Why Bitcoin is ultimately doomed to fail (not today or tomorrow)

[deisik]

Now if you were careful in the past, you might remain anonymous, but don't forget the NSA is storing all the data and it is very likely you have leaked your identity in a cookie in a Google ad, in a VPN that is a honeypot, in Tor exit node that is a honeypot, in timing analysis in Tor, in a firefox exploit in Tor, etc...

And in the future, no one who can surely be 100% reliably anonymous will accept payment from you if you don't provide your identity.

This is the crucial point of your argument. If there is some level of truly anonymous transactions where you don't know the guy at the other end and he doesn't know you either, the reasons backing you up become impractical to carry out day in and day out. I don't say it is impossible, my point is that the effort just won't be worth it and would create such a mess that losses from this mess would ever exceed potential gains...

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[deisik]

Once the IRS starts attacking, no one will accept or sell coins without knowing the identity of the counter-party.

The government is sitting back letting the wildwest go on so as to let electronic money become popular. Then they will crack their whip and it will done. There will be no difference between Bitcoin and 666. Everything is on the public ledger. Much worse than cash.

Despite what you say, they weren't able to do anything to Edward Snowden, so I think it is not too late yet. Though I agree that anonymity of Bitcoin is a myth. Was trying to explain this to one of the converts here, but to no avail...

Don't you know what Russia does to anyone who exposes the corruption in Russia, see the poisoning of Litvinenko.

Firstly, as far as I know, Litvinenko was mixed up in the illegal rare earth metal trade and poisoned himself through his own carelessness and rough handling of the radioactive polonium isotope. Secondly, even if what I heard is false and he was actually murdered in 2006 by Russian authorities, you still can't deny the fact that the Russians declined the US government's request for Edward Snowden's extradition now...

Actions speak louder than words ("show me the code", lol)

[deisik]

Do you think we will have free markets if we depend on the mafia who run Russia? Also Russia is going bankrupt.

At times your perverted logic makes me laugh really. You blame the US government of all sorts of sins (and what not), and at the same time make references to mafia in Kremlin... Who is the real mafia out there? Also, I think that with all those prices of oil and other natural resources we see nowadays, it will take ages to see Russia go bankrupt

Though I never said that a resource-based economy would be good for being excessively vulnerable to external factors...

[AnonyMint]

Do you think we will have free markets if we depend on the mafia who run Russia? Also Russia is going bankrupt.

At times your perverted logic makes me laugh really. You blame the US government of all sorts of sins (and what not), and at the same time make references to mafia in Kremlin... Who is the real mafia out there? Also, I think that with all those prices of oil and other natural resources we see nowadays, it will take ages to see Russia go bankrupt

The "mafia" is in all countries, even as the "banksters" or the "NY Club", especially the nations with more value to steal.

Though I never said that a resource-based economy would be good for being excessively vulnerable to external factors...

Exactly. And what I am thinking. It is what always happens to commodity economies when the debt bubble of the world bursts.

Firstly, as far as I know, Litvinenko was mixed up in the illegal rare earth metal trade and poisoned himself through his own carelessness and rough handling of the radioactive polonium isotope.

You believe propaganda put out by mafia because you want so much for the Snowden thing to be a good for us. Well it is good in a way, he revealed how corrupt everything is, but you want to think Russia isn't just playing the politics to win over your mind. By the way Merkel said, "at least the German STASI didn't get caught". So there are no good guys out there. It is all sh8t.

Face it, we are doomed. I know it is difficult to accept. The sooner you leave the fantasy world and realize what humanity is really facing at this juncture, the more likely we can actually do something effective about it.

[deisik]

The Homeland Security in the USA is procuring 2714 tank-like armored vehicles and billions of rounds of hollow-point bullets over next 8-9 years (which are illegal in war by Hague Convention).

Etc, etc, etc. If you can't see the writing on the wall, you are blind.

