Anonymous businesses: the bitcoin killer app?

[Phinnaeus Gage]

It's very hard to start a business in the United States without doing something illegal.

I am not sure this is true.

Go to Google News. Type in "lemonade stand" in the search box. Read until you weep.

OMFG!



But this did give me an idea of building custom Lemonade Stands out of reclaimed barn wood and selling them on/through TOR, accepting only Bitcoin for them.

[1715394887]

1715394887

[1715394887]

1715394887

[elggawf]

I'm advocating getting rid of the system that FORCES fiascos like this to occur. If there was a choice, I'd rather choose a scenario where it was possible to get ripped off than your system where it's guaranteed.

What IRL parallel to MyBitcoin do you have in mind? Where has regulation forced a company to rip people off? We've been in business about three years using our current brand, and I've never been compelled by the long arm of the law to rip anyone off.

I feel like you're referencing some event that you consider to be obvious, but that isn't to many of us... care to elaborate?

Also haha @ Astrohacker's description of a pot grow-op as a "legitimate business". I'm against prohibition, but "legitimate" isn't a word I'd use to describe such a business. As far as the other stuff (financial services etc), again... throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

[markm]

I feel like you're referencing some event that you consider to be obvious, but that isn't to many of us... care to elaborate?

That could be it, certainly.

How much has Lloyd's of London quoted prospective exchanges for deposit insurance on deposits?

If the insurance companies aren't quoting insane rates that would make a legitimate exchange economically unfeasible, maybe the example we are all meant to think of is setting up open source exchange software on a laptop to run wherever we happen to be as a roving webserver so we always have our customer's deposits right within our reach, showing that app to the licensing people and asking for a licence to operate such a business, and... presumably it is thought that we would find we are not in fact permitted to operate such a business?

I dunno, it seems to me if you need to be anonymous you are maybe in a war, and if your opponent(s) in that war are not anonymous they might be stupid to imagine you are not going to kill them at the first opportunity since as the weaker side in a war taking prisoners might not be practical - one is, in effect, a prisoner already, in protective custody of oneself...

-MarkM-

[Exonumia]

lol. It is very easy to make a business that is ethical. For instance, I could buy some marijuana seeds, grow some marijuana plants, and sell the marijuana for a profit. After establishing this perfectly legitimate and ethical business, I would be imprisoned.

Ahh... it is coming clear... so ethical... sure for some people it would be an ethical business. It would not be legitimate however.... a legitimate business cannot run afoul of laws in your area.

Look... are the US drug laws stupid? Yes... they train more criminals than any other system on earth (that is putting drug users in prison with real criminals). Here is the thing... you can get this changed. Get involved in the legalization efforts. You might not realize this but in the US alcohol was made illegal and then that law was repealed... if enough of the population wants to overturn a law, it gets overturned.

You do have an uphill battle with marijuana however as the big pharma, alcohol, and tobacco guys work pretty hard at keeping it illegal to keep it from competing.... but I suspect it will be legal nationwide within 5 years.

Perhaps you've never actually tried to think of starting a business. If you do, you'll realize how huge the regulatory hurdles are for almost all businesses you could make. Another possibility is that your mind is so warped by the government and the status quo that you dismiss illegal business ideas without even realizing that they are perfectly ethical and only illegal because the government is corrupt.

Have started several and still run one... turn off the talk radio and faux news and learn to think for yourself.

[ctoon6]

drug solution

tor hidden service
when someone buys the drugs, you go deaddrop them
tell where you dropped them off, that way you can not be caught, unless you get caught dropping it off

I believe we should be able to grow any plant or consume any substance that is reasonable, assuming it does not harm the environment or others. the bs government can go fuck their self before i change my mind.

[cbeast]

Legal prescription drugs like those to treat AIDS would benefit from a privacy based currency. In fact, there are many aspects of one's life that would benefit from a little more privacy on the financial side. I'm tired of the whole credit rating Big Brother judging me. Who are they to say what I do makes me acceptable to employers or anyone else they want to sell my private information to?

[EhVedadoOAnonimato]

Very nice post, OP. I agree with your thought, bitcoin is a great tool to ignore state threats.

Some hurdles remain though. Besides trust issues, which I think can be solved, there is the fact that you can't scale. I mean, you can't possibly manage an anonymous company with 100+ staff without being caught.

There enters another advantage of bitcoins: its ability to cross borders easily. If your anonymous company grows enough, and what you're doing is not illegal in the entire fucking planet, then start a registered company on a tax haven with easier regulations and use it as base for everything you do, (not) paying your taxes there. If you need to hire people on more authoritarian places due to lack of manpower in the tax haven, create contractors in these authoritarian countries that would have a budget as small as you need in order to have those employees there, and register these firms as "generic software developers" or something, nothing that would be blatantly illegal. Or really hire true contractors, if you prefer.
Companies today have a hard time doing this because, if they want to have clients in a certain country, they have to receive state money from that country, and for that they'll have to comply with all taxes and regulations of that government.

