Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Should Bitcoin Be Regulated?
Nerval's Lobster writes "Federal regulators are starting to make noise about Bitcoin, the digital currency that's gained in recognition and value over the past few years: the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) is offering up 'guidance' for digital currency and those who use it as part of commerce. But the Bitcoin Foundation, which is devoted to standardizing and promoting the currency, doesn't like that idea; as Patric Murck, the organization's general counsel, wrote in a March 19 blog posting: 'If FinCEN would like to expand its statutory authority over "money transmitters" to include brand new categories such as "administrators" and "exchangers" of digital currency it must do so through proper rulemaking proceedings and not by fiat.' If Bitcoin continues to gain in value, it could spark a rise in virtual currencies—and force some very interesting discussions over regulation. But here's the question: would regulation actually be good for Bitcoin, if it made organizations and businesses more comfortable with using it as a currency?"
It should if you want it to be as legitimate as the dollar.*
* That's a joke son.
How can your regulate something that you do not or can not control?
ENOUGH!
at least TAX rules is it stock like? casino like? Other?
Here's another pointless story to remind you to invest in it! You'll be a billionaire!
I've looked, didn't find it. I just found some vague mumbo about cryptography with a ton of loaded buzzwords.
I want specifics.
1.) What is a bitcoin, EXACTLY?
2.) How divisible is a single bitcoin?
3.) All the specifics of any relevant protocols.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
the number of /. articles about it should be.
Just regulate the exchanges. Once the druggies and child pornographers see that it isn't really an anonymous currency, Bitcoin will crash hard.
If Slashdot now sponsored by the Bitcoin promotional council or something?
seems like a story a day about it this week, I do find Bitcoin fairly interesting, but not reading about slightly different thoughts on it every day...
But the whole point of BTC is to be impossible to regulate. It's simply not feasible to enforce any regulations you could pass, even if you observed all traffic on the web.
I've looked, didn't find it. I just found some vague mumbo about cryptography with a ton of loaded buzzwords.
I want specifics.
1.) What is a bitcoin, EXACTLY?
2.) How divisible is a single bitcoin?
3.) All the specifics of any relevant protocols.
You looked at what? First result of a google for "bitcoin white paper" is http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf, the white paper originally released by the creator of bitcoin.
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
I just use the tax rules for Forex. I don't think a judge/jury could argue with that. It's a currency after all.
Protocol specification: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_specification
1 Bitcoin can be subdivided into 100,000,000 Satoshis, the smallest possible unit under the current specification.
I thought this was slashdot, where people understood "...cryptography with a ton of loaded buzzwords."
You must be lost - the USA Today forums are over here:
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/community/forums.aspx
If Bitcoin continues to gain in value, it could spark a rise in virtual currencies—and force some very interesting discussions over regulation.
Actually, if it continues to add value it will only make the unavoidable crash worse, and will deal a serious blow to virtual currencies, which will be viewed as a scam. The best thing right now is low volatility, there's sufficient valuation to facilitate huge trade. At a money velocity of 1 trade/month/unit (typical for US dollar base M1), there an 12 bln dollars market. few of those trades are happening right now, because people are too busy watching mtgox.
An even better thing was a properly designed expansion curve, with a long term for inflation of 3% which will drive hoarders and speculators away (Friedman's money by computer). Maybe an alt chain will solve this problem and displace Bitcoin.
Let's not get confused here, people.
1. Government doesn't care about stability. They care about being able to tax it.
2. Government doesn't care about stability. They care about being able to tax it.
3. Government doesn't care about stability. They care about being able to tax it.
4. Government doesn't care about stability. They care about being able to tax it.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
It might be a joke but it raises the question: whose dollar? As a virtual currency whose regulations will apply to a transaction when, for example, one person is in Europe and another in the US?
By whom? A government that is subservient to the banks, as most of them are? I should think not!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
the problem with government regulations is that if the government fails, so does that which is governed
Slashdot Bitcoin articles should be regulated to 1 per week!!!
If it moves, tax it.
If it keeps moving, regulate it.
If it stops moving, subsidize it.
In all seriousness:
I'm not sure where people got the idea that bitcoin is not regulated. It is. And regulators will let everyone know that very soon, especially now that everyone is pulling their money from European banks in favor of bitcoin.
If regulation is based out if the USA that will make it a no-go for me. The US already illegally snoops my EU-based bank account, illegally gets my UK-based purchase data and has illegally obtained SWIFT data in the past. A US-based regulator is not to be trusted.
Work like no one is watching. Dance like you've never been hurt. Make love like you don't need the money.
bitcoin already is regulated, it's just difficult for .gov to track so many people do not report their income and the banks like mtgox don't follow the rules.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I laugh at you pathetic poor people!