The hollow-point bullets you refer to here have been in use for many decades by both police and civilians for self-defense as well for hunting big game. They are among the most common types of bullets beyond military primarily due to the reduced risk of hitting bystanders with passed through or ricocheted bullets and the increased incapacitation capability. The Hague Convention you mention here has also universally prohibited, for example, bombs discharged from anything that flies through the air (then balloons). Such bullets haven't really been used widely in warfare by all belligerents due to more prosaic reasons such as lowered penetrating capability, poor ballistics in the long range, problems with cartridge feeding in automatic rifles, etc...

[deisik]

You believe propaganda put out by mafia because you want so much for the Snowden thing to be a good for us. Well it is good in a way, he revealed how corrupt everything is, but you want to think Russia isn't just playing the politics to win over your mind. By the way Merkel said, "at least the German STASI didn't get caught". So there are no good guys out there. It is all sh8t.

Face it, we are doomed. I know it is difficult to accept. The sooner you leave the fantasy world and realize what humanity is really facing at this junction, the more likely we can actually do something effective about it.

I don't believe they are good in any imaginable way. But as long as they fighting with each other, we are not doomed. I think you're crying wolf right now. Are you trying to make yourself into a a self-proclaimed messiah? What you say here looks much like propaganda as well...

[AnonyMint]

You believe propaganda put out by mafia because you want so much for the Snowden thing to be a good for us. Well it is good in a way, he revealed how corrupt everything is, but you want to think Russia isn't just playing the politics to win over your mind. By the way Merkel said, "at least the German STASI didn't get caught". So there are no good guys out there. It is all sh8t.

Face it, we are doomed. I know it is difficult to accept. The sooner you leave the fantasy world and realize what humanity is really facing at this junction, the more likely we can actually do something effective about it.

I don't believe they are good in any imaginable way. But as long as they fighting with each other, we are not doomed. I think you're crying wolf right now...

They are not fighting when it comes to the fact that their control over money within their borders must be absolute. They are and will all come together on that one. Bitcoin is just the honeypot.

Julian Assange, Snowden, Alex Jones, etc... it is a well orchestrated Hegelian dialectic show put on to give us hope and preoccupied by noise. So we won't turn to more drastic measures before it is too late. Those people may not realize they are being used as tools by the elite.

[AnonyMint]

Remember everyone thought the EU was going to disintegrate. I wrote in 2009 or 2010 predicting no (that article was also published at gold-eagle and other sites). And now we see EU countries are becoming federalized just as I predicted. Merkel lied and then federalized the German banks after the election.

You are thinking the trajectory is discord and disintegration. Whereas, as I explained in the above linked article, the trajectory is unification and all-for-one-and-one-for-all towards NWO.

[Kane49]

They are not fighting when it comes to the fact that their control over money within their borders must be absolute. They are and will all come together on that one. Bitcoin is just the honeypot.

Julian Assange, Snowden, Alex Jones, etc... it is a well orchestrated Hegelian dialectic show put on to give us hope and preoccupied by noise. So we won't turn to more drastic measures before it is too late. Those people may not realize they are being used as tools by the elite.

Am I right in assuming that you are a bot that spouts idiomatic drivel stapled together from predefined sentence pieces ?

[AnonyMint]

Another idiot Kane49 has been put on ignore.

Now if you were careful in the past, you might remain anonymous, but don't forget the NSA is storing all the data and it is very likely you have leaked your identity in a cookie in a Google ad, in a VPN that is a honeypot, in Tor exit node that is a honeypot, in timing analysis in Tor, in a firefox exploit in Tor, etc...

And in the future, no one who can surely be 100% reliably anonymous will accept payment from you if you don't provide your identity.

This is the crucial point of your argument. If there is some level of truly anonymous transactions where you don't know the guy at the other end and he doesn't know you either,

You are still missing the point. Whether the parties know each other is irrelevant. It is whether NSA (and equivalent secret spy agencies in every G7 nation and some in G20 such a China) knows who any party to a coin trail is.

the reasons backing you up become impractical to carry out day in and day out. I don't say it is impossible, my point is that the effort just won't be worth it and would create such a mess that losses from this mess would ever exceed potential gains...

If the IRS says they have proof you own a coin, then they put the burden of proof on you that you did not own the coin since it was mined until the present. Sending a coin to self is a valid transaction.

So you just become culpable for every activity on that coin.

