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This hasn't been the best week for WikiLeaks, to put it mildly. Coinbase has shut off the WikiLeaks Shop's account for allegedly violating the cryptocurrency exchange's terms of service. In other words, the leak site just lost its existing means of converting payments like bitcoin into conventional money. While Coinbase didn't give a specific reason (it declines to comment on specific accounts), it pointed to its legal requirement to honor "regulatory compliance mechanisms" under the US' Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
This doesn't prevent WikiLeaks from accepting cryptocurrency, but it will have to scramble to find an alternative if it wants to continue taking digital money from customers buying shirts and coffee cups. Unsurprisingly, the organization is less than thrilled -- it's calling for a "global blockade" of Coinbase, claiming that the exchange is reacting to a "concealed influence."
Source: https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/21/wikileaks-loses-coinbase-account/
(Score: 5, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday April 23 2018, @02:11PM (47 children)
It's a great concept, but unless you have a node to post your transactions into the blockchain it's inaccessible. And unless you can convert it to an from other currencies it is useless unless whatever other service you're looking for natively accepts it.
But this is how governments can regulate it: Crack down on the control points, and then restrict access to control points out of the government's jurisdiction (or cooperative efforts with other governments). Or restrict the ability of in-jurisdiction control points to recognize "rogue" transactions (i.e. those outside the jurisdiction's regulatory control).
It will be interesting to see if Wikileaks complies, finds a different processor outside of U.S. regulatory control, or stops accepting Bitcoin.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by YeaWhatevs on Monday April 23 2018, @02:30PM (1 child)
I think the only thing I might disagree with you on is your first statement. I like the idea of firing my bank and I wouldn't mind some of that sweet sweet bitcoin billionaire honey, but I'm not sure it's a great concept.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @08:29PM
Just wait till the societal pendulum swings the other way. I got a feeling we will be really back to our Christian roots this time, and we will outlaw Usury. This will be followed by some much publicized banker Crucifixions.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @02:31PM (42 children)
To interact with the Bitcoin network, all you need is a computer that is connected to the Bitcoin network (e.g., a computer on the Internet); there's no need for an "account" with a company like Coinbase, unless you wish to Interact with the Old World network (e.g., banks and government money).
Secondly, there's no real reason that you need to interact with the Bitcoin network for every transaction; the Bitcoin network is merely the settlement processor, and thus only needs to be used to verify that a certain balance is indeed considered "True". You could, for instance, embed private keys in "physical" tokens that you pass around just like governmental cash today. Or, you could interact solely with something like the Lightning Network in a private setting, and then carry your final state on a USB device to a computer that can access the Bitcoin network, for settlement.
Do you get it yet?
Bitcoin is to Government money as General Relativity is to Newtonian mechanics; the weakness of which you speak occurs in the more, specialized primitive system: Government fiat.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @03:04PM (13 children)
The problem is Bitcoin, the specific implementation. I will grant that it was a revolutionary proof of concept, but looking at it with hindsight, it wasn't ready for the big leagues. Transactions cost, what, $20-$50 or so? That's really only good for speculators, useful idiots that don't share the vision of a decentralized cryptographic currency (as opposed to Bitcoin, which is a vehicle for speculators and requires conversion to/from USD for all practical use). There has to be a better way.
We need more experience with cryptocurrencies before we'll have a good one. I've been introduced to Ethereum (have about 0.1 ETH mined [unattached to a USD transaction], just haven't done anything with it) and Monero. There are others out there as well, no?
Cryptocurrencies fill a need that many people have, especially as the elites clamp down on the proles and finish the transition of the USA to a full-blown fascism. People will keep trying, and I remain hopeful that eventually there will be success.
It's just time to recognize the role Bitcoin played in these early years and to let it become a museum piece. Nothing wrong with that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @03:11PM (2 children)
Well I transfered 100 euro bitcoin two weeks ago and fee was about 1 euro. Tooka about 2 hours to complete.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @05:48PM (1 child)
Bitcoin or bitcoin cash?
2 hours is still too much for popular adoption. How does 1 euro to transfer 100 euro equivalent of bitcoin compare to VisaCard fees? That transaction is competitive with Western Union, but we need to compete with VisaCard and cash. Western Union is not a common way to buy a burger for lunch; yet I want to buy a burger for lunch with cryptocoin some day.