You have no power over the mighty B$!
Fools!
Perhaps a more pertinent question would be this - if an international currency is to be regulated, who should be in charge of the regulation? Who has jurisdiction?
In science fiction (at least, in games, not so sure about literature) we often see the term 'credit' used to refer to some vague internationally accepted currency. But if such a thing existed (and bitcoin might be heading that way), who sets the rules on it? if it's 'every country', then the concept breaks down and the currency becomes unworkable as you start having to track too much to use it. If it's the UN? I don't see the US ever accepting that.
So that leaves the only workable answer as the originators or the currency.
Regardless, different nations can tax transactions in the currency with the same rules they use for domestic currencies. If the currency is processed by a domestic bank or financial institution, they'd have to process it in much the same way as they would any other transaction. So it seems the simplest way to handle these things is just to make it clear in the law (if it isn't already) that all transactions, regardless of currency, must adhere to the same rules.
Put it this way, the rest of the population is even dumber than /., for that reason alone nothing should be regulated, because who do you think comes up with regulations and votes for people that set regulations?
The lucky thing is that Bitcoins cannot themselves be regulated, but the end points can be. Stores, exchanges, those can be regulated, and that's a problem. Bitcoins will be used by people as means of exchange, some may think they are a store of value, I do not know that it is so, they can go up to be 1 million or 1 billion dollars for 1 Bitcoin, they can be 1 cent, I can't say.
However I can say that Bitcoins have value in one very specific way, it is precisely that they cannot be regulated themselves in the sense that the government cannot issue them.
However do not forget, governments can buy up all Bitcoins to try and shut down the idea, they can even drive the prices very high because of it and remove most of the coins from circulation by producing huge amounts of inflation. What they can't do is stop people from cloning the code and restarting it again.
You can't handle the truth.
Is there a law I'm not aware of saying that Slashdot must have a BitCoin related article every day ?
Exchanges have been compromised, customers have lost money, basic protections are absent. It is used freely for the silk road drug trade, hiding money from governments and evading taxes. Can anyone seriously make the argument that it won't be regulated?
Or, go move to the Democratic Republic of the Congo or other similar place with effectively no government and see how unlimited liberty really works. Turns out that when there's no regulation, when people can do whatever they please you get a lot of people who's idea of "freedom" is "the freedom to oppress, kill, and harm others."
There's a reason why free nations actually end up needing a government, laws, regulations, and all that kind of shit. You have to keep people form shitting on the rights of others. If you don't, some people will, it is just the way humans are.
Some security is necessary if we want individual liberty, and if we want to be able to live and enjoy that liberty. That does not mean that all security is good, that we should trade off liberty for no reason (like with the TSA, which isn't even useful security wise and is just a dong and pony show) but stop quoting this like it is some kind of maxim, like we should just toss out all regulation and let people do whatever the fuck they want. We can see, time and time again, in history what happens when that goes on. the result is not good.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tax_compliance#Are_my_bitcoins_taxed_as_income.2C_or_as_capital_gains.3F
I.e. if bitcoins are treated the same as gold coins, then for every transaction, one must calculate the capital gains or loss, and pay 28% tax on the total net gain on Form 1040 Schedule D. For anyone who tries to comply with U.S. tax code, such as those seeking political office or security clearance, this makes it impractical to use bitcoins for everyday transactions, and practical only for occasional, large transactions such as investing in bitcoins for the medium or long term.
Like everything else in the Obamaverse.
Please check out http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/ for questions and answers like these!
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
bitcoin isnt a popularity contest, its an open distributed currency that was originally created to get away from the current system. asking if government regulation is a good tradeoff for increased popularity means you clearly dont get why people created bitcoin or are switching to bitcoin
http://interserver.net/
One (or more than one) of the editors/staff is in to it and thus they push it here. Bitcoin is only valuable so long as people keep giving a shit and buying in to it. If suddenly everyone ignored it, the value would drop to zero. It has no national economy behind it, there are no taxes you can pay with it, there is no reason to hold it unless you are playing the bubble game with it. So those in Bitcoins need it to keep getting hype.
all forms of currency should be regulated, else there will be abuse, it's that simple and it's been proven historically over and over again.. Even today, normal currency gets counterfeited.. So, digital currency can't?
That would include being "post" the state regulations that, for example, prohibit me to build a cabin on your front lawn?
