This is not a tax avoidance strategy available to people with incomes below a a couple of hundred thousand dollars, which is almost all of you.
It is available, actually. You could set up a trust fund in Bermuda or elsewhere. However it doesn't make much sense for most people to use it because most people want to spend their income on things useful for themselves. You don't typically live in one country, receive income in another and want to spend that income in a third country - why would you? You want to spend your income on nice food and houses and other things near where you live. But for a company it's a common scenario.
Fortunately you don't have to, there's an article on (of all places) The Register which quite powerfully makes the case for abolishing corporate taxes. Problem is, at least in the UK, it makes up about a big chunk of government revenue. Roughly the entire defence budget. My solution? Slash the military and then slash corporate taxes, rebalance by abolishing the concept of capital gains (a distinction which is rather arbitrary and was introduced on the back of economic theories of questionable reliability).
Sure there are. MtGox was not breached since the "big one" (which was itself only a few thousand coins and the owner covered the loss from their profits, so it had no user impact). Quite a few other services just tick over making money without any drama. You don't hear about that, of course.
You don't need a bank if you are using Bitcoin. However your existing money does and your existing trading partners do. Therefore you need a way to move between the Bitcoin and banking worlds. Hence, exchanges (which already exist, but a new one has launched).
Of course, with no banks, this leads to the question of how you can get credit from the Bitcoin economy. I explored these topics in a talk I gave at the London conference, the latter part covers distributed markets, ways to use modern cryptography in P2P networks to implement things like low overhead bond and stock markets. Consumer credit financed by individual bond issues isn't really practical today, but technology could make it so.
PCI compliance is only for credit card payment processors. Bitcoin Central does not (as far as I know) accept deposits with credit cards because of the fraud risks from the completely insecure card-not-present payment system, so PCI compliance is irrelevant. Also, as far as I can tell it doesn't actually mean much beyond basic best practices like having firewalls, being up to date with the latest patches, encrypting card data at rest, having access controls etc. It's hardly a magic bullet.
Hah, Facebooks response is right on the mark. They did not take away the informed consent. They moved where the permissions apps requested appeared from a popup interstitial to a list on the app page next to the install button. If German government has an issue with the CSS used by Facebook they're welcome to suggest an alternative, but I'd agree with Facebook that governments surely have better things to do than dictate to foreign web sites the exact font styles in use. Apparently the VBBZ doesn't - surely a good indication their budget needs to be reviewed.
You can't print money with ASICs, all you can do is win more and more of the fixed supply that is being issued. It's like trying to win a lottery by trying to buy all the tickets - it's a nonsense strategy because if you did do such a thing everyone else would leave and you'd end up with something worthless. If BFL tried to dominate the network it would massively undermine confidence in the whole Bitcoin system and many (most?) users would leave, resulting in their massive hardware buildout being worthless.
Are you being deliberately obtuse? It's quite clear that when people refer to the Fed "printing money" they don't literally mean running printing presses or forging coins out of molten metal. They are referring to the process by which they type a new balance into their own accounts and then proceed to use it for, eg, buying bonds. This is creating money from nothing and we use the term "printing" to refer to it, as that's a simple metaphor everyone can understand.
Are deation and depression empirically linked? No, concludes a broad historical study of ination and real output growth rates. Deation and depression do seem to have been linked during the 1930s. But in the rest of the data for 17 countries and more than 100 years, there is virtually no evidence of such a link.
What you think of as mainstream economic thought is all too often little more than dogma, beliefs based on neat arguments that are never exposed to the harsh light of data.
By the way, there's another term for what policymakers do with money printing. It's called a planned economy.
Email has been steadily upgraded over time to support pretty good point-to-point signing and crypto. With DKIM, SMTP-TLS and so on, email can be transparently signed and encrypted on the wire without the end user having to do any setup. It's all on the providers end. The email is still decrypted within the mail providers systems so they can do spam filtering, search, routing, etc. But organizations that are not the mail providers can't see it, nor can anyone send email forged as you without being detected.
