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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 Before the law was repealed, not only bitcoin but everything from Amazon Coin to Starbucks Stars were techinically illegal; the law was generally not enforced."
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.
I'll take the turds. They have value as fertilizer. While Bitcoin is bullshit, physical bullshit at least has a use.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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.
Finally, with the world's largest economy behind it, it will be unstoppable.
Its the year of the bitcoin wallet ...
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 still would have gone nowhere.
Fixed that for you...
On a Linux desktop?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Its the year of the bitcoin wallet ...
Stallman has announced that it should be called gnubitcoin.
We do have a head version. Here's the federal: http://uscode.house.gov/
Here's california's: http://leginfo.legislature.ca....
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
"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!
Its the year of the bitcoin wallet ...
Stallman has announced that it should be called gnubitcoin.
Makes sense, I've heard that the gnu is very protective of its bits.
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
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.
Actually carrying around the turds everywhere seems pretty impractical, though. Wouldn't it make more sense to just store them in a warehouse, and then transfer ownership of them back and forth? So for example when you want to pay with 10 turds at the gas station, instead of unloading them right there, you simply transfer ownership of 10 of your warehoused turds to the station, perhaps using tokens that represent them.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
A some point one would think the fact that damn near every high speed bus contact and nearly all high current power connectors are gold plated would allow gold to be characterized as "useful."
Sounds great. We can have the government make them and call them U.S. dollars. And then we can run a sensible monetary policy around them. Or I guess we can use numbers on a computer in a deflationary currency with no controls whatsoever and a setup you need a degree in CS to understand. But I think I'll go with the government route.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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.
Or we can use both, and choose whichever is the most convenient at the time. A few weeks ago I ordered something from a Chinese producer, and made payment in bitcoin. Within a minute, the producer could see the transfer to his wallet, and could start the production run. The other options were to use paypal, and pay an extra fee, or to use an international wire transfer, adding several days of extra delay.
Gold doesn't corrode and it is the most malleable metal. Those two factors are alone make gold hugely useful for a number of practical uses. Literally every single connector in your PC (aside from the molex plugs) is gold-plated for corrosion resistance. Every single connector in every single cellphone is gold-plated for the same reason.
And then you get into the malleability and reflectivity. Because gold can be rolled so thin (or deposited on a mylar film) and still reflect infrared radiation, it is an essential material in designing heat shielding.
Gold does look pretty and shiny, but it does happen to have a lot of industrial and practical uses as well.
Eat the rich.
Yes, but the total amount of gold in electrical contacts is small, and the industrial use alone does not warrant the high price.
...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?
As a sidenote, I assume the good contact resistance of gold is because it is soft. Is this true?
Bitcon is NEVER mentioned.
It IS mentioned.
The assembly member that proposed it, in the press release announcing the passing of the bill, talks about BitCoin, Amazon Coins, Starbucks Stars, and Diablo II Stones of Jordan*. Of course the legislation itself doesn't mention BitCoin, since the section that it repeals pre-dates BitCoin, and when you're repealing a section, you just say "Section X is repealed", not "Section X is repealed because BitCoin".
*One of these is a lie.
Little discs of metal and rectangles of paper / fabric / plastic are also quite lacking in use. There's nothing wrong with Bitcoin (aside from the tracking aspects) if you think of it as a digital coin. The problem is thinking that just because you can stamp out a load of coins that you now have a lot of wealth. The US dollar has a value because the Federal Government will enforce your ability to use it to settle debts held by US citizens and will accept it as payment in taxes. Cryptocurrencies are a good way of exchanging tokens, but just being able to exchange tokens doesn't mean that you've exchanged something of value.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
No. It does not oxidize at all. Even aluminum builds up a very thin oxidation layer.
Yes, Gold also dos not oxidise (unlike silver, copper or gold)
Cryptocurrencies are a good way of exchanging tokens, but just being able to exchange tokens doesn't mean that you've exchanged something of value
As long as other people are willing to trade items or work of value for these tokens, it would be reasonable for me to also attach a value to these tokens. For example: assuming current exchange rate of about $600 for a bitcoin. Let's say you loaned a friend $400, and he's offering to pay you back with 1 bitcoin. Would you accept it, knowing that you can probably find someone to pay you more than $500 for it ? If so, it has value to you.
Even to them, it was still a precious metal. They only had it in relative abundance - a lot of their gold decorations were actually alloys, to make their gold stretch further.
What's amusing is that because they have the word "coin" in their name, people automatically consider coins money. But they're not money. They're just tradeable metal discs. If they had called them Nickelplates or Copperounds, no one would think of them as money, and they would have gone nowhere.
