Bitcoin Dystopia

[stevedekorte]

Imagine that bitcoin becomes ubiquitous and instead of fighting it, government embraces it.

Every business is given a unique tax-id wallet and told that all of the business' transactions must be sent through this wallet. The government owns the private keys for these wallets and takes a cut (taxes) and sends the rest to the business' after-tax wallet which the business owns.

Tax enforcement is as easy as sending agents to make purchases and observing whether the transaction goes through the business' tax-id wallet. The government could also provide a public list of business names and their wallet-ids and make it a crime for anyone to purchase anything from them through a wallet other than these.

Bitcoin would then have provided the perfect means for government to control all economic activity.

Note: I'm a big fan of btc and only mention this in the context of preparing to avoid it.

[Mike Christ]

"Bitcoin is not going to solve all our problems." -- Some Bitcointalk user or another I dunno whoever it is

The problem isn't Bitcoin.  The problem is the State.  Deny the State and the events you described will not ensue.  Bitcoin is like any other tool, and anyone can use it.  Though it is resistant, it's not impenetrable.  It's a step in the right direction, but like the Internet, it needs to be protected, until we can overthrow the meat grinder.

[Stampbit]

Ah, neat scenario, i suppose it could make you register a wallet, but control it as well? Thats like saying the government would control everyones bank accounts, not very likely to happen. Government cant prove who owns what wallet nor can it keep people from making wallets of their own. It would be unenforceable to create such a law.

[FreddyFender]

Everyone would go dark with NFC/MeshNet/Tor/Alt Crypto$/P2P DNS.
Decentralization is why we stand here confident. It is not due to random factors that we have arrived at this nexus, many futurist have stated decentralized, highly mobile networked entities would act as disruptive agents against centuries-old financial infrastructure.
Future Shock is now Today Shock.

FF
PS. Everyone was warned, so enjoy the show.

[BluesBrother]

Guys remember
You have the power

But if government ever goes that far don't trust that those decentralized networks will ever work. Sniffing their location isn't to hard and if they remove access to the web they will remove any reasonable access to large WiFi networks or other types of hardware-darknets.
Using other ancient protocols could work for some time until that's sniffed up to and then switching to radio signals because they can be setup easier and dismantled could be an answer.

http://c6.org/archive/radio/pirate-fm.html#Broadcasting....%20How%20to%20get%20away%20with%20it
http://securology.blogspot.se/2012/04/how-to-send-digital-messages-using-ham.html