Parece que charge-back existe sim, mas de uma forma mais limitada:

https://cms.paypal.com/br/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=ua/BuyerProtComp_full&locale.x=pt_BR

If I was holding EUR in a bank account in Greece, Spain, or Portugal, I would have reasons to be seriously worried at the moment, even if I was an "ordinary person" who doesn't know what a libertarian is.

The risk of the Euro breaking apart as a result of bad central bank policies is very real at the moment.  It is not some theoretical dystopian wet dream in the minds of libertarian philosophers.
I know lots of hands-on people who are working in the finance industry and some of them think that the risk of a EUR collapse by 2013 is 50%.

Your EUR in the Greek bank would then probably be converted to Drachmes, and god knows how far these would devalue.  Even in a German bank account you will be facing uncertainty. How would the central bank set the EUR / Deutsche Mark / EUR2.0 / whatever exchange rate?

Skepticism about centralised fiat currencies is very much in the Zeitgeist at the moment, even among ordinary people. That skepticism will draw some of them to Bitcoin.

You think I am being paranoid? Well, you don't have to take my word.

The Swiss Franc/ Euro exchange rate has recently reached a historic high. (the Swiss Franc is seen as a safe haven currency because the Swiss central bank is not quite as incompetent as the others). The market doesn't lie.


I agree, ordinary web merchants are no killer app.

Some have suggested decentralised p2p file storage as a killer app. This is an example where you can only utilise a decentralised currency. Or at least, if you utise a third party payment method, that third party has the power to shut down the entire storage network at will. This would be seen as a weakness and would increase the risk of data loss from a user's perspective.

Another killer app that has been suggested is a p2p DNS fused into the blockchain of Bitcoin.

Scary.

Imagine the following, not totally unlikely scenario:

Your boss has just discovered Bitcoin, and for a laugh, he gives everyone a little "New year's bonus" of 150 BTC.

Being the meticulous person that he is, he includes this bonus when he fills out his tax form and asks you to sign it.

You are new to Bitcoin and not particularly convinced by the idea, so you immediately spend it all on 2 lbs of finest CaPulin coffee.

A few month later your HD fails catatrophically, and your wallet (and thus any proof that you no longer "own" these bitcoins) has vanished.  In the meantime coffee4bitcoin has gone out of business and is nowhere to be found.

Another couple of months pass, and suddenly Bitcoin goes viral. There are millions of new users joining every day and the price of a BTC skyrockets to 10,000 USD.

At the end of the year you get a tax bill for 10% of your assets, including the 150 BTC that you still officialy "own", now worth $ 1.5 M. Uh oh...

That would be diabolical.

Technically, Bitcoin is not money or property. Bitcoin is just valuable information so my guess is that in theory it's not taxable.
 
Perhaps it helps to think of other situations where an employee gets "paid" in valuable information.

Example: Software company A hires a developer, and pays him a fixed salary. After a few months a competitor tries to hire him by offering a bigger salary. Company A cannot afford to raise his salary, but to avoid losing him they make a deal. He is allowed to study the entire source code of their closed-source product.  Previously he was just given access to the module he was working on.  This will give him valuable insider information about industry practices that will potentially increase his net worth.  

The question is: Will such a "raise" be taxable? If yes, how would the value of the be "raise" be calculated in USD? Would the taxman need to hire an external auditor who signs a non-disclosure agreement? What if it is a prototype that isn't on the market yet? Can the value even be estimated? How would the taxman even know about this, given that the software is secret? And so on...

Bitcoin is such a fundamentally new technology that not even a lawyer will be able to tell you what the precise legal status is.

Certainly, Bitcoin behaves like money, and I'm sure that some judges will also see it that way.  Judges have a tendency to be awfully computer illiterate anyhow, and the risk of a mistrial is high even if technically you are not breaking the law.

The only way to find out for certain is to step forward and be the first of us test it in court. You are entering pioneer territory.

Government does a terrible job of providing public services such as roads and sidewalks.