With tax matters, it is not innocent until proven guilty. It is the reverse.

If they don't know your wallet, the information about someone down the chain won't help them.

You missed my point. The person whose identity they do know any where down the chain, is in deep shit until they can provide the upstream and downstream name who they bought from and sold to. Then when they help the IRS to identify those, then ditto for those people and so on, until it reaches back to you.

No, I didn't because I kept that in mind. To work it that way, first of all, you would have to physically catch and corner everyone who is down the chain.

No the NSA only needs to catch one IP address of one person on the coin's trail in the block chain.

This is named "coin taint" and the experts of Bitcoin recognize it is the most serious problem. You can google for "CoinJoin" to read more about it.

This is such a huge problem, that for example Mike Hearn is proposing all coins will be labeled with blacklists, whitelists, and pinklists.

[deisik]

You missed my point. The person whose identity they do know any where down the chain, is in deep shit until they can provide the upstream and downstream name who they bought from and sold to. Then when they help the IRS to identify those, then ditto for those people and so on, until it reaches back to you.

No, I didn't because I kept that in mind. To work it that way, first of all, you would have to physically catch and corner everyone who is down the chain.

No the NSA only needs to catch one IP address of one person on the chain.

It seems that now you are trying to confuse and obfuscate matters. At first you said the person down the chain would be in deep trouble because they would knock the crap out of him until he provided the names of whom he had bought from and sold to, and then you are saying that they only need to catch one IP address of one person on the chain. If the poor wretch just doesn't know the names how can he be of any help to the investigators?

And this still doesn't prove that they wouldn't have to catch everyone (which is what you assumed)...

[AnonyMint]

You missed my point. The person whose identity they do know any where down the chain, is in deep shit until they can provide the upstream and downstream name who they bought from and sold to. Then when they help the IRS to identify those, then ditto for those people and so on, until it reaches back to you.

No, I didn't because I kept that in mind. To work it that way, first of all, you would have to physically catch and corner everyone who is down the chain.

No the NSA only needs to catch one IP address of one person on the chain.

It seems that now you are trying to confuse and obfuscate matters. At first you said the person down the chain would be in deep trouble because they would knock the crap out of him until he provided the names of whom he had bought from and sold to, and then you are saying that they only need to catch one IP address of one person on the chain. If the poor wretch just doesn't know the names how can he be of any help to the investigators?

And this still doesn't prove that they wouldn't have to catch everyone (which is what you assumed)...

If the IRS and criminal law enforcement (via the NSA) knows that you sent a spend transaction on a coin because they correlated your IP address using one of the many reasons I stated above that a user can fail to hide their IP address even with Tor and/or a VPN, they can come to you and say, "please provide records of whom you purchased from and who you sold to, so we can verify which transactions on this coin are yours. If you failed to keep proper records as required by law, we can only assume you may have been sending transactions to yourself ever since this coin was mined until the present time, so you've owned this coin since its creation until now".

Thus now you are responsible for all gains and all criminal activity on the coin, until you can prove you did not send transactions to yourself by showing whom you bought from and sold to.

You don't seem to understand that "I don't know" is not a valid defense. That defense means you own all history until the present on the coin.

They won't "knock the crap out him". They will send him a tax bill for the entire coin's history and put him in jail for any criminal activity on the coin. You can bet it won't take many examples like this for people to demand complete identification of the seller before buying and of the buyer before selling a Bitcoin.

I am continually amazed that people haven't realized this. The Bitcoin developers know this. Go to the CoinJoin thread which was started by Bitcoin developer gmaxell.

[CasualSam]

I have my own thread here where any discussion on economical matters and related questions is welcomed. By the way, gold (and why it was finally abandoned as a means of exchange) has been thoroughly debated over in that thread too. If you are interested, you could at least read that part there...

Hi from the other thread

I think you were basically implying that Bitcoin potentially can store value even if it mostly fails as a medium of exchange. Is that correct?

[deisik]

I have my own thread here where any discussion on economical matters and related questions is welcomed. By the way, gold (and why it was finally abandoned as a means of exchange) has been thoroughly debated over in that thread too. If you are interested, you could at least read that part there...

