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Venezuela Will Force Bitcoin Miners To Register With the Government (themerkle.com)
schwit1 shares a report from The Merkle: No one will be surprised to hear the Venezuelan government isn't too keen on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Since Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can't be regulated or controlled by the government in any official capacity, they could damage the country's brittle economy even further. As a result, the government has imposed new rules for anyone mining cryptocurrency. To be more specific, all miners will now be taxed and required to register with the government. Being taxed is not entirely illogical, but the registration requirement is pretty worrisome, to say the least. The government shouldn't need to know who is doing what in regards to crypto trading and mining. Nevertheless, authorities want to know who is mining, where they are located, and what type of equipment they use. "That'll put food back on the shelves," adds schwit1.
"These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who's the banana republic now?" - Senator Bernie Sanders
https://www.sanders.senate.gov...
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Same way they track people who grow pot in their homes, I suspect.
"This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has got to go." -- Oscar Wilde on his deathbed
I wonder how they'll track miners.
They could track them by electricity use. Venezuela gives away electricity for almost nothing, less than 1 cent/kwhr, which makes it an attractive place to run miners, as well as other activities that squander energy.
The only party that might get damaged is the government. The people of Venezuela can at least use bitcoin as a way to store their value, and to conduct trade, free of the hyperinflation their government imposes on them with its rampant spending. For them bitcoin is a gift from heaven, a way out from their broken system.
The government, OTOH, should definitely be worried. Bitcoin offers no way for them to print money, so as their nation switches away from the old coin, government income will dwindle to nothing. They will be left with a valueless coin, and therefore without the means to effectively control their country.
And Venezuela is only the first country to go down this road. Eventually _all_ nations will end up in the same spot, as people will generally prefer bitcoin (which is free from inflation) over whatever local currency they are now stuck with. Governments that wake up to this in time will try to put a stop to it, using whatever draconian measures they can get away with. The people, who will have a major part of their wealth in bitcoin, will fight them.
It will be interesting to see who will win.
Mining virtual coin needs to use a lot of electricity, so if you are looking for cheap electricity, consider the small kingdom of Brunei
http://www.des.gov.bn/SitePages/Electricity%20Tariff.aspx
NEW ELECTRICITY TARIFF STRUCTURE
0001 kWh to 0600 kWh B$ 0.01 cents
0601 kWh to 2000 kWh B$ 0.08 cents
2001 kWh to 4000 kWh B$ 0.10 cents
4001 kWh and Above B$ 0.12 cents
And then the fix is "okay, we'll subsidize the first X kWh, then it gets more expensive". But that's just dancing around UBI. If you want a basic subsidy to cover necessities, just give people the money rather than distorting market prices. And as for the notion that some people will just "squander it" - well, that's their bloody choice. If someone finds buying liquor to be more important than keeping the lights on, hey, it's their choice if they want to drink in the dark. Most people won't join them.
"This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has got to go." -- Oscar Wilde on his deathbed
Like dorm electricity. When I was in school, electricity in the dorms wasn't metered, at least not at our level. I guess they paid a flat fee per dorm to the utility based on averages. We used to joke about electroplating stuff in the dorms. Nobody ever did, and in those days there the penalty for merely having an ounce of pot was quite severe, never mind growing it. Bitcoin? Inconceivable. I wonder what's going on in sweltering-hot dorm rooms these days... aside from the usual antics.
Of course they have a way. Where does the miner get his electricity?
When in the US potgrowers can be found by their electricity usage, why not in Venezuela?
Unless someone dams a river in the jungle and imports generators from GE or Siemens (both are massively laying of people since no one buys big generators anymore) there is always a way to find miners. At least miners above hobbyists.
This is what happens when you run out of other people's money that you were using to pay for the "free stuff" you were giving away.
You have to double down on shakedown schemes.
The only thing sustainable in Venezuela under the suffocating blanket of dying socialism is starvation and disease.
Are you really going to argue socialism could have worked in Venezuela had it been "done properly"?
<SARCASM>Yeah, right. Sure it would have.</SARCASM>
Do you have the brains to even ask why you have to do that every damn time socialism fails? Naah, you don't.
Have you met people who have handouts for their rent and food? This is exactly what they'll do with UBI - they'll blow it on bullshit like cigarettes, and then complain that they don't have enough for rent (but fuck their landlord, he's rich anyways and should just take it). I don't believe for a second that the same bleeding heart fools advocating for UBI will turn around and have hearts of stone when the money is misspent and poor kids are hungry.
> Being taxed is not entirely illogical
Whatever services government provides must be paid for somehow. Taxation is not only logical but inevitable.
> but the registration requirement is pretty worrisome, to say the least.
Since crypto is being used to subvert the government-controlled economic system... registration is not only logical but inevitable.
>The government shouldn't need to know who is doing what in regards to crypto trading and mining. ...the opinion of people attempting cheat their government with crypto trading and mining.
The problem is political mismanagement of the economy, but you don't fix that by removing all economic control from the government unless you want things to get worse.
New Hampshire seems to be doing pretty well.
The Chavez family has billions in assets. Is that getting redistributed at all?