Full end to end encryption with no provider insight is a dramatically harder problem. I mean, people outsource mail for good reasons. I don't believe you're right when you say "none of the issues are very difficult".
I think this view has a grain of truth but is unnecessarily dystopian. You assign a lot of importance to Facebook even though it exists entirely in the realm of the trivial.
I use Facebook and I suppose I pay for it with my privacy, though in reality, Facebook won over other social networks partly because of its extensive privacy controls, and privacy from friends/family is my primary interest. But nothing which actually matters is on there. The stuff I do that could potentially have an impact (currently, mostly research into Bitcoin) is all done over email.
Now as it happens that is hosted on Gmail where various governments can access it. But, if I wanted to start encrypting end to end I certainly could do that, and it would be only a minor extension of what I do now. I could use Thunderbird with GPG and Gmail would still work. If I wanted even envelope information away from foreign governments, I could switch my mail back to my own hosting. I forward to Gmail so could easily redirect my mail back to a server in my own country, and Gmail offers free forwarding even if I hadn't.
In practice though, I'd probably keep Gmail for my less sensitive communications and use a separate account for the stuff where I wanted encryption.
So yes, whilst the net may be superficially more centralized than it used to be, it's not that bad. Certainly people who want to have iron-clad privacy can get it, and modern P2P tools like Tor and Bitcoin even make it easy!
The biggest problem for avoiding state surveillance on the net is still the same as it always was - end to end encryption sucks donkey balls. The only real way to be sure you have the right key is to swap in person or use a web of trust which is horribly complicated. Signing and encryption requires extra software which uglifies everything it touches. Most people don't understand asymmetric crypto and software like GPG doesn't make it easy for them to learn, due to terrible UI design. If somebody could find a way to make end-to-end crypto really work well, they'd have made a big step forward.
Traffic pumping is/was a practice that essentially let rural US phone companies suck money directly out of large carriers bank accounts. The various regulations in place over the telecom industry meant that companies like AT&T couldn't do anything to stop it.
No, US law is being applied to a non-US company because they offered services to US residents.
In a sane setup, the US regulators would go and prosecute US residents who used illegal services, not foreign companies with foreign owners who are not in US jurisdiction. However, prosecuting lots of ordinary Americans is not politically attractive to these sorts of regulatory bodies, so they try and impose US law on foreigners instead. Now maybe these InTrade employees will have to avoid ever flying near the USA again in case their plane is forced to land and they're arrested.
It spent the first part of the year at $5 per coin, rock solid. In the latter half that went up to around $10-$12 per coin, a bit less stable but it wandered around in that pretty tight range for months. So vastly more stable than last year, with only two real price points held for the entire 12 months. Go look at the price charts on blockchain.info for example.
He's taking the piss because Bitcoin has in fact solved the problem of how to distribute fees to miners without any of the problems you claim will exist, and that's trivially verifiable by anyone who takes the time to learn about how the system works. His wider point which you missed - if you think you've found a obvious and gaping flaw in its design, you're probably wrong, or at least you're going to find yourself in the middle of complex debates with no clear resolution (eg, about Austrian vs Keynesian economics).
Yes, but what's your point? All real economies have imports and exports. Bitcoin is a much younger and smaller economy than any other. It's certainly possible for coins to circulate internally (eg, a site that earns money in coins using that to pay for its own hosting fees), but it'll never be the case that people stop wanting currency exchange, just as for dollars or euros.
I can't see any reason for the parent comment to be at -1, that seems like a moderator with an agenda at work. So I'll use my excellent karma to repeat what roman_mir says here:
'Hoarding' (saving) currency itself is only useful if the interest rates on all investments are so terrible (low, or maybe even negative) that you can't make money by investing in anything. But in a legitimate economy, that is not controlled by central banking and central government this does not happen, because the more money people save, the lower the interest rate becomes, because there are so many savings, their value is going down. USA 1800 to 1917 has conclusively shown that money that is intrinsically valuable and is slightly deflationary is still not 'hoarded' but is used for investments because there is no manipulation by the central government. Central government was basically irrelevant, it wasn't spending much on anything because it wasn't doing much of anything, and so it was cheap and didn't meddle with individuals investing their money in businesses, whichever way they wanted.