*dons white beret*
Guess what! Everything is arbitrary! And it's wonderful! You can buy a house with colored pieces of paper or wear a beaver tail or race steam-powered airships or conduct a symphony underwater. The world we know is nothing but the sum of a billion crazy ideas, and the greatest people in history are the ones who made it a slightly weirder place...Or not! Who knows?
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
That depends on the volatility. If the price of bitcoin today is $600, but judging by previous trends, might swing to $200 tomorrow, then I'd probably just take the money. If it were a really sound choice, then my friend would be an idiot to offer it: he'd just sell the bitcoin, give me the $400, and pocket the $200. Volatility in a market is generally related to the ratio of speculators (people who just buy and sell the commodity but neither produce nor consume it) to producers and consumers. You need some speculators to provide liquidity (when you produce something, it's good if you can find a buyer now, even if no one wants it yet and it's someone who's just buying it in the hope that they can sell it later), but if their trades start to dominate the market then you get lots of volatility.
The volatility of bitcoin has dropped off a bit recently, but it wasn't long ago that it was considered stable if it only had 25% swings in the value over the course of a day. That is the last thing that you want form a currency. If someone pays me a token in exchange for some work, then I hope to be able to exchange that token for something of approximately equal value when I need to. A small amount of inflation is fine (you don't want people hoarding the tokens, you want an incentive for people with spare capital to invest it in real things), but it should be predictable.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Of course. Governments love bitcoin because it is actually traceable. And as an added bonus, the public perception of the bitcoin is that is totally UNtraceable.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Sounds like Bitcoin is really really tangential to this story... but hey *page views*
Were it not for the 60% usage in China and India to fulfill their local traditional needs for family treasures, gold would plummet to a third of its current price. The price of gold is very volatile, much more than any currency. You can compare the prices for platinum with the prices for gold for the last 20 years. Both metals are quite similar: Main use is jewelry, with some usage in the electronics or as catalyst, the frequency of occurrence is about the same (0.004 ppm vs. 0.005 ppm in the Earth crust), and still the prices of both metals are not parallel, but swing hugely into both direction (up to three times the price for one vs. the other).
Taken all things together, gold makes for a horrible currency.
US treasury bonds are still "safer than gold", they are backed by the US government who in turn controls the US military, and power trumps gold any day of the week.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
What's amusing is that because it has the word "coin" in its name, people automatically consider it money
They should have named it PonziCoin.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
For all those thinking that gold is an ideal currency.
We have ridges on the edges of quarters as a throwback to gold coins, where someone would shave a bit of metal from the coin to devalue it (passing the coin off at full value)
The art of coin casting isn't unknown to the non-bank public. You have people willing to do backyard forges and melt in a little metal into their gold and re-stamp it. After it is a bit worn, it can be (depending on skill) passable as a worn 100% gold coin.
We haven't even approached the age old "lead in a gold envelope" techniques, which Archimedes made famous.
Basically, if you're getting paid in gold, there's still a lot of trust, but a few new / old ways you can get ripped off. That alone causes a lot of concern. With a paper dollar, generally it is quickly inspectable and at least somewhat designed to prevent counterfeiting. A transaction with gold coins could cost quite a bit of overhead, if your recipient demanded that you pay to verify the authenticity.
Our AC is full of bull. Gold is more conductive than aluminum. However, the figures for the four top metals are grouped so closely that there isn't much to choose (other than heavy-duty power transmission, where the ratio of resistivity to density rules and cost matters greatly, so basically it's either copper or aluminum, and aluminum has a significant edge).
Resistivity in ohm-meters at 20 C:
Silver, 1.59*10^-8
Copper, 1.68*10^-8
Gold, 2.44*10^-8
Aluminum, 2.82*10^-8
Gold (or platinum) plated contacts are most desirable for circuits which carry very low to extremely low current, because it is free from corrosion, so surface resistance stays low. For circuits carrying significant current, contacts operate under much higher mechanical pressure, so wiping clears the corrosion at the points of contact. Platinum has more than TWENTY TIMES the resistivity of gold, yet it is still very suitable for contact plating. The resistance contributed by a plating only 1.3 MICRONS in thickness is utterly insignificant. In fact, you need a tin substrate under the gold plating to make it durable, and tin is only as conductive as platinum. But it doesn't matter, because the tin substrate only needs to be 1.3 microns thick, too.
The meat of the connector, relay or switch contact can't be silver, copper, gold or aluminum because none of them has any significant degree of springiness. Phosphor-bronze is good. Its resistivity is seven times higher than copper, but that is just a fact of life. The wires leading to the contacts form a current path many times longer than that of the contact itself, so the resistance of the contact is not very significant.
"Stallman has announced that it should be called gnubitcoin."
While ESR countered it should be called gunbitcoin.