Here is a real life example: I used to live on a narrow residential street where a lot of families with young children lived. The families were very concerned about their children's safety, because a small number of inconsiderate drivers were using the street as a "rat run" and speeding through at 50-70 km/h. The street became a very stressful, menacing place to live, and so the families proposed turning it into a "living street" with a 10 km/h speed limit, park benches, flower beds, and so on. This proposal was accepted almost unanimously among the residents, and the impact on city traffic flow would have been negligible because it was not a main traffic artery.  

Note: There seems to be a pattern in economics that when anything is offered for "free", a small number of anti-social rogues takes shameless advantage of it to the detriment of a considerate majority - you call that social justice?

Anyhow, the residents ended up lobbying the city council for almost a decade before anything was done. Meanwhile, a whole generation of overweight sedentary children grew up because the parents were too scared to let them ride a bike in front of the house.

First the city council rejected it on bureaucratic grounds. There are top-down, inflexible regulations on how roads are "supposed" to be utilised, completely ignoring the diversity of local preferences and needs.

Then the city council rejected it on political grounds. The mayor's financial sponsors were mainly people who lived outside the city and just commuted through central neighbourhoods for work or shopping. It was not in their interest to promote "living streets".

In a more anarchist society this issue would have been resolved within weeks. One possible scenario: Since the parents care passionately about this issue, they all would have chipped in and purchased the street and run it as a cooperative where they can set their own rules.   Ok, there are  now a handful of commuters who can no longer take the  shortest path to their workplace at a high speed, but do they really care enough about losing 10 seconds commute time to purchase back the street (among themselves) at an even higher price than the concerned parents are prepared to pay?

Nobody can prove this conclusively.  

There are just too many aspects of economics that are not understood yet.  Saying something like "X exacerbated the great depression" is an educated guess at best.  It is like saying "X causes clinical depression, and Y will cure it".  

Perhaps we will never know what really caused the great depression, because even if we develop a  better economic understanding we can't go back in time to do accurate measurements. Or perhaps it will turn out that the great depression was just a random fluctuation in a highly choatic system, in which case it could neither be predicted nor prevented.

Anyhow, intervention is wrong on moral grounds, and it would remain wrong even if it could be proven that intervention has desireable consequences.

The Bitcoin community is doing a good job of selling Bitcoin using rational arguments.

Unfortunately, I don't believe rational arguments are going to convince non-technophiles and non-libertarians (the majority of the population).

My experience so far: When I try to explain the benefits of Bitcoin to friends and relatives, in the majority of cases I get a strong negative emotional response.  

This response is almost automatic, knee-jerk like.  There seems to be something at the very core of Bitcoin that bothers "normal" people, something irrational (when I ask them to be specific about their objections, they become irritated or change the subject).

When I try a rational response, it doesn't work. Even if the rational part of their brain agrees with me.  

I think we need some snappy emotional counter-arguments that we can throw at people pre-emptively.  

So here are some emotional objections I've heard:

* Scam!
* Ponzi scheme!
* Name calling. (You are an idiot for falling for something like this! ; Another one of your harebrained Utopian ideas! ; You are clueless because you are no banker!)
* Proof of work is a waste of energy!
* If there is no guarantee, it must be worthless!
* If I can't touch it with my hands, it must be worthless!
* Economic inequality is unfair! Everybody should be issued an equal amount of BTC!
* OMG Deflation! Bad!
* No regulation against speculators? I lost half of my pension because of those bastards!
* Nobody in charge? That's anarchy! Nothing ever succeeds without a strong leader!
* Money Laundering! Kiddie Porn! Gambling! Drugs! Terrorism!
* I hate tax evaders!
* Capitalism/money is evil!

A currency split is extremely unlikely, unless two networks become completely isolated from each other.

It is almost impossible to restrict the adoption of a Bitcoin clone geographically, because anyone can join the mining effort, and all it takes is one communications link to the main network and the blockchain of the isolated network will be rejected.