There is a huge disconnect today between value of savings (interest rates) and real existing savings. The interest rates are so manipulated by the central banks that it seems like the system is flush with cash (is that the saying?) The interest rates are at historic low, actually they are negative, and the only people who can find yield are banks that borrow at 0% from the Fed and then lend to the Treasury at 2-3%. This means that the government has completely crowded out all private investments while sending an insane fake signal into the market that there are huge savings in the system, but there are none, the system is deep in debt, it has no savings. Whatever meagre savings that individuals manage to collect are irrelevant, because their share of government debt has gone through the stratosphere.
I think that Bitcoins have their use, but they have no intrinsic value at all, they are based on confidence, always were, based on the confidence in the protocol. Bitcoins are valued because people trust the protocol, and surely that protocol is much more trustworthy than any government and any opaque bank. So the interesting part about Bitcoin is will the trust in protocol be enough, because again, there is no intrinsic value?
So when you say: "Bitcoins will perish because people hoard them", the point is that hoarding something without any use that can be used to invest doesn't make sense if the economy allows any investments in the first place (more precisely if the central government doesn't prevent investments, which is the case now).
However hoarding a resource that has no intrinsic value is dangerous. If you want to hoard and not to invest, you do not use Bitcoin, I think people understand that, that's why it will not be a problem in itself. Bitcoin is for circulation, it's not a good safe haven, it has no intrinsic value.
For example storing 1,000,000 USD in Bitcoins for too long is in fact dangerous, you do not want to do that. Either you invest that money or store it in something else (not dollars, not cash, either an investment vehicle or real money, gold or other inflation hedges, property, valuables, etc.) and let people keep trading in Bitcoins.
As a side note I heard some people talking about using flash drives to pay in Bitcoins, but this breaks the way that the protocol prevents double spending, if you copy your Bitcoins onto a thousand flash devices and pay with them somehow and they are not verified by the seller, you can doublespend plenty. So a seller will not accept your file unless he can record the transaction in the network, which is only a prudent thing to do, otherwise it's the seller who will be out of money.
A deflationary currency would never mpose any kind of good balance
But this is irrelevant because Bitcoin is not a deflationary currency. It's at present an inflationary one, and will eventually become a stable currency.
In a stable currency, if people stop investing or something happens to make the economy shrink, then you have the same amount of currency being mapped to less goods and services, ie you have inflation. You only have deflation if the economy is growing. So saying that Bitcoin would cause the economy to shrink because of deflation is a self-defeating argument. If that happened (it won't) then Bitcoin would become inflationary again.
You believe inflation is "healthy" because economists like Bernanke tell you that. It's not based on anything real, just some self-serving arguments made by the people who are (surprise) the ones inflating the system. In reality compound inflation (in which the currency grows by more every year than it did the previous year) has locked our society into waves of crippling asset bubbles, in which people "invest" in things like houses that aren't needed or internet stocks for companies with no-hope business models. A stable currency would result in investment happening when it actually makes sense, not because the system presents you with an invest-or-lose proposition.
Actually, Google has already launched neural network based speech recognition. The cat demo was for fun, the underlying technology is already applied to real problems though. I can tell you now based on practical experience as a user that the accuracy boost from it has been amazing. The dictation feature in Android went from being "amusing toy" to "actually useful" almost overnight.
That's not quite true. Many mail providers these days support SMTP-TLS which means that whilst your mailbox provider may have the mail unencrypted, when it travels over the wires it's actually encrypted at every point. It's only in the clear at rest. For instance Gmail supports this. If mails ever travel over wires in the clear, it means a mail provider needs to upgrade their SMTP servers.