I think Slashdot has officially become a pump and dump vehicle for BTC manipulators.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Yeah, Platinum would be better, since it is rarer, and has more uses (eg as a catalyst)
Of course there are other metals that are even rarer, like Plutonium, but you can't carry that around in your pocket...
Gold is also used for ultra-fine wires in sensitive test equipment, during chip development and research work, including chemistry and medicine experiments (gold substrates can be used for DNA analysis). Sure, gold is generally not used in large quantities for a single task, but it is a vital part of keeping the modern technological world running. There is ~50 milligrams of gold in a modern mobile phone, which isn't a lot, but it adds up with billions of devices in use.
Not to mention tooth fillings (gold is bio-compatible), arthritis medication and so on. It is also very easy to electroplate gold onto other surfaces, which makes it even easier to make use of its reflective properties.
Of course, the value of gold has been grossly inflated by jewelry manufacture because "ooh shiny", but that doesn't change the fact that it is a rare metal with numerous practical uses, some of them relatively low-tech. That is what helped cement its value throughout human history. On a very basic level, gold is denser and more malleable than lead, and non-toxic to boot. If nothing also, that alone would ensure a number of practical uses.
Eat the rich.
This legal change allows companies (and people) to issue money other than US dollars.
If a company pays its employee $6/hr in US dollars, it's failing to meet the minimum wage requirement, period. Issuing a gift card loaded with McBucks, quatloos, or whatever will not put them in compliance.
Admittedly, this is a common-sense observation, which means its legal relevance may be limited.
How long until companies are paying in their own special dollars that can only be used at their company stores (again)?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
'Running' as people do with feet, or as water does down a streambed?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
So, "priceless" does not mean it has no price. In fact, it apparently means it has a price that isn't particularly high.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
They can refuse any sort of money that is not US$ for it is not legal tender.
The Euro would still be legal tender, even if Fry's doesn't accept it. The company's willingness to accept foreign currency does not affect the validity of that currency.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
De ja vu...
Quick, hide. Agent Smith just found us in the matrix.
G f J l
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e o p t
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n i n e
+ g e r
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If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
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.
I use ChromeOS, iOS, Android, Linux, Windows for my desktop. The things I use are available on most, if not all, of those platforms. Very few of the tools I use are not available on anything other than Windows, but those have more to do with managing Windows platform than actual "work".
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
No one I know uses anything but Windows on the desktop (and a few OSX).
Allow me to introduce myself. I've been using Linux on the desktop since 1997. Also Windows from time to time, and for the last 7 years, frequently OS X. Maybe I've been at war with myself, but casualties have been very light.
As to the parent AC's reference to "desktop wars" being rendered irrelevant, it's probably with respect to those whose computer requirements are sufficiently trivial that they are satisfied by a smartphone and/or tablet. I have an Android phone and an Android tablet, and I enjoy using both of them for casual content consumption; but, they aren't anywhere near adequate to do most of what I use a desktop or laptop computer for, either at home or at work.
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.
Bitcoin is traceable, but there are plenty of coin washing services out there. There are also transaction exchanges where coins are washed as they are exchanged for goods and services. Bitcoin can be "less traceable" if you also take simple steps to avoid wallet re-use.
If you combine any number of these techniques, your individual transactions while traceable, cannot be traced back to you, which is the goal. And they are working on extensions to the protocol to help make a few of these more "automatic" than before.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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.
Silver does have a niche where that lower resistance does matter: Very compact inductors and transformers. Lower resistance means you can use thinner wire, which means denser packing of coils. It's not often seen due to price, but for some weight/volume-critical applications (missiles, spacecraft) it's worth the extra cost to make parts smaller.
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.
Or a Hurd desktop.
I'd make a Duke Nukem Forever joke here, but that actually got released.
Gold doesnt actually have sizeable physical value.
The value of everything is "arbitrary" in that it is simply a function of the worth an individual or society assigns to it. Even something like waterbuffalo has an arbitrary value: some societies would value it highly, but I certainly would be pissed if a waiter gave me my change in waterbuffalo.
Tin whiskers for the win!
Gold is not "the most malleable metal", and it sounds like what you're alluding to is actually ductility
As a long-time ./ reader, I am not familiar with that word, "washing". Could you explain without the fancy bitcoin mumbo jumbo?
Copyright (c) 1990 - 2014 Dice. All rights reserved. Use of this comment is subject to certain Terms and Conditions.
And because Dogecoin has the word 'dog' in it, people think it can bite you in the ass ......
No, wait. That works just fine. Never mind.
Have gnu, will travel.
Actually carrying around the turds everywhere seems pretty impractical, though.
Everyone carries around turds the human body and most animals have a good mechanism for the temporary storage of turds.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
Gold actually is very useful, but because it's so expensive it's not used for a lot of things. Example, blocking X-rays (you know that piece of lead armor you have to wear at the dentist when they're taking a photo of your teeth?). Sure, a lot of the price is the inflated feel of "gold is gold", but if it ever became dirt-cheap, it would be used more.
