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UK Setting Itself Up To Be More Friendly To Bitcoin Startups
An anonymous reader writes While various states in the U.S. (most notably: New York) are trying to regulate every last aspect of Bitcoin, making it very difficult to innovate there, the UK appears to be going in the opposite direction. It's been setting up much more open regulations that would allow for greater freedom for Bitcoin startups to innovate without first having to ask for permission. In fact, the British government decided that what is most appropriate is to work with the digital currency community to develop a set of best practices for consumer protection and create a voluntary, opt-in regime. Hopefully other governments take note.
I think someone started to believe their own hype....
...insecure as to back an unproven currency! OP most be a just another cad trying to suck real value into something of no value.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
And hence, Bitcoin actually makes it easier to monitor money-flows, as they already have all Internet traffic. Getting the data from Banks, especially foreign ones, may be a tad more effort and the Bank knows.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
...it's obviously time to ditch it.
Well in the U.S. context that would mean being able to operate outside the existing laws for banking and electronic funds transfer
https://www.fdic.gov/regulatio...
Personally I am a little leery of bankers innovating after 2008
News Release - Quarterly Bulletin pre-release articles: âInnovations in payment technologies and the emergence of digital currenciesâ(TM) and âThe economics of digital currenciesâ(TM) http://www.bankofengland.co.uk... and The economics of digital currencies http://www.bankofengland.co.uk...
This move makes sense for the UK. AFAIK Bitstamp, which is the largest EU based BTC exchange, is headquartered there.
They have A LOT of traffic.
Making UK btc friendly also means that they can tax some of that revenue in exchange for the "easiness" to operate under UK law.
Hence more money for government.
London is a global financial hub. What better place for BitCoin to get mainstream acceptance?
I'm still struggling to see what the benefit for me would be? I have little need for making anonymous payments,
Anonymity isn't what crypto currencies provide. In fact, far from the opposite: Their whole structure is based on publicly broadcasting every transaction, that then everyone in the network store in its local copy of the common ledger (= into the blockchain). At best your can call it "pseudonymous" (wallets are identified by a base32 hash. it's not obvious at first look which real person is behind a wallet, just like the username on a forum doesn't immediately looks tied to an identity).
The main argument for bitcoin is decentralisation: because everyone has a copy of the blockchain, every one can verify that a transaction is legit and did indeed happen. There is no need for a central authority. Things are kept in balance by the whole network, no single entity can take control. (Unless they control 51% of all mining hash power).
Another peculiarity which stems from the above is that you aren't bound to any specific company. As long as both ends of a transaction support the bitcoin protocole, they can do whatever transaction suits them.
(you could be using a web-based coin payment processor like coinbase, i could be using a wallet running locally on my machine like bitcoin.org's own, and we can still exchange BTCs)
international transfers are reasonably fast, cheap and convenient these days. {...} for local purchases iDeal (the Dutch banks' online payment solution) is better,
Well, we are both in Europe, so thanks to SEPA we already have reasonably fast and cheap transfers, that can work between any participating banks (I don't need to be at the same bank as you, or even in the same country. Because your dutch and my swiss bank are both participating in SEPA, we can send each other funds).
But that's not the case everywhere else.
Also, even if they are relatively fast, they still take between 24 and 72 inside the same country, and a few days up to a week for international payment. That makes it still usable for ordering goods around, for example.
One of the small advantage of bitcoin protocol is that it works much faster: between a few minutes up to half an hour at worst. Between any end-point wherever on the world as long as both support the protocol. That makes it usable for buying services.
It gives the easy and quick possibilities of cash transaction (here's your 5EUR note).
- but without the limitation of needing physical present (I can't send a 5EUR note over e-mail)
- and without relying necessarily on a third party or the same 3rd party.
One benefit is not having to give online merchants my full credit card details {...} and for international orders I can almost always use PayPal for that.
Yet still, these are form of payment where there is one single company in charge or supervising everything (most credit cards issued by banks will rely on the VISA or MasterCard companies). When paying an online merchant through a credit card, you need to have a credit card at the same company (e.g.: MasterCard) and that company is going to charge you both for the transaction.
Also, the company can decide to stop receiving payments (see Visa and MasterCard deciding to stop processing donations to WikiLeaks).
Same with PayPal: a single company, requires that both ends of the transaction use paypal.
Is known for making troubles and locking account on a very regular base.
And very often, you need to give your credit cards info to paypal anyway, in order to be able to add funds to your paypal account.
One of the reason bitcoin gained some traction, is to work around the blocking of funds by Paypal and credit card companies.
That's not the case, neither with SEPA as you mentioned in Europe, nor with bitcoins.
I could by exchanging my BTCs with CHFs face-to-face by meeting people (like localbitcoins) and sending them using a wallet runnin
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Unless they plan to regulate it, all that will continue to happen is exchanges will start up, or businesses that hold bitcoin in escrow....and they suddenly go away, or get "hacked" and the owners run off with the bitcoin.
until then, nothing changes
...new ways for people to steal your bitcoins.
It's an euphemism.
In fact, the British government decided that what is most appropriate is to work with the digital currency community to develop a set of best practices for consumer protection and create a voluntary, opt-in regime.
Because self-regulation has always worked so well in the banking sector.
Why "hopefully?"
Is this a biased story?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Here's my startup: please click the links in my signature and get free bitcoins and dogecoins for yourself!
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I thought sure Bitcoin would be used in the sex slave and drug markets.
These two (and assassins-for-hire) are probably the use case where the governments would be accepting to throw the necessary resources to do the kind of big-data analysis necessary to track down the culprits.
(Follow the money trail. i.e.: follow the life of bitcoins along transactions, until a real-life event can be mapped to a transaction [e.g.: bitcoins were used to order some product online which was delivered at an adress. Or bitcoins were exchanged for cash at an exchange and were wired to a bank acount]. Do a huge amount of these trackings. After a while some pattern is going to emerge. This pattern might be used to get leads for real-world investigations).
Such tracking is well within the reach of various tree-letter agencies in the US (and in Russia, and in China, etc.)
Had not the founder of Silk Road been caught on some very stupid operational mistake, its likely that the US government would have gone this route to track him down (or it's still possible that they indeed tried the route, and on their way discovered a few operationnal mistakes, and decided to use those as evidence, in order not to admit their tracking capabilities)
Anonymity can be better achieved by what is kown as tumblers.
The cryptocurrency equivalent of money laundering.
You send bitcoins to a tumbler. These bitcoins are added to a big pool that is constantly mixed.
After a while, a similar amount of bitcoins (minus some fee) is sent out of random wallets from the mixing pool, to another address of you choosing.
Nothing is linking the 2 adresses.
If you try tracking the money (not easy because the tumbler itself is constantly mixing them) you see that the emerging BTCs come initially from a dozen of unrelated accounts.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]