I'm all for anonymous digital cash (an idea that's been around much longer than Bitcoin), but pretending that any sort of economic regulation is an "enemy of freedom" is a juvenile misunderstanding of freedom.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
While "billionaire" is a bit beyond me, I did just cash in a bunch of bitcoins I've mined over the last several months using several of my PC's with dual AMD video cards. Compared to the cost in power to generate those bitcoins, I made quite a handsome profit. And I cashed out just three USD below the current high water mark of bitcoins, so I timed it pretty good. Hard to argue with the moneymaking aspect of it, at least if you've been mining since bitcoins were $5 each like I have.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Juvenile misunderstanding?
It is a young avnt-garde understanding, prior to the corrupting cynicism that enables the tyrannies of conventionality.
Bitcoin was built to evade controls. Sure you can regulate that transactions above a certain amount must be reported, but good luck enforcing it. Transactions can be split into thousand of components at no cost, be dispatched through mixers to thousands of wallets. If the government become savvy enough to track such movements, then anonymous internet banking with chaumian cash can be implemented on top of bitcoin.
So if regulation gives the government the temporary illusion that it's controlling bitcoin, then by all means start regulating. The alternative is government trying to kill bitcoin, which it might be able to pull off at this stage by targeting the exchanges.
\u262D = \u5350
Scrooge McDuck here: if i can't own it and hold it while i count it and then weigh it before storing it in my safe, then i don't accept it. all y'all go ahead.
One of the founders of a currency designed from the ground up to be resilient to Government intervention, is now complaining that the Government wants to intervene. Have they realised they failed in their mission (which at this point, I think is too early to say) or were they naively hoping it would never actually happen. Or maybe, the anti Big Brother thing was just marketing and they actually expected the whole thing to collapse (and they would have cashed out) long before that point.
"bitcoin white paper" is http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf, the white paper originally released by the creator of bitcoin.
The technical details are what they are, but it is an attempt at imposing uniqueness on computer data (no two bitcoins are the same). To introduce notions such as "value" or "currency" you must involve economics since they are economic terms.
A Bitcoin is nothing more than a rivalrous good (or an attempt at one), and other rivalrous goods have already been shown to be acceptable mediums of exhange (like cigarettes or sea shells). It just happens so that this involves computers.
Money is a "I owe you" As long as we play the game and use fiat money the governments can regulate but there are so many kinds of alternative currencies becoming more popular.
It is quite common to do a plumbing job for a mate and have the mate come around one weekend to build a fence. I owe you. Currencies can take so many forms and those that are trusted will become main stream.
After I have done a plumbing job for my mate he owes me building a fence. However, I don't need a fence but my neighbor who is a baker does. What I do need is bread. I can go to the baker and pass on my mates debt of building a fence to the baker in exchange for bread but if my mate has a bad reputation and the baker doesn't trust my mates promise then there can't be a deal.
Governments can only regulate through compulsion. Fiat money that may not be refused as a legal tender. But with bitcoin, they don't appear in the game at all. I like that.
4) Who fucking cares?
The current crop of white collar criminals that "Handle" our money right now would love another way to rip off the little guy.
Clearly everybody involved with Bitcoin does not want to be regulated - if they did it would have been designed differently.
So the actual question here is, "should an unregulated currency be allowed to exist?" Or, without the euphemisms and passive voice, "should we bust the heads of people who use an unregulated digital currency?"
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I honestly wish Slashdot would stop posting stuff about Bitcoin.
Every time you guys get together to "talk" about Bitcoin, the amount of lies and outright retarded shit that comes out of your mouths is simply off the charts. It makes Something Awful look like a highly developed children's playground in comparison. I have read every single lie there is to say about Bitcoin, in triplicate, here. Everything from Ponzi to scam to ayayay deflationary spiral to fucking libertarians I wish they were murdered (seriously, in Slashdot?). It is not even fun to show you reality anymore.
I used to like this place, but now it is so irrelevant and so dominated by angry retards, it is not even worth the read, cos I just know I will be confronted with losers who did not buy in at $2 and are bitter and hateful about it.
Bitcoiners do not need you. You are obsolete. Keep your greenbacks, enjoy losing your savings every day, and don't ask for help when the chickens come home to roost. Get lost, seriously.
Rudd-O - http://rudd-o.com/
Speculation based on volatile ups and downs is a pretty good argument for a currency...
Ask Slashdot: Should we stop posting about bitcoins?
Yes. Please stop.
Every paycheck I get I spend of bitcoins. Then cash those coins out a month later, it's like have an incredibly high interest rate bank account.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
The primary benefit (aside from being able to create your own) is anonymity, and if they are going to look into regulations then they are going to look into anonymity.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Put it this way, the rest of the population is even dumber than /., for that reason alone nothing should be regulated, because who do you think comes up with regulations and votes for people that set regulations?
Lol so true.
