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Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

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Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#71

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…

I really am not a bitcoin fan, but my hatred towards PayPal's payment monopoly may one day weigh more heavily than my reservations about cryptocurrency. :)

Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#73

> Someone This is a little misleading. This could be a business etc. A mining pool or exchange transferring from one wallet to another (ie. to cold storage)? You wouldn't want a typo in your address for that amount of cash! I'd probably break it up into a bunch of smaller transactions just to be safe.

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

Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#76
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government can tax anything it wants. For example, barter exchanges are taxable by the government, even if no actual money changed hands. They would just put a dollar figure on the barter, and then tax it accordingly. Bitcoin doesn't have to be a currency in order for the government to tax any gains made on its sale or transfer.

The IRS purposely keeps the definition of income loosely defined so that they can broadly apply it as new schemes and technologies arise. I am sure the IRS could bust you for income tax evasion if you didn't declare your bitcoin appreciation as income.

Oddly enough, the pioneers on this subject are actually game currencies. Look up Julian Dibbell's Play Money.

Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or why it would be ideal to be used by the government - so we could track how they move money around, prevent corruption and generally keep an eye on the untrustworthy ones.

Let's say that you pay for Virgin Galactic ticket - that will be a fairly large transaction pointing to your wallet. Someone will be able connect the dots and find out that you also bought Viagra, and a penis enlargement pump. Do you really want that connected to you? Another case - you buy something from one of the stores that accept bitcoins. That store may have the address of your bitcoin wallet. They will be able…

@Watty even if you create new bitcoin wallet you need to fill it out with bitcoins. You either have to mine them, or get from someone else. Since we can safely assume that mining is out of the question the only other option is to use exchange.. There will always be a point of entry that the transaction can be traced to..and this place/person/organization will know who the user is. From that point forward they can track you..

Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#78

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…

How often is there a direct transfer of this size? Fedwire moves about 2.7T/day and I believe it would have cost $0.26 to transfer this amount, assuming that its at the upper end of their sliding scale ($0.08 - $0.26/transfer).
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