Problem with passing around tokens on bills is double-spending, so that will likely never happen unless individuals prefer to manage their own wallet that way. A central clearinghouse could issue print cryptocoin denominations that are very difficult to counterfeit, but then we're right back to centralization. The transaction needs to complete in a matter of seconds.
As far as fees, unfortunately it'll be an uphill battle, because VisaCard forbids merchants from revealing the merchant fees. All most places can get away with in this neck of the woods is a 5 USD minimum to process payment with VisaCard. Merchants will undermine even an ideal crypto currency by loudly informing the customer of the transaction fee instead of building it into their prices like they do with VisaCard fees.
It will be difficult, and some of those barriers (especially wrt merchants and txn fees) certainly aren't fair, but I hope a cryptocoin will be viable in the near future.
(Score: 2) by Snow on Monday April 23 2018, @06:44PM
If it took 2 hours, it was Bitcoin (Core).
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Monday April 23 2018, @03:18PM (9 children)
>Transactions cost, what, $20-$50 or so?
That's a political problem though, not a technological one. Imposed by the extreme artificial limits on the number of transactions that can be recorded in a single block. I believe I've heard that the Bitcoin Cash fork is in large part about dramatically increasing that limit.
Overall though I agree - bitcoin was a spectacular proof of concept of something that had long been considered an unfeasible pipe dream - fiat currency without centralized control. As it's been scaled up though it has certainly revealed many of the challenges a large-scale cryptocurrency will need to address. Haven't seen any real contenders to solve it yet, but I haven't been watching too closely either.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @03:35PM (8 children)
bitcoin 3 transactions per minute
bitcoin cash 30 per minute.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 23 2018, @05:25PM (7 children)
Global population: 7.6 billion. If we all use bitcoin cash, that's over 480 years to process a single transaction from every person on the planet.
Still missing practical scale by several orders of magnitude.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @06:37PM
You know what does need a ZERO TRUST environment? Settlement, such as the settlement at the end of the day of 1 million coffee purchases.
Fortunately, even for huge volumes of tiny microtransactions, it turns out that you don't have to trust others that much; hence, the development of second-layer protocols built atop Bitcoin, like the Lightning Network.
Your confusion over the value of Bitcoin is not a fault of Bitcoin.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday April 24 2018, @05:25AM (5 children)
So increase it to 300,000 per second - the threshold is entirely arbitrary, based on a large number of very adjustable variables.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 24 2018, @11:28AM (4 children)
Somehow, I have the feeling that if Bitcoin could scale from 3 per minute to 300,000 per second without losing security or increasing power demand, it would have done it. At 3 per minute, we're sucking down more electricity than all of Iceland (pre-BTC processing).
After 10 years, Bitcoin cash is bumping up to 30 per minute. At that exponential growth rate (x10 every 10 years), we'll be at 300,000 per second in ~2080. Kurzweil is either brilliant or mad when he says that the singularity is coming with respect to immortality, unless he's brilliant, very few people over the age of 40 today will be alive to see 2080.
I truly believe that cryptocurrency will get to 300,000 transactions per second, and before 2080 (Visa, MasterCard et. al. are most of the way there already), but, I believe it will be doing that without proof of work. I do hope it can do it in an open-source distributed manner, the cynical will observe that entrenched interests will be fighting that every step of the way.
The fun/weird aspect of a truly cheap transactional system like that is how people might move from making an average of one financial transaction every few hours to one every few minutes. Your balance might show as you remove items from the shelf in the store, one at a time, without needing to stand in line to checkout.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday April 24 2018, @01:20PM (3 children)
I certainly hope you're right about the proof of work going away - it does seem a terrible waste. An alternative would be using the heat for something useful - but CPUs generally run at such low temperatures that it wouldn't be good for much beyond space heaters.