So how do one know if bitcoin is real ? Which nation willing to back bitcoin? is there gold or some precious metal backing bitcoin?
In Canada Bitcoin is thought as a capital asset and not regulated as a currency. Canada does monitor Ebay and Kijiji for people who sell commercialy over the Internet that do not collect sales tax. No sales tax yet for Bitcoin transactions just capital gains when you convert it to CDN dollars.
You could just keep the same coins, you know.
Bitcoin is not "legal tender" nor is it a government-backed currency. It is a contract for trade based on a nearly secure system. If you can buy discount coupons or tokens and trade them for goods and services, why not Bitcoins? Not only is this virtual currency helpful, but the purchase price changes to reflect the relative risk and combined value of the purchasing currency. Apparently the value of a non-regulated currency has appreciated about $40 per unit over the last month.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
Regulation and manipulation are two sides of the same coin. Those who do the regulation are hardly disinterested parties.
I am just not keen on the idea of the US government being the one to do it.
Is Bitcoin restricted to the US only? In that case, it would be up to the US to look after its own.
The problem is that the US government regularly shows that it has as much idea about "international" as I have about gynaecology. It's complicated, do do with other people and it really helps if you actually know where the patient is.
You can tell the suitability of someone to have any say in something trans national if you find out how they feel about it being regulated by a UN body.Yes the UN contains corruption but so does every government in the world and the US one is well known to be in corporate pockets to an impressive degree.
Sure Congress can identify Bitcoin use as gambling or something and that will keep it under control of the Mafia where it belongs but fortunately, the remaining 96% of humanity can ignore their veniality.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
A Bitcoin is nothing more than a rivalrous good (or an attempt at one), and other rivalrous goods have already been shown to be acceptable mediums of exhange (like cigarettes or sea shells). It just happens so that this involves computers.
So how hard is it to carry a few billion dollars worth of cigarettes or sea shells? For bit coins, it's as hard as carrying a memory stick.
the transactions only go in one direction and are irreversible by design. how many people's computers are infected with malware? there you go. bitcoins are an evildoer's dream come true.
or obama can just shut down the internet.
"Should a P2P Network Be Regulated [by the government]"?
The funny thing is that Slashdot hasn't erupted in squeals of outrage.
..
Let me end this right now. It's unregulateable. They can try to nip at the heels of the exchanges but other than that, it's impossible. Nobody runs it, nobody controls it. It's distributed, encrypted, and transactions cannot be modified or blocked or intercepted or duplicated. So that sort of makes any "decision" pointless.
I bet you're better off with out debit and credit cards anyway.
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
Were the Bitcoin regulated then Obama's off-the-books profits not reported to the IRS would be reported to the IRS and his whole Ponzi Scheme would crumble faster than Bernie Madoff's.
" illegally obtained SWIFT"
Technically speaking, SWIFT *gave* the USA all that lovely private data free to be mined for the good of the EU citizens being spied on.
And later, Barosso *handed* them the data, claiming it was allowed under the crime prevention exemption and that USA was somehow the EU police.
Maybe the betrayal of the privacy right is more sinister than the loss of privacy, you know there's some lever on your elected leader, you just don't know how big the lever is.
Whenever Bitcoin is mentioned for regulation, regulation is really a code word for tracking/surveillance.
So you won't accept the $50,000 USD wire transfer either? interesting.
My understanding is:
1) A bitcoin is 100 million Satoshis. A satoshi is the smallest amount of value that can be exchanged on the bitcoin network. Each transaction on the bitcoin network transfers some number of Satoshis from one address to another. The number of bitcoins a wallet/person owns is the sum of the number of all the Satoshis that have been transferred to addresses in wallets they own minus the number of Satoshis sent *from* addresses in wallets they own, all divided by 100 million.
2) 100 million units per bitcoin.
3) Can't be answered in a brief summary like this, but suffice it to say that the important thing to understand is that each wallet or address is associated with a private key and a public key. You need to public key to transfer value to the address, and you need the private key to be able to send value from the address to another address.
These things are nothing but hash-hunting algorithms, right? Aren't there an infinite number of very slightly different bitcoin currencies available, and the only thing that actually imparts value to any one of them is how much of a meme they are?
Regulation doesn't stop corporate elite from robbing us blind and committing all sorts of fraud with our money.
Fuck regulation, all it gets us is smoke and mirrors reassurances that don't have any teeth.
I'd say that bitcoin is better off staying wild and untamed. At least that way people KNOW not to be stupid with who they trust.
With dollars, people get lulled into a false sense of security.
With bitcoins people are naturally paranoid and are much more careful.