There's no significant difference between an absolute libertarian state and pure anarchy.
The fundamental system shucks off all civility and slowly returns to the natural state of things if you remove intelligent management: predator/prey relationships.
I'm reasonably certain that the majority of people promoting libertarian states or anarchies believe THEY will be the successful local strongman lording over everyone else in such a situation. I'm also pretty certain they're delusional.
only because all the high paying jobs are south of it's border. Almost all jobs in NH pay a bit above minimum wage and for health benefits you need to use the ACA
I wonder how they'll track miners.
In a collapsed socialist economy, miners will be the only large users of electricity.
Bitcoin offers no way for them to print money, so as their nation switches away from the old coin, government income will dwindle to nothing.
Stupid statement #1. The problems of Venezuela are not rooted in them printing money. The problems are far more diverse and numerous.
They will be left with a valueless coin, and therefore without the means to effectively control their country.
Stupid statement #2. Even if they cannot revive the bolivar they can simply use another fiat currency like the dollar or the euro. Countries experiencing hyperinflation do this commonly for periods of time. It isn't a cure all but sometimes it is a useful tool.
And Venezuela is only the first country to go down this road.
Stupid statement #3. Venezuela is not the first country to experience hyperinflation and bitcoin will not save their economy.
Eventually _all_ nations will end up in the same spot, as people will generally prefer bitcoin (which is free from inflation) over whatever local currency they are now stuck with.
Stupid statement #4. "free from inflation"? Umm.... no. Just no. No all nations will not end up like Venezuela and bitcoin is not likely to become a preferred currency. You are demonstrating a profound ignorance by stating that bitcoin is free from inflation. NO asset is free from inflation including bitcoin. You seem to not understand what inflation is or how it is caused.
Seriously, you post has to win the award for dumbest post I've read on slashdot this week. You are either young and naive or a bitcoin fanboi but either way you don't understand currencies and economics at all.
I am. In fact I'm astonished, because only last week the Venezuelan government announced that it will develop its own cryptocurrency (backed by natural resources, apparently, although I'm not sure how that will work).
It annoys me when I see their beards and glasses and hairy arms.
Yeah... and that's just the hipster women!
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
The same way they come up with electric bills. A guy I worked with was running some miners. The power company contacted him because his power usage was so high they were certain something was malfunctioning. He was using something like 20x the average power of a house. Tracking it would be trivial.
And in a country where electricity is subsidized by the government (everyone else) that 20x power consumption amounts almost to stealing from everyone else (the rest of the country is paying for you to get rich).
As you say, they should be easy to track, and whereas I don't agree with Venezuela's form of government, the government in that case absolutely has the right, and moral responsibility to track these people down and tax them accordingly.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Instead of UBI it needs to be delivery of necessities. Free but boring clothes, tiny dorm room, cafeteria downstairs with food. Free wifi and cheap netbook (to look for jobs, or porn, or whatever). If they want nothing more in life, they are free to live it out like that forever. The important thing is to divorce necessities from money.
Hell even after getting a job, people would be be free to stay there (after all, universal applies to everyone, from homeless dude on the street to Bill Gates). It would remove the work disincentive. In theory people will want more than three hots and a cot, and move out.
If government issued currencies were not so much manipulated, nobody would use bitcoin. Even the collapse of the dollar is rather likely, given the never ending inflation.
THAT is the reason for investment into bitcoin. Here in Germany we had people losing their bank accounts two times in the last 110 years. Same in Russia for the last 30 years.
Only fools think government issued money can store wealth over extended periods of time.
>I make a recommendation to actually talk to some libertarians to find out what libertarian state would actually look like.
You're an idiot if you think privatized courts and policing wouldn't lead to chaos and ultimately local warlords.
>The difference between anarchy and libertarianism in a word is accountability.
The difference between anarchy and libertarianism is the philosophy. The inevitable conclusion is identical.
intelligent management: predator/prey relationships.
Intelligent management...as in communism, responsible for over 100 millions deaths globally? How about fascism, where the Nazi party as "intelligent management" - you don't march across Europe without at least some intelligent management?
There's nothing inherently good or evil about order or chaos. They're two different axis. For example: you can have evil order, benign order, evil chaos, and benign chaos. Chaos is merely an agent of change. That's it! And depending on the state of society, it may be welcomed, or might not be.
Life is not for the lazy.
>Intelligent management...as in communism, responsible for over 100 millions deaths globally?
Ask an old Russian how they felt about Communism compared to the state of Russia shortly after Communism fell. Or anybody who survived a state in 'transition'.
Order is better than chaos for the majority, even when that order is pretty grim.
>How about fascism, where the Nazi party as "intelligent management"
How about the overall order of the world that brought that under control? In a more chaotic world there would have been nothing to stop the only organized force present.
More like how Stalin registered all the Jews and sent the useless ones to Siberia.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
In Finland the taxman has sent letters to persons asking them to declare their income from bitcoin. Be it mining or just a trading wins, the taxman want's his share (30%) of the profit.
