[2015-12-02] Why It's So Hard to Make a Campaign Donation With Bitcoin

[ezak]

Why It's So Hard to Make a Campaign Donation With Bitcoin


Bit­coin, the de­cent­ral­ized di­git­al cur­rency, is sur­ging in the bank­ing, com­merce, and tech­no­logy worlds. But when you look to Wash­ing­ton elec­tions, growth is an­em­ic. Only one ma­jor pres­id­en­tial can­did­ate, Rand Paul, ac­cepts bit­coin dona­tions, and just a hand­ful of con­gres­sion­al can­did­ates are do­ing the same. So what ex­actly is hold­ing back the bit­coin wave in cam­paign fin­ance?

Per­haps un­sur­pris­ingly for a di­git­al cur­rency that can trace a lot of its back­ing to the liber­tari­an com­munity, sup­port­ers say it is reg­u­la­tion.

They point to a Fed­er­al Elec­tion Com­mis­sion ad­vis­ory opin­ion is­sued last year as a ma­jor reas­on why bit­coin hasn’t caught on as a mean­ing­ful source of cam­paign fin­ance for the 2016 elec­tion.

In the opin­ion, the FEC un­an­im­ously ap­proved a su­per PAC’s pro­pos­al to ac­cept bit­coins as dona­tions. But the com­mis­sion also capped those con­tri­bu­tions at a value of $100 (based on the mar­ket value of a bit­coin at the time of dona­tion). It also re­quired the or­gan­iz­a­tion ac­cept­ing the bit­coin to be able to prove that the per­son donat­ing the di­git­al cur­rency can show that the coins they are giv­ing are leg­ally theirs.

Those look­ing to ex­pand bit­coin’s role in polit­ic­al giv­ing say this hes­it­ancy stems from fed­er­al reg­u­lat­ors’ doubts about the di­git­al cur­rency’s role in the mod­ern eco­nomy.

“[There’s] a per­cep­tion in the gov­ern­ment that bit­coin is used for crim­in­al pur­poses primar­ily,” said Stan Hig­gins, a re­port­er for the di­git­al-cur­rency-news site Coin­Desk. “Cer­tainly while there are few cases for us­ing bit­coin as a base cur­rency for on­line drug mar­ket­places, the real­ity is that the land­scape of sur­veil­lance is very, very dif­fer­ent from what it used to be two or three years ago. The at­tract­ive­ness of bit­coin as a cur­rency for money laun­der­ing or crim­in­al pur­chases is just not the same game it was a couple of years back. But still, that per­cep­tion is very much in play.”

It’s not just the stigma that’s hold­ing bit­coin back. At a time when a flood of un­dis­closed su­per PAC cam­paign cash is mak­ing trans­par­ency ad­voc­ates nervous, the use of bit­coin adds a new di­men­sion to the struggle to track who’s giv­ing what.

Bit­coins are de­signed so that the trans­ac­tions can be an­onym­ous. Bit­coin trans­ac­tions are re­cor­ded in the cur­rency’s “block­chain”—the pub­lic, “di­git­al ledger” that serves as the back­bone to the en­tire eco­sys­tem—not un­der a per­son’s identi­fy­ing in­form­a­tion like name or ad­dress but un­der a bit­coin ad­dress, which is a pseud­onym­ous string of let­ters and num­bers that is unique to each user. There’s no lim­it on how many ad­dresses a per­son can have.

The au­thor of the ori­gin­al white pa­per that pro­posed the cur­rency even en­cour­aged bit­coin hold­ers to use a new ad­dress for every trans­ac­tion to pro­tect them­selves from hav­ing trans­ac­tions traced back to them. Keep­ing with the theme, the founder of bit­coin is un­known, with that pa­per writ­ten un­der a pre­sumed pseud­onym, set­ting off wild chases to try and un­mask him or her.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/s/125324/why-its-so-hard-make-campaign-donation-with-bitcoin

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[qwk]

It also re­quired the or­gan­iz­a­tion ac­cept­ing the bit­coin to be able to prove that the per­son donat­ing the di­git­al cur­rency can show that the coins they are giv­ing are leg­ally theirs.

That's impossible to prove.

[Kprawn]

I think most of these politicians are worried that the donator might be some crime boss or criminal and that they could be implicated with these crimes, if they accepted these

"tainted" coins. They also believe most of the crap that are being circulated by Bitcoin shills and they do not want to be associated with something that has a bad reputation.

No matter how hard we try, we will not erase all this FUD being spread about Bitcoin on the internet. {Terrorism / Ponzi's / Drugs / Child porn} ...we have been linked with it all, IF

you believe everything you read in the media. As if all politicians are squeaky clean.