381–390 of 474 posts
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Not really. It is much easier to lose or make illegible a piece of paper or data than it is to lose large heavy gold or to damage the gold to a degree that severely reduces its value.
Actually, you could--you could irradiate the gold to the point where decontamination would cost on the order of the worth of the gold itself.
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Attempting to strictly enforce tax on such transactions would probably cost more than any revenue generated.
... and the government cares about that why?
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Who's forcing anyone to use a bank even without Bitcoin?
Two words: inflation.
If this was an actual transfer of ownership of Bitcoin at all near that value, this would trigger money-transfer reporting requirements under the laws of most countries,[1] especially if this was an international transfer of ownership. I see that all the other comments here are speculating about what exactly happened here, and one astute comment before this one pointed out that the actual owner of the Bitcoin may sti…
I'm not sure I see where you're going by mentioning reporting requirements. Isn't the point of Bitcoin that those kind of laws are unenforceable?
and finally mathematicans could get rid of poor now
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Not true: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-31/venezuela-receives-... http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2013/01/16/germany...
Not only is gold shipped frequently, it's also stolen frequently: http://rt.com/news/gold-shipment-stolen-france-304/ http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/16/us-usa-miami-gold-...
The equivalent commodity value in BTC can be stored on a tiny rom, and transferred anywhere in the world for free from anywhere with network access.
I hate to be cynical, because the ideals behind this currency seem nobel -- but I can't help but feel dread that it is only a matter of time before bad things start happening here.
Is this outlook too negative?
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Huh, if you make a valid transaction there is no reason why it would fail.
Not true. The transaction has to be verified by multiple other people before it can be trusted. If you spend the same bitcoin twice in a short time period, it's a toss-up as to which one gets accepted into the official blockchain.
That's not how it works, sorry. If you don't double spend your transaction and you attach a proper fee it's going to get in the chain, period.
Hardly. If you tried to sell 195,000 coins you'd wipe out all the exchanges and cause a crash. Talking numbers, you could sell them all on BTC-E right now, bagging you just $7M, and take the price down to ~$36. You can spread that around the exchanges of course, if you're quick, but you're still nowhere near $147M at current market depth.
Why do you seem to think that selling them all at once is the only way to sell them?
The post is about a transfer of 195k bitcoins (not dollars) from one wallet to another, all at once. However, as grandparent comment points out, the title is inaccurate: even if this transaction indeed involved an exchange of dollars, it's incorrect to assume that the dollar amount was 195k × (current BTC/USD rate).
You could probably make such an assumption for, say, JPY/USD, because the daily volume of yen trading is measured in hundreds of billions U$. Not so with bitcoin.
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Central banks moving gold reserves is very different from everyday financial transactions because reserves have a special status tied to their physicality. They act as a form of physically controlled collateral. Corporations and individuals generally do not move wealth via physical assets.
False, and trivially easy to demonstrate. Off the top of my head, I am thinking of ... - A deep, pervasive culture of gold hoarding and gold wealth transfer for dowries (yes, even in 2013) for Indians.[1] - Persians/Iranians who have a deep cultural link to carpets as a store of value that can be used in day to day life, but also transported and stored as value. How about any middle american over the age of 50 who co…
Like the first google result for payments volume yeilds this: http://www.gfmag.com/component/content/article/119-economic-... As you can see, credit transfers dwarf everything. It's worth noting that all of these payment types are cleared electronically (including checks).
I sincerely doubt gold bugs and Persian carpet fans are trading at total volumes of 100's of trillions of fucking dollars globally.