Ask Slashdot: How Does One Freely Use Bitcoin In the Land of the Free? 270
New submitter devrtm writes: It appears that Bitcoin, a currency designed with anonymity in mind, can be effectively used almost anywhere in the world, except in a few countries where it is regulated, and in one country where you can only use it if you give up your privacy. That country is the United States. I have accumulated quite a few BTC from the currency's early days where block rewards were still at $50. There was a period of time where one could get a nearly anonymous debit card, or use BTC online with merchants. Nowadays, non-U.S. payment providers no longer issue debit cards to the U.S. residents and the U.S.-based merchants accepting BTC are nearly extinct. The only way to use BTC in the U.S. is to convert it to USD. Unfortunately, that conversion requires giving up your personal information to a U.S.-based BTC payment processor, and there are rumors that signing up for those services raises red flags with certain three letter acronym organizations. I have nothing to hide, but I do value my privacy. Can one freely and anonymously live off of their Bitcoin wallet in the U.S.? I am afraid the answer is no. Does anyone have an experience that proves me wrong? Please share.
Cash (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want privacy use cash with people who don't know you.
Re:Cash (Score:5, Informative)
To simplify the instructions: take your pile of BTC, convert it to cash as a single event, pay your taxes, and live off your BTC proceeds.
20% capital gains isn't killing anyone. If you want US dollars, you'll need to pay US taxes on your BTC gains, or be a criminal. Your choice.
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"Only criminals need to hide their spending activity."
So you agree that the CIA, NSA, etc. are criminal organizations?
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Sure they do, society often is is piss poor at determining who should be classified as a criminal. I shudder to think how terrible it would be if law were perfectly enforcable; especially since its creation remains so imperfect.
Society loses a ton when bad laws are enforced and criminality is used as a weapon to subjugate it.
but he needs it in cash. (Score:4, Insightful)
oh but he is asking how to turn it into cash without paying taxes or having a record he has the cash.
he probably totally ignores the fact that once he pays the tax on the investment he is free to do whatever he wants with the money without any of the agencies caring anything - UNLIKE if he just got magically a million dollars of cash and went buying expensive things which would put him on the hitlist of dea etc.
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Privacy : cash is better than bitcoin (Score:5, Informative)
And for the last time,
bitcoin IS NOT DESIGNED with anonymity in mind.
It is designed for being a distributed system with no central authority (in theory at least).
And this system works by replacing any central authority with a consensus among all the nodes of the network.
Which is achieved by all (full) nodes of the network having, by design, a local copy of the whole ledger (= the blockchain).
That mean each of them can see any single transaction you did at any point of time.
(Again, by design. That's how the bitcoin protocol can reach consensus and trust without needing any central authority to act as a reference).
That means that no, you're not anonymous, I can see all the transaction you ever did inside the blockchain on my own locally run node.
At best, bitcoin protocol provides pseudonymity.
It's not Facebook require real names.
Transaction aren't officially done in the name of your real identity, they are done in the name of some base64 encoded public key.
And normal client are constantly shuffling sums around so there might be hundred of transaction between the time you received some amount of BTC and the time you spent them at an online shop where you order something to be mailed to you (and thus where some phyical world coordinates can be linked to your bitcoin identity).
That mostly prevent casual/accidental snooping.
But that's not beyond the capability of data-mining any government-level agent.
If your neighbour want to spy on you, he can't do it easily.
If any three-letter agency wants to track you, they just need to spend some of their tremendous computational power.
Your are not anonymous on the bitcoin network (at least to to governments).
And that's part of the design (it also help you trust the network without needing there to be a "Bitcoin Global Inc." to be held accountable).
Also, because the lack of central authority, nobody can prevent you to spend or receive any BTC money.
Government can see you and track you in the global ledger, but they can't prevent you.
There's no PayPal, Visa, or any other company that can block transactions.
Transaction can happen between any end-points as long as they conform to the bitcoin protocol.
(And that is one of the big motivations behind the rise of bitcoin protocol : people getting fed up of their account getting frozen for any random reason.
e.g.: see donations to WikiLeaks)
If you want (Relative) lack of control AND total anonymity, as suggest above : USE CASH.
Pay your taxes (Score:5, Insightful)
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Since you did hold on to them more than a year that's long term capital gain tax which is a bit less, though
But it may indeed be hard to prove where these come from. Did you mine them, did you buy them as an investment, was this some kind
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Are they seeing this a currency or stock? Because what they could (and probably do) tax is Capital Gain. You bought some bitcoins at 50$, they are now 1050$ (looks like some people cashed in from the 1280$ peak :-)), so that's 20-30% capital gain tax on 1000$/btc please.