The Euro would still be legal tender, even if Fry's doesn't accept it.
If Fry's has the option of refusing to accept the Euro as repayment for a debt, then the Euro is not legal tender in that context. (For example, the Euro is not legal tender within the United States. It remains legal tender in the EU.)
The company's willingness to accept foreign currency does not affect the validity of that currency.
Indeed, but this has nothing to do with legal tender status. A currency does not need to be legal tender to be valid (or legal to use in trade). Lacking legal tender status just means that it can be refused as a form of payment for a debt.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
" 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."
There's plenty other reasons gold gets used in place of copper or silver in electronics work. For example, you're not going to have much luck putting copper bonding wires on an LED die. Gold is almost exclusively used in this case.
Gold is also used in medicine, such as corrosion-resistant fillings for dentistry. Particles of a radioactive gold isotope are implanted in tissues to serve as a radiation source in the treatment of certain cancers. Injections of sodium aurothiomalate or aurothioglucose are sometimes used to treat rheumatoid arthritis.
In aerospace, many things are covered with a gold-coated polyester film. This is to block IR. Gold is also used as a lubricant between mechanical parts. In the vacuum of space, organic lubricants would volatilize and they would be broken down by the intense radiation beyond Earth's atmosphere. Gold has a very low shear strength and thin films of gold between critical moving parts serves as a lubricant - the gold molecules slip past one another under the forces of friction and that provides a lubricant action.
Tons, tons, tons of uses for gold. It is one of the most versatile metals on the entire planet.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
"washing" is a term used to make illicit currency legitimate. In this case, washing BitCoin means sending an amount of BitCoin to a Middle Man, who then exchanges it for a random amount of Coins (minus a transaction charge) with uncertain history. In an overly simplistic scenario Person A gets BitCoins with serial numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 for a transaction. He takes all those coins (plus a fee) to a "washer" who then returns BitCoins with serial Numbers (not real) of 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. He now has the same number of coins, but doesn't have coins that are linked to his previous transactions, thus making them less traceable.
The real trick is to have sufficiently large amount of BitCoins to draw from in the "washing machine", so that it is very hard to link users together from these kinds of exchanges.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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.
Pure gold won't do anything to help arthritis, but some real drugs used to treat it are gold compounds. Gold doesn't form compounds easily, but it can be done.
From the very link you posted:
"The most ductile metal is platinum and the most malleable metal is gold."
Gold is both highly ductile and very malleable.
Eat the rich.
Gold (or platinum) plated contacts are most desirable for circuits which carry very low to extremely low current, because it is free from corrosion, so surface resistance stays low.
Or for environments that are hostile. A family member assembled aircraft radios for the US Navy back in the day, they used gold solder. Don't know if they continue to do so or if everything is just in a sealed black box.
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.
Somebody should mod this up. The GP's description makes no sense, but this makes it clear.
I stand corrected; I would have thought lead was more malleable.
Nobody who advocates the gold standard (of whom I'm not one, just playing a bit of devil's advocate) believes we should be running around with pockets full of gold doubloons. The gold standard doesn't mean the currency is gold, it means the currency is backed by gold - that is, whoever has issued the currency holds enough gold in reserve to exchange your dollars for bullion.
The reason isn't usually "gold, yay!"; it's proposed as a means of controlling inflation by tying money to something governments cannot manipulate (e.g. scarce physical matter). Bitcoins are usually appreciated by the same crowd, for the same reason, because governments cannot manipulate maths either.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Here's a modest proposal to the contrary.
For example, the Euro is not legal tender within the United States. It remains legal tender in the EU.
Just in some EU member states. Some lucky country managed to remain out of this trap, and experience shows economy works much better without it.
You are unaware of the information that can be extracted (mined) by looking at the big picture.
When a lot of transactions go through an intermediate point (this can easily be detected by just looking at the amounts of money transferred), this point is marked as a possible washer. Then again, looking at the transferred amounts, the "real" transactions that are taking place can be mined.
(Even if the washer uses an intermediate network, and divides the transaction into smaller transactions, well, the NSA has algorithms for that).
And even if only the washer could be identified, it is possible, by certain law-enforcement techniques, to extract more information from them.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
It's reasonably close, and I would think more people have experience with lead than with gold, at least in the quantities to easily demonstrate malleability.
Eat the rich.
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?
Hurm yes I must be a dwarf.
How does it go?
Gold gold gold
Gold gold gold gold
gold gold Au Au
GOLD
TP got it right
Should have been
"unlike silver, copper and aluminium"
all are good conductors but the oxides are not so none are good for push fit connections.