Bitcoin Forum

At least the one going through mine..


How do you legislate around bitcoin, in order to take down the bad guys (like murderers, terrorists, not to mention drug deals, sex traffic, etc.) without bearing down too heavily on innovative businesses or shutting out potential markets?


THAT my friends, is the question...or its at least one of them.

You don't. 

Do I win a prize?

I guess feds (or local law enforcement) must be able to blacklist some adress, meaning miners wouldn't accept transactions coming from this adress. Then they would be able to block some drug dealer fund if they can identify the address.
But this is easy to counter, online criminal just have to use different adress for each incoming transaction, randomly generated.

Another solution is to disable criminals to spend their coins without telling their identity. To do that you need to make every business using bitcoin follow KYC policy.


PS : english not native language

How do we keep people who use Bitcoin to buy offensive things like pornography or devil music such as Metallica or One Direction or non-mainstream religious material such as some forms of Christianity or certain Muslim/Jewish teachings?

I know most people have been thinking about this but I am bold enough to say it.

One solution may be to require webcams to be attached to all Bitcoin clients with desktop streaming and we monitor every person spending their money. The more centralized solution the better of course.

Being ironic, best way to solve problems since 1853.

There are two things that scare me :
-the government passing laws crippling it (in my country)
-bitcoin+tor makes it easy for cyber-criminals to buy drugs, guns, child pornography, crowfund for murders or terrorist actions

Burying your head in the sand won't help in findind some kind of balance

I suggest they use whatever laws they use against those people with their use of dollars in those SAME activities. Simply setting a legal precedent by ruling that where the law states "money/ dollars /payment" that bitcoin or any vitual currency is held to be within that definition and therefore could not be used as an excuse to evade or circumvent existing laws.

There is no need to re invent the wheel for bitcoin in those respects. Legislation may be required for other matters.

No, no.  It's, unfortunately, written into law that we can't monitor our own citizens, even for their own good like you propose.  But this doesn't have to stop us protecting people from becoming victims of their own deviance: afterall, we have friends with benefits!  The US and Great Britain can monitor each other's citizens so all of our people can benefit from these freedom-protections.   :)

What makes you think the purpose of legislation is to not hurt the small businesses?

If you are a big business you pay Congress a lot of money to specifically hurt the small businesses.   The small businesses, the startups are your biggest strategic threat.   Far cheaper to just kill them in the cradle then someday run the risk of having to face them in a fair fight. If you are a company like WU or PayPal you aren't going to 51% the Bitcoin network, nerd fantasies aside it would be risky, expensive, and pointless.  You are going to lobby to have Congress to slam these tiny startups (2,3, 6 people and budgets of $100K to $1M) with tens of millions of dollars in regulatory cost.

You do like you did it before Bitcoin.
I'm in for the second place prize.

Before Bitcoin the dark net was way less frightening. And they couldn't stop it anyway.

I am sure this is what you meant.


When will people learn that governments do not always have their best interests at heart.

The Bank of England sent a representative to a meeting to discuss this precise issue.  They were very blunt about it - cash is way more suited to crime than Bitcoin and as such they have no particular concerns about Bitcoin as a way to pay for crime.

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2013/11/20/1699582/the-bubble-is-us/

Bitcoin is well suited to money laundering though - they have a very different attitude to it from that perspective.

Well.. Is that's the default state of mind nowadays hm? Why should drugs be something forbidden? Because the government decided so?
It's easy and popular for politicans to "fight" the symptoms all over the gobe instead of dealing with the root-causes. But there are still too many people which believe this BS they are telling.
And by the way: How do we take down the bad guys which are using [$/€/whatever]?

The ability to use recon and killer drones will more than compensate for this if you ask me

+1

+1

It's a well established businness to keep ppl in this bubble..

Well, bitcoin has already been demonstrated to be less anonymous than cash in many cases. I would suggest more legislation is not needed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q

when has legislation stopped any of the badness it was created to stop?

All of those things are already against the law.  Problem solved.  :)

I think the biggest misunderstanding regarding crypto currency is that it's compared to regular fiat transactions when in fact it resembles cash much more. Before the internet and credit cards, we would use cash which was, and still is, very difficult to keep track of. Now that people are increasingly using the internet for shopping instead of physically going to a store, bitcoin lets us pay anonymously just like if we paid a shopkeeper in cash, without them ever knowing our name and who we are.

