Let's say the IRS wants to be able to confiscate bitcoins from tax evaders. So they go to the US courts to get this. A judge ends up ordering the bitcoin.org dev team to include a government backdoor so the IRS can take funds away from those who don't pay taxes.
The devs would be forced to comply right?
Pieter and Wladimir are not US citizens, so a US judge can't order them to do anything. If I was ordered to insert a backdoor, I'd just resign as lead developer and find something else to work on. But this whole scenario sounds like a paranoid delusion; has there EVER been a case where a judge has ordered a software developer to do anything other than stop distributing their software (because of some copyright or patent issue) ? Not so sure you need to be US citizen, extradition is the favored tool theses days, even by other means, eg Assange. Also I think that various protocols, and programs have been ordered modified by Judges, though mainly in patent suits, though this prism thing is perhaps a more pertinent example. If a program was somehow effect on national security I think Judges may order the programer change it, or face contempt. Sorta like journalist who elect to not give up their sources. They don't get to go, oh well I'm not a journalist any more, or working for this paper/story. I disagree with all of this by the way, but never underestimate how flexible the law is against the individual in the hands of the Government. |
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you would not necessarily know that there is a backdoor.
For an experienced programmer who reviews Bitcoin code on a daily basis it should be trivial to spot such a backdoor. Git is such an extremely powerful tool to review exactly who does what and when. It will be almost unfeasible to put a backdoor in Bitcoin, currently. what if they get to git, to not compare this code, mod git just for BTC, in some update, that would trick you as you had being relying on git to find the difference. |
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Let's say the IRS wants to be able to confiscate bitcoins from tax evaders. So they go to the US courts to get this. A judge ends up ordering the bitcoin.org dev team to include a government backdoor so the IRS can take funds away from those who don't pay taxes.
The devs would be forced to comply right?
Open source software makes it so that every change is visible. Currently the Bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind release is signed by the Bitcoin Foundation ... which means the release won't work for Windows 8 and Mac users (as an update) unless Bitconi Foundation signs it. This makes it difficult for some other dev team members who are not a party to this hypothetical IRS backdoor demand to be able to release updates to the client without this backdoor themselves. It would probably have to be a fork with a different name (and signed by some other organization). But the developers don't have final say as to what changes are accepted for the Bitcoin protocol. It is the economic majority who decides: - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majorityi don't get this why does it need to be signed, just copy the cod, take out signing requirement bit and release....what am I missing |
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once you have a right to asset from a debtor as collateral against the loan you get a put option to the value of that asset at that time in BTC But not exactly to the value of the asset at that time. Ok that's really good then, that means you can almost guarantee your operation to 100% of underlying capital as long as the put options can be exercised. The amount of work you must be doing behind the scenes to do all of this must be a lot! |
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So if XRP ever went open source, would it not just get cloned by the BTC community ending XRP, as the cloned version could have a much lesser premine, you know less than 100% so making it more attractive
I do not see a logical way out of this for the XRP claim to going open source.
Open to your views
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We have put options on the assets we have as collateral.
ok by assets do you mean people offer assets and you have option on them or once you have a right to asset from a debtor as collateral against the loan you get a put option to the value of that asset at that time in BTC or something else?  sorry if I am not understanding this right. |
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Given XRP/opencoin seem to be more in the money transmitting business, than you could ever construe BTC to be, where are all the cease and desist/threatening gov letters to them?
Anyone know?
Or is it the case that since Google money and similar are backing it, and it is controllable , there is a hands off approach?
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Yes. with a BTC denominated loan you have to deal with price fluctuations. To counter that you can either take a usd denominated loan or buy an call option...
ok so a BTC loan would have a better security if they backed by escrowed call options. Is this a function of any loan facility in BTC here? I realize this would make the return less but I for one would feel much more secure lending money to a lending institution if they had call options against all bitcoins lent. This would almost guarantee I would at least get my bit-coins back. <brain thinks a bit more> I suspect thought the person offering the call option would charge a lot for it, in fact it just seems to push the same problem back to that person issuing the call option, so maybe a call option is not really a solution |
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Quite Obviously Cali, executive is wrong
Goto court, defense,
[1] it's not recognized by any govt as FIAT,
[2] not issued by any recognised sovereign govt
eg, does giving monopoly money to each other constitute fiat?
What the gov' types fail to understand is that people are willing to work for something, BTC and value it independent of any central issuing authority.
Thus they face a paradoxical dilema, to recognize BTC would legitimize the people the holders of btc as quasi sovereign, and send the price to the "moon" to use troll box vernacular.
to not makes it very hard to make laws that capture it.
How do you write a law that says,
'you can not use Crypto's as money and we don't legally recognize Crypto's as money'
the logic of this is delicious. BTC/CC is really going obliterate much of illogicality in any law / gov system over time.
also does opencoin/XRP get any of these type of threats....I suspect not as it seems to be in the maw of the right money
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Why don't you invest the bitcoins into asicminer shares?
