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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 Before the law was repealed, not only bitcoin but everything from Amazon Coin to Starbucks Stars were techinically illegal; the law was generally not enforced."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?
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 ...
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.
"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.
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.
Yes, but the total amount of gold in electrical contacts is small, and the industrial use alone does not warrant the high price.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
I stand corrected; I would have thought lead was more malleable.