Since you did hold on to them more than a year that's long term capital gain tax which is a bit less, though
But it may indeed be hard to prove where these come from. Did you mine them, did you buy them as an investment, was this some kind of payment, etc...
How you got them is somewhat irrelevant. What counts is your cost vs what you sold them for so the delta is a taxable gain in the US. Unless you mined them you'd do well to record your deductible cost so as to verify the gain or loss like any other cost associated with production. If you mined them you probably could include the mining costs as to offset the gain but that cost would be negligible since the cost of the infrastructure probably could not be included and the actual electricity cost directly re
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Unless you mined them you'd do well to record your deductible cost so as to verify the gain or loss like any other cost
The guidance/recommended reporting is exactly the same deal if you mined the BTC, other than the fact a person who mined coins already had an obligation to report income and possibly have income and self-employment taxes due during the year they mined the coins. You had to have reported your ordinary income (Fair market Value of BTC earned minus Ammortized portions of the Fixed and
Donate the Bitcoin (Score:5, Informative)
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Are gambling gains taxed in the US? If so, yeah, you're stuffed. If not, then one could argue that speculating on the value of BYC would be like speculating on the value of some magic beans, ie. gambling.
Re:Pay your taxes (Score:5, Informative)
The IRS considers bitcoin an asset, if you are selling bitcoin or bartering it for goods you are subject to capital gains tax on it, just like any other appreciating asset. It's got nothing to do with the Federal Reserve. Bitcoin rising in value isn't inflation of a currency, it's the market attempting to price the future value of an asset, same as with a stock.
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Bitcoin rising in value isn't inflation of a currency, it's the market attempting to price the future value of an asset, same as with a stock.
Inflation is an increase in the amount of currency required to purchase an assets on average. [wikipedia.org] If you consider bitcoin to be a currency, (technically anything can be) then bitcoin is undergoing deflation since it takes fewer bitcoins to buy an asset on average.
In a broader sense, stop considering things assets or currency. Any asset can be a currency and vice versa. What matters is that item's value compared to everything else.
Re:Pay your taxes (Score:4, Informative)
He had x bitcoin 5 years ago, he has x bitcoin today
He had X BC 5 years ago. His basis was either what he paid for them, the money invested in mining them, or in certain cases (such as a if he received them as an inheritance), the fair market value at the time he came to possess them.
His capital gain or loss is the dollar value of any proceeds from any sale or trade minus his basis, subject to "wash sale" and other rules that would make hte sale a "non-taxable" event.
In any case, as long as he continues to hold the BC, he doesn't owe any taxes. If he holds them until they are worth no more than his basis then sells them, then he won't owe any taxes. If he holds them until he dies, the tax basis is "reset" to the fair market value at the time of his death, likely saving his heirs a boatload of capital-gains taxes.
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or trade minus his basis, subject to "wash sale"
Wash sale is a regulation that Only applies to transactions involving the trade of securities. It does not apply to Currencies, Futures, and Non-Equity options.
I believe the type of commodity called "Non-Equity Option" is the closest comparable transaction to securing the rights to BTC on an Exchange.
Your deposit to an exchange secures you the right, But not the obligation to have your exchange assign a number of BTC to your Wallet ID of choice; wh
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What income? He had x bitcoin 5 years ago, he has x bitcoin today. No bitcoins incoming, there was no income.
He had $10 5 years ago. He bought something. He sold it for $100. That's $90 in income. Pretending math doesn't work because you hate government-mandated inflation just makes you look like an idiot.
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No, you';re getting paid exactly what was agreed to. If you negotiate dollars, you get dollars. I suppose you could get paid in M&M's if you want.
Buy foreign. (Score:2)
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That's fine if you have about $1000 worth of bitcoins, for amounts larger than $10K it becomes unpractical.
anti-money laundering laws (Score:2, Insightful)
Is it really as surprise that a scheme designed to facilitate money laundering is not allowed without a paper trail in the US?
Bit coin is not money (Score:5, Insightful)
In addition BitCoin is slow, not entirely trust worthy (you can argue the fact that one farming group controls more than 50% of the computing power used to back bitcoin is a real problem), doesn't understand the basics of monetary policy (price fluctations anyone), let alone a way to implement it. These could all be contributing factors as to why large organizations are not willing to exchange goods and services for bitcoin.
