I would strongly suggest that you consider opening this up to non US residents since this is where the real opportunity and demand will be. It is a hugh myth perpetrated by many in the US financial industry that the Patriot Act and related AML requires that one be a US resident with a SSN in order to be able to open a US Bank account or obtain financial services in the US. Nothing can be further from the truth. A non US resident can open a bank account in the US provided they have a TIN (Taxpayer Identification Number from the IRS). One note however the use of a non SSN TIN in this context by a US resident may be against the law. To quote the Bank Secrecy Act, Anti-Money Laundering and Office of Foreign Assets Control Introduction to the Bank Secrecy Act. http://www.ffiec.gov/bsa_aml_infobase/documents/FDIC_DOCs/BSA_manual.pdf (My emphasis in bold) Transactions regulations must be filed with the IRS. Financial institutions are required to provide all requested information on the CTR, including the following for the person conducting the transaction:
Name,
Street address (a post office box number is not
acceptable), Social security number (SSN) or taxpayer identification number (TIN) (for non-U.S. residents),
and
Date of birth
The documentation used to verify the identity of the individual conducting the transaction should be specified. Signature cards may be relied upon; however, the specific documentation used to establish the person’s identity should be noted. A mere notation that the customer is “known to the financial institution” is insufficient. Additional requested information includes the following:
Account number,
Social security number or taxpayer identification number of the person or entity for whose account the transaction is being conducted (should reflect all account holders for joint accounts), and
Amount and kind of transaction (transactions involving foreign currency should identify the country of origin and report the U.S. dollar equivalent of the foreign currency on the day of the transaction).
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+1 We need to be linking to a readable .pdf that does not require to "log in with Facebook". To qoute the report I would say with "High Confidence" that this report is a genuine leak not a fake. |
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First I must say that I am not a Lawyer or an Accountant. I am only sharing what I do for both Bitcoin / Namecoin mining and trading. Bitcoin / Namecoin mining. The value in CAD of the Bitcoins or Namecoins is taken as income when they are mined at the market exchange rate regardless of whether they are subsequently sold or not. This value is the same that is used as the cost to determine the adjusted cost base of the Bitcoins or Namecoins. One can also use an average value for the exchange rate as the CRA will likely accept any reasonable approach applied on a consistent basis. Are Bitcoins or Namecoins "money" or a "commodity"? For Bitcoins the case for money is very good in particular with respect to section 123 of the Excise Tax Act http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/E-15/page-94.html#h-71 “money”
« argent »
“money” includes any currency, cheque, promissory note, letter of credit, draft, traveller’s cheque, bill of exchange, postal note, money order, postal remittance and other similar instrument, whether Canadian or foreign, but does not include currency the fair market value of which exceeds its stated value as legal tender in the country of issuance or currency that is supplied or held for its numismatic value; This means treating any increase or decrease in value on disposition as a capital gain or loss and there being no GST/HST on the sale of Bitcoins in Canada. For Namecoins on the other hand I would argue for a commodity. In this case GST/HST would have to be charged in Canada for a sale and one can elect to have any increase or decrease in value on disposition treated as capital gain or loss. Are mining costs deductible? This really comes down to whether the mining operation is a hobby or business? If it is the former no. If it is the latter then yes. The electricity cost would be deductible (although if the "waste" heat from the mining is used to heat a residence in winter a CRA auditor could argue this). It should also be possible to depreciate the equipment etc. |
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Is this not a huge opportunity for the traditional fiat banks? They can take the Bitcoin deposit under the bank's address and then credit the business's bank account. The only public information on the blockchain are the bank's reserves which should be public in any case. The larger the bank the better the mixing.
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...
There's this "bank" see, run by a mysterious individual going by the name of "pirateat40" (pirate at 40) who has been soliciting Bitcoin deposits to finance an even more mysterious business of sorts. There are various theories floating around as to the nature of this business, most of which fall into one of two categories: one, a massive (by Bitcoin standards) Ponzi scheme where the interest on earlier deposits is paid using later deposits, or two, pirateat40 actually sells Bitcoins for cash to various entities who are looking to acquire substantial amounts of the currency without leaving a paper trail, as would happen if they used a conventional exchange.
Six months into the scheme, and not a single interest payment from the Bitcoin Savings & Trust bank has been missed, yet the interest rates are enormously lucrative for anyone willing to take the chance. For example, a 2000 BTC deposit (~$10,000 USD) will earn 7% interest per week! You heard (read) me. If you were lucky enough to be one of the earlier account holders, you could be pulling in enough interest on a 2000 BTC deposit to cover a mortgage on a decent sized home. Unfortunately, pirateat40 is not always accepting new deposits (lending some support to the "not a Ponzi scheme" theorists), which leads us back to GLBSE and the "Pirate Pass Through" bonds, a means for anyone to get in on the Bitcoin Savings & Trust action.
