If extreme libertarians wanted to support the libertarian paradise, then they would flock to Somalia and participate in assassination politics to keep a centralized government from forming that controls all of Somalia.
Wut? Just to be clear, it is a hypothetical. I'd like an extremist libertarian to explain how Somalia differs from a libertarian utopia, just like I'd ask an ideological communist why the Soviet Union didn't turn out to be the worker's paradise that Karl Marx envisioned. So far the only answer presented is that a very young, internationally recognized government that has held the majority of the capital city for less than three years, is to blame. I think mostly you'd just like to boost your post count .... all of your stupid questions (and straw arguments) are answered quite well elsewhere in numerous publications over many years already. Just get out there and research, if you are genuine, which I highly suspect not. |
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Coward. You disagree with a corrupt system but state you'll do nothing to change or stand up to it.
Proud to remain a coward. Smart criminals don't get caught. Dumb criminals get caught. Really dumb criminals don't require a confidential informant to inform the government of their activities. You seem suspiciously well-versed in the conniving (covertly criminal ways) of the government agents, and their informants ... coward government agent? |
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Federal Judge Rules Bitcoin is a currency ... http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/07/bitcoin-clampdown-continues-as-federal-judge-says-its-a-currency/A federal judge in Texas has declared that Bitcoin is a currency and should therefore be regulated just like U.S. dollars The only limitation of Bitcoin is that it is limited to those places that accept it as currency. However, it can also be exchanged for conventional currencies, such as the U.S. dollar, Euro, Yen, and Yuan. Therefore, Bitcoin is a currency or form of money, and investors wishing to invest in BTCST provided an investment of money. This a Federal court ruling. Schizophrenic tax-evading Judges? |
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No. How about you describe in detail to us idiots how screwed up and schizophrenic the Federal government really is? It's quite clear the Federal Judge is saying it is legally to be treated as money. Are you saying the IRS is basically a criminal organisation that can use its very own legal definitions to extort wealth from the USA citizenry? How does that work?
Umm, ya. They even have their own court in which to sue you for your unpaid taxes. I never advocated or endorsed the system, I just want to stay out of jail and be able to live a public life without having to go underground as a criminal. Coward. You disagree with a corrupt system but state you'll do nothing to change or stand up to it. |
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Herp, derp ... guess he didn't read the Satoshi white paper, Abstract, first line.
"Regulators we've briefed love our innovative approach to solving the compliance problem because we've given them control over every transaction."
Lol, wtf, are they serious or just trolling?! Regulator control over every transaction is one of the huge problems with the current system.
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But, but but ... Federal Judge Rules Bitcoin is a currency ... http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/07/bitcoin-clampdown-continues-as-federal-judge-says-its-a-currency/A federal judge in Texas has declared that Bitcoin is a currency and should therefore be regulated just like U.S. dollars The only limitation of Bitcoin is that it is limited to those places that accept it as currency. However, it can also be exchanged for conventional currencies, such as the U.S. dollar, Euro, Yen, and Yuan. Therefore, Bitcoin is a currency or form of money, and investors wishing to invest in BTCST provided an investment of money. This a Federal court ruling. It seems pretty well spelled out ... someone must be smoking the SR products at the IRS? |
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You do know that the IRS ruling and the federal judge's ruling are two different things, applied to narrow scopes in the law. The case you cited applies to AML/Money Transfer laws, while the IRS ruling allows bitcoin holders with long term capital gains to be taxed at a lower capital gains rate. No. How about you describe in detail to us idiots how screwed up and schizophrenic the Federal government really is? It's quite clear the Federal Judge is saying it is legally to be treated as money. Are you saying the IRS is basically a criminal organisation that can use its very own legal definitions to extort wealth from the USA citizenry? How does that work? |
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It appears so .... Federal Judge Rules Bitcoin is a currency ... suck on that fat one IRS!! http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/07/bitcoin-clampdown-continues-as-federal-judge-says-its-a-currency/A federal judge in Texas has declared that Bitcoin is a currency and should therefore be regulated just like U.S. dollars The only limitation of Bitcoin is that it is limited to those places that accept it as currency. However, it can also be exchanged for conventional currencies, such as the U.S. dollar, Euro, Yen, and Yuan. Therefore, Bitcoin is a currency or form of money, and investors wishing to invest in BTCST provided an investment of money. This a Federal court ruling. It couldn't get any clearer, the IRS has made a huge mistake! |
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Yes the TARP was paid back in full except for Citi of which the Treasury hold common stock of C and will make $12B profit on the TARP program on selling the Citi stock. This is a fact.