Re: anyone that actually matters (Score:2)
If enough people use BTC as money, then it's money.
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Re:Bitcoin is not money (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re: Bitcoin is not money (Score:2)
The document from the South African treasury about virtual currencies you linked to states:
"Due to their unregulated status, virtual currencies cannot be classified as legal tender as any merchant may refuse them as a payment instrument without being in breach of the law. In addition, virtual currencies cannot be regarded as a means of payment as they are not issued on receipt of funds. The use of virtual currencies therefore depends on the other participant
Money != Legal tender (Score:2)
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All true. It's also worth noting that most sizeable governments are working on their own blockchain based crypto currencies. So, it'll just be Bitcoin they don't accept, they'll (one day) quite happily accept e-dollars or e-pounds or whatever because they'll be the ones in control of it.
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Ask Slashdot: How Do I Avoid My Taxes? (Score:2, Insightful)
Your question boils down to, "How do I avoid capital gains taxes on my Bitcoin earnings?" That's problematic, as you can imagine.
My how times change. (Score:2, Interesting)
My how times change. "Back in the day", anyone voicing most of the opinions here so far would be modded into oblivion...
Re:My how times change. (Score:4, Interesting)
The thing about that is that the people invested in Bitcoin (emotionally, not necessarily financially) have a quasi-religious fervour and are willing to put proportionately far more time than anyone else into the subject.
They must be down to an exceedingly small fraction of the social networking user population if they're no longer able to overpower discussions on social networking sites.
Re:My how times change. (Score:4, Insightful)
There's so much wrong with the thinking behind your post that people have dedicated essays to it. I'll go with the overly simplified version:
If you treat Bitcoins as currency, you spend them. Thus, you're not holding on to them long enough for them to accrue value. If you treat them as an investment, you're not spending them, and there's no Bitcoin economy to make them worth anything.
That's why Bitcoin trading is pure speculation. There's absolutely nothing behind them except the willingness of the next idiot to buy some. They're different from Beanie Babies only in that when Bitcoin finally peters out you won't be left with something you can put on a shelf somewhere or give to a little kid.
If you could magically time markets, Bitcoin is probably one of the last things you'd try it with since it's a lot easier to trade in other financial instruments with far less risk of fraud.
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Say I bought 100 bitcoins back when they were worth nothing and never touched them until today. One bitcoin is worth $1055 now. What did I lose? Changing them into currency isn't a problem. Newegg accepts bitcoin so I buy random items and resell them on eBay. So yeah I take a slight loss there along with fees but come on how is that not a sound plan?
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There's a TON of digital currencies and other schemes and ventures out there; say you bought 100 'shares' of each of them, your 'bitcoin gains' ... might offset your losses elsewhere or not.
When the winning move is to bet on the right scheme/venture...well... good luck with that.
If you can do that reliably, let us know which penny stock or startup will be a billion dollar company in a few years. Because the odds are about as good.
Same as betting on 28 on the roulette wheel (Score:2)
If I put $100 on 28 on roulette wheel and the ball happened to land on 28, what did I lose? It just so happened that this particular gamble worked out this time. If you bought when it was $1300 (or bet on 23) you lost money. Some people won the gamble. It's still gambling, not investment.
> Newegg accepts bitcoin so I buy random items and resell them on eBay. So yeah I take a slight loss there along with fees but come on how is that not a sound plan?
When I do work, I like to make money, not lose mone
currency trading: speculation vs hedge (Score:2)
If you treat Bitcoins as currency, you spend them. Thus, you're not holding on to them long enough for them to accrue value. If you treat them as an investment, you're not spending them, and there's no Bitcoin economy to make them worth anything.
That's why Bitcoin trading is pure speculation.
There are two good reasons to "invest" in a currency:
1) Utility: It's a "safe, convenient, and easy to use" currency. For most people in countries with relatively stable currencies, their country's fiat currency fits this bill. I for one keep at least a month's worth of expenses "in cash" in a bank account, knowing I will lose very little to inflation, that I have a very low risk of the money suddenly becoming temporarily inaccessible, and knowing that I can pay any domestic debt with it without having to
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Well played sir.
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Just think how rich you'd be if you started buying up bitcoins back when they were worth nothing...
How liquid is the market? If I have a million in bitcoin I am a paper millionaire unless I can convert all of them at will. Is there a market maker that can do such a transaction, like you can do on the NYSE, to ensure the transaction can be processed immediately? Liquidity is one of the problems bitcoin must overcome to be a viable store of wealth and not speculative. Given the concentration of production in a few miners also means if you create a liquid market a few people can easily manipulate the price
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See now you're greedy. If you bough that much early on you'd probably affect the market somehow and it would backfire.