Translating "Should Bitcoin Be Regulated?" into its plain meaning, that is, "Should peaceful Bitcoin users be threatened with harm, or harmed?" should yield the answer almost immediately: of course not, any more than any other peaceful people should be harmed, whether they want to sell or consume "large" sodas, trade or manufacture "high" (standard) capacity firearm magazines, use drugs, give food to the hungry, or engage in any other pursuit that is not directly harmful to other people or property. How can it ever be right to so threaten and harm peaceful individuals? And is not all regulation such a threat - give us money or we will harm you (take the money by force, cage you, murder you if you resist); conform to our requirements, even though you do no harm, or we will harm you? There is no case where such harm is justified.
Why did they divvy it up this way? Since it exists only on computers, they could have divided it into 1,073,741,824 (2^30) parts for the smallest value. But what when the value grows and bitcoins need to be divided into more? Wouldn't Satoshis appreciate as well?
We're gonna regulate the shit outta you!
All the idiots who keep adding this bloat and regulation in the US are doing it while longingly gazing at Europe and telling us that all those smart people "over there" are doing stuff like that..... so we should too. As messed-up as the US is becoming, we are still far behind you guys in the UK in some areas of extreme government nastiness; we do not have those London-style cameras tracking every car entering and leaving a city (though, again, jerks like Bloomberg are lusting after this for NYC) and we've never had trucks with electronic sensors driving through our neighborhoods "sniffing" for the emissions radiated by our TVs so that they can make sure we are paying our TV tax to support the government-run TV stations, etc. While we have been sadly getting more like you guys across the pond in restricting free expression, we have not yet jailed otherwise law-abiding citizens for the "crime" of writing a book on how to make guns.
I'm certainly not bragging that things are going the right way in the US; they're not... we bloated the government, militarized the various civilian policing agencies and introduced the idea of "politically correct" speech under Clinton. We elected Bush to change the course away from that, but he reacted to 9-11 by doubling-down and bloating the government even more and clamping-down further on freedoms. We elected Obama to change course and he doubled-down on Bush by taking all the worst things (many of which had built-in "sunset" provisions that would have gradually killed them) and making them permanent. He has amped-up the spending so much that the government demand for money will force even more control over the people (to enable squeezing even more cash out of them) and as he cuts the American military it will become even more necessary to deal with foreign threats proactively so all the spying and droning will need to be increased dramatically.
Everything is better when it is regulated. You wouldn't eat food that was not regulated, or fly on a plane that was not regulated or drive a car that was not regulated or live in a house that was not regulated would you? People are stupid and should not be allowed to run their own lives or make their own decisions. Nobody is qualified to perform their own risk/reward calculations on any aspect of their lives. The divorce rate is high because we do not let a government agent tell us who to marry. Our kids a screw-ups because we did not let a government regulator tell us when to have kids, how many to have, and what type to have or abort. We would all probably have better more-successful careers if we would let the government tell us what jobs to train for and take (they have all the data that says what will be in demand and where it will be needed and they are much wiser than we are).
Bitcoin itself doesn't need much regulation, but some of the companies profiting from it do. Entities which hold onto your money, from PayPal to Mt. Gox, are depository institutions, and should be regulated as such. Customers need to know who's behind them and that they really have the money. There's a long list of defunct "Bitcoin exchanges" which took the money and ran. That's where regulation is needed.
Customers need strong enforceable rights against exchanges. Mt. Gox is notorious for blaming their own business partners (OKPay, Dwolla, etc.) when something goes wrong. They also limit how fast you can take money out (even in Bitcoins) change those limits from time to time, and the limits are very low by banking standards. Since Mt Gox supposedly has 100% of the deposited Bitcoins, they should be able to pay out 100% of any account on demand.
I'm new to Bitcoin but I've Seti@home'ed a lonnng time ago and done gene folding so I get the distributed CPUs thing. What I'm missing here is why. If I understand it correctly all these processors are essentially looking for rare numbers and when they find one they're give a Bitcoin. Do these numbers have an actual value to science or math or is it just manufactured scarcity? Does all this do anything worthwhile or are bitcoins essentially tokens of luck and wasted electricity? In all that I read about Bitcoins nothing suggested that anything useful is being created by all this cpu time and energy spent crunching hashes. I kinda hope I'm wrong and someone clues me in.
Glad they admit having a departament enforcing financial crimes.
But... the future refused to change.
Bitcoin can't be regulated, it's not country specific, and there is not centralized data store under any jurisdiction. A government can try and regulate a company that converts normal money into Bitcoins for you, but realistically you can simply walk up to anyone you know that has enough Bitcoins for your requirements, give them a wad of cash, and transfer them to your personal Bitcoin wallet without the use of a regulated 3rd party at all, and the government would be none the wiser.
