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October 27, 2011, 03:16:32 PM |
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/begin tl;dr version:
If you want to be in the business of buying and selling bitcoins, read these links and hire a lawyer or just forget about it.
Biz: Barrier to entry. Tech: Stifling of innovation in payment system technology. Politics: Hindrance of social progress, maintaining overreaching govt. control.
/end tl;dr
It bears mention that the U.K. and the E.U. are even more deeply in debt to major international banking interests than the U.S, even post-obamasaster. As much as the U.S. govt. is bought by the banks, the E.U. govt. is even more so.
The fees that financial service firms pay to lawyers, bankers, and accountants to comply with the cited regulations and their ilk in all developed nations are, per annum, an order of magnitude larger than the entire market capitalization of the Bitcoin project. The fees that these private firms charge the end-users for the simple, automated act of addition and subtraction in a ledger pass-through these regulatory compliance fees with a hefty markup.
That's why we are seeing 3% tax on electronic money transactions for legitimate businesses, and 25% to 40% tax on criminal enterprises. Taxes paid to the private firms that have "captured" the regulatory agencies like the FSA. They spend a small portion of these fees on lobbying to maintain and expand the regulations that allow them to demand these "rents", as they are known in political science. Another small chunk goes to the "no work" and "no show" employment contracts for former top regulators.
It's hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Hundreds of thousands of middle to upper-class families are supported by these fees paid to private companies. The right to collect fees taxes is created by administrative agencies in an almost entirely undemocratic fashion. Agencies like the FSA. These people are going to jealously protect their parasitic (value-extraction, no value added) role in the economy. Entire careers and livelihoods depend on it, in numbers an order of magnitude larger than the number of bitcoin users.
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