I doubt they could just "outlaw" it, but i bet they could certainly tie it up in a lot of regulation similarly to what they did with e-gold ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold). However I think Mt.Gox is run from japan? So i don't know if the same laws apply. With Mt.Gox handling nearly 95% of bitcoin exchanges I think in the short term the market would react badly (perhaps a 50%+ drop, maybe more). The #bitcoin-otc irc channel would become a mass brawl. None other the other exchanges look ready for prime time at the moment, but i'm sure a new exchange would pop up fairly quickly and the price would slowly recover (more cautious than before). Maybe instead of a new centralised exchange some clever nut will develop a p2p one. My 0.2cent +1 I think the closure of MtGox will depress the price to $0 for a while and then it will skyrocket up again. |
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They don't need additional structures. Once they find out you have the money, they'll want to know where you got it, what it was for and then their cut of it. They can simply force you to pay by threat of imprisonment.
My bigger concern is for bitcoin. It would not be an insurmountable task to build an alternative using many of bitcoin's fine properties and simply add the concept of complete anonymity with completely reliable accounting.
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the UK tax authority stated that thus far you are only taxed in BTC if you convert it to FIAT currency. So why ever cash out?
Cannot wait until you can buy things like houses directly with BTC
That's today, what happens when NHS and the pound collapses? |
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Today there needs to be a lot of leg work to trace money between institutions. With bitcoins all you would need to do is have a record of address holders. You would be able to trace the flow of money very, very well and much faster than you can today.
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If all the transactions are so clearly visible and they all date back to the creation of the relevant bitcoins, wouldn't bitcoin simply be the single best taxation tool of all time? All that would have to happen is to make it illegal to own a bitcoin address that has not been registered with the state.
Voila, world wide taxation. Not only that but the capital structure of the entire world would be subject to regulation then. The government can then control what you get money for even more than they do now.
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Ender, you have no interest in reason.
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I did not change the question, just because it was in a film does not make it true.
The regulation you are referring to I assume is Glass-Steagall (since you still haven't mentioned a single act by name). Glass-Steagall simply prohibited an investment bank from being a normal bank as well. Nothing in Glass-Steagall would have prevented the repackaging of loans into other vehicles and then having them resold into packages. Not a single line of it would have helped and the actual practice started before Glass-Steagall was repealed in the 90s. Did you actually know that?
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Who thinks both Silk Road and the publicity around it and Bitcoin might not be complete coincidence. Drugs, money laundering, terrorism and child abuse. That's probably what they'll accuse bitcoin of.
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You can't say something wouldn't work if it has not been tested before. Unless you have the tools to scientifically prove it, like I can inference from a formula that I wouldn't be able to lift the earth. And no, comunism or fascism or whatever-ism has nothing to do with the venus project. We are talking about replacing politics with the scientific method, the same way politics replaced religion for social organisation. It has not been tested before. "95% of the evils in that movie could be removed from Earth if we simply started shrinking the government substantially... and that was obvious before the movie." Yeah like we are better now with an unregulated financial system that has led the world to bankrupcy. If anything, this crisis should teach us that neoliberalism benefits a handful of people while the rest of us pay its consequences. About the bitcoin+venus. Venus project doesn't really need any "coin" to work so from that perspective it wouldn't fit. What bitcoins could be useful for is for the transition. We would need money then, and a money that pays no interests to banks etc is perfect  I'm sorry but your facts are skewed. Neoliberalism is every BUT unregulated financial markets. I'm going to challenge you and ask you to point to specific regulations that were lifted that led to the crises, linking cause and effect. Also name the size and the funding of the SEC and other financial regulatory bodies and how they grew in the decade preceding the crises. Please do not simply repeat the party line if you have not seen the facts for yourself. The financial crises was cause by easy fed money, the rest are simply details, cracks the water followed to seep out of the ceiling. The answer is not to build a water proof ceiling but to fix the leaking pipe. An excellent book to read on the subject is Thomas J Woods' "Rollback." An excellent documentary to watch is "Inside Job", won the oscar this year. There you have specific laws that were created after the 29 crack that were lifted since the 80's. USA passes the laws because your government is infiltrated with wall st. capos and all the world pays. It is fact, tv just won't show you. Think why. An oscar does not a fact make. Everything that happened would have happened anyway. I challenge you as an individual to restate the logic behind why "deregulation" and the "free market" are to blame in your own words. Everything you are being told will enslave you more if you believe it. |