Physical cash is still used without tracking to purchase illegal goods. Short of discontinuing it altogether there really is no practical way to avoid this and with bitcoin, just like cash, the pro's massively outweigh the con's. Should we also stop selling steak knives and paper weights, because someone might use them to hurt someone?

What's even funnier, is that e.g. in the US guns are sold quite freely and they have but one purpose, but somehow bitcoin gets a bad rep just because a fraction of the population uses it for illegal purposes.

Guns have multiple purposes, the least of them being "to kill" (according to mortality statistics, which show that most GSWs aren't fatal). Despite millions more justified uses by innocent victims than criminal ones, and the BS that "guns are sold quite freely", the exercise of the human right to effective self-defense is nearly infringed into oblivion.

Expect the same googolplex lightyears of liberty taken from BTC if a fraction of an inch is given to the totalitarians.

Well then.. bitcoin will always be cast in a bad light...

The Statist authoritarians always cast anything that could take away their control in a bad light. The same group has been fighting for power for centuries.  Their goal is to rule you.

How is China doing it?

“We have taken note of the development of bitcoin and have adopted measures to prevent money laundering through its trade,”

http://bitcoinblogger.com/taiwanese-and-chinese-central-banks-in-agreement-bitcoin-is-a-virtual-commodity/


Step 1: go after the large "exchanges" and plant them firmly in your pocket (can someone explain how coinbase isn't violating a whole lotta money transmittion laws?
Step 2: require multiple IDs and certainty of who is 'exchanging' maybe even form an official centralized exchange since you can offer the lowest price that noone else can beat, and you're proven safe and secure! even offer instant exchanges right into your visa debit card! heck maybe even end the concept that private companies can be exchanges! Why not!
Step 3: that blockchain is way too large for someone's computer now that all these transactions go through it! enforce the use of official clients that tie in to your amazon / ebay accounts and are usable at any target or starbucks! sign me up!
step 4: yay, everything's documented, a layer above this spooky crypto layer!

b-b-b-but you can just fork the bitcoin chain! sure, then you have the "shady underworld" and the "i opt in to being 100% traceable" chains! which will you prefer? the one that can reverse charges (for a fee of course)?


This FUD brought to you by every government in the world.

(after they do this they're gonna get around to shutting down bittorrent, too)

regulation and legislation around bitcoin does not stop crimes.. it just stops people getting paid for it. but no matter if it bunny rabbit credits, gold, bank notes or another countries legal tender. government do not need to track every transaction to a name and address.. "following the money" is just one option

government for centuries have been able to capture murderers and other notorious criminals without asking everyone to mark bank notes with their name and zip/postal code. so bitcoin does not need to implement any ID for each TX either. i do say if your doing large volume of funds transfer into fiat then obiding by the ID rules can benefit some issues. but there is no need for ID for every tx of bitcoin peer-2-peer.

and this is coming from a high moral person that has only stolen 50c of sweets as a kid as being the worse crime i ever done.

It's a law enforcement issue, not a currency issue.

Anything that can be done with a suitcase full of cash can be done with bitcoin. Laws already exist to deal with financial crime.

A mark on your hand or forehead?  Something with a "666" somewhere in it?

Can you send a suitcase full of cash to the other side of the world in less than a minute? It's a law enforcement issue and a currency issue.

nope, but with bitcoin yes!

I'm not sure I understand what you mean here. What purpose does a gun have, apart from harming living creatures?

How is forcing a violent criminal to surrender without firing a shot "harming living creatures"? Whose fucking side are you on? With BS lines like that, it's certainly not innocent victims'.

The invention of the wheel made it much faster to cart gold around too.

That's not the point of my post. You're argument is that nothing needs to change, but just as currency has evolved laws will evolve. It's one thing to want everything to stay the same, but it's another thing to be realistic and realize legislation is coming. Too much money is changing hands for the power heads not to want a cut of it. Too much money is also being spent "illegally" for them to turn a blind eye to it. The fact legislation is coming makes it a currency issue.   

Dude, chill. The only point I was making when talking about guns vs. btc is that btc in its essence is benign whereas guns are not. I'm not discussing the validity of using a gun for self defense. 

statist bitcoiners

I really just don't get it

 ???

Many people are getting into Bitcoin for many reasons, many of them seeing only understanding portions of the advantage of Bitcoin such as making money or low transaction costs.

When governments fall they will be quite confused as to how it happened.

Get some relationships and infrastructure in place, then wait for the big 'cyber 9/11' so that the laws which become possible afterwards will have some teeth.