321–330 of 474 posts
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The government would have to consider Bitcoins as a currency for it to be taxed like a currency. Right now it has no status identified for legal purposes so no way to tax it. I am sure that several governments are looking in to it as we speak. Death and taxes
Not even close. Anytime you buy low and sell high you owe taxes on the difference. This applies to everything from antiques to livestock. It doesn't matter if the stuff is tangible or imaginary. You would owe taxes for mining World Of Warcraft coins if you sell them. You would owe taxes for picking up cans off of the street and recycling. How much you owe can change with how you earned the money, but if you earned mo…
And they say we have a free country.
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Luckily Bitcoin addresses use Base58 encoding [1] and have built-in checksums, so any typo you make likely won't be a valid address. [1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Base58Check_encoding
And a transfer to an invalid address just fails?
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This is the correct answer. People rave about how "cheap" it is to transfer bitcoin. What about actually buying anything with that 'money'? Sure, you might be able to buy some crap on the internet with bitcoin, but it won't put food in your table anytime soon without you having to pay a good % in fees to convert it to real currency.
You're conflating liquidity with value. The same is true of any foreign currency. I could send $150 million in Russian rubles to my sister, and she wouldn't be able to do jack with it until she finds someone willing to give her dollars for it. With the amount of money involved, getting it all converted at once would be extremely difficult. That doesn't mean that what's transferred doesn't have real value. Just that t…
That's exactly the point. If you had $150 million in rubles, you could transfer it for only a nominal fee ($20 for my bank, although you can get a lot cheaper if you regularly did transfers like that) to any account in the world that could hold rubles. Exactly the same with bitcoin.
The only real cost in transferring sums of money is either extreme convenience, transferring to a country with an extremely poor banking service or exchanging currencies. None of which bitcoin solves yet.
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Goats aren't tracked by the blockchain?
people are building (and/or have already built) systems that allow parties to transfer both pure-digital-only assets (images, videos, music, ebooks, etc), and, the rights to RL assets (eg. a goat, a painting, a vehicle), both "on top of" the Bitcoin network/architecture as well as via completely separate but Bitcoin-like systems. Systems which are also distributed, anonymity/privacy-optimized, resilient, globalized,…
/ super jaded
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Given the transfer of ownership could just as well have occurred by transferring the private key of the address, these requirements are going to get pretty hard to enforce.
I think that scenario is pretty unlikely for large exchanges. If someone gave me a copy of a private key, corresponding to some bitcoins, I wouldn't consider it payment, as they still have the private key as well (meaning they could still spend the bitcoins at any time). It's more like a "shared account" at that point.
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Keep in mind though, this transaction was nearly instantaneous. Bank Wire transfers take 3-4 days to complete (at least, as far as I know with normal-person quantities of money). Instant international money transfer is amazing!
> this transaction was nearly instantaneous Aren't Bitcoin transaction times generally in minutes?
Consider this: They paid $0.00 for the transfer of $150 million dollars. A direct (i.e. not based on third party credit, regulations, etc.) transfer of wealth of this magnitude between two entities usually consists of a heavily guarded, insured, physical shipment of cash or gold. Depending how safely you want to make the transfer, and how far the entities are on the globe, it can cost hundreds of thousands to million…
Unfortunately for me right now bitcoin has zero value. Until I can use the millions in coins to pay off my house, buy a car easily, pay my taxes and go out to eat with them, or hassle free convert them to cash in my bank, it is still funny money.
You can at least buy a Ford.