[d'aniel]

So to avoid having shitty over-regulation where young children are harassed while running lemonade stands, you throw the baby out with the bathwater and would advocate a system that makes something like the MyBitcoin fiasco possible instead?

So I presume the obvious solution to MyBitcoin would be for its risk to be externalized upon taxpayers by undercapitalized federally mandated deposit insurance managed by people with no skin in the game, and blatant conflicts of interest?

Or how about this:
bitcoinjs.org (specifically, the Webcoin project being built using the bitcoinJS libraries)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yoduTFjZW4

This will allow for a web-based wallet service to never have the ability to spend or lose your coins, and the only added responsibility on your part is to keep one single, never changing, rarely used key safe (print it out, and store it safely offline!), and only dig it out when you need to enable a new device to access your wallet.

So much more is possible nowadays than was possible in the early 1900s.  Be a little more creative...

[koin]

along the same lines as what falkvinge described: http://falkvinge.net/2011/06/16/bitcoins-four-drivers-part-one-unlawful-trade

what would some of these anonymous businesses be? so far i see lemonade stand (not really much profit and/or doesn't scale) and silk road (not something i care to become involved in), but little in between (hard to be an anonymous taxi service).

i can think of a few more though:

toilets - in the u.s., congressman rand paul isn't the only one unhappy with his toilet.  either you buy something that won't work very well or you pay double, triple or more to get a state of the art model that work nearly as well as the ones sold in other countries.  though i don't know how you would ship something like that anonymously.

light bulbs - same thing as above: outlaw light bulbs and only outlaws will have light bulbs.

tobacco road - like silk road but for items that are legal (e.g. cigarettes) but shipped in a manner that would not please the tax collectors

foakleys - fake (imitations) of brand name items such as oakley sunglasses and coach handbags.  they might raid t-shirt shops for these because they have a physical location and an inventory to seize.  but chasing down anonymous online sellers is another matter and there probably are other priorities that matter more.

for more ideas, there is ebay's prohibited list: http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/items-ov.html

[Phinnaeus Gage]

along the same lines as what falkvinge described: http://falkvinge.net/2011/06/16/bitcoins-four-drivers-part-one-unlawful-trade

what would some of these anonymous businesses be? so far i see lemonade stand (not really much profit and/or doesn't scale) and silk road (not something i care to become involved in), but little in between (hard to be an anonymous taxi service).

i can think of a few more though:

toilets - in the u.s., congressman rand paul isn't the only one unhappy with his toilet.  either you buy something that won't work very well or you pay double, triple or more to get a state of the art model that work nearly as well as the ones sold in other countries.  though i don't know how you would ship something like that anonymously.

light bulbs - same thing as above: outlaw light bulbs and only outlaws will have light bulbs.

tobacco road - like silk road but for items that are legal (e.g. cigarettes) but shipped in a manner that would not please the tax collectors

foakleys - fake (imitations) of brand name items such as oakley sunglasses and coach handbags.  they might raid t-shirt shops for these because they have a physical location and an inventory to seize.  but chasing down anonymous online sellers is another matter and there probably are other priorities that matter more.

for more ideas, there is ebay's prohibited list: http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/items-ov.html

so far i see lemonade stand (not really much profit and/or doesn't scale)

You may not see it, but these folks were able to scale the lemonade stand concept:





They just need to add one more twist--accept Bitcoin.


For the past couple days, I've been kicking around the idea of a protobite, first deep-fried Bitcoin. NO YOKE!

[nighteyes]

Regulation doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing thing, and unless it was for something I needed/wanted that wasn't strictly-speaking legal where I lived, I sure as shit wouldn't do business with an anonymous "business".

Why wouldnt you do business with an anonymous one?

What would one look like?
-No main office building...workers would work from home and be unemployed(or dont want to 'work') in govt statistics
-Probably some hybrids that offer the normal economy but also supply the shadow economy

I keep on harping about a confidential social network that would verify the trustworthiness of the business. Now at least I can show what kinda of what it would look like since lorea.org put it together.... https://n-1.cc/

You would have competing social groups vying for trust. So the anonymous business would be part of the 'Better Business" group and if it was a currency exchange also part of the 'Forex' group for example. Not to mention there could be like/dislike and feedback.

Granted, this only works in mass if the government cracks. Its dependent on less government spending, aka the elimination of government goons. I'll put it this way, if the US goes third world, you are going to want to deal with an anonymous business since not only will the businesses go unchecked, but the government unchecked as well.

[Nagle]

You would have competing social groups vying for trust. So the anonymous business would be part of the 'Better Business" group and if it was a currency exchange also part of the 'Forex' group for example. Not to mention there could be like/dislike and feedback.

It's been tried. See Citysearch, Yelp, WOT, etc. If the raters are anonymous, the system will be spammed. If the ratings influence search results, the system will be spammed very heavily.  See any black hat SEO forum for details.