In my opinion yes. It it going to be hard to convince a Swiss person of the benefits of an alternative currency when what they have has worked pretty well for the last century.  (In fact, Switzerland already uses a decentralised alternative currency called WIR). 

Someone who has experienced the horrors of the Zimbabwean Dollar first hand, however, is going to be instantly sold on the idea of Bitcoin.

No it doesn't force them to be techies.

Forcing people to be responsible for their own health doesn't force them to be doctors.

Forcing people to secure their gold coin doesn't force them to be banks, or safe manufacturers.

etc.

If there is strong demand for user friendly wallet security, I gurantee that it won't take long until lots of friendly entrepreneurs will offer this service.

Just give it some time. This project is still in its infancy.

Bitcoin is more that just a payment method. It's also a currency.

Other payment methods such as Visa, Paypal, Liberty Reserve, Pecunix, etc. are not currencies. They need to denominate their payments in some external currency that they have no control over.

Bitcoin as a currency solves the problem of the need for a corruptible third party (eg. central bank) to mint the currency.  Compared to gold and silver, it solves the problem that it's hard to send gold over long distances and it's expensive to store securely.

Bitcoin as a payment method is irrevocable like Liberty Reserve but unlike credit cards and paypal. Many here see this as an advantage because revocable payment methods are often abused for chargeback fraud.

It also solves the problem of needing to trust a "bank" to hold your wealth. Liberty Reserve for instance could go bankrupt, become rogue, be shut down by government, etc.  Your bitcoins are stored in the network and you retain full control over them.

Also, anonymity will improve as the economy grows, and more and more people can offer their work/services/goods directly for Bitcoin without relying on exchanges. As long as you only purchase and sell virtual goods full anonymity is possible.

 

Most people in the Bitcoin community think that deflation is actually good for the economy.

The last three months we've already had massive deflation (approx. -75%)  and the Bitcoin economy is doing fine.

See:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deflationary_spiral

Also, the deflation from losing wallets is going to be negligible compared to deflation from new users joining. 

Unlike credit cards, Bitcoin feels like real money to people, and I think that most users treat a wallet.dat file differently to just any data stored on their harddisk. I would be very surprised if many people who own more than few hundred BTC don't keep at least one backup of their wallet.

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.

These companies happily support government coercion when it works in their favour so I have sympathy for people who suggest coercive solutions.

Not if you take the right precautions:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Securing_your_wallet

I doubt that in Guatemala itself they would use the saying "to go from Guatebad to Guateworse". Unless they have a very self deprecating kind of culture, which Latin American countries don't tend to have.

Most likely he is from a neighbouring country.

Seriously though, US Treasuary bills are definitely a Guatemalinvestment.

You are probably even safer buying Guatemalan government bonds.  

Anyone who owns a large proportion of Bitcoins (say, more than 1 million) could in theory corner the market.  

But that would be a one-off.  My estimate is that you could permanently crash the price by selling 1 million BTC at once.  But then you would no longer own 1 million BTC, and the price would eventually creep back up
as more users join. Somebody actually did try to crash the market by dumping 30,000 BTC back in September. They failed - the price went back to the original almost immediately.
 
Also, no matter how many datacenters you fire up, you can at most generate 7200 BTC per day. That is hardcoded into the protocol. So, to get hold of 1 million BTC, Amazon would not only need to fire up the equivalent of several supercomputer clusters, but keep them running for several months. Even a large company like Amazon would have to justify that kind of investment to its shareholders.  They wouldn't do it for frivolous reasons.


There price of Bitcoin is free floating. Currently it's trading at approx. USD 0.25 / Bitcoin.

like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RONJA

Government prohibiting all cryptography? How is that supposed to work? Cryptography is just applied mathematics. The notion of making cryptography illegal is just absurd as, say, making calculus illegal.

and again

Exactly. I grew up with the internet and I may be scarred but I know how do deal with the rawness of an uncesored medium.  If anything it is my parents who need to be protected from stumbling across goatse.