No, there is not intrinsic value, unlike gold. So when one day, nobody will accept your nice stack of bitcoins as payment you won't be able to do anything with those. If this is not regulated before, this will be regulated at that point because "We lost a lot of money, how did this happen? Why the government was asleep at the wheel and did not regulate that shadow bank?"
The current number of tracked digits after the decimal place (8) is actually rather arbitrary. If need be, it can be changed in a future version. Bitcoin is infinitely divisible.
So how hard is it to carry a few billion dollars worth of cigarettes or sea shells? For bit coins, it's as hard as carrying a memory stick.
Yes, and your post above includes "It just happens so that this involves computers." The point is that this idea is not an economic innovation.
by the creator of bitcoin.
And who is that?
So yes, all currencies are just theoretical constructs, they have value purely because we believe they do. Yes even in the case of things like gold coins. If the world suddenly decided to stop taking a currency, it would cease to be one. Money is only money if you can spend it, and money is only money if people do spend it.
However the difference is that US dollars are legal tender in the US. What that means is the government requires taxes to be paid in them, and so all of the country's residents who pay taxes, which is most adults that aren't retired, have to get US dollars to do so. Speaking of the retirement thing, it is also the currency that the government pays out to retirees. Also, the government requires it to be accepted for all debts. So if you owe someone in the US money, they have to accept its value in US dollars to settle the debt. They cannot require you to get another currency.
That little reality means that there will always be a good deal of interest in US dollars so long as the US exists. There are even more factors that make it much, much more desirable and useful, but so long as it is what you use to do business with the government and to settle debts, it is what will get used all over.
Same deal in other countries. If you move to Canada, you'll find you need Canadian dollars. There is a good deal of acceptance of US dollars there since there is a lot of tourism and the US dollar has a sort of special status as the world's reserve currency, but you can't function entirely in them. The Canadian government wants to be paid in Canadian dollars and you'll encounter other agencies that are the same. The fact that it is a national currency keeps it going.
More or less, national currencies are backed by the economy of that nation. Because of that economy, they are useful and valuable to at least the people in that nation.
Bitcoin has none of that. It is just some geeks faffing about that read Cryptonomicon and thought it was a guide, not a work of fiction. Very, very few places accept it, and they just use it for payments, they immediately convert it to a real currency. It fluctuates as much or more than a thinly traded stock, any currency that fluctuated like it did would be said to be in extreme crisis. It's value is almost entirely based on speculation. That means that for its value to hold or increase, the hype and speculation needs to continue. If it vanishes, the price will crash, perhaps down to zero.
Real currencies that actually get used as currencies don't need hype to keep them going.
Bitcoin is already regulated by somebody, so it is only a question of who gets to write the rules. It's a bit like PayPal - they do all the things a bank does, but they escape bank regulations by not calling themselves a bank - I don't think I need to reiterate all the complaints against PayPal, so I won't, but they are getting away with these things because they don't follow the normal banking rules.
The reason we have laws and standards regulating the handling and production of money is to protect society, ie mostly ordinary people. And the reason the rules have to be written by the legislature is that self-regulation never works in favour of people, it only works for the said industry. At least the government has to consider all the industries, and who knows, maybe even the people sometimes.
As far as I can see, somewhere behind Bitcoin there's a group of people who are making a profit from it, and whose profit would be diminished by having to follow rules meant to protect the ordinary user. I haven't been able to find out who they are; IMO, you should never trust a business who doesn't want to look you in the eye. There is nothing wrong with wanting to make money out of something, so why hide behind anonymity? It is certainly not because they are saintly idealists who only want the best for you. Remember the old saying: "If it's too good to be true ..."
Which belies the bubble-like nature of BitCoin. There is no reason to hold it. It's predicated on the greater fool theory - you don't want to hold BitCoin (because you can't spend it) - so you sell it on to someone for whom the same will be true, but who is either a fool, or convinced they'll sell it on to yet a greater fool.
i would rather ask, "could bitcoin be regulated", its designed to be inherently self regulatory and reject outside influences. its one of the main reasons why its so popular. you might want to regulate bitcoin, but can you? its not as simple as declairing "let it be so"
www.jewishproblem.com
what the hell...
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
They have destroyed all other monies in the world - why wouldn't they want to destroy that one as well. It's what they do, it's all that they do..
Who cares.
I don't need to know who created the U.S. dollar in order to use it as a store of value or medium of trade for goods or services.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
You can't spend Bitcoin? News to me. There are fewer places to spend Bitcoin but you can certainly spend it.
It could be whatever you want, but you have to take into account that when building the block chain.