Nobody is stopping you for applying for loan at a bank. If your business is so big that banks can't service you, then you go to the govt to get the loan. The role of gov in economics is to be buyer or lender of last resort. If they didn't provide this function there is nothing to stop a downward spiral.
You haven't just been drinking the Kool-Aid you've been swimming in the punch bowl .... we're on a wild downward spiral of the banks and govt. making. Recall the "too big to jail"? ... this is why justice has been denied, prosecuting individual criminal bankers, like Blankfein and Dimon would collapse the whole rotten system. MF Global? Corzine walked away uncharged after demonstrably misappropriating customer funds and physical assets worth $1 billion ... do I need to go on? Paid back? Point to me one criminal banker who has handed back their bonuses that was known to have come directly from government bail-out checks. The rest of the money was taken from society in one form or another as the mega-banks provide zero utility, only serving to bleed the real economy to line their own pockets, It's become a mega-racket and it serves only to enrich those at the top, as can be seen very clearly when you look at long term graphs of wealth inequality and the soaring inequality since 2007-08. Final comment. Apologies to Slippery Slope and his excellent model and discussion thread |
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I'm not sure I would class some of those countries as 'major' ... but there is a general sense now that bitcoins are leaving the USA, and at an accelerating rate.
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Without derailing the thread any further into anti-Libertarian rants from Newbies ... (strange how none of them have anti-Mao anti-Marxists rants, USA after all was founded and made great by Libertarians)
... you're wrong, they suspended GAAP and changed the mark-to-market rules to mark-to-model for the very reason that the entire mega-banking complex was operating outside the law under colour of criminality. They were insolvent and to continue trading knowingly an insolvent institution is criminal. They were not only bailed out financially by the taxpayer (the economic repercussions are all around you so have no idea how you can say "it was paid back" like some petulant child) ... they deserve not one cent of the 100x salaries because they owe society every penny and more, not just for the ridiculously misallocated bonuses, but for the massive and widespread economic destruction they have caused. Must be nice to have a bribed congress who can change the laws when you are caught involved in a massive criminal enterprise that is raping society for trillions eh?
They should have all be let go bust and begin again. As it now stands, you should be very afraid because by bailing out the incompetent and corrupt all Congress has done is double down and make a bigger bet, such that the next bust will be worse than 2007. There are no free lunches my ranting banker friend, nature always bats last and human nature owes you one.
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The story: "The federal government will tax digital money such as Bitcoin".
The rest is peripheral, no matter how shiny.
Can they do it? Can they tax global entities? Can they tax mathematics? Can they tax abstractions? Can they tax global mathematical abstractions in their little corner of the world?
Time will tell.
