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Bitcoin, a service and the micro-micro-economy

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Re: Bitcoin, a service and the micro-micro-economy

#61

Post by kiba »

vilhelm_s wrote: post #60
dublinclontarf wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) see this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2386956 2)In the near future there will be anonymous bitcoin exchanges, immune from government actions. http://weekly.co.nr/index.php?q=article/anonymous-money-need... 3)If people have no faith in the $ then that system will not work, the reality is than money is what people accept for goods and services, every currency whether bitcoin, USD,or gold is backed by the good…

I'm not very convinced. The excitement about bitcoin now is that it seems like a semi-mainstream alternative payment system. And a big part of that is that it seems legal in the first place. Soon enough, I expect law enforcement to start to actively target bitcoin exchanges (see e-gold). Sure people can respond to this by using elaborate schemes like the one you link to ("When depositing or withdrawing from ATM's the…

I'm not very convinced. The excitement about bitcoin now is that seems like a semi-mainstream alternative payment system. And a big part of that is that it seems legal in the first place.

I need to write an article on kitty activism and other ways to allow bitcoin to thrive.

Re: Bitcoin, a service and the micro-micro-economy

#62

Post by dublinclontarf »

lutorm wrote: post #56
dublinclontarf wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly just like cash, people like cash. However you could sell a lot of online services with bitcoins, potentially millions of USD worth without the taxman getting so much as a sniff that anything odd is happening. Nor even if they investigated you would they be able to prove anything(depending on your lifestyle,no pricy sports cars). With regards to my political views, I'm not a fan of paying governments to screw…

I tend to like the idea of keeping the wealth I created. You should add, "while letting everyone else pay for the benefits I receive," just so it's clear.

When I use those benefits I pay. Internet, I pay for it. Healthcare, I pay for that too. Education, you can be sure I paid for that. Roads, pay the toll, pay road tax.Pay petrol tax. Pay tax on the required insurance.

Research? Paid for it when I bough the product that was used to monetise it.

I've been working since I was 15, paying taxes since I was 16. I'm nearly 30 now. I'm not wealthy by any count but you can be damn sure I've paid plenty.

I save my money in the bank I pay tax in the interest, I save money in my pension, I pay tax when I withdraw it. I buy shares I pay tax, sell I pay tax. I even have to sell the shares every few years just so the government can tax me on it in the meantime.

I own a house, I pay tax just for the privalege (I don't own a house by the way, just saying).

I get taxed on the money I make as income, I get taxed on the money I spend as sales tax, I even get taxed on the money I don't spend.

If I give what little I've earned to my kids when I die, a huge whopping chunk of it is taken in tax. If I have a home, and I give it to my kids when I die, they have to sell it to pay for the tax the government has charged.

I'm wondering where other people are paying for me, cause from what I see I'm paying for everything I get and use, and paying tax.

I think, one less way the government can squeeze a little bit more blood out of a person is a good thing.

So you can just go ahead and suck my cock with your collectivist claptrap.

Re: Bitcoin, a service and the micro-micro-economy

#63

Post by burke »

mizerydearia wrote: post #37
mischa_u wrote: post #6

Your two cents worth literally; although at the current Bitcoin exchange rate [1] a typical post/comment/vote on witcoin.com costs USD 0.079. [1] http://www.bitcoincharts.com/markets/

or USD 0.0079 Also, each category has its own prices. Some categories post/comment/vote costs at current Bitcoin exchange rate are USD 0.0000000079.

This brings up a little facet of bitcoin that I'm /really/ not crazy about: The smallest possible unit is 0.00000001 BTC. With a fixed cap of 21M BTC, requiring that each transaction be for at least 4.8*10^-16 of the total possible amount in circulation seems like a questionable choice at best.

Re: Bitcoin, a service and the micro-micro-economy

#64

Post by mike_esspe »

lutorm wrote: post #56
dublinclontarf wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly just like cash, people like cash. However you could sell a lot of online services with bitcoins, potentially millions of USD worth without the taxman getting so much as a sniff that anything odd is happening. Nor even if they investigated you would they be able to prove anything(depending on your lifestyle,no pricy sports cars). With regards to my political views, I'm not a fan of paying governments to screw…

I tend to like the idea of keeping the wealth I created. You should add, "while letting everyone else pay for the benefits I receive," just so it's clear.

Don't you think, that it's obviously immoral to force others to pay for the benefits, if they don't want them, like governments does? And to forbid the competition in providing of such services?

Plus if i charge different amount for the same service, i will be frowned upon. If government does this, nobody notice. Probably the only fare tax - is when anyone pays proportionally to services they got, not proportionally to income.

Re: Bitcoin, a service and the micro-micro-economy

#65

Post by PostOnce »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #51
PostOnce wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin banks negate true anonymity, the govt can contact the bank and ask for acct details, so they are worse than regular banks, being uninsured, unregulated, and unsecured. Also, real banks have men with guns (not to mention the capability to summon heavily-armed police officers on very short notice) to protect them. Neither your computer nor your bitcoin bank is 1] stored in a vault or 2] protected by armed guard…

Sure online banking has risks. But do you imagine the cash in the vault at your local bank branch has anything whatever to do with your deposits at that bank? Regular banks use computers too. Police and guns (physical security) have nothing whatsoever to do with security differences between bricks-and-mortar banks and online ones.

I am talking about the security of banks (online and physical) vs. your average windows PC. It is a LOT more likely that you will have bitcoins stolen from your PC than all the cash from your bank account, assuming bitcoin were as ubiquitous as bank accounts.

In fact, let's put it this way: to steal all the bitcoins from my non-techie friend's PC is going to be much easier and less traceable than stealing all the cash from his bank account.

