161–170 of 194 posts
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It's the wild west, except not a single person ever died from it. It's a communications network . I'm all for treating it as the wild-west, self regulating thing it is. Applying this logic, mail is the old Wild West.
Nobody has died in the Internet, but money has been stolen and commerce has been interfered with, and that was one of the major drivers behind the taming of the Wild West. Stage coach robberies and train holdups.
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This is why I don't believe in BTC for the long term. It's not anywhere near anonymous. Those saying BTC has no inherent value (as opposed to gold, for example) are completely overlooking the fact that BTC is the only kind of exchange that can be used for illicit activities in a relatively untraceable manner (good luck buying stuff on SR using gold). Unfortunately, BTC is traceable if governments decide to spend the…
>Those saying BTC has no inherent value (as opposed to gold, for example) are completely overlooking the fact that BTC is the only kind of exchange that can be used for illicit activities in a relatively untraceable manner (good luck buying stuff on SR using gold). Alternative equivalents like litecoin work equally well. That's why I think bitcoin is bound to collapse. There's no a priori reason to use one root over…
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Taxed at what percent? Ludicrous.
Why ? Seems like a great tax to me. The people who are most likely to be hoarding large sums of cash are the type of people who you want to be taxing.
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>Those saying BTC has no inherent value (as opposed to gold, for example) are completely overlooking the fact that BTC is the only kind of exchange that can be used for illicit activities in a relatively untraceable manner (good luck buying stuff on SR using gold). Alternative equivalents like litecoin work equally well. That's why I think bitcoin is bound to collapse. There's no a priori reason to use one root over…
Do you have any reason to believe that the wealth distribution of other coins (forked from Bitcoin) looks much different? With an deflationary currency you will always have early adopters that own a large percentage of the wealth.
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Nobody has died in the Internet, but money has been stolen and commerce has been interfered with, and that was one of the major drivers behind the taming of the Wild West. Stage coach robberies and train holdups.
I'm assuming the reason somebody downvoted you is the implicit assumption that saving fat cat bankers from middle class teenagers justifies turning the Internet into cable TV. I want to make the other point. You're claiming it was about commerce rather than loss of life and then using examples where there was often loss of life.
There was often loss of life during train robberies, but the economic disruption was a major component. People knew Jesse James for all the trains he robbed, not the people he killed.
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> the Internet as a new Wild West I thought that idea died, was buried, exhumed, and reburied back in 1996.
I don't think it's dead. I think a lot of people romanticize things like Bitcoin as being part of a world that's lawless relative to the real one. And as hackers, it's one where the lack of order favors them, just as the lack of order in the Wild West favored those with the most horses and guns.
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Whilst way you say may technically be true, the government could just declare this: Each person must publicly declare the bitcoin addresses that they hold. Any legitimate business accepting payment in bitcoins can only receive bitcoins from other registered addresses, else they are black flagged and no longer a registered address. Now, your average business and the banks are not going to circumvent these rules. The B…
>Any legitimate business accepting payment in bitcoins can only receive bitcoins from other registered addresses, else they are black flagged and no longer a registered address. This particular implementation wouldn't actually work. Anyone can send BTC to any address, so it would be easy to poison the well. (But I suspect some similar scheme could be feasible. You might be able to enforce the rule on BTC->$ withdrawl…
You could easily have software that would automatically turn over to the government any coins sent from addresses that are not registered. It's like if you found a briefcase full of money: you'd turn it over to the police (or maybe you wouldn't, but that's what you should do). With software, it could just be automatic.
If you refuse to run software that does this, or you don't turn over coins received from blacklisted sources within some period of time, you get blacklisted.
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Whilst way you say may technically be true, the government could just declare this: Each person must publicly declare the bitcoin addresses that they hold. Any legitimate business accepting payment in bitcoins can only receive bitcoins from other registered addresses, else they are black flagged and no longer a registered address. Now, your average business and the banks are not going to circumvent these rules. The B…
Even if it was technically possible[1], I don't think it's any more feasible than forcing citizens to publicly declare the serial numbers of dollar bills that they hold. [1] By design, Bitcoin addresses are supposed to be single-use. Reusing them is a security risk and not recommended (recent android vulnerability is a good example - it only affected reused addresses). Every transaction done with the standard client…
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Why ? Seems like a great tax to me. The people who are most likely to be hoarding large sums of cash are the type of people who you want to be taxing.
Seems like a horrible tax because it's not your property. It doesn't matter if the person in question has many resources or few, those resources are not yours to steal (or "tax", or whatever euphemism for aggression you want to use).
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How is that any different than controlled dilution of a fiat currency, like the Federal Reserve does? The net result is the same.
The Fed controls reserves, not net financial assets. The net result from a fiscal injection and a financial composition shift is not the same at all.