As for the transaction rate - I don't know if Bitcoin specifically could securely scale as dramatically as I suggested, but it's currently limited primarily by two fairly arbitrary limits: the proof of work difficulty automatically scales to maintain roughly one block every 10 minutes, and blocks are limited to only 1MB in size. You might get into security problems lowering the proof of work time too much, but experimental forks have already shown that the block size can be increased to at least 1GB without problems. That's a 1000x increase in transaction rate right there.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 24 2018, @10:09PM (2 children)
See, I think proof of work is a sham - important in the psychological adoption of the system, value of the coin (I worked hard for this, spent money, I'm not giving it away for nothing...), but... the bitcoin network is also vulnerable to timejacking attacks even with proof of work, and if you can prevent timejacking, do you really need proof of work? All you need is trust in your servers that compute and publish the blockchain, and if a server proves un-trustworthy they have burned their future income... As long as a majority of the servers in the network remain trustworthy, the bad actors should fall away.
Ethereum may be on to something, trusting those who hold coin. A sham server that cannot point to escrowed coin should not be trusted with transactions larger than the coin they stand to lose (because: if they process a double-spend of some coin, they can just disappear into the ether, and who's to say that the shady processor isn't also the double-spender IRL?) When there's a critical mass of servers who have sufficient historical record and skin in the game, that should be enough to keep the network going.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday April 25 2018, @05:16PM (1 child)
Proof-of-stake certainly has some merits, but the fact that it inherently concentrates power in the hands of the greatest stakeholders makes me a little dubious about it's value as a democratizing force in finance, which was once of the big appeals of Bitcoin in the early days. Of course as we've seen, proof of work isn't much (if any) better - power concentrates in the hands of those who can afford to buy the most mining nodes.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 25 2018, @05:43PM
I inherently agree, the motivators are key because without a strong base of transaction processors no system is going to work.
However, a system need-not require proof-of-stake, it could be an option to the persons performing the transaction, if I'm going to trust this "miner" to handle my transaction (ensure that it is valid and recorded in _the_ blockchain), I have the option to check out their (disclosed) holdings - and I might not choose to process a 10 coin transaction through a processor that is only disclosing 0.0001 of coin holdings from that one transaction they processed 30 minutes ago.
There are always problems, chief among these I see is miners might opt to freeze out new miners who don't demonstrate enough stake - the only motivation I can see for this is to eliminate competition, but... that's a pretty big one.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Monday April 23 2018, @03:22PM
I used to build condos. Some folks paid with a check. Some did escrow. A lot had mortgages. But so many came in with a box of cash. No bank, no problem. And so many were buying for LLCs -- they call it a shell company -- you never heard of. And I never heard of. But flush!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Monday April 23 2018, @05:06PM (8 children)
So things like food, shelter, healthcare, plumbing, the babysitter...
Unless a currency is reasonably stable, not subject to fees unless you're doing something truly unusual with it (by which I don't mean simply spending it), broadly accepted and easily kept in one's pocket, ready to hand out in any direction you choose, it's not broadly useful. There's just no way around that; thinking otherwise is unduly optimistic.
(Score: 2, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 23 2018, @05:20PM (7 children)
Hey, I suppose I should sell my stock in Visa and Mastercard, then...
The fees are always there, and inflation is yet another way to effect a fee on those who hold currency.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Monday April 23 2018, @06:10PM (6 children)
No. They aren't. I can hand you $100 for any good or service, and there is no fee. You are choosing to pay a fee when you use a transaction-per-fee financial service, and that's perfectly fine in terms of you should have that choice... but it's not fine if it subsumes all other choices. Availability of options is good.
You don't have to hold it. You can invest it. Loans, infrastructure, inventory, art, collectables, etc. You can do all of this without incurring fees if you choose compatible venues. Not that you have to, not saying that at all; but it's highly functional in terms of getting ahead. As my mom used to say, "never a borrower, but always a lender be." It was great advice. You have to be at least somewhat clever about it, but that's true of growing net worth for most people anyway.
A useful currency in an inflationary environment is more easily passed around and less costly, not less easily and more costly. In this consideration, cryptocurrencies compare poorly to cash right now. That's the math, there's just no way around it as things stand today. Tomorrow... well, who knows.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @06:29PM
Firstly, you are free to ask the Bitcoin network to process your transaction without taking a fee, but it takes resources to mine, so you just have to wait for the altruism of one of the miners.