Can you back that up with something more substantial? I found this in depth article and it paints a very muddy picture. PayPal suspended their account and then re-activated it again, but that sort of thing is par for the course with them. The banks that were interviewed all seemed to say either, "decisions are made by local branches, we don't control it" or "VISA and Mastercard forbid businesses selling obscene things" (ok) but also that the banks have ethical policies and may "refuse to engage if it would damage the brand".
The EU has a terrible track record when it comes to stuff like this. SWIFT was the only major payment network that was a European company and the US Treasury completely compromised it by seizing their US datacenter. So they built another datacenter in Europe so they could have multi-homed operations without exposure to the USA and whilst construction was being done, the US put huge pressure on the bureaucrats who then rolled over and said, sure, you can have all the data you want from SWIFT. So if the EU parliament really wants payment networks to stop doing things because the US wouldn't like it, the first step is to cut off the US Treasuries unilateral access to SWIFT data. But they won't.
Yeah, she's not bad, especially not in the first photo (chronologically). And let's get real here - the man is 67. Judging from the photos that were going around (the crazy one with him in aviators with a shotgun), he's in amazing shape for his age. How many 67 year old men can get an even slightly cute 20 year old to run away with them? It's not like he's going to be buying her diamonds and taking her on fancy vacations whilst he's on the run, is it?
Slashdot Mirror
It is available, actually. You could set up a trust fund in Bermuda or elsewhere. However it doesn't make much sense for most people to use it because most people want to spend their income on things useful for themselves. You don't typically live in one country, receive income in another and want to spend that income in a third country - why would you? You want to spend your income on nice food and houses and other things near where you live. But for a company it's a common scenario.
Fortunately you don't have to, there's an article on (of all places) The Register which quite powerfully makes the case for abolishing corporate taxes. Problem is, at least in the UK, it makes up about a big chunk of government revenue. Roughly the entire defence budget. My solution? Slash the military and then slash corporate taxes, rebalance by abolishing the concept of capital gains (a distinction which is rather arbitrary and was introduced on the back of economic theories of questionable reliability).
Sure there are. MtGox was not breached since the "big one" (which was itself only a few thousand coins and the owner covered the loss from their profits, so it had no user impact). Quite a few other services just tick over making money without any drama. You don't hear about that, of course.
You don't need a bank if you are using Bitcoin. However your existing money does and your existing trading partners do. Therefore you need a way to move between the Bitcoin and banking worlds. Hence, exchanges (which already exist, but a new one has launched).
Of course, with no banks, this leads to the question of how you can get credit from the Bitcoin economy. I explored these topics in a talk I gave at the London conference, the latter part covers distributed markets, ways to use modern cryptography in P2P networks to implement things like low overhead bond and stock markets. Consumer credit financed by individual bond issues isn't really practical today, but technology could make it so.
PCI compliance is only for credit card payment processors. Bitcoin Central does not (as far as I know) accept deposits with credit cards because of the fraud risks from the completely insecure card-not-present payment system, so PCI compliance is irrelevant. Also, as far as I can tell it doesn't actually mean much beyond basic best practices like having firewalls, being up to date with the latest patches, encrypting card data at rest, having access controls etc. It's hardly a magic bullet.
Hah, Facebooks response is right on the mark. They did not take away the informed consent. They moved where the permissions apps requested appeared from a popup interstitial to a list on the app page next to the install button. If German government has an issue with the CSS used by Facebook they're welcome to suggest an alternative, but I'd agree with Facebook that governments surely have better things to do than dictate to foreign web sites the exact font styles in use. Apparently the VBBZ doesn't - surely a good indication their budget needs to be reviewed.
You can't print money with ASICs, all you can do is win more and more of the fixed supply that is being issued. It's like trying to win a lottery by trying to buy all the tickets - it's a nonsense strategy because if you did do such a thing everyone else would leave and you'd end up with something worthless. If BFL tried to dominate the network it would massively undermine confidence in the whole Bitcoin system and many (most?) users would leave, resulting in their massive hardware buildout being worthless.
