you can't sell 100M of bitcoins. In every sense.

I don't think that you can prove your statement, anyway. It's just your tought.

I used that number as an example. I also just proved my statement, the forums on the Deepweb are bigger than this, and there are 100's of them. Even the biggest profitable section of this forum is illegal. At least for about 90% of the forum. Do you have any statements to back up why you think it isn't used for a large majority of illegal activities?

http://evoorhees.blogspot.com/2012/04/bitcoin-libertarian-introduction.html

following topic will help you figure out why bit won't be illegally

Are you sure that Bitcoin Talk is where the large majority of Bitcoin transactions take place?

No. All publications by the US government are in the public domain. The GPO may have a nominal charge if you want something on paper, but everything the US Government makes available is completely unrestricted by copyright. When the NSA published suite B which includes SHA-256 and ECDSA they both became public domain. Actually they became that earlier in the process of being proposed for inclusion in suite B.

Anyone saying either algorithm is encumbered by patent or copyright is spreading FUD.

The problem of the proof stands to who brings up the theory - show me these deep web forums.

Here's a post where I describe a site from the Deep-Web in depth  :P - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=135976.msg1448469#msg1448469

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt

Look for FUD first, before the effort to eradicate begins...

I am a bit suprised this has'nt happened form a company you can "trust" i.e. instead of Bitcoin why isn't there YahooCoin or MSCoin?

Patrick

It's already 12 days into 2013 here where I live and Bitcoin was still legal last time I checked. Hanging on for further updates...

it would be easy to make bitcoin illegal.... but MUCH harder to cripple or eradicate it completely... so doubt they'll even bother making laws on it

it would be easy to make cannabis illegal.... but MUCH harder to cripple or eradicate it completely... so doubt they'll even bother making laws on it


i hope this illustrates how hopelessly misguided that statement sounded to me.

My hope is that Bitcoin stays under the radar until it's in widespread use, and then it's too late for the government to ban it. Just like happened with alcohol, tobacco and the internet. They got too big before the government could stop it and use their propaganda against it, so they just had to accept it. Perhaps it will happen with Bitcoin too.

why would it be illegalized lmao... bitcoins are great

Because the drugs war is going SO well  ::)