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All currencies are pyramid schemes.
The question becomes how strong is their backing.
Legally impossible pretty much anywhere (Score:5, Informative)
If you're a US resident you would have to pay income tax or at least declare it as an investment income regardless of how you convert it. You can go to any other country to cash out or convert it into goods, even if you could buy a car with it, you have to pay the tax man. And that's not unique to the US.
The tax man however does not necessarily need to know where the money has been or currently is (how you are investing or realizing the profit is not recorded) as long as you don't use the money.
Monetary transactions above a certain value also need to be recorded, again, not unique to the US. If you make any further investment (house or otherwise) with the money/value, the bank also wants to know where it came from for credit reasons (to make sure you didn't owe a loanshark).
In none of those instances do you need to declare the full transaction history of your investments or profits. The "problem" with Bitcoin is that it explicitly does not offer anonymity (you can't launder bitcoins) and gives you a full transaction history regardless. To request anonymity from an explicitly public ledger is ludicrous. You can only hide the owner of a bitcoin through technical means as you can attempt to hide any transaction on the Internet but it's only incidental and also detrimental to the Bitcoin system.
Convert it to cash by buying/selling goods (Score:5, Interesting)
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So go on the "dark web" trade your bit-coin for drugs. Sell drugs to locals and take cash. Bingo! Really, this isn't a difficult situation at all.
Perhaps Ross Ulbricht could enlighten you as to what a "difficult situation" is, since it fits so well here...
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So go on the "dark web" trade your bit-coin for drugs. Sell drugs to locals and take cash. Bingo! Really, this isn't a difficult situation at all.
Perhaps Ross Ulbricht could enlighten you as to what a "difficult situation" is, since it fits so well here...
Well learn from his mistake and don't get caught. Duh.
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The topic is correct, comment about buying drugs is bad advice and was presumably not meant to be taken seriously.
Spend your BC on something that's legal and whose transactions aren't of interest to any government, then sell what you bought.
For people with less than a few thousand dollars (US) that they need to convert, this should be easy.
From the sound of things, the original submitter has much more than that. His best bet is to not try to hide his money. He won't owe taxes on it until he sells it. If
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The topic is correct, comment about buying drugs is bad advice and was presumably not meant to be taken seriously.
How dare you presume my sarcasm you cis-sarcastic oppressor!
Was NEVER meant to be anonymous (Score:5, Informative)
"It appears that Bitcoin, a currency designed with anonymity in mind..."
FALSE.
Bitcoin was NEVER meant to provide anonymity. Can we please stop with this misconception?
It depends (Score:2)
There are some online retailers that accept bitcoin. Since there isn't a credit card involved, there is no reason why you need to give them your real name. Checkout is a breeze too, relatively speaking.
Depending on where you are, you might be able to do small cash transactions for people in your area that are looking to buy.
If you need a lot of cash quickly, there is no practical way around it - you'll need to register with an exchange, under your real name. Depending on how large, you may need to go thr
Whats really being asked (Score:3)
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The government may be crooked and bloated but if we don't pay for the government, those bitcoins would be worthless in the US anyway. This is the land of the free, as in the people are free to do as they wish (in theory) as long as it doesn't effect anyone else. Not a place where the land, or any other property, is free of any obligation.
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NO, I have a problem with corporations and arseholes that don't pay their fair share
Corporations never pay taxes. Never have, never will. Only people pay taxes. Corporate taxation is just a way for government to collect taxes from the taxpayers without the taxpayers knowing it's been done. Taxpayers/voters are typically quite happy to vote for corporate taxes because it seems like a "free" way to fund government services, and anyway everyone hates those nasty corporations. In fact, any expense you impose across all of the companies in an industry just gets built into the cost structure of
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they do pay "their fair share" which is what law requires. There is no other meaningful definition. If you think certain groups should pay more that's fine, but your lawmakers are the problem.
Where? How much? (Score:2)
There are usually people in populated areas who are looking to trade BTC for FRN's. Do you have thousands to offload?
Donate to charity? (Score:2)
It's not bitcoin, it's the dollar (Score:2)
You can easily freely use bitcoins in t he land of the free. It's the dollar you apparently cannot use so freely. Just don't use it. Problem solved. You're welcome.
