Topic: Bitcoin Controversy Research paper UPDATE, rough draft posted (Read 2806 times)

its not illegal. but people are trying to make the claims that bitcoins should/will become illegal due to various reasons... i started the paper out of concern for the bitcoins becoming illegal, but after i finished i am pretty sure it won't happen and as far as i can see there is no legit reason (although laws pass all the time for no legit reason)... i turned in my final draft today if anyone is interested btw.

I don't see how buying and using bitcoins is any more illegal than buying game credits, amusement park tokens, Facebook credits, or MFC tokens. Only difference is that a single entity doesn't control the bitcoin virtual currency.

Ok I listened to it --- all he said was 21mil btc...

I was ref to the beginning part of the sentence: Not per min, per 10 mins. But yes, source him for 21mil is correct.


rate of about 50 bitcoins per minute until the total in circulation is 21 million bitcoins (McCarthy 4:30). So once 21 million bitcoins are on the Bitcoin network there will no longer be miners.

thanks for the help! much appreciated.what is wrong with the McCarthy source? btw its not written its a Ted talk speech (at 4min 30sec) feel free to double check maybe i misquoted? the guy seemed to have a good idea about bitcoins. also i think i might have written per minute instead of 10.

FTFY... If you need anymore help with editing in general... happy to help.

Also you may want to checfk that McCarthy source, it that's actually what was written then the guy doesn't understand bitcoin and you can probably find a plethora of sources contradicting him.

OP updated with rough draft, i would appreciate any suggestions and criticism. This is about 7 pages double space, the minimum is 8 but I am aiming for at least 10 pages.

thank you all for your help so far, and if anyone takes the time to read my work in progress i will be extremely grateful. Also i'm planning on including the petition to SIX, but i am not sure if it will help the future legal status of bitcoins.  I am hoping that if the petition pass that would protect bitcoin from becoming illegal in the future, if that is the case i will certainly include it in my paper as a way citizens can take a stand for bitcoins legality.

yes i am, composition 250. its like the second time taking this class, i have hated it but i have been doing well this time probably because i have picked a great topic that i am interested in and is current so my teacher and classmates have been finding my research very interesting... and i made a pre-order from BFL not long ago with some confidence it will be doing well thanks to some research i have been doing (although mining research is not the focus of my paper, it has been more of a distraction from my actual paper research...)

haha i seen a few examples of people getting raid for growing pot only to discover they were just mining bitcoins... i don't have to worry about that in my state though its legal  

edit: unrelated to my thread but i does anyone keep their mining equipment in a refrigerator? i have a mini fridge i don't use, and i ordered from BFL and i'm thinking i could just keep it in the fridge as it mines. i'm not worried about getting raided, but i know people use all kinds of fans to cool their equipment, and keeping it in a fridge ought to be perfect and probably waste less energy even if it uses more... and by that i mean that the 5 times more energy it might use will actually help cooling maybe 20x more, than a bunch of fans will...

Rather curious to read your paper when it's done. Will you share it with us?

Are you writing this for a class or something?

this is really helpful thanks! can you come up with some sources explaining this idea? i mean people can use marijuana or other illegal commodities as currency, like bartering with, bitcoin can really more easily be seen as a commodity that many people use and barter with, cause it to be a currency among certain people... in that sense you could see prohibition just like you see with drugs and certain weapons.

honestly being paid with marijuana is better in my neck of the woods because people tend to want it more than they want money, so more money can be made bartering with marijuana than selling for cash... for example.

also Nakamoto said that the sole purpose of designing Bitcoin was a result of the Euro crisis and his distrust in banks. is there any good sources that discuss why it would be better to keep money in Bitcoin rather than banks? seems like an important point but i haven't really found much on it, seems like most people exchange bitcoin to money in the bank pretty quickly...

Oh don't worry, they can put people in jail if they want. Laws? They make the laws lol.

To continue this train of thought, the Bitcoin analogy would be if Mt. Gox or similar was shut down for failing to implement AML - Bitcoin still lives on as it is entirely separate from the exchanges.