Of course they can tax it, simply passing a law requiring all bitcoin wallet addresses of US citizens and corporations to be declared for tax purposes would suffice. How many people then choose to avoid tax by not declaring is another question all together, but I suspect most would rather not risk prison, and 'most' is all you need. So will that be Litecoin wallets also? Namecoin, peercoin, primecoin ... really? |
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You say the current system is fragile. That may be true but it isn't because of the Federal Reserve System. The dollar is/was pretty stable. The 2008 crisis has more to do w liquidity. Banks like Bear Stearns & Lehman got too leveraged on mortgage derivatives. But these derivatives were back w toxic assets. Investors heard the rumors and worried their investments would go bust so they pulled out. It's like a bank run but not because they feared collapse of dollars. They feared the collapse of their investments. As these MBS collapsed, the banks couldn't unwind them fast enough. Other banks wouldn't lend them money so Bear & Lehman went insolvent. Over at Goldman, their MBS was insured by AIG. So that means AIG would implode if they had to payout all the insurance on Goldman's MBS. It was a big mess. This is completely delusional or wantonly revisionist ... the entire system was insolvent and the taxpayer bailed them out. If you really are involved in banking how could you have missed that detail? Goldman Sachs bonuses in 2008, (~ $20 billion worth) were paid directly out of the check that the taxpayer wrote to bail-out AIG. It was a pirate@40 pass-thru scandal only a truly evil cadre could abide by and profit from .... They were criminal because a criminally compliant congress bailed out broke institutions to the tune of trillions of dollars stolen from the wealth of nations themselves to make bankers whole on bad bets that made the entire system insolvent. Just because they were not prosecuted does not absolve them of their criminality. |
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From my comments on various MarketWatch.com articles, I believe that only a minority of ordinary stock market investors have purchased bitcoins, and even fewer are true believers. And the ponzi scheme, pump and dump notions have been applied to bitcoin for four years by skeptics. A true believer is one who believes that the Bitcoin economy will achieve future market domination. I became a true believer in the 30 minutes that it took me to read Satoshi Nakamoto's paper back in 2010. I am a computer scientist with a degree in applied mathematics, who also has a great interest in business. I have lived long enough to witness full adoption of many disruptive technologies, e.g. TCP/IP, bank credit cards, ACH (US Automated Clearing House), bank check truncation, Automatic Teller Machines, emailed financial statements, hard disk drives, open source software, microcomputers, electronic word processing, digital spreadsheets, relational databases, algorithmic credit scoring, Virtual Private Networks, High Frequency Trading, etc. Back in 2010 I had recently worked with X.509 certificate trust chains and knew how digital signatures worked. I also understood how distributed peer-to-peer networks and clients worked at the developer level. Thus it was easy for me to understand how Satoshi's platform operated. I fully understood the problems with the current financial infrastructure, having programmed for a wide variety of bank software applications, and also as an ordinary banking customer. Whether a particular Bitcoin company can build a moat around its core business to fend off competition, whether a particular Bitcoin company can endure and achieve market domination - is not my concern. Whether Bitcoin achieves future market domination as a payment mechanism, as a technology platform, and as a deflationary store of value - is my concern. One of the reasons I came to this board is because my old retired father got a tip somewhere to invest in bitcoins because "its the future of curency", "its like digital gold", "designed deflationary - always go up in price", etc.. I got so sick of hearing this drivel and thinking how all these unsophisticated folks will get suckered into it and lose their money. It happens on Wall Street all the time w tech stock pumping. Before that it was mortgages. And before that it was internet stocks. The worst are penny stocks and small & micro cap. But at least w stocks we have fundamentals to use as price indicator. I also have some background in economics and finance. So I understand the finance/ banking system The simple economic reason bitcoin will fail as replacing fiat. It is not centrally controlled. The power to adjust the supply of money is extremely crucial in order to maintain liquidity in money markets. This didn't happen overnight it evolved to this stage through painful lessons of history. Without this aspect bitcoin is inefficient as money. As a technology I think cryptocurrency has potential. The public ledger aspect of it is extremely intriguing. Bitcoins potential is in money transfer not as currency. This is what GS and Buffett said and I agree. I predict that in the future the banks will create some digital cash using public ledger idea. But its not a separate currency but based on dollars in your bank account. Thats what consumers want. Something like M Pesa or Ripple Anyways, you seem like a smart guy. Smarter than most of the bitbugs I've encountered or "believers" if using your semantics I suggest you look into a coursera.org course called "economics of banking" taught by prof Merhling of Columbia U. Theres no politics in this course. Just banking, how it functions, its history. I think you will understand money much more and how banking infrastructures weakness is not because Central Banking or fractional reserve banking. It has more to do w regulations surrounding derivatives, prop trading, shadow banking, etc. Things that can't be solved by inventing a new currency https://class.coursera.org/money-001https://class.coursera.org/money2-001If more crypto developers understood how money works then maybe the next iteration won't be so held back by immature politics or designed to be abused by speculators. If you want to design something useful, then design it to work on top of what we have not replace it. Why do you want millions of indiviual networked bankers? Can they provide financial services like loans or credit? Deal liquidity? Make markets? Or are they there just to support the network for blockchain? Why do you need a new curency when it has to be converted back to dollars? I just don't get what problems bitcoin is supposed to solve Probably when you are so late to the party you should try to figure out what the heck happened to make it such a blast before your shining intelligence showed up to elucidate all and sundry. |
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/26/irs-says-it-will-take-years-produce-tea-party-targ/So is it Commissioner John Koskinen who has handed down this objectionable ruling? Is this the guy who should be getting his email box pounded? Seems like he doesn't give shit much about public opinion ... The Internal Revenue Service’s tea party targeting program is still withholding approval of 19 organizations’ nonprofit status, nearly a year after the scandal was revealed, the agency’s commissioner testified Wednesday to Congress — where he faced fierce criticism from lawmakers who said he is stonewalling.