Secondly, the Bitcoin network is a zero-trust settlement layer, but the world has a lot more trustworthiness than zero; you don't need a zero-trust environment to buy a cup of coffee, and so you could exploit that non-zero trust for profit: There's nothing preventing you from handing a private key directly to a barista, as an extreme example. And, with something like the Lightning Network, you can transact in great volumes with tiny amounts without ever having to hit the Bitcoin network, and without having to trust anybody that much.
Your problem, which is replicated across so many people's minds, is that you are incapable of seeing the possibilities. You are arguing in two-dimensional land, when Bitcoin is running in three dimensions.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 23 2018, @07:50PM (4 children)
Where did you get that $100 bill? Did you get it from an ATM? Many of those charge fees, and if your bank is one that absorbs the ATM fees for you, you still have to get yourself to the ATM, transact with it, and then carry that $100 around in your pocket at risk of loss. I use a Credit Union which has exceptionally low fees, but mostly how they do that is by providing lower interest on savings than they otherwise could, it's not as if Banks provide higher interest, it's just that Banks siphon off more profits, and none of the insured interest paying accounts are even near to keeping up with inflation. Also, God help you if your time is worth so little that traveling to a bank, standing in line, and transacting with a teller isn't a cost to you.
Again, risk of loss, low returns in low risk investments, monetary and time/effort costs to purchase and liquidate an investment, all the while if your investment isn't returning CAGR better than inflation (which most low risk investments do not), then you're actually losing value.
Until you lend to a deadbeat. Or, invest in a risky commodity, like, say, FNMA or other home mortgage based securities about 10 years ago...
I agree there, the energy (literally, electricity) being put into Bitcoin and friends is insanity incarnate. I have been a fan of peer to peer network applications since the 1990s, and the Bitcoin demonstration of a distributed yet trustworthy ledger is an impressive leap forward, but it's just nowhere near being the "cash of the future."
I don't think the fault lies in the private key encryption of the value token (yet), quantum computers seem ~10 years out from breaking those (+/- about 1 order of magnitude at 3sd), but there are some quantum-safe alternatives already developing, sadly their signature sizes are currently running ~20K or ~80x larger than the signatures used by Bitcoin today, but hopefully our broadband speeds and cost of processing continue to increase and trivialize that difference.
To me, where the network is really weak at the moment is in scalability of the ledger processing. It seems to be shaping up that alt-coins are rising to fill the demand for additional transaction bandwidth, and a loose federation between the alt-coins and bitcoin has developed for their exchange, but that's even more speculative and volatile than solo-bitcoin.
I hope that compelling, valuable real world uses for bitcoin emerge before the mass hysteria subsides. Conversely, I hope the mass hysteria subsides before the amount of coal being mined to support crypto-mining gets any higher. I don't want to hear how BTC is mined in Iceland and the PNW where electricity is cheap (well, maybe Iceland, but it still sucks that those people's power supply is being strained for this, and it's not as if geothermal generating equipment is maintenance for free, or constructed without the use of real-world mined resources and energy...) that energy that Washington state can't feed into the grid is effectively increasing the load on coal fired generation far away.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Monday April 23 2018, @09:26PM
I get almost all of mine these days from being handed them by actual human beings buying stuff from me. This is not an accident.
Which is why I said "You have to be at least somewhat clever about it, but that's true of growing net worth for most people anyway." It works out very well in my case; the strategies I have chosen have been effective thus far. It's not for everyone, certainly.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Monday April 23 2018, @09:31PM (2 children)
I walked into my bank, asked for a counter check, filled in my name and bank account number both of which I have memorized, wrote "cash" on the "to" line, wrote out the check for $100 and signed it and they gave me $100. I didn't even have to pay for the paper check I used.
As for losing my wallet, apparently that happens to people who use bitcoin (or they lose some other physical object on which the bitcoin is inscribed -- isn't there a guy thinking about digging up a dump to find the HD he tossed years ago when bitcoins were worth nothing?).
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 23 2018, @10:20PM
If I could click a button and "back up" my money every night, that would make theft much less of a concern - particularly if my money were so compact that I could store Billions on a thumb drive and disguise it as vacation photos.