How do they know? Oh the joys of modern and organized society: They ask companies who do bitcoin business (sell/buy) for their ledgers and identify persons from there and then contact those persons. In modern western society, every transaction leaves a trace. Just a matter of getting the data from the right place. Thus as soon as you want to convert your (semi)anonymous virtual currency to real world currency, you create a trace which can be picked up.
EU is very hard on money laundering, all bank transfers are more or less monitored. For example, a person made a 65€ bank transfer and wrote to recipient as "isi" (That's "daddy" in Finnish). The person was contacted by the bank tp clarify the transaction, just incase the person was attempting to give money to embargoed recipient (Isis?)(*). One might laugh on this stupid false positive, but it does give out the fact that even the smallest money transfers are monitored.
(*) https://translate.google.com/t...
I'm sorry, Sen. Sanders, but as a socialist, you should know that money comes from taxpayers and that money distributed under the guise of UBI isn't, in fact, theirs.
I don't know who this schwit1 is, but his comment "That'll put food back on the shelves" is completely moronic. The reason Venezuela has no food on their shelves is because the official exchange rate doesn't match the actual value of the bolivar, which means that it's basically fucking impossible to import anything, whether that is actual food or materials needed for farming. So given they can't exchange the bolivar for anything without going to jail, they'll need some other currency. Unlike the bolivar, bitcoin isn't experiencing hyperinflation, in fact the opposite is happening. Either way, unlike the bolivar, bitcoin is actually worth something, which means that they could import any goods they need with it. THAT will put food on the shelves, not Maduro's (and Chavez's) stupid policies which took food off of shelves to begin with. This is just another policy that will keep food off of shelves.
Given Bitcoin's excessive fees and delays these days, it won't help with anything.
Litecoin, Dash, Monero... heck, even Dogecoin is better than Bitcoin.
#DeleteFacebook
Venezuela, unfortunately, has a central bank like we do. The currency in that country has crashed, such that millions of citizens want to get out of the Venezuelan currency and use dollars/pesos/anything else. The government has prevented this by 'fixing' the currency to the dollar to ensure a very bad exchange rate, trapping the citizens into using a worthless currency that can't buy them much of anything. Bitcoin has been enabling transactions, allowing some of the poorest in that country to buy bread, milk, and other necessities, often on the border where a healthy 'black market' thrives and accepts other currencies, including bitcoin.
This action by the Venezuelan government is their attempt to completely squash any last monetary freedom present amongst their citizens.
That part is coming, that's why they just lowered the tax brackets and changed withholding so that you have more takehome pay
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The problem is that Venezuela can't print bitcoin. It could mine them, but that isn't a solution.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Actually they can detect the same way... energy usage ...
small setups undetected, but they will mine little. Big setups will eat lot of energy, so they can be detected if they check that...
mining also require more cooling than pot, so check who is buying AC systems when there is little food and you can find then too.
Higuita
Well, a government should not oppress it's people. That said. The people of Venesuela might in unision, accept donations of bitcoin miners, and convert their vast resource of oil into bitcoin to alleviate their debt to international bankers and restore prosperity to the region. Just don't borrow from international bankers ever again.
In reality, people will keep the three hots and a cot, and subsidize their income with illicit and highly profitable activities: prostitution, gambling, drugs.
If the government turns a blind eye to these activities, the negative repercussions will spill over and drive down everyone's standard of living.
If the government cracks down, then your Universal Basic Dormitories are pretty much just prisons at that point, as police raids will be constantly needed.
UBI and UBD and UBwhatever all fall into the same trap: welfare disincentivizes productive beneficial behavior and encourages mediocre bottom-of-the-barrel thinking. A handful of people will study their asses off and leave, but most will not, and the ones who stay behind will just keep breeding.
There's nothing inherently good or evil about order or chaos. They're two different axis. For example: you can have evil order, benign order, evil chaos, and benign chaos. Chaos is merely an agent of change. That's it! And depending on the state of society, it may be welcomed, or might not be.
Life aren't DND.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
I wonder how they'll track miners.
They could track them by electricity use. Venezuela gives away electricity for almost nothing, less than 1 cent/kwhr, which makes it an attractive place to run miners, as well as other activities that squander energy.
That way they'll find all the pot growers as well.
Venezuela is a bad place to run a bitcoin mine because basics like water and electricity are... transient things. if you were running a bitcoin mining farm, you wouldn't be relying on government electricity
This is just another pointless edict from a despotic government (that wont be overthrown any time soon as the Vz govt controls the military).
If you're thinking of mining coin in South America, I'd recommend next door in Colombia. Some of their cities have near western levels of services, it's dirt cheap to live there, the people are friendly and in many cases, even like Gringos, at the very least you wont get stabbed for a can of beans, the government is considerably less corrupt (but still corrupt enough to let you get away with a lot) and you can get a Miss Universe there for $50 easy.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
From the summary:
Since Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can't be regulated or controlled by the government in any official capacity, they could damage the country's brittle economy even further.
If a competing currency can "damage" an economy, it's already damaged. The competition just makes the damage more conspicuous, by allowing people additional choices, choices they sometimes choose to take.
Remember the Soviet Union and East Germany? The people running their governments tried to quash competing currencies, too.
Golly. What's the common denominator, here?
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.