Privacy? Or just tax evasion? (Score:2)
Most likely, the poster's real motivation is avoiding taxes on his BTC profits. The anarchist in me understands this: taxes are the government taking your property by force. On the other hand, few people would voluntarily pay the amount that governments consume, and we don't seem to be willing to dismantle our governments, so...there we are, taxes.
If it's not about taxes, then cash out. If you register with a BTC exchange and cash in your BTC then, yes, the IRS will know who you are. So what? Just pay your
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Concur.
Bitcoin as a financial system is made impractical in the long term by the fact that it is limited in the total number that can be issued. After the last one is issued, the intent is for the value of them to simply go up. It was proposed as an in-built method to combat inflation, however what it really is is a way for the inventor to pad his own pockets by owning a significant fraction of the total number of bitcoins that can ever be produced. In a best-case scenario, this means he now owns a fract
Re:cash is getting controlled (Score:2, Insightful)
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Is this fake news? (Score:2)
Concur.
Bitcoin as a financial system is made impractical in the long term by the fact that it is limited in the total number that can be issued. After the last one is issued, the intent is for the value of them to simply go up.
A Bitcoin is the solution to a hashing problem for which the ease in calculating a solution goes up with the size of the search space. In a very large search space it's easy to generate a solution, but as the search space becomes smaller you have to spend more time hunting around for a correct solution.
As more solutions are found, the people behind bitcoin validate that 'coin and then shorten the length in bits needed for a valid solution. They have a fixed number in mind that they want to base the currency
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Concur.
Bitcoin as a financial system is made impractical in the long term by the fact that it is limited in the total number that can be issued. After the last one is issued, the intent is for the value of them to simply go up.
A Bitcoin is the solution to a hashing problem for which the ease in calculating a solution goes up with the size of the search space. In a very large search space it's easy to generate a solution, but as the search space becomes smaller you have to spend more time hunting around for a correct solution.
As more solutions are found, the people behind bitcoin validate that 'coin and then shorten the length in bits needed for a valid solution. They have a fixed number in mind that they want to base the currency on, and as the number of solutions found approach that number, they have been shortening the length so that they will eventually have exactly the number they want, and finding new solutions will take an astronomically long time.
There's nothing preventing them from increasing the valid length of solutions and letting people find more. They have explained countless times that this is how they can have actual inflation in their currency.
Countless times of explaining this to the public, and yet people continue to repeat bullshit they've heard "somewhere on the internet" that matches their woldview.
It's no wonder they're having trouble - they're concentrating on their project, but losing the war against propaganda.
That's a totally inaccurate means of explaining this.
The difficulty of finding a solution scales as the network grows, it has nothing to do with the amount of currency in it. Mining continues once the full amount has been released, because mining is about transactions, not block rewards. Once the total amount of the currency exists, then mining is rewarded by transaction fees as there is no more block reward.
The nameless "They" cannot increase the money supply. The entire network would have to vote to fo
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And it's hijackable by a single person. When a single person has control of the blockchain long enough, which happens as people drop out of the mining business, a single entity could transfer all coins to themselves, then process the transactions, until they "own" them all. It will happen, and when it does, people will lose faith in all block chain systems, even those withou
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It's a deflationary system. People will lose wallets (die without clear instructions and such for others to use them, and the like).
And it's hijackable by a single person. When a single person has control of the blockchain long enough, which happens as people drop out of the mining business, a single entity could transfer all coins to themselves, then process the transactions, until they "own" them all. It will happen, and when it does, people will lose faith in all block chain systems, even those without the same limitations.
It's useless at that point anyway,. as if everyone drops out of the network there is no more network to process transactions and the value drops to zero.
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When a single person has control of the blockchain long enough ... a single entity could transfer all coins to themselves
How would they do that without the private keys?
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Sounds like hell to me. Somalia? Sudan? Yemen?
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I hadn't thought of it that way. Heaven is a communist dictatorship. And presumably you can't get pregnant in Heaven (since you have to die to get in), so if there is sex then it would be purely for pleasure and not procreation.
It looks like there might be a lot of fundamentalists who are in for a bit of a shock when they die. That is, unless they find that there is no afterlife and so they would be in for no shock at all.
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The reason governments are attempting to ban cash worldwide is exactly because it's so hard to do exactly what you're describing.
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Busted [wheresgeorge.com]
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Bitcoin is fundamentally impractical. It limps along ...
and it occasionally makes dazzling leaps into the air and then trips over itself, falls down and just lies there.
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Sadly this is mostly true (but not entirely).