I tried using a local bank back in the 1990s, the fees and outright theft (they made a $20 addition error on a monthly statement, in their favor of course, and basically shrugged at me when I pointed it out - corrected it after a week), convinced me to continue to do business with my Credit Union by mail with the closest branch office ~200 miles away. Two or three times since then, I've opened brick and mortar bank accounts, only to close them within months because the reality of banking with them is much more expensive than the Credit Union. Bank by mail in the 1990s meant ~$0.40 stamps on the deposit envelopes, but that's cheaper than driving to a local branch anyway, unless your bank branch is directly on your normal daily path, less than 1 mile out of the way, and even then the time differential between: address, seal, stamp and drop in post box and standing in any kind of line at the bank is pretty huge. The banks I used that had "convenient" location right across the street from work (only have to walk 2 blocks to get there and back) seemed to always have 20+ minute lines to wait to talk to a teller.
And, if you think that your time face-to-face with that teller, in that commercial building, isn't being siphoned away from your money somehow, do you also believe in magic fairies? Banks explain that away by lending your money to other people and claiming that all their expenses are covered by the differential between savings and loan interest rates - which is probably why savings has paid virtually zero interest during the past 10 years. Notice any inflation in the cost of living over the last 10 years? That's your money in the bank, shrinking.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @11:30PM
Where I'm from, you get even steeper fees for doing that than getting it from the ATM.
On your monthly statement it doesn't have fees for $someamount?
Some banks offer low interest low (or zero or flat) fees accounts, it's possible you have something like this, but low interest rate *is* the fees.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 23 2018, @05:17PM (4 children)
When your local sources of food, shelter, electricity and internet connectivity accept Bitcoin fungible cryptocurrency as payment for their services (and taxes), then Bitcoin will be the wunderkind that it is so often espoused to be. As long as proof of work is essential to the network, meh. Transactions are far too expensive for real-life use, it's just an entertaining form of speculation (aka gambling.)
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @05:22PM
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(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @05:52PM (1 child)
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @08:18PM
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @02:13PM
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(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday April 23 2018, @06:12PM (12 children)
First of all, I'm in the USA.... that may matter.
Yeah. I get it. You can push Bitcoins all over the place with just web wallets or other third party softwares to handle your transaction details to the Bitcoin network. (You can't just open a telnet session and send "Hey, here's X bitcoins I want to move them!" If you figure a way to do that without a third party software brokering it for you, post the details, please.) Or you can just say "here's my public and private key.... you can transfer my coins away to your own account." Equivalently I can send you a paper wallet with Bitcoins in it and you have control of it and no third party must be involved. Of course I get that.
What you can't do is make them Dollars, or Euros, or Rubles. That requires someone to settle your account for an exchange. And ANY entity of size that will handle exchanges of size is either Regulated, or it is Criminal. Every one.
"But wait! I can! Just go to messageboard_blah_blah_blah and they'll send me $ or EUR for my Bitcoin! So there!"
Aside that you're then engaging in blind trust of that other party (or they are trusting you.... somebody has to drop the money first), if you don't think FINCEN are all over any transaction of significance.... well... good luck to you. And they do prosecute hell out of people acting as exchangers without having registered with them. (For example here [moneylaunderingwatchblog.com].)
You can move all the Bitcoin you want to other Bitcoin without a Government being involved. But what do you DO with it? Yes, you can buy stuff on Overstock. Or Microsoft. Can you pay your datacenter costs to Amazon? Or your electric bill? Or eat it? Or pay your employees in it? You know, the stuff that say a major organization might need to use it for. No, you need a converter for that. (And the big boys who are accepting Bitcoin.... are using converters as well like Coinbase or BitPay. They don't have time to screw with accumulating your details. Those big converters, as WikiLeaks just found out, are indeed subject to FINCeN regulation.)
By the way.... all those major players who are taking Bitcoin.... how did they get there? Oh. Just as above, the big players of the conversion world sold them on the idea of taking it. You know, the ones who HAVE to make nice with the Governments and make sure that Microsoft or Expedia or Overstock aren't being used for money laundering. They gave them sweetheart deals on fees (usually zero for a certain amount or time).
Yep. You can have endless amounts circling the universe in Bitcoin. But whenever you want to do something meaningful with it.... That Government will be there, watching and ready to slap the cuffs on. As Wikileaks just found out.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @08:06PM (5 children)
The problem is interfacing with the old system, not Bitcoin.