A "cartel" of some of the more well-known members of the community has established a series of bonds that pay out 1.28 BTC per bond after four weeks. Each issue of bonds (PPT.A, PPT.B, PPT.C, etc) is auctioned off on GLBSE and typically sells for between 1.06 and 1.09 BTC per bond, giving investors a very respectable 15 to 20% ROI. The money raised from the bond sales is deposited into the Bitcoin Savings & Trust, where the bond backers earn substantially more interest (as explained above) than is paid out to the bond holders. Should the Bitcoin Savings & Trust default on their interest payments, the whole scheme would fail, and the bond holders would be paid out only a fraction (25%) of the bond value. For the moment, however, everything is holding together.
Not surprisingly, given the ingenuity of Bitcoiners and the ease with which Bitcoins enable financial transactions, an issue of "Anti-Pirate" bonds was created, sort of a credit default swap for anyone looking to hedge the risk of depositing with Bitcoin Savings & Trust. Interestingly, after a week, not a single Anti-Pirate Bond was sold, and in the words of the bond's backer, the sale was "a spectacular failure."
By the looks of things, pirateat40 has earned a lot of trust in the community. The question remains, however: what the heck is he doing with all those Bitcoins?
...
Here is a theory: Factoring, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoring_%28finance%29, Bitcoin receivables. This can work particularly well if the business is looking for fiat cash say USD for the receivables up front. Let us say that a business has one or more receivables for 1000 BTC total due in one week. They approach Bitcoin Savings & Trust (BST) who pays the business the USD equivalent of 900 BTC say 4500 USD for the receivables. BST then borrows 900 BTC from its depositors and promptly sells the 900 BTC for 4500 USD on Mt Gox. BST absorbs the carrying cost of the 4500 USD as part of its service. When one week is over BST receives the 1000 BTC, and pays 963 BTC (principal and interest) back to its depositors and keeps the 37 BTC as profit. The only cost is the carrying charges on the 4500 USD between paying the business for the receivables and receiving the funds back from Mt. Gox. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine where one can find, today, a significant number of Bitcoin receivables due in one to two weeks from debtors who are willing to discount them for an effective interest rate well over 7% a week! |
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Great idea. I'll just get right on boycotting food producers by not eating. That will show them. Ever heard of a farmers market? slow food? the 100 mile diet? There a lot of food options that do not support large multinational agri business and guess what are far healthier than the heavily marketed, chemical laden, nutrient depleted "food" that many Americans eat. Guess what it is even available from the same supermarkets. Furthermore your body will thank you for it. By the way obesity and related diseases are an epidemic in the United States. Do you really not see the difference between boycotting digital goods that are infinitely fungible and boycotting the producers of actual goods that are backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in physical infrastructure? In the middle of an inflationary depression in which commodity prices are soaring and an all-time record 45 million Americans are on food stamps? I mean, are you one of those people who thinks boycotting gasoline is a good idea as well? No I do not. Consumer boycotts work regardless of whether the goods are actual or digital. As for boycotting gasoline. A lot of good can come from parking ones car once in a while and walking, riding a bike, taking transit etc. Your pocketbook, body and the environment will thank you for it. Pork producers don't care whether a few uppity hipsters buy their sausages or not. They can always sell directly to the welfare state, which will extract payment from you regardless of your consent. It is called the bottom line and business does care about the bottom line. This is called fascism. Recognize it. Learn to deal with it on the correct terms. This guy at least seems to realize what he's up against.
A consumer boycott is one of many effective weapons to have against fascism. |
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These kind of situations can be addressed by targeting the cause of the problem namely in this case the members of the Michigan Pork Producers Association with a punitive consumer boycott. The boycott to remain in place until one of two things happen: The harassment of the small farmers by the state ends or the members of the Michigan Pork Producers Association declare bankruptcy.
When businesses that lobby government for oppressive laws start to feel the financial pressure the impact of the lobbying will be minimized and more often than not the oppressive laws will go nowhere. We saw this for example with SOPA and the GoDaddy flip flop.
I am not convinced that getting the farmers in question to accept Bitcoin will do much for the cause.
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You likely don't. However most Boomers will be dead within 20 years which is how long I think it will take Bitcoin to become as mainstream as Paypal, twitter, or ebay.
