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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.
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.
To be fair "these days" was referring to 2011, when that article by Sanders was written. A time when the Venezuelan economy was rebounding. Two years before Maduro was even sworn in.
"This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has got to go." -- Oscar Wilde on his deathbed
Venezuela? Bernie wants us to be like Venezuela? The country is freaking destroying itself! Ah, well, I always knew Bernie was nucking futz.
Even 2011, Venezuela was awful; it just was able to paper it over with huge oil exports. Then the bottom fell out of oil prices and Venezuela's lottery prize ran out.
To be fair "these days" was referring to 2011, when that article by Sanders was written. A time when the Venezuelan economy was rebounding. Two years before Maduro was even sworn in.
To be really fair, when someone predicts something and their prediction turns out accurate, then their hypothesis is *probably* correct.
Like if, for example, someone in 2011 said "Socialist policies don't really work, mostly", and Sanders points to Venezuela as an argument that they do indeed work, the future collapse of Venezuela provides support for the statement "Socialist policies don't really work, mostly", not for whatever counter-argument Sanders was attempting to make.
Another example to clarify: if I were to say, right now, that BTC is not really a currency and you point to its use by $fraction of retailers as proof that it is a currency, any future decline in BTC acceptance by retailers adds support for my assertion, not for your counter-argument. A future rise in % BTC acceptance by retailers may provide the support for your counter-argument, but current cherry-picked examples do not.
Predictive power beats single-data-point examples when proving or disproving a hypothesis. Pointing to a single example only works when the assertion is an existentialist one ("All $FOO are unworkable" needs only a single counter-example to disprove, while "$FOO is not long-term viable" cannot be disproved with a single counter-example).
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Black Unemployment Rate Lowest in 17 Years
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
So if I predict "Company A's stock will rise and become huge!", and then the next day someone blows up Company A's headquarters in a terrorst attack, is that my fault that the prediction turned out bad? Heck, Sanders isn't even making a prediction, just an observation about the present.
Most of the disastrous policies that led to Venezuela's plunge were enacted under Maduro. His approach to deal with the decline in income in 2014 was, rather than cutting back, to pretend that it wasn't happening by printing more money. And more. And more. And raising minimum wages to keep track with inflation. And again and again and again. And raising subsidies. Anything to pretend that it wasn't actually happening. Which of course plunged Venezuela deeper and deeper into a hole. It was entirely preventable, had Maduro responded to changing circumstances. Every government, regardless of where it lies on the capitalism-socialism spectrum, must do this. Venezuela did not.
Is it somehow Sanders' fault that someone who wasn't president when he wrote an op-ed decided to close his eyes, plug his ears and chant "la la la I can't hear you" as his government's revenue stream was reduced, rather than responding to it?
One could raise the contrast with, say, Ecuador - also under hard-left leadership, with someone whose personality is not too unlike Maduro's (blustering, anti-democratic tendencies, etc). Ecuador's economy is also heavily dependent on oil. But Ecuador didn't try to print its way out of the oil crash. Correa may have wanted to, but he couldn't, because Ecuador is tied to the dollar. Ecuador's economy certainly weakened from the oil crash, but did not crash in a way reminiscent of Venezuela's.
"This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has got to go." -- Oscar Wilde on his deathbed
> 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.
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.
To be fair "these days" was referring to 2011, when that article by Sanders was written. A time when the Venezuelan economy was rebounding. Two years before Maduro was even sworn in.
To be really fair, when someone predicts something and their prediction turns out accurate, then their hypothesis is *probably* correct.
Like if, for example, someone in 2011 said "Socialist policies don't really work, mostly", and Sanders points to Venezuela as an argument that they do indeed work, the future collapse of Venezuela provides support for the statement "Socialist policies don't really work, mostly", not for whatever counter-argument Sanders was attempting to make.
Another example to clarify: if I were to say, right now, that BTC is not really a currency and you point to its use by $fraction of retailers as proof that it is a currency, any future decline in BTC acceptance by retailers adds support for my assertion, not for your counter-argument. A future rise in % BTC acceptance by retailers may provide the support for your counter-argument, but current cherry-picked examples do not.
Predictive power beats single-data-point examples when proving or disproving a hypothesis. Pointing to a single example only works when the assertion is an existentialist one ("All $FOO are unworkable" needs only a single counter-example to disprove, while "$FOO is not long-term viable" cannot be disproved with a single counter-example).
The FUBAR otherwise known as the Venezuelan economy is what happens when you over-leverage your economy and bet on oil prices permanently remaining at an all time high. Conflating Bernie's brand of social democracy with Chavista style socialism and then pointing at Vesezuela as an example that Bernie's ideas don't work is simplistic to say the least.
Unemployment is down? Great. How about earnings?
People need money. Not employment. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who finds enough things to do with my time, what I need is money. If you allow me to hold slaves, I am fairly sure I can ensure 100% of them will be working.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's the inherent flaw of centrally planned economies, though. A small number of idiots can tank an entire country. In a capitalist country, a large number of competing idiots have to simultaneously ignore facts and reason, and all make the same move, in order to tank the country. Our closest recent example was the banking crisis, and even then, there were still winners - all the smaller banks that were like "lol wtf?" at the sub prime mortgages and stayed out of that game. As well as any individuals with precious metals stashed away. When things are traded at what they are worth, it's difficult to make wealth disappear. In this regard planned economies make David Copperfield jealous.
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.
>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.
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 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.
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.