Then, you introduce a straw man; nobody said that Bitcoin is currently a good replacement for the entirety of the old system. However, that doesn't stop the world from moving away from the old system towards Bitcoin, slowly but surely, inexorably, as a way to avoid the Tyranny of an absolutely-controlled, monopolistic, governmental currency.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @08:59PM (1 child)
"the AC"? You are that AC.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @09:57PM
No. YOU are that AC.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday April 23 2018, @11:51PM (2 children)
No, the problem is that the old system is the one with the people with guns and the power to put you in gaol insist that all currency shalt be used in the approved manner, and if the new system hopes to survive it shalt pay homage to the people with the guns and the power to put you in gaol. Which includes Bitcoin, which when it crosses for conversion in the USA meets FINCEN. And you don't fix that problem, if a problem it is, with technology.
And my "straw man" is the point of the argument. Tyranical or not you must lay your head down somewhere. In that place is an authority who says what you shall and shalt not use for currency, and if you want to use something else they shall control how you are allowed to use it. You might not like that, but that is reality. That might change some day, but until it does you will reckon with the people with the guns and the power to put you in jail. One way or another. (Or you might become them, and learn why the old system is the way it is and why you will fight the new system - aka what happened to most of the hippies from the 60s.)
In terms of Wikileaks: It doesn't want Bitcoin, though it will accept it - especially if it gets donations that it would not have otherwise. But it, along with any sane money-taking entity, wants a currency with which it can negotiate for the services for which it needs. (Or that can be invested for the prospect of obtaining even further negotiable currency later.) Which is not Bitcoin or any cryptocurrency, sorry to burst your bubble. It is now just trying to ride a sentiment wave since their bubble of easy-conversion was burst by backroom strongarm pressure of the US Government.
As was pointed out: If all it wanted was Bitcoin all it would have to do is establish a paper wallet public address and say, "Hey! Send them here!" It wouldn't need a processor and the blockchain would just record all those transactions to that offline wallet address. Oh, but it can't do that! Because it needs that money in actual usable currency. So it needs a converter, and it makes far more sense to let that converter take the transactions than have to pay conversion fees from a paper wallet (which would still require a converter). So it calls out, "Meanie!" in the hopes that it can again find a source that will convert without falling awry of currency transaction law.
At any rate, before one processes transactions of scale, one will come to terms with the people who have the guns and the power to jail you for disobedience.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @12:23AM (1 child)
All those with entrepreneurial spirit and a respect for the rights of the individual (especially in the face of authoritarian Tyrannies) left your country long ago for the United States.
The world was never moved forward by men of your ilk.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday April 24 2018, @05:12PM
Lol. Nice troll attempt. It would work better if you knew anything about me, but you don't.
Advancement never comes without cooperation. Cooperation never comes without structure. Structure never changes without adjustments, and those adjustments never occur unilaterally without disruption of some sort. And disruption isn't always good. It isn't always bad, either. But the system already exists and thus there is a built-in conservancy against disruption - disruption must prove itself.
You can have independence and change and growth and entrepreneurship. But not without realistic recognition of the way power currently is. Those who try to change it unilaterally usually find differently when the power structure exercises that power. And the world gets more crowded every year - the places in which a person can set off and establish their own independent power without bumping someone else's nose are shrinking.
So, since you have all the answers: How do you stop money laundering and the financing of terrorism in the cryptocurrency environment without proceeding as the governments have done to place the strictures they have? I await your response and predict some form of anarchy as a reply.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 23 2018, @08:15PM
Anecdotally, I work in the US for a large multi-national corporation - 30% of our employees and 40% of our sales are outside the US. When I wanted to contract with a vendor for something priced at 25K Euros, it was a major act to get purchasing to process the PO - anxiety over shifting exchange rates, ignorance of how to make the PO pay in Euros, etc. Our systems are all in-place to handle these things, but the locals here just aren't familiar or comfortable with the process.
So, you can imagine trying to do something new like accepting bitcoin. I think it might have a chance at high volume, high margin places like Starbucks - they may lose or gain on the volatility between accepting payment and cashing out, but it should even out in the end, and even if they end up discounting their lattes 30% to a big batch of customers, if they got more customers than they had before by accepting bitcoin, that's probably a win for them. I could also see it becoming a popular (asshat) tip mechanism, better than giving lottery tickets.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by legont on Tuesday April 24 2018, @03:05AM
It is way worse, actually. Every time you "push Bitcoins all over" you have to record each transaction and report it to IRS in dollar amount and pay capital gain taxes if any. No, you can't submit a summary similar to 1099. You have to submit each and every transaction period.