I would like to see your source on the life expectancy of baby boomers. A more realistic figure for the average life expectancy of a baby boomer is 30 years. That also means that a significant portion of the baby boomers will live well past age 80. As to why a baby boomer should hold Bitcoin. Very simple. Holding a small portion of their retirement savings say even under 1% in Bitcoin can mean the difference between a comfortable retirement and retiring in poverty particularly should the stock market drop significantly. By the way I am a baby boomer I am not planning my retirement on the basis of dying in the next 20 years I do hold Bitcoin ... and by the way I also backed up my wallet.dat among other places on a 5.25in floppy disk. A technology that was obsolete before most of the members of this forum were born! Well, I got mine on an 8" floppy disc, Sonny. Seriously, there currently are about 65 million of us boomers still around. Imagine only a fraction of them converting 1% of their savings into Bitcoin. The way I figure it, that'll be the ultimate hedge against inflation. Fuck gold! $1,700 worth of gold today, buys you $1,700 worth of stuff. Twenty years from now, if gold is at $5,000/oz, you'll be able to buy...wait for it...$5,000 worth of the exact same stuff.  ~Bruno~ Bitcoins on an 8in floppy. Cool. I suspect most baby boomers will not invest 1% of their savings in Bitcoin, but those that do could very well end up living a long comfortable retirement. They may also outlive some obese 20 year old that has a heart attack at age 40. |
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You likely don't. However most Boomers will be dead within 20 years which is how long I think it will take Bitcoin to become as mainstream as Paypal, twitter, or ebay.
I would like to see your source on the life expectancy of baby boomers. A more realistic figure for the average life expectancy of a baby boomer is 30 years. That also means that a significant portion of the baby boomers will live well past age 80. As to why a baby boomer should hold Bitcoin. Very simple. Holding a small portion of their retirement savings say even under 1% in Bitcoin can mean the difference between a comfortable retirement and retiring in poverty particularly should the stock market drop significantly. By the way I am a baby boomer I am not planning my retirement on the basis of dying in the next 20 years I do hold Bitcoin ... and by the way I also backed up my wallet.dat among other places on a 5.25in floppy disk. A technology that was obsolete before most of the members of this forum were born! |
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The United States is becoming a cashless society. The Housing Assistance Tax Act of 2008 allows for the IRS to require all purchases by businesses to be reported to the IRS. The thing is, the credit card company or bank will automatically report the spending to the IRS, or make it really easy to report. So what the IRS is really doing is requiring any business that uses cash to report the payments. It does not matter how long it takes a business to spend to get to the threshold amount. Actually the US is moving towards cash with 10% of US residents giving up or loosing their credit cards and 29% of US residents do not have a credit card. http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/poll-1-in-10-americans-gives-up-loses-credit-cards-1276.phpA further downturn in the economy and the use of cash will go up not down. |
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I am figuring it is a botnet. With botnets reaching past 1 million computers someone must have selected a group of computers with good GPU's in them. Imagine good GPU's in 1% of machines, breaking them off as a seperate botnet. Now run them at low levels, do not run them hard enough for fans to get aggressive or any slowdown. 10,000 machines could make 2TH ran slowly. The internet connection usage would be kept to a minimum by only getting the bare minimum information (no transactions) and relaying back only when a block is found. This could live under the radar on a machine for a long time if they did nothing else with the pwned machine. And for $3000 a day, they would not have to resort to any other uses.
Of course it could be 5000-50000 machines in play.... But this is what I think it is.
