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California Legalizes Bitcoin
jfruh (300774) writes "California governor Jerry Brown has signed a law repealing Section 107 of California's Corporations Code, which prohibited companies or individuals from issuing money other than U.S. dollars. Before the law was repealed, not only bitcoin but everything from Amazon Coin to Starbucks Stars were techinically illegal; the law was generally not enforced."
Finally, with the world's largest economy behind it, it will be unstoppable.
As a currency.
Bitcon is NEVER mentioned.
Sigh, of course BITCOIN IS NOT MONEY!
Hence was not illegal.
It is a tradable commodity. just like gold, tulip bulbs, or online porn.
But hey, who cares about reality, which fishing for a good story. If trading bitcoin was illegal, then so what a WHOLE lot of other transactions.
Seek immediate psychiatric help. Seriously.
BitCoins will be declared as NOT known to the state of California to cause cancer!
And here I was thinking we'd finally killed defacto indentured servitude/slavery via company scrip.
This is a stupid act, and it's going to have very real consequences in the future before long.
And Bitcoin will still be just as irrelevant regardless.
What's amusing is that because it has the word "coin" in its name, people automatically consider it money, as per the intention of Bitcoin's creator. But it's not money. It's just tradeable bits. If it had been called Bitvalues or Bitnumbers, no one would think of it as money and it would have gone nowhere.
I hope I'm not the only one that dislikes that how you remove some legal code is to add a patch that removes it to the gigantic patche set that is our legal code.
Wouldn't it be nice if we had a "head" or "master" version of the law, maybe even a "stable" version that said what the legal code is? We can keep the version history if people want that (its needed to know what the law was at some time in the past).
Maybe portions of the law that describe well defined things, like the tax code, could be in a nice declarative language that could be compiled into state and federal tax filing websites?
Maybe I'm crazy for thinking we could handle legal code, a large body carefully edited text describing rules, in a way thats better millions of diff files but I think some people might have come up with better ways.
I won't go so far as to fork our legal code and refactor this horrible mess, but I think thats what it would take since there is no way such fixes are getting merged upstream: they don't even have the concept of merges, and they don't accept pull requests without a lot of money anyway.
oh yea
"Section 107 of California's Corporations Code, which prohibited companies or individuals from issuing money other than U.S. dollars"
So issuing US dollars in California is fine? I thought issuing US dollars was called counterfeiting.
Time to see if the the big color laser printer at work is up to the task!
Shill!
Excellent!
Anyone know when Fry's will start accept these Emperor Norton bills I have?
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Excellent!
Anyone know when Fry's will accept these Emperor Norton bills I have?
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Soon BitCoin will became what really it was meant to be in the first place - asset for investment trades. A bitcoin is virtual, non existing in the real world asset, but when the invest market crashed back in 2008, they found most of the assets where non-existing anyway. Now the difference 6 years later - you know that you invest in something that is virtual, so you take a risk again, only more educated risk. It didn't make your investment more risky, just more obsessive, since you can mine with expensive hardware to gain some more coins.
...and money laundering and sanction evading are illegal... and they can fine foreign banks for those activities that were carried out overseas... could they have fined banks for issuing currency overseas?
...shitcoin ponzi schemes will always be a bad idea.
Bitcoin is code for big brother technology. Every transaction you do can be tracked by anyone with access to the blockchain. So is anyone surprised big brother legalized a technology that allows easy spying?
California thinks it can legalize alternative currency just like they think they can legalize pot.
They can do neither, because both are against Federal Law.
We are figuring out how to devalue the US dollar, before we pay you back with them.
This legal change allows companies (and people) to issue money other than US dollars.
If a company pays its employee $6/hr in US dollars, it's failing to meet the minimum wage requirement, period. Issuing a gift card loaded with McBucks, quatloos, or whatever will not put them in compliance.
Admittedly, this is a common-sense observation, which means its legal relevance may be limited.
How long until companies are paying in their own special dollars that can only be used at their company stores (again)?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Gold actually isn't that useful. It has a few niche applications in engineering that need tiny quantities as a corrosion-resistant coating or ultra-thin foil, but that's all. It's not even a very good electrical conductor - copper is better. The main use for gold is to be expensive - people wear it in order to flaunt their wealth. Like designer clothing, if it weren't so expensive people wouldn't want to wear it.