Hi from the other thread

I think you were basically implying that Bitcoin potentially can store value even if it mostly fails as a medium of exchange. Is that correct?

Yes, probably some form of electronic gold (Gold 2.0 in local parlance). It has properties such as security, limited supply of coins, independence from authorities, etc that correspond to those of real gold (without many of gold inherent deficiencies) and make it useful as a store of value in the first place. These properties are useful to people, so it may actually have a chance to replace gold...

[CasualSam]

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

Investors generally buy gold as a hedge or harbor against economic, political, or social fiat currency crises.

I think this explains the value that gold has above it's intrinsic worth.

[deisik]

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

Investors generally buy gold as a hedge or harbor against economic, political, or social fiat currency crises.

I think this explains the value that gold has above it's intrinsic worth.

This refers only to "paper" gold

Gold has been falling since the beginning of the year, some people which are long in precious metals began attacking bitcoin as having no value and all that nonsense. It is possible that others, more clever ones, could have switched from gold to bitcoin or at least diversified their investments...

[CasualSam]

Yes, probably some form of electronic gold (Gold 2.0 in local parlance). It has properties such as security, limited supply of coins, independence from authorities, etc that correspond to those of real gold (without many of gold inherent deficiencies) and make it useful as a store of value in the first place. These properties are useful to people, so it may actually have a chance to replace gold...

It is interesting to separate Gold 2.0 (value store) from Coin 2.0 (medium of exchange)

Referring to Gold 2.0 it also has the property of having no intrinsic value. Any value is entirely derived from belief. I think it is like a pyramid scheme. What happens when new investment starts to level off? As the return on investment approaches 0 I would think there would be panic selling and the whole thing would crash to nothing.


Sorry if this seems a bit aggressive, I would very much like to hear a response from you.

[Etlase2]

Yes, probably some form of electronic gold (Gold 2.0 in local parlance). It has properties such as security, limited supply of coins, independence from authorities, etc that correspond to those of real gold (without many of gold inherent deficiencies) and make it useful as a store of value in the first place. These properties are useful to people, so it may actually have a chance to replace gold...

I really don't see how. Bitcoin has zero advantage as a store of value over any clone, and if they're all terrible media of exchange, limited supply, independence, etc. don't really mean much. And when coins start arriving that don't rely on proof of work for security, bitcoin will be far more costly to transact with, leaving it only valuable in the eyes of the bagholders hanging on desperately to their "network effect".

[deisik]

Yes, probably some form of electronic gold (Gold 2.0 in local parlance). It has properties such as security, limited supply of coins, independence from authorities, etc that correspond to those of real gold (without many of gold inherent deficiencies) and make it useful as a store of value in the first place. These properties are useful to people, so it may actually have a chance to replace gold...

I really don't see how. Bitcoin has zero advantage as a store of value over any clone, and if they're all terrible media of exchange, limited supply, independence, etc. don't really mean much. And when coins start arriving that don't rely on proof of work for security, bitcoin will be far more costly to transact with, leaving it only valuable in the eyes of the bagholders hanging on desperately to their "network effect".

Actually, I'm not very familiar with the clones you refer to, though I agree that bitcoin (and likely the rest of the crew) makes a poor means of exchange. But if you are right and the clones are really as good as you paint them, what's the point actually? We could just as well use a clone if it does prove to be really better than bitcoin as a store of value...

[Etlase2]

Actually, I'm not very familiar with the clones you refer to, though I agree that bitcoin (and likely the rest of the crew) makes a poor means of exchange. But if you are right and the clones are really as good as you paint them, what's the point actually? We could just as well use a clone if it does prove to be really better than bitcoin as a store of value...

I was referring specifically to it being gold 2.0. Bitcoin is easily copied and there is copious evidence to this, and those copies have quite handily stolen some percentage of marketshare from bitcoin. This is not analogous to gold vs other precious metals as there is essentially no cost to bootstrapping these new currencies. The store of value property can only hold for as long as people are willing to transact in the currency and pay what will be exorbitant tx fees (comparatively) to support mining. This is a serious conflict.