Are you being deliberately obtuse? It's quite clear that when people refer to the Fed "printing money" they don't literally mean running printing presses or forging coins out of molten metal. They are referring to the process by which they type a new balance into their own accounts and then proceed to use it for, eg, buying bonds. This is creating money from nothing and we use the term "printing" to refer to it, as that's a simple metaphor everyone can understand.
Because you think Bernanke does? I don't think so.
What you think of as mainstream economic thought is all too often little more than dogma, beliefs based on neat arguments that are never exposed to the harsh light of data.
By the way, there's another term for what policymakers do with money printing. It's called a planned economy.
I have the S3 and got Jellybean last month, I think. The issue there is really Verizon.
Email has been steadily upgraded over time to support pretty good point-to-point signing and crypto. With DKIM, SMTP-TLS and so on, email can be transparently signed and encrypted on the wire without the end user having to do any setup. It's all on the providers end. The email is still decrypted within the mail providers systems so they can do spam filtering, search, routing, etc. But organizations that are not the mail providers can't see it, nor can anyone send email forged as you without being detected.
Full end to end encryption with no provider insight is a dramatically harder problem. I mean, people outsource mail for good reasons. I don't believe you're right when you say "none of the issues are very difficult".
I think this view has a grain of truth but is unnecessarily dystopian. You assign a lot of importance to Facebook even though it exists entirely in the realm of the trivial.
I use Facebook and I suppose I pay for it with my privacy, though in reality, Facebook won over other social networks partly because of its extensive privacy controls, and privacy from friends/family is my primary interest. But nothing which actually matters is on there. The stuff I do that could potentially have an impact (currently, mostly research into Bitcoin) is all done over email.
Now as it happens that is hosted on Gmail where various governments can access it. But, if I wanted to start encrypting end to end I certainly could do that, and it would be only a minor extension of what I do now. I could use Thunderbird with GPG and Gmail would still work. If I wanted even envelope information away from foreign governments, I could switch my mail back to my own hosting. I forward to Gmail so could easily redirect my mail back to a server in my own country, and Gmail offers free forwarding even if I hadn't.
In practice though, I'd probably keep Gmail for my less sensitive communications and use a separate account for the stuff where I wanted encryption.
So yes, whilst the net may be superficially more centralized than it used to be, it's not that bad. Certainly people who want to have iron-clad privacy can get it, and modern P2P tools like Tor and Bitcoin even make it easy!
The biggest problem for avoiding state surveillance on the net is still the same as it always was - end to end encryption sucks donkey balls. The only real way to be sure you have the right key is to swap in person or use a web of trust which is horribly complicated. Signing and encryption requires extra software which uglifies everything it touches. Most people don't understand asymmetric crypto and software like GPG doesn't make it easy for them to learn, due to terrible UI design. If somebody could find a way to make end-to-end crypto really work well, they'd have made a big step forward.
Traffic pumping is/was a practice that essentially let rural US phone companies suck money directly out of large carriers bank accounts. The various regulations in place over the telecom industry meant that companies like AT&T couldn't do anything to stop it.
No, US law is being applied to a non-US company because they offered services to US residents.
In a sane setup, the US regulators would go and prosecute US residents who used illegal services, not foreign companies with foreign owners who are not in US jurisdiction. However, prosecuting lots of ordinary Americans is not politically attractive to these sorts of regulatory bodies, so they try and impose US law on foreigners instead. Now maybe these InTrade employees will have to avoid ever flying near the USA again in case their plane is forced to land and they're arrested.
It spent the first part of the year at $5 per coin, rock solid. In the latter half that went up to around $10-$12 per coin, a bit less stable but it wandered around in that pretty tight range for months. So vastly more stable than last year, with only two real price points held for the entire 12 months. Go look at the price charts on blockchain.info for example.