See also diamonds.
Thing is, you don't have to shave metal from the coin unless you're stupid, lazy, and/or in a big hurry.
Coins of precious metal wear down with use. Metal gets rubbed off the high points of the coin. A heavily worn silver dime can lose as much as 20% of its weight, and still be recognizable as a dime. Where does the metal go? All over the place -- bits of it are left as dust or markings at every point where the coin moves across a surface. In the days of circulating PMs, when coins wore down too far, they were returned to the government, which would melt them down and recycle their metal into new coins. The government absorbed the losses due to circulation.
If you're an enterprising individual, you can get a bunch of silver or gold coins, put them in a dust-tight bag, tumble that bag for a few days, and collect the dust. You're left with worn, but still perfectly legal, coins; they are, in fact, circulated, just not among multiple entities. It's called sweating, and can be done chemically as well, although that method is easier to detect.
So, if you're on a gold or silver standard, your "hard currency" still loses value over time, but you have the power to capture that "lost value" yourself if you so choose. If a state or nation proposed to issue silver or gold coins for circulation today, you can be sure people would use the full power of twenty-first century technology to chisel their cut off the top. There's no way any entity would volunteer to be on the hook for circulation losses, especially when it's so easy for another entity to accelerate and capture those losses.
From the US. Constitution:
No State shall ... make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts;
I guess that one has not been generally enforced for a while either.
What about all those Disney bucks or whatever they call the currency that you can buy in Disneyland and is only good in Disneyland, and hardly anywhere even within Disneyland? Has that been technically illegal all these years?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Store credit has always been legal. Stores allowing customers to use credit from other stores it has a reciprocal agreement with for honoring store credit has always been legal. As long as a place of business is willing to accept US dollars, it can accept whatever other form of credit, discount, or voucher that it wants. And given that the federal constitution declares that the US dollar is the currency of the nation, the state law was, at best, redundant.
Individual states weighing in on bitcoin doesn't make it any more or any less valid or relevant in the market. When the IRS, SEC, and US Treasury finally make definitive policy statements specifically mentioning bitcoin, then you'll have your validity, or invalidity, as the case may be.
California has no say in the matter. It is completely legal because they have no control over it. Period.
California generally has immaculate consumer protection laws. A good number of those laws eliminate methods stores sue to lock money that could otherwise be taken elsewhere, or even strip money away without providing any services at all. For example, they were first to make it illegal to charge monthly fees on a gift card (which would eventually bring a card's worth down to nothing even if the owner never spent a dime of it's starting value).
Gift certificates and cash-like coupons like Starbuck's stars, Kohl's cash, and the like are fine as as an option, but I certainly wouldn't want to get them back in lieu of real cash if I, say, returned a purchase.
Sometimes California is a large enough market to drag the whole country along for the ride, and sometimes not. In this case, I think Californians will mostly be affected, ad the rest of the country will plow on as usual. Even so, we should all have a critical eye towards any reduction in consumer protections.
No, actually, that one has been enforced. Read it again: no *State* shall. The point of that clause is that only the Federal government controls the currency, states can't have their own currencies.
He's done an amazing job and I love the guy, but this was a mistake.
Legitimizing the currency of drug addicts and drug dealers is a terrible idea.
Then again Brown has had a rich history of drug abuse, so I can understand he's got a soft spot in this regard.
That's okay, currency of any sort including the USD is also treated like both a currency and a commodity.
It depends upon your tax agency, in the US the IRS is treating bitcoin like an asset. Under such policies people are expect to declare the gain or loss of value of bitcoins between the time they acquired the coins and the time they spent the coins. When this reality is enforced, i.e. people get letters from the IRS asking for such info, bitcoin usage in these jurisdiction will change.
The above is a key distinction between spending fiat and spending bitcoins.
Now factor in that in tax jurisdictions where bitcoins are an asset, like the U.S., that a person spending a coin at any of these merchants is obligated to report to the IRS the gain or loss the bitcoins spent had experienced between the time they were acquired and the time spent.
Rather, I suspect this was done as a way to open the door to taxing 'income' via Bitcoin etc., which if it's not money, is harder to do.
California gov't is nothing if not avaricious.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?