John Koskinen, the man President Obama tapped to clean up the embattled agency, also said it will take years to respond to all of the document requests from Congress. I guess with rogue agencies you get rouge rulings and no longer operate under rule of law .... dyodd. Morally corrupt organisations probably shouldn't be supported but rather disbanded for the greater good.
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btw, has everyone seen this already? http://politiken.dk/oekonomi/dkoekonomi/ECE2244816/bitcoin-gevinster-kan-stikkes-direkte-i-lommen/After seeing the tax treatment the IRS put out recently, I'd move to Denmark in a second, if I didn't think the whole country is going to sink into the ocean, lol. This would be the sensible stance for Canada (and every country really) to take, but sadly, I get the feeling that Heir Harper will follow the US precedent, as always. :edit: Whoa, wait a sec, Greenland would be under the same law, right? Greenland can't be much worse than Canada, and after the glacier melts, there should be lots of cheap land for sale... hmmmmmm  I think the Danish news is excellent. First UK and now Denmark ... but mostly because this almost guarantees that Switzerland will be able to treat Bitcoin like a foreign currency without being treated like a pariah by the EU ... and Switzerland is the one that matters ... because that is where >$5 trillion in offshore wealth is in "cold storage" ... |
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Question, How is the IRS going to go after all who are mining BTC and how will the IRS go after all of us who purchase goods with BTC. And how will the IRS go after the ones who gamble and receive earnings with BTC  What if we all refuse to give any information to the IRS regarding our BTC trades? I say we End The IRS and EndTheFed!! they will make an example of a few people who will be audited comprehensively. once you hear on the news some guy got 20 years in jail for tax fraud because he didn't report his bitcoin capital gains properly you will think twice before attempting this. if you refuse to give the IRS any information they will throw you in jail obviously... the IRS is already guilty as sin for selectively targetting Tea Party groups and other Libertarian-minded organisations in politically motivated ferocious, terrifying audits that drag on for months and sometimes years ... what's changed again? Once the war starts it may behoove you to recall who fired the first shots? Edit: celebrating and cheering on of State sanctioned violence, intimidation and threats of violence for what are essentially acts of civil disobedience is disgusting and downright ghoulish, on a moral par with the Nazis cheering the persecution of Jews. |
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Therefore it is reasonable to suppose that small-world effects will disconnect the bitcoin price relationship from transaction volume, in that the future whole Bitcoin network will not be uniformly well connected but rather be clusters of well connected nodes.
I don't see how this applies to Bitcoin. One of its fundamental properties is the decentralized consensus, as long as this mechanism works all nodes must be in the same state. By definition there can't be any clusters that behave differently and connectivity is not an issue as long as there is a connection to the network. Unless you are assuming that forks could exist alongside each other in completely disconnected networks, but then Bitcoin has failed as a whole. Sorry that I was not sufficiently clear. By way of example lets look at the worldwide email system. Every email client can reach any other email client by email address - just like Bitcoin. But if China was suddenly subtracted from the email system, it would not make my email service worth a lot less because I cannot communicate in Chinese. The worldwide email system has small world effects in that well connected nodes, i.e. nodes that might send messages to one another, are partitioned by natural languages that the users understand. By well connected, I mean that a node has a reasonable probability of reaching another node in the network - not that it merely possible to reach that node. But if everybody on the network can speak Bitcoin .... |
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Sounds reasonable. Gold isn't a currency either is it?
Seems rather complicated to report for taxes though.
I think you'll find gold and silver referred to as the only "lawful money", as per the Constitution. |
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