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You can't say something wouldn't work if it has not been tested before. Unless you have the tools to scientifically prove it, like I can inference from a formula that I wouldn't be able to lift the earth. And no, comunism or fascism or whatever-ism has nothing to do with the venus project. We are talking about replacing politics with the scientific method, the same way politics replaced religion for social organisation. It has not been tested before. "95% of the evils in that movie could be removed from Earth if we simply started shrinking the government substantially... and that was obvious before the movie." Yeah like we are better now with an unregulated financial system that has led the world to bankrupcy. If anything, this crisis should teach us that neoliberalism benefits a handful of people while the rest of us pay its consequences. About the bitcoin+venus. Venus project doesn't really need any "coin" to work so from that perspective it wouldn't fit. What bitcoins could be useful for is for the transition. We would need money then, and a money that pays no interests to banks etc is perfect I'm sorry but your facts are skewed. Neoliberalism is every BUT unregulated financial markets. I'm going to challenge you and ask you to point to specific regulations that were lifted that led to the crises, linking cause and effect. Also name the size and the funding of the SEC and other financial regulatory bodies and how they grew in the decade preceding the crises. Please do not simply repeat the party line if you have not seen the facts for yourself. The financial crises was cause by easy fed money, the rest are simply details, cracks the water followed to seep out of the ceiling. The answer is not to build a water proof ceiling but to fix the leaking pipe. An excellent book to read on the subject is Thomas J Woods' "Rollback." |
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I'm really dissapointed that the Mises.org website has been completely ignoring Bitcoin. Does anyone here know any regular Mises.org contributors?
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I am liberal, but I am confused regarding the intent and meaning of your post.
Im trying to understand, and I will try do make a guess:
Are you suggesting that, because my views are liberal, I believe that Bill Gates (and people like him) is directly influencing global or local poverty? Maybe my answer is yes, but not necessarily the way you think.
do you? |
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Hoarding of sound currency is how an economy begins to repair itself during a hyperinflation. This is not speculation or theory, it's history.. Zimbabwe, as one example, hoarded, Dollars, Rands and Pulas for years and years. Then in one months time the economy nearly completely rejected the Zim Dollar. Many other countries have dollarized since the Dollar is more stable than their local currencies.
There is undoubtedly a ceiling for bitcoin, we will over shoot that ceiling by a mile most likely before coming back down. That ceiling is much, much higher imho than anyone would like to guess at right now. Think about this for a moment, with only 6mil BTC in existence, how much would it value need to be for a company like Amazon to be able to use it for any practical purposes? What would it's value need to be for a view large companies to use it? What would it's value need to be for Amazon, a few large companies and only 20 million other people need to be to use it?
All I'm saying is that the value will most likely be reached first as adopters climb into a very scare item and then the market will become truly effective.
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Read this quite old reply by forever-d to a post about hostile action against the bitcoin network, though it just had to be posted afresh. Personally I don't agree with the concept of pirating stuff that others worked to produce, but the sentiment and logic here are elegant to say the least! Since you are using p2p filesharing networks as an analogy...
Government crackdowns actually stengthened the p2p filesharing ecosystem instead of weakening it.
Government crackdowns acted like something of an evolutionary pressure; for every filesharing network that was successfully destroyed, a new generation of better, stronger ones sprang up.
Napster relied on a single centralised server. The government shut down the server. Result? Several Napster clones that could support multiple servers. Then the government started taking down servers one by one. Result? Serverless technology. Then the government started prosecution of individual users. Result? Proliferation of VPN providers and pseudonymous p2p. And so on....
I doubt we would have a lot of innovative technologies today (eg. i2p, tor, bittorrent) if governments simply had left Napster alone. Talking about unintended consequences!
Conclusion:
Government may succeed in destroying the current block chain. It may even succeed in destroying the current implementation of the Bitcoin protocol. But it will never destroy the source code, the meme, the spirit, and the community. The p2p cryptocurrency genie is out of the bottle.
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During hyperinflations sound money is first hoarded until it reaches sufficient volume and holders to displace the unsound money. During this period the sound money is only used as a store of value, it would not make too much sense to trade in it when one has little of it and quite a bit of the stuff you don't want. Get rid of the stuff you don't want first.
Once everyone has enough (doesn't need to be a lot) of the stuff they do want as money, they can stop using the stuff they don't want to use as money, hey presto, new money!
There are very few coins and very many dollars. It may be some time before it is sufficiently hoarded to displace current economic activity.
Quite serendipitous as I'm not sure even Satoshi saw this as occurring. :-)
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