+1. When most people think "botnet", they seem to be considering only CPU power - but it is entirely possible that the compromised machines have GPUs - and if the user from IRC is to be believed, this is indeed the case, from looking at his hardware manifest. This alone does not explain the drop in "luck"; however when combined with discarding the golden nonces on legitimate miners it does make a lot of sense. Why discard the golden nonces? To lower the overall difficulty |
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One possibility is Microsoft Windows malware that targets existing Bitcoin miners and steals a portion of their winning blocks. The impact would be. It's impossible unless this malware also provides all those miners with work too. If the malware also provides work effectively stealing a portion of the hash rate it would still have the impact I mentioned. If would appear to the pool that it is taking longer to solve to block. |
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This is what Im looking at: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-2k.pngAnd obviously not the 8 hour avg green line, but the 3 day estimate. Though variability is high enough to make firm conclusions impossible, its not quite what youd expect if 1.3 TH joined the network out of the blue. There is no spike up, its flat or down best I can tell. DrHaribo did have another hypothesis; rather than stealing blocks he suggested it might be possible for an attacker with a botnet to intercept a % of winning blocks of other pools to keep difficulty down. That would show up in stats eventually, but made me wonder why we arent using HTTPS on our miners to prevent such sabotage in the first place. One possibility is Microsoft Windows malware that targets existing Bitcoin miners and steals a portion of their winning blocks. The impact would be. It would affect all pools and solo miners running infected Microsoft Windows No increase in over all network hashrate or difficulty A significant drop in reward vs expected reward as shown for example by Bitminter https://bitminter.com/stats/rewardsZero transaction blocks as a way of minimizing the risk of detection Infected machines not mining Bitcoins can be used for other illegal activities One way to test this is for the larger pool operators to test if miners using GNU / Linux are statistically "luckier" than those using Microsoft Windows. |
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cash in hand is cheaper
credit card is cheaper, plz don't tell me that you only look at direct fees
- the client need a smart phone
- a internet connection plan
- a bitcoin client on the phone or a payment processor account
- accepts to pay the same value in USD/EUR using bitcoins but losing the ability to charge back
- needs to know that is doing
if the buyer is a eCommerce site not a shop then instead of a phone he need a PC
so what are the cost of using bitcoins instead of credit card ? and all the burden are shifted on the buyer
What if the customer does not have a credit card or bank account and wishes to purchase something online? For in person transactions cash is the option. But what options exist online on a worldwide basis in this case other than Bitcoin? By the way people without credit cards or bank accounts are a very significant proportion of the population. |
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Congratulations, S3052.
You're saying that he was the one that caused the price to go so down? I call BS. Here's my reasons for this: S3052 claims to predict the movements - the congratulations seem quite adequate. In that case - yes. But there are unite a few people around here that seem to think that he is "the manipulator" and his analysis moves the market in whatever direction he wants it to, which is BS.
The bitcoin market is small, but way to big for my analysis to move the market in any significant way. The forecast only works if the analysis is spot on. I have observed that if my forecast is wrong, the market tells me quickly.
Fortunately my analysis is more right that wrong. I have to disagree with the premise that S3052 does not influence the Bitcoin market. I will share my personal experience. I am not a subscriber, but I do follow S3052 on this forum, http://www.bitcoinbullbear.com/ and http://chart.ly/. Now over the last 30 days my own Bitcoin trades have amounted to 2% of the volume on the Canadian Bitcoin exchange https://www.cavirtex.com/. Was I influenced by S3052? Yes. Was that the only factor? No. If one individual who is not even a subscriber can account for 2% of a not insignificant Bitcoin market, it is not at all unreasonable to conclude that the only analyst that consistently publishes Bitcoin market analysis does influence the market. Now S3052 provides a very valuable service to this community, and I am sure that subscribers receive excellent value for their money provided the information is used correctly. Technical Analysis based upon the Elliot Wave Theory is ultimately about probabilities, as there is always more than one possible interpretation of a chart. A good Technical Analyst only needs to be right more often than not in order to provide a valuable service; however those receiving the advice whether subscribers or not need to understand the foundation behind the analysis and also the impact of the analysis on the market before making a trading decision. Does S3052 influence the Bitcoin market? Yes Does S3052 provide a very valuable service to subscribers and non subscribers alike? Yes |
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DMetcalfe92: Can i first say that, as a seasoned IT worker i personally find this kind of behaviour and blatant admission of criminal activity to be abhorrent. I can only hope that karma sees it fit your employer catches wind of this and takes some instant action - in the industry, we call this kind of forum posting a CLM (Career Limiting Move); criminal charges against you by an employer are generally the kind of thing that follows you for the rest of your career. Ill content with waiting for karma, i began to wonder what D Metcalfe 92 might be a contraction of.... and armed with your self-confessed skills portfolio (from here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?&topic=61890.msg722090#msg722090 ) we found a little something you might find interesting.. IF your name just happened to be Daniel Metcalfe then this link with a very similar set of skills might worry you: http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/daniel-metcalfe/45/824/a76 Especially because it lists the lovely services of [Weston EU Ltd August 2008 – Present (3 years 8 months)] as this this persons current employer... http://www.westoneu.net/westoneu.htmlSounds like a lovely family operation - it would be terrible to hear that the Sutton's had gotten wind of an employee behaving like this. I REALLY hope you werent that silly bro Someone call the partyvan. Cheers MrTiggr +1 |
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Seems Richard Stallman is not following bitcoin.
Who is he? If one wishes to learn about RMS a good place to start is http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu.html as it covers the history of the GNU project and Free Software. Another good site is the FSF http://www.fsf.org/ |
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