Re: Bitcoin, a service and the micro-micro-economy

#66

Post by lutorm »

dublinclontarf wrote: post #62
lutorm wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to like the idea of keeping the wealth I created. You should add, "while letting everyone else pay for the benefits I receive," just so it's clear.

When I use those benefits I pay. Internet, I pay for it. Healthcare, I pay for that too. Education, you can be sure I paid for that. Roads, pay the toll, pay road tax.Pay petrol tax. Pay tax on the required insurance. Research? Paid for it when I bough the product that was used to monetise it. I've been working since I was 15, paying taxes since I was 16. I'm nearly 30 now. I'm not wealthy by any count but you can be…

So you can just go ahead and suck my cock with your collectivist claptrap.

That's real eloquent of you.

Yeah, I'm sure you only benefited from services that are directly taxed. How wrong I was... If this is the level of farsightedness in the bitcoin community, I'll know to stay away now, thanks.

To remain nominally on-topic: unless you live in a place like Somalia, Afghanistan, or Iraq, I'm pretty sure you are benefiting from living in a country with a stable government and enforceable laws and contracts and all that. I'm also pretty sure you'd like someone to go after those who might all of a sudden take off with your retirement savings (unless you have them in Bitcoin) or that prevents a gang of armed thugs from kicking you out of the home you were planning to give to your kids. Well here's the news, take away your despicable, tax-stealing government and all those things go away.

I'm pretty sure that there's a very strong correlation between a government funded by general taxes and the presence of said benefits. Show me one example where there's functioning rule of law without a functioning government. And a government does in fact cost money to run.

Re: Bitcoin, a service and the micro-micro-economy

#67

Post by PostOnce »

dublinclontarf wrote: post #53
PostOnce wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin banks negate true anonymity, the govt can contact the bank and ask for acct details, so they are worse than regular banks, being uninsured, unregulated, and unsecured. Also, real banks have men with guns (not to mention the capability to summon heavily-armed police officers on very short notice) to protect them. Neither your computer nor your bitcoin bank is 1] stored in a vault or 2] protected by armed guard…

>the govt can contact the bank and ask for acct details And the bank, being a website(quite possibly based outside the government in questions reach) can ignore them. And that's if the "banks" really have any information about you besides your username and password. >they are worse than regular banks, being uninsured, unregulated, and unsecured. Why would a website(aka, the bitcoin bank) that stores a few bits, infor…

Depending on the country, maybe. Every website is hosted somewhere, though.

The reason a bitcoin bank needs to be insured and secured is so that someone doesn't gingerly walk in, pick the computer up, and take off with $40,000,000 of your customers' money. Part of the point of a bank is security. That's why people who earn no interest don't keep large sums of cash in their homes.

And yes, using a gun to force someone to give you a computer with $40,000,000 in it is likely to happen. Clearly, I have read and understood what I wrote. Have you?

You can encrypt a hard drive, sure, but do you? If the bitcoin bank isn't regulated, they don't have to encrypt their drives. Depending on the encryption, the same gun they use to steal the computer can be used to force you to give passwords. Or they can eavesdrop on you, or the account holder, or both, or an infinite variety of other things that I am not going to go into.

I'm done with this argument; you are trolling.

Re: Bitcoin, a service and the micro-micro-economy

#68

Post by yummyfajitas »

lutorm wrote: post #56
dublinclontarf wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly just like cash, people like cash. However you could sell a lot of online services with bitcoins, potentially millions of USD worth without the taxman getting so much as a sniff that anything odd is happening. Nor even if they investigated you would they be able to prove anything(depending on your lifestyle,no pricy sports cars). With regards to my political views, I'm not a fan of paying governments to screw…

I tend to like the idea of keeping the wealth I created. You should add, "while letting everyone else pay for the benefits I receive," just so it's clear.

A big chunk of your taxes are not paying for the benefits you receive. At least 47% are direct wealth transfers to other people [1]. Unless you believe that there is The basic, vital services you need (police, fire, roads, water, government administrators, etc) amount to only 24% of the government budget and a much smaller fraction of the federal budget.

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2009_US_total#u...

(Education and the military make up the remainder.)

I draw a line at 50%. When >50% of your taxes are simply taken and given to others, I think it's morally legitimate to evade them.

Your morality may vary. I'd be curious to know where you draw the line. Is it ok for the government to waste 75% of your tax money? Is it ok for other organizations threatening violence to do the same? I.e., is it morally legitimate to evade Mafia protection payments if they spent 50.01% on publicly beneficial services?

[1] I'm counting SS, medicare/medicaid/etc, welfare and mortgage interest deduction as "direct wealth transfers". I don't know how to allocate interest on debt, so I'm excluding that from the total. There are probably other categories of direct wealth transfers that I didn't think of.

Re: Bitcoin, a service and the micro-micro-economy

#69

Post by kiba »

lutorm wrote: post #54
rmc wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1)Hard money, once you receive payment in bitcoin it stays with you, meaning no chargebacks(Paypal, credit cards, looking at you). I read this as: "If you give bitcoins to someone in exchange for goods/services and they don't deliver, you're screwed, your money is gone, there is no-one you can talk to". That sounds like it's good for sellers and bad for buyers.

Yeah, this is what makes no sense to me. In a f2f transaction, I exchange money for goods. In a virtual transaction, it creates a fundamental asymmetry if the money transfer can't be reversed, since you have no way of verifying the other part of the transaction, i.e., that the goods were actually shipped. The bitcoin proponents make a big deal that transactions can't be reversed. But if you continue reading the FAQ,…

chargeback is a cost. That cost is then passed on to consumers.

It's a tradeoff.

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