I'm fairly confident that Bitcoin returns will beat asicminer returns. But it's his money to invest as he wants I guess. Yeah, it looks like he is just going to keep the whole thing. How does that compare to that pirate guy? Did he get over $600K? By A LOT! Also, all the money that pirateat40 was holding wasn't actually his, unlike all the money that theymos is holding. I don't know what was said or what promises were made or who owns what funds. But, look at this: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=33E6kJ46This is a non-legal agreement between The Bitcoin Forum ("Forum") and John K. ("Treasurer"). This agreement is intended to be enforced in a non-violent, non-legal way by the community.
What is a "non-legal agreement"? How do you "enforce" an agreement in a "non-violent, non-legal" way? Has anyone, anywhere, ever seen such an agreement in the history of the World outside of Bitcoin? Point of law, courts generally reject privitave clauses 'eg non-legal" on the basis they seek to usurp jurisdiction, not always but often, and the default supervening jurisdiction is usually the one where the service is offered or where the server resides |
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If a loan is made in BTC, and the investment to give the return is not in mining (and that has its risks), eg the investment is a fiat investment, so can only have a fiat return, does this not ensure a a sizeable default on all loans if BTC goes through an order of magnitude increase (10x) over a short period.
Eg, Say bob takes out a loan for 1BTC for 4 months, converts to cash, and does X it makes 200% return, however during the 4 months to repay, BTC has gone up 10x, how will bob repay?
Ok bob may be able to repay, but a lot of the "bobs" out there will not be able to.
So at some point during an BTC evaluation event, I would expect to see a lot of defaults.
I also have not seen any trading scheme that has delivered the increase of BTC over the few years it has been around, so it seems to rule that out as well.
Any how I am interested in you views, and why I may be wrong.
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here is a defacto sticky on QC's |
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I don't want to conduct all my business activities while having to run away & hide from authorities - it's too stressful.
clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap Finally someone around here with sense! it doesn't quite work that way. The gov changes the rules and then they come and get your previously legitimate business, very easily as they know who and where you are. False sense of security. |
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Probably because BTC-E doesn't accept bank wires, well you could send one through interkassa but you'd pay a huge amount of fees. BTC-E only thing I know about them is that I think it's out of Bulgaria, though maybe he just incorporated there and is living in Russia. Either way owner isn't really well known, so unlikely to be trusted with millions per day in liquidity but they're still doing really well anyways. Might as well stay under the radar and continue to make good income with trading fees and avoid mass government problems when you start trading way too much
good point though BTCE seems to trade millions a day? |
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Currently there is no consensus among developers on whether this restriction will EVER be lifted.
Incorrect. Progress is being made on it: The block size will be raised, that is the overwhelming consensus among the people who are actually writing code and using Bitcoin for products and services that it needs to happen.
And there is a tiny minority of people who will loudly proclaim that isn't true and that the core developer are going to destroy Bitcoin if the block size is raised.
If you want to be helpful, please organize a list of objections to raising the block size limit and responses to those objections.
I believe the last objection raised was that a higher block size limit would make it impossible to mine anonymously, but I think that has been debunked with the notion of "read the firehose of transactions non-anonymously, then broadcast just new block header + coinbase + listof(truncated transaction hashes) anonymously."
I'll soon be writing up a plan for how we can safely raise the block size limit.
RE: central planning:
No central planning is why I would like to eliminate the hard, upper blocksize limit entirely, and let the network decide "how big is too big."
RE: "the plan" : The plan from the beginning was to support huge blocks. The 1MB hard limit was always a temporary denial-of-service prevention measure.
This, plus the blockchain optimization work, once live, will enable the next leg of growth for Bitcoin and see the widespread market usage which is needed to justify a four-figure fx rate. i think increasing processor power and internet speeds makes larger blocks ok. |
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I'm pretty much certain that the scalability issues can't be solved soon enough for the exponential trendlines to hold. My old back-of-the-envelope calculation suggested a max price of $400/BTC in the long term, unless the MAX_BLOCK_SIZE issue is solved. Of course it can momentarily shoot to 10 times that.
um what scale ability issues? Its just moving a decimal point for price. I think it will go the other way, price will go up which will drive solutions, because there is more money on offer. Also processing fees will drop as the price goes up because btc it worth more. finally block size can be increased |
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Does anyone know why btce get usd in and out better than GOX,
Btce it seems to have a rock solid trading platform it looks like it could do the volume
so why isn't BTCE number one for volume?
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Confirming Trade Fortress Paid
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we need a quantum computer to solve this also a bit more on yes or no cases |
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It took hundreds of years between the first printing press and mass literacy...
except in korea. also btc has many financial advantages in a short time frame, reading did not. |
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