I believe Satoshi (whoever he/she/they are) intented to bitcoin to be the first solid crytpo-currency, but not the last. IF and WHEN bitcoin attains high usage it will be eventually upgraded or replaced by a better competitor. I know it may be hard to understand but there is a free market for crypto-currencies.
I believe the difficulty of using bitcoin in the physical world (confirmations take too long, you can't use it without internet) will eventually spur another currency to deal with those use cases (probably something backed by goods), that will exist alongside with bitcoin.
1) A bitcoin is nothing. It is fiat currency, but without the regulation and manipulation that all the others have for us to deal with. It exists in the blockchain which is simply an accounting of every bitcoin transaction ever, that uses cryptography to allow and confirm the transfers from one account to another. Accounts are were the magic is. Every account is a pair of crypto keys. If I want to send money to another account, I just sign a statement to that effect and submit it to the global blockchain, where it is confirmed. If you choose to, you can put a reward in for the miners to process the transfer, which speeds up the transfer significantly.
2) .00000001BTC is the smallest measure. Many people call .01 the "bitpenny" but this is a convention that will pass before too long. The bit penny is almost worth 1USD now!!
3) Read the whitepaper for that stuff. There are two crypto algo's at work I believe. AES256 and a smaller hash function for signatures.
Bitcoin Miners Threaten Strike Over Fed Regulations
The number of Bitcoin stories on Slashdot should be regulated...
.. the likes of Rothschild the better.
We have vast amounts of technology now, and we should use that technology to create material abundance for all. We do that through five interwoven types of economic operations involving subsistence production, gift giving locally and globally, exchange in the market, planning at various levels of government, and theft/extraction/conquest (see my site). Bitcoins fall mostly into the area of exchange (as an artificially scarce token). However, there is a seeming subsistence aspect in Bitcoins because you can in theory produce them yourself. That is similar to how people can create virtual objects in some online games which they can exchange for national currencies. But, in the case of Bitcoins, they are produced more as a form of almost online gambling (since you may not find one even having put in the electricity).
In general, it is a waste of CPU cycles and electrical energy to engage in this form of creating artificially scarce tokens to be used for exchange. Society woudl be better off if peopel with spare CPU cycles from always on computers donated them to other causes like protein folding or NASA or SETI or whatever. It is better to create locally useful products for subsistence, or to create inherently worthwhile things for exchange or gift-giving. We should be planning how to create more shared abundance not more artificial scarcity.
For those interested in a virtual currencies, a better model is "LETS" (Local Exchange Trading System) systems where currency production is regulated by democratic involvement in a LETS system, which anyone can set up for their local community (subject to any local laws and gathering community support).
http://www.lets-linkup.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_exchange_trading_system
Anything that has some value due to rarity can be used as a currency as a medium of representing demand. That can include artificially created things like fiat dollars, Bitcoins, Kanban tokens, or LETS credits. But a currency not based on one-for-on exchange with a useful item (like electricity currently or food or CPU cycles) only has value if the community gives it value as a medium of exchange and signaling demand. Thus stable currencies need to be regulated by a community or a trusted organization the community delegates the responsibility to -- because a currency represents a social contract. Otherwise, we will see some pattern of valuation as a bubble as the community eventually figures out the dynamics of the thing (which may take some time for the learning to propagate). Example of a community slowly becoming aware it is being collectively scammed in another financial context:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/600m-ponzi-scheme-incubated-small-nc-town-18845335#.UVhOeLAq3D0
The bottom line: it is wasteful of electricity to compute otherwise worthless mathematical functions for arbitrary social reasons. Of course, the same can be said of much gold mining, too -- although at least gold looks pretty and has some inherent usefulness. If people want a fiat currency, there are many ways to create one like via LETS that don't entail that level of waste.
Perhaps the biggest problem with Bitcoin conceptually if it is successful may just be that anyone can make a slight variant of it with a somewhat different mathematical function (Bitcoin1, Bitcoin2 ... Bitcoin100000) -- and then what is the value of Bitcoin0, the first one? The only value is in the social sentiments about it. And feelings can change about the social worth of a pattern of bits in some computer somewhere.
Will some people make a lot of money from Bitcoin0? No doubt, as people have told about on Slashdot already. But people will likely lose a lot in the bubble, too. And the waste of electricity is a surety. LETS its a better idea which promotes a re
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Bitcoin is a system with rules that govern its creation, dispersal & transaction.
They don't want to regulate bitcoin. They want to regulate YOU.
That's why they would rather the US dollar remain the leading currency. The regulation of YOU is established by the US dollar.
From TFA: Bitcoin is "unregulated BY A CENTRAL BANK" (Caps mine)
The true color of the lie (need for "regulation") is thus revealed.
