More than 9/10th's of USD is "virtual". Banks do not have a dollar bill (note, or coin) for every dollar they "have" in their accounts. We're talking at least 90% of the USD has no note or coin to represent it. There just is no reason to have that. Coin and note go through fluctuations where banks try their best to predict how much they'll need, which comes and goes from them.

When Bank A sends money to Bank B, Bank A needs to mark it off their books or they are "double spending" (they could also claim they sent it to two different banks). The US uses clearinghouses as a third party to verify that these things are happening correctly, without creating money out of thin air on the books ("double spending"). This is happening constantly as every single debit and credit card is used, on top of other banking/money service activities.

ON the other hand, any sufficiently decentralized virtual cryptocurrency cannot double spend. That's literally the first thing in the Bitcoin white paper. I highly suggest you read this in order to understand a bit more, and the link at the end of it is very good for a slightly technical understanding.

Policing agencies can use bitcoin for tracking. The problem is they need pre-existing targets to make it very useful. If you are hacked then you can show them your address, but by the time they get to you, who knows what has happened to the bitcoin. Who knows if the private address holder is in your country. Unless it's repeatedly used by bad people, like for terrorism, they won't have any way to go out and reclaim it. It's like if someone steals a $20 bill from you. Even if you have the serial number and it gets read at a bank one day, that doesn't invalidate the other 100 transactions it has legally been used for, at all.

But no matter what details you have, literally unless it's your cousin whom has your Nano Ledger in his glove box, they can't recover anything for you. And even at that, there may not be any funds left on it. No government can force a change on any cryptocurrency ledger that is decentralized.

That's because you can double spend good ole fiat. The problem doesn't exist with Bitcoin and most cryptos. There just isn't the need for the same regulation and oversight, especially when anyone can look at the blockchain.

Well, the problem is that whatever happens with Bitcoin effectively pretty much happened in another country. What are the police suppose to do? Hire a bunch of hackers?

Ya, it was kind of hard to see his end game, since he was obsessed with the Starks, but not necessarily benefiting them all the time?

I got an idea. Why not carry a coin purse with some symbolic bitcoins? They can say bitcoin on them. See what they say when you show them to them. 

Maybe I missed this already being said...


You need to understand that the thing about Bitcoin being limited is that we may never seen that last coin. It's like a math problem that approaches zero, but never gets there. The difficulty never stops increasing. At some point it may take a year to mint one single coin. We just won't know till we get there.

Wow. What a horrid outlook.

ICOs allow autonomy of money. They allow decentralized participation.

The average person can get in on an ICO, the same way they can go to a casino. Where as securities require archaic framework, muddled with endless corruption, short sellers, etc. You may not even be able to buy into them, depending on who you are and who they are, and it'll cost you money.

An ICO also allows funding without a change in ownership. Unlike a traditional security where public stock offerings may kill the company under new ownership, thereby screwing the small investor, an ICO doesn't relinquish control to penny pushers. Another way to see them is they allows the mission statement to continue without intervention.

IMO ICOs are amazing, many of their attributes will be found in the future of investing.

Legalization isn't always a good thing. Consider that it may not have been illegal before. It's not like if you make something in your wood shop you need to ask the state if it is legal.

Legalization often provides a framework for how they want to treat it, perhaps separate from existing laws. Sometimes they are just saying they are not going to criminalize it. Whether or not special laws are more beneficial than existing ones is a case by case basis.

"friendly" might be a better term.

Ripple isn't a cryptocurrency. XRP is...

It is the same as before, if it's not a security, they don't care.

I highly doubt it is John Cena promoting Bitcoin. It's John Cena promoting John Cena, with Bitcoin.

Invest in good cryptos, take some out to play with so you aren't unsettled.

Actually it's more like this...

The US sees it as money falling into your lap, as if you did it for free. That is because it is treated as property. Think of it like this, you "inherited" Bitcoin from your uncle when he passed away. But your uncle is a miner.

They are not recognizing that you've paid taxes on everything that allowed you to mine. And if you didn't it was probably subsidized by taxes. Yet. They do not recognize the POW required, either.

Your analogies do work. So you can see how absurd it is...




There are actually funny clauses. Technically if you don't regularly and substantially (the law's words) produce bitcoins you don't fall under the law. No one with a "hobby" fits under the law, legally. However this clearly doesn't make any sense given that there's no reason to turn off a bitcoin miner. And there is no definition of what "substantially" really means; but it would be clear if you lived off of it instead of another source of income it would be considered substantial.

Here's an analogy I will make: If I make a substantial omelet every morning single morning, do I own tax on the going rate of $12 at a breakfast restaurant?



I recommend you don't pay taxes. Frankly I cannot condone paying taxes on any crypto until the conversion to fiat. I am not saying what I suggest is defacto legal. The problem is while you could probably win in court, you can't afford to fight the battle in court. The future is unwritten in this realm. For countless reasons it's not practical at all to impose these taxes. Examples are: embedded forms of mining & fractions of unmovable amounts; the US will be crippled in financial structures by being out-competed, the state has no real purview over something that is decentralized globally & offers no basic rights for the, etc!

You can always choose to record your mining for future implications. But as you know this is basically insane as well, trying to keep track of tiny fragments of stuff.

Uh... so you paid more taxes on actual income, and you expect them to come down on you for not paying less tax through capital gain tax? 

Right. They are trying to cover their own butts. Why? Because millions of little whiny idiots have condemned ICO's and pressured the SEC to act like it has something to do with them. If you have ever been on twitter you'll notice a lot of people worried about ICO's causing harm. And yet gambling is legal all over the US in one way or another, smoking tobacco is legal, alcohol is legal... What's their point? That people are not smart enough to choose how they spend their money? We live in the information age, never before has there been a better time to buck the nearly century old laws about securities. When the laws for securities came about the telephone had only just become widely adopted...

Those people are just trying to make the past present.

Paying tax on Bcash would make sense if it were in the purview of the state, but it is not.

Those who write these articles are just desperate to write about anything, especially if it's BS. They don't see the future in the least. The future cannot be the same as the past, and be new. Crypto's cannot fall under the same tax as the past of it will cripple the United States. I suggest giving my website a read...

All this stuff is based on an assumption banks or something will use XRP. Right now, they don't. All the news you see is about adopting the Ripple Network, not XRP (they may be on the same blockchain, ironically).

The Ripple Network merely saves a bunch of "IOUs" on the blockchain.

Seriously... it doesn't look good.

Probably more like $0.10... 

Nodes don't get anything for running the network. That makes it centralized, because no one cares unless they can make money on it.

You can transfer fiat to paypal from Coinbase but not vice-versa.