A key part of an economy is the ability to purchase something and have a clear path of recourse if you don't get what you pay for. While bitcoins themselves don't cause this problem it is the anonymous transactions that do. It put the buyer in greater risk because the seller has all the advantages. If I buy x in bit coins the seller will know who I am to deliver the goods however if if I don't know who the seller is then if what I get isn't what I purchase, I h
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Technically unless it's gold or silver coin, it's all made up bullshit; money is only valuable because you can convert it to a desired goods or service at a future date. Even gold or silver coin's value is more dependant on conversion to a desired goods or service at a future date than it's innate value.
Re:I guess /. still approves this crap (Score:4, Insightful)
All money is made-up bullshit.
Yes, but the US dollar is backed with the US banking system, the US government, and the US military. Bitcoin is backed by the fact that the exchange you use maybe doesn't want to rip you off today.
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All money is made-up bullshit.
Yes, but the US dollar is backed with the US banking system,
The US Federal Reserve is a privately owned institution.
the US government, and the US military.
Are clients of this private banking system.
Bitcoin is backed by the fact that the exchange you use maybe doesn't want to rip you off today.
However even if a bitcoin's value is zero, you still have a bitcoin.
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The US Federal Reserve is a privately owned institution.
The non-profit Fed is "owned" by nobody. The leaders of the Fed are confirmed appointees of the US Federal Government. It is a "government institution" by all measures.
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Not only that, all profits go directly to the US Treasury.
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The Fed is a hybrid system, both public and private.
The Fed is owned by its member banks. They get to elect board members to the regional boards. Profits accrue the banks, kind of. The Fed doesn't pay a dividend so those profits never get monetized. So de facto profits go the Treasury.
However the Board of Governors is appointed by the president. This limits the amount of control the banks have over the institution. So what is ownership without access to profits or control?
A analogy would be the local co-op
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We set up institutions up like this all the time when the goal is a level of detachment from popular politics or cooperation across jurisdictions. In local government, they are usually set up as "authorities", such as the entities which administer the bridges between states (e.g. Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Delaware River Port Authority, etc.).
More broadly, every single corporation in the US gets its charter from a government. What we think of as "private" are actually entities that exist onl
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The banking system in the US is intrinsically tied back to the Federal Reserve. Which is part of the US government.
Re: I guess /. still approves this crap (Score:2, Insightful)
The Fed is NOT part of the USG. It's just a cartel of European banks. They don't answer to US taxpayers and they don't answer to congress. They are beholden only to themselves and they care only to continue their monopoly on banking where every USD automatically comes with a 6% debt that is paid back to the FED. Woodrow Wilson signed them into power, at night, in secret, on an island and then immediately and publicly regretted it and said he'd made the worst mistake that could have been made against US.
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Bitcoin is backed by mathematics.
So is Euler's equation, but it's not particularly useful to anyone to put food on the table.
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In what twisted universe are tactical nukes not nuclear weapons?
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Doesn't Amazon take bitcoin payments? I'd buy Amazon gift cards and sell them on ebay for a minuscule loss.Hell pawn shops buy gift cars now days if you want cash.
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Dealing in a substantial $$$ amount in gift cards would be a way to get on FinCEN's watchlist
Also, I believe no Amazon doesn't directly. At a time at least Overstock did. I believe you will be required to identify yourself to the retailer to conduct these kinds of transactions BTC is not for anonymity, at least not when dealing with reputable ecommerce companies.
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Go to Toronto, find a BTC ATM, cash out, convert to USD, go back to US and use said USD anonymously anywhere except online
That's a good way to get added to watch lists and have gov't agents seize your cash, unless/until you can prove that cash has not been involved in any crime before or after you came into possession of it.
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Works well enough for Satoshi, no one seems to know his secret identity
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That's because the only BTC Satoshi is known to have has never been Spent.... that includes the 50 BTC award for the genesis Block 0 and the next few blocks. Because of how the code was written, however, Block 0's reward is unspendable,
and the other early blocks have never been spent.
It's possible that Satoshi's secret identity would became known if coins from Block #1 get spent.
If Satoshi was smart, he could keep his ID hidden by leaving those in cold storage forever, and engaging in other mining
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The only reason e-gold crashed and burned was because the feds charged the operators with money laundering and with violating some regulations about money transfer passed as part of the Patriot Act.
It won't be that easy with bitcoin because of the decentralized aspect of it. If there was a "Bitcoin Inc." with a corporate HQ, the feds would have shut it down a long, long time ago. When they really want to crack down on bitcoin, they might just make it a crime to use it for any transaction.
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