It's as anon as you make it. Everyone can see the blockchain, but they couldn't really link a specific user with an address without either owning the vast majority of the nodes on the network (and if that happens they might as well 51% and just deny all transactions) or unless that user is silly and publishes an address with other information linking them to that address.

Another cool thing you might consider using in your paper... existing drug enforcement tactics sometimes result in raids on bitcoin miners... apparently the power consumption + heat generated looks a lot like growing pot. So if they did for example, make mining illegal... a good mechanism to locate miners is already in place on the local level using offline tech.

DOJ is going to DOJ

You seem to be confusing two things.  eGold (the currency) wasn't shutdown because it was a virtual currency.  e-gold ltd (the company) was shutdown because the operators failed to implement anti-money laundering procedures.  They violated existing laws related to money transmission and their shutdown had absolutely nothing to do with it being a virtual currency.  If they operated the same network using USD they still would have been shutdown.  Had e-gold ltd implemented AML procedures and complied with other laws it is entirely possible they would still be operating.  As a side note it looks like the operators were also embezzling as the amount of gold reserves was significantly less than the amount of eGold issued (a problem w/ centralized opaque currencies) but that wasn't discovered until after the fact.

It just so happens that the only issuer and redeemer of eGold was e-gold ltd and thus closing down the company killed the currency.

Could the US government declare bitcoin illegal?  Sure they can declare anything illegal.  They could declare forums illegal, or porn, or cars with more than 4 cylinders.  However no existing laws on the books make bitcoin illegal.  No existing laws on the books make buying and selling goods and services in bitcoins illegal.  The fact that a counterfeiter and a money launderer were charged isn't exactly the same thing as saying "virtual currencies are illegal therefore bitcoin is illegal".

Unlike e-gold even if the US did pass laws making decentralized currencies illegal the network would still be legal outside the US (you know that place called the entire rest of the world).  In e-gold case with the issuer being centralized it could be shutdown when it violated US law however bitcoin doesn't suffer that flaw.

See that's the thing. A currency by itself can't be illegal. You can't just go ahead and declare Bitcoin illegal. How would you rationalize such a decision?

Now what you CAN declare illegal is the behaviour of those handling or issuing the currency.

e-gold was killed because the company directors actively facilitated money laundering. Killing the company as the sole issuer killed the currency.

Liberty Dollars was killed because the issuer behaved in a way that was clearly intended to defraud customers. Stopping the issuer stopped the currency.

Bitcoin has no issuer (or philosophically everyone in BTC is an issuer, miners by proof of work and users by way of trust). So there's no one to kill or stop (or everyone).

Bitcoin itself is just a digital expression of trust into ownership and value. You can't declare trust illegal. You'd have to prohibit the whole concept of trading itself to be illegal first. And that's something even communism didn't/couldn't do.

Yea in my paper that is one of my points, if the US or anyone country where to ban Bitcoin it would be impossible to actually put a stop people from using. I suppose it would be possible to catch people who mine bitcoins or otherwise sell/buy them, because money is so traceable and people wouldn't want to people random people. but things like Greendot MoneyPak would work well for buying and selling them anonymously, BUT i'm sure it would be possible to have a GMP number be traced to someone cashing it. but having to pay 5 bucks to get a moneypak sort of makes buying bitcoins not very worth it unless you sold them 5 bucks cheaper than they are worth.

i realize Bitcoin can't get shut down, but it would suck if they became illegal and people started getting charged for using bitcoins.

thanks greyhawk, that's what i was think. so it can still be considered money laundering then.

does anyone hope that banks start accepting bitcoins so it establishes legitimacy, people think since its "anonymous" that its like laundering money. yet the network knows how bitcoins are out there, which accounts transfer to which accounts. it doesn't seem to be that anonymous to me and it seems like if it were to establish legitimacy then there will not be an "untraceable" element to it.

e-gold was a proprietary currency administrated, recognized and traded through and by a single company (e-gold ltd.). Shut down the company, and you shut down the currency.

Bitcoin is an open source peer to peer protocol. Shut down a node, no one cares.

Good luck shutting down bitcoin 

yea but people are considering bitcoin to be money laundering too