He's taking the piss because Bitcoin has in fact solved the problem of how to distribute fees to miners without any of the problems you claim will exist, and that's trivially verifiable by anyone who takes the time to learn about how the system works. His wider point which you missed - if you think you've found a obvious and gaping flaw in its design, you're probably wrong, or at least you're going to find yourself in the middle of complex debates with no clear resolution (eg, about Austrian vs Keynesian economics).
Yes, but what's your point? All real economies have imports and exports. Bitcoin is a much younger and smaller economy than any other. It's certainly possible for coins to circulate internally (eg, a site that earns money in coins using that to pay for its own hosting fees), but it'll never be the case that people stop wanting currency exchange, just as for dollars or euros.
It's not disastrous. That's a modern myth. But you don't have to take my word for it, ask economists at the Federal Reserve.
I can't see any reason for the parent comment to be at -1, that seems like a moderator with an agenda at work. So I'll use my excellent karma to repeat what roman_mir says here:
But this is irrelevant because Bitcoin is not a deflationary currency. It's at present an inflationary one, and will eventually become a stable currency.
In a stable currency, if people stop investing or something happens to make the economy shrink, then you have the same amount of currency being mapped to less goods and services, ie you have inflation. You only have deflation if the economy is growing. So saying that Bitcoin would cause the economy to shrink because of deflation is a self-defeating argument. If that happened (it won't) then Bitcoin would become inflationary again.
You believe inflation is "healthy" because economists like Bernanke tell you that. It's not based on anything real, just some self-serving arguments made by the people who are (surprise) the ones inflating the system. In reality compound inflation (in which the currency grows by more every year than it did the previous year) has locked our society into waves of crippling asset bubbles, in which people "invest" in things like houses that aren't needed or internet stocks for companies with no-hope business models. A stable currency would result in investment happening when it actually makes sense, not because the system presents you with an invest-or-lose proposition.
Actually, Google has already launched neural network based speech recognition. The cat demo was for fun, the underlying technology is already applied to real problems though. I can tell you now based on practical experience as a user that the accuracy boost from it has been amazing. The dictation feature in Android went from being "amusing toy" to "actually useful" almost overnight.
That's not quite true. Many mail providers these days support SMTP-TLS which means that whilst your mailbox provider may have the mail unencrypted, when it travels over the wires it's actually encrypted at every point. It's only in the clear at rest. For instance Gmail supports this. If mails ever travel over wires in the clear, it means a mail provider needs to upgrade their SMTP servers.
Can you back that up with something more substantial? I found this in depth article and it paints a very muddy picture. PayPal suspended their account and then re-activated it again, but that sort of thing is par for the course with them. The banks that were interviewed all seemed to say either, "decisions are made by local branches, we don't control it" or "VISA and Mastercard forbid businesses selling obscene things" (ok) but also that the banks have ethical policies and may "refuse to engage if it would damage the brand".
No, we already know what happens in this situation. US law takes precedence. Example: Danish company wires $26k to a German bank and the payment is seized by the USA because it was a payment for Cuban cigars.
The EU has a terrible track record when it comes to stuff like this. SWIFT was the only major payment network that was a European company and the US Treasury completely compromised it by seizing their US datacenter. So they built another datacenter in Europe so they could have multi-homed operations without exposure to the USA and whilst construction was being done, the US put huge pressure on the bureaucrats who then rolled over and said, sure, you can have all the data you want from SWIFT. So if the EU parliament really wants payment networks to stop doing things because the US wouldn't like it, the first step is to cut off the US Treasuries unilateral access to SWIFT data. But they won't.
Yeah, she's not bad, especially not in the first photo (chronologically). And let's get real here - the man is 67. Judging from the photos that were going around (the crazy one with him in aviators with a shotgun), he's in amazing shape for his age. How many 67 year old men can get an even slightly cute 20 year old to run away with them? It's not like he's going to be buying her diamonds and taking her on fancy vacations whilst he's on the run, is it?