The same people who so ....indispensably big to fail..., who MUST have trillions of bailout, and now trillions of easing, who are now stealing people's savings DIRECTLY, now they want your bitcoins.
See, it's not that hard to figure out.
But *I* can't borrow money for my business, or to put a roof over my head, yet am expected to pay for licenses, fees, permits, rent, utilities, taxes, should I make any profit, etc,. while every freeloading, govt favored parasite around me is grafting government contracts and grant money, enjoying fiat or de facto state-granted monopolies, or getting a fat government paycheck to stomp all over my rights, berfore we even get to "entitlements"?
Go Fuck Yourselves. I say. Hands off the bitcoin; you're stupid to try, anyway; it's not that kind of thing. But fuck yourselves anyway, just for thinking it.
Yes, and your post above includes "It just happens so that this involves computers."
It's remarkable how the narrow-minded can trivialize the most remarkable inventions and discoveries. Let's suppose a carton of cigarettes weights 200 grams and costs $40. A billion dollars of cigarettes then is 5,000 metric tons. A memory stick might be oh, 10 grams. Do you see where I'm going with this? An eight order magnitude improvement in mass (over your example) for something that is in use today and it's just an "idea".
THIS is why he's doing it & proof of it, here -> http://interviews.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3585927&cid=43295193 when others pointed out Jeremiah Cornelius forgot to submit one of the "first post spams" masquerading as myself as AC, & mistakenly submitted one of the impersonations of myself as his registered 'luser' name here on /. forums.
Pretty pitiful actually, but like every up to no good idiot does? He screwed up & submitted it under his registered 'luser' name here.
* Jeremiah Cornelius: DO YOURSELF, and the rest of us, A GIANT FAVOR MAN: Seek professional psychiatric help!
(Since Jeremiah Cornelius obviously can't get over the fact he made a spelling error on what it is HE ALLEGEDLY DID FOR A LIVING? That's not MY fault... it's HIS!)
APK
P.S.=> I seriously must have dusted JC (in his mind @ least) for his BAD spelling error & it "got his goat"...
I.E.-> Catching what he claimed to do as a job, for YEARS he left "PENETRATION" (correct) spelled as "PENTRATION" (incorrect) on his resume on LinkedIn & I pointed it out as he & his friends trolled me as usual (webmistressrachel, gmhowell, & crew (probably ALL JC no doubt using alterate emails or TOR to do it as a possible - I've caught "them & theirs" doing it before, ala Barbara, not Barbie = TomHudson (same person))).
So THAT is what has gotten his goat in a technical debate & his "geek angst" could only come up with *trying* to "impersonate me" in every news thread on /. for the month of March 2013 so far!
(Just to attempt to 'discredit me' as a spammer here obviously)
Doing so, by posting that "$10,000 challenge" &/or reposts of my old posts on hosts file value to end users into EVERY SINGLE NEWS ARTICLE POSTED on /. ...
It's all I can think of that *might* cause such a mentally troubled 'reaction' like the Jeremiah Cornelius is doing & there's NO QUESTION he's the one doing this spamming of nearly every posted article masquerading as myself...!
... apk
All of which depend on being able to exchange Bitcoin into another currency first in order to realize it's value. None of them can pay taxes or rent in Bitcoin.
Regulation of currency is evil.
-- Mean People Suck
hello. I would never invest in a monetary system that can be wiped out by cosmic rays. if they will not occur naturally within our lifetime- it's only a matter of time when they will be capable by man. these people with financial faith in electronics are fools.
Bitcoin doesn't need the "help" of regulators to make that happen anymore than did Gates need their help to spread DOS.
Seastead this.
[I]t's like have an incredibly high risk rate bank account.
So your accusation involves a for-profit Corporation accepting astroturfing money??
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Scrooge McDuck being a cartoon character, I would no more expect real economic behavior of him than I would have expected it from the family that found A Diamond As Big As The Ritz (from the F.Scott Fitzgerald short story).
I don't need to know who created the U.S. dollar in order to use it as a store of value or medium of trade for goods or services.
Everybody else does, though. Otherwise, Confederate bills would have value (interestingly, uncut bills DO, as a curiosity), and Zimbabwe would be the richest country in the world, followed by the Weimar Republic It is only the one-time probity of the US Government that made the US dollar better than other fiat currencies, and only since the term of Alexander Hamilton (ever hear the expression "not worth a Continental" describing the first attempt at a US dollar as a store of value?).
Because 1/100M is just an arbitrarily small value that can be reduced when necessary. When necessary, the change will be implemented by the client maintainers and approved by majority vote of the network's hashing power.