Messing with IRS? Good luck with that.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Wednesday April 25 2018, @05:22PM (3 children)
Actually, I seem to recall that there were at least a few nations being subjected to hyperinflation where Bitcoin was in fact being adopted as a viable payment method for groceries, rent, etc. Especially popular since relatives working abroad could send home money without incurring substantial fees. I would assume the scaling problems have caused that usage to either fade away, or at least migrate to other crytpocurrencies.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday April 25 2018, @09:21PM (2 children)
I hadn't heard about that. So I tried to make Google my friend. Zimbabwe might be where you were thinking [bloomberg.com]? And then a week later an announcement from the Zimbabwe government that trade either wasn't legal or wasn't officially negotiable, depending [coindesk.com], with the same article saying Namibia has outlawed it. [?] Then in December clarification that it is completely unregulated but seems to be 'use at own risk'. [techzim.co.zw] And finally in March a Zimbabwean Bitcoin exchange was somehow hacked, though they described it as certain accounts were accessed unauthorizedly for trading and not a hacking of their exchange. [itwebafrica.com]
Or you could be referring to somewhere else.
I do still think the point is valid: It isn't yet a negotiable currency in which you can reasonably expect to make payment for whatever service you want from whomever you want, not the way a state currency is. A little bit more research (on that Bitcoin exchange site) turned up that Zimbabwe's central bank has decreed that travel agents and airlines can only accept local bank accounts for travel purposes - not Bitcoin. And it comes back to the central theme of mine: Cryptocurrency acceptance, generally, is allowed by a government. It isn't a divine right. You will find exceptions in all forms of currency: So I've read, in Russia in the 1980s Dollars were easily exchangable on the street for Rubles (and worth more than officially exchanging them,) but private ownership of foreign currency was illegal. They could do it, but if caught or if someone got too big without protection, again a reckoning would happen. And if a government does become Bitcoin friendly, again that is because a government decides to do so - if they decide to criminalize holding it, they can legally do that too.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday April 26 2018, @03:33AM (1 child)
That might well be it. And you would hardly expect the government to approve, would you? After all inflation, especially hyperinflation, doesn't just "happen" - it's an intentional act by the government, devaluing the currency as it increases it's own buying power by printing more money without a corresponding increase in economic activity. Any competing currency further devalues the inflating currency, making the "game" even less profitable and sustainable. Often even other "normal" currencies such as USD are discouraged or banned as well.
My point though is that it's not government approval that validates a currency, but popular adoption - though obviously a government has many tools at its disposal to hinder or encourage such adoption. As long as you can fairly reliably use a currency at the market for goods and services with "real" value, the currency itself has value, and you'll probably be willing to accept it as payment yourself. It doesn't much matter if the currency is bits of paper, metal, seashell, or completely abstract cryptographic ledger balances - they're all equally valueless in themselves, but once you have a critical mass of merchants willing to accept it as payment it becomes a viable currency.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday April 26 2018, @09:50PM
Yeah, and it's a good point. The exchange industry is throwing a lot of weight into getting adoption rolling and there will be a tipping point where it is used.
The real question is what risk you are willing to bear, be it currency fluctuations or being caught and jailed if the authorities so desire. I don't know about the accuracy of this article - I read something awhile back about Australia now requiring exchanges to comply with anti-money laundering provisions, but this [medium.com] seems to be a good spectrum. Some places there is no physical risk to utiziling cryptocurrency. Other places you can be jailed for it. It'll get used even if illegal - the Russian ruble thing proved that. But for today there are still a lot of places that "accept" it but won't hold it.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @03:14PM (1 child)
You do know there are alternatives to coinbase?
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday April 23 2018, @06:18PM
You do know that all the ones of any size must follow FINCEN regulations as a money exchanger (if they're going to remotely touch USD or American soil,) right? And that in any other country of size there's an equivalent agency that cooperates with FINCEN?
This sig for rent.