Topic: CFTC Regulating Bitcoin, Totally sell on this news guys. (Read 5540 times)

I've always contended that if CFL bulbs had become popular through natural market forces then they would have been banned because of the mercury.

Yeah, we don't have those  in Germany. People ran to the hardware markets and basically bought bulbs for three generations

Well, I don't know where you live, but in southern europe you can get illegal light bulbs in every convenience store run by chinese or pakistani people. And you have 3 of those in each building block.

Well, have you worked in a Baumarkt some time ago? They were CRUSHED by the demand and people ran their doors in. They all bought every single light bulb you could find, because peopel are sceptical of these low energy lights.

Which is a good thing, since the new technology to look at is LED and banning lightbulbs was premature. They should have been banned together with energy saving bulbs running on Mercury at the same time, leaving the market open for only LED.

Well said. If we want bitcoin to succeed, we need to bootstrap the marketplace and show the world it's value. Speculators have their role, and they're performing it well. We as a community need to develop easy to use, integrated markets that utilize bitcoins strengths to make everyday life easier. The is a limited market for political goods and services, there is an endless market for revolutionary ideas that reduce the cost of living.

Email wasn't widely adopted because it had an agenda to crush the post office, it was adopted because it was cheaper and more efficient.

This is the key to everything - bitcoin is not mainstream, and when I talk to 'plain folk' / muggles / real people etc nobody knows what a bitcoin is, or why they would want one!

We are still looking at the internet circa 1993, but we don't have a friendly media helping us push a vision of Money 2.0 on to a apathetic public. 

Rather than talk about a bitcoin being worth billions per coin as a sign of success, its time to start spending to get the message out there.

If you want to limit regulations, we need to demonstrate that bitcoins is more about pizza than paying for drugs and human traffic! Its far more difficult to limit people using their own currency if all they are doing is buying sensible stuff from people who are honest traders.

Maybe its time to start finding bitcoin users in Africa and show the world what free trade actually looks like?

Yes, this is key. I do have high hopes that governments will not attempt to shut down the bitcoin market (not that they could, entirely, of course), and the relatively non-threatening nature of FinCEN's scheme supports that. But personally I am cautious, as I have in the past lost considerable money to government seizure in the grey market.

There is currently little demand for bitcoin as currency. We are nowhere near the critical levels of adoption that would be required to stave off massive downward price movement in the case of being targeted by major governments.

If this were to happen, speculators -- virtually the only thing that is massively propping up bitcoin prices -- will dump en masse. They will move on to much safer investments.

In the case of online poker, US consumers clearly decided in favor of brick-and-mortar casinos and specifically legal forms of gambling. What will demand look like if new users begin to get the impression that dealing in bitcoin is "illegal"? If regulatory schemes come about that are too costly or legally uncertain, venture capital dries up.

Not trying to troll... this is a scenario that should be considered. I lean bullish longterm, but I consider bitcoin quite risky (this is only one scenario that could crush it). And those perma-bulls who have pie-in-the-sky ideas about what regulation will look like need a reality check. This will make or break bitcoin.

I find that we often talk here as if bitcoin has already achieved mass adoption. It hasn't. We are a very long way from that. The new money coming in -- how long it will sustain we will see -- IMO is not from bitcoin users, but by and large from speculators. That is not sustainable.

This is very much based on your list of illegal stuff.  If you go down that list to the boring stuff, the rule that government intervention increases demand isn't true.

60w light bulbs were made illegal in the EU a few years ago - we must now use low energy light bulbs which cost 10 times as much.  But there are no dodgy light bulb salesmen hiding in doorways trying to sell me illegal light bulbs.

Leaded petrol (gasoline) was made illegal 20 years ago, yet, there was never a demand for this old fuel from hardcore drivers, not happy with the alternative.

Even cigarettes which are being made more and more illegal through harder ways to buy them is also suffering from a lowering of demand.  Latest usage figures are touching 20% of the population, down from 50% 40 years ago.

Its only when the item being made illegal doesn't have an alternative which is good enough for the public that government's find that there is a black market formed.  And in bitcoins case, I don't think that is going to happen.  While its cool to be able to use bitcoins to cut out government, I don't know how big a market there is for that exclusive use - I don't think its so big that people are willing to go against big government to get their hit!

Although I could be wrong

I would argue there are many markets around the world that do not have the economic infrastructure the US has, as corrupt as it is, which need a monetary system. Bitcoin, with all of its well-known capabilities, fits this niche nicely, and as such would increase in demand regardless of US intervention.

As for the OP, I take from her post the following points:

Labeling something illegal does not reduce demand, it only causes demand to mask itself.

Government regulation has a history of harming, rather than benefitting, economic markets; and as such can be expected to act in kind regarding bitcoin.

Revolutionary technologies have a way of proliferating  regardless of oppression.

That and the amazing amount of people on this forum who lack critical thinking skills.

believe it or not, but this cftc thing is actually adding to bitcoin's legitemacy...  it may be hard to see at the moment...

BitcoinAshly is my new favorite person on here. at first i was like aughh what the fuck are you talking about!! oh man im gunnaaa..... ohhhhh wate a minute. this seams a bit...... humm oh ya she is crowing it up. hahaha . that was a good one my friend. thank you. it like making fun of republicans and they dont even know it....... your are on par with "the colbert report" pose as an ass and realy you are making fun of the asses hahahah love love love it.

+1
But also "shadow money" how they call it. Which they (think they) can crush anytime if they want to do so.

The parallels are there. The regulation question is actually quite scary.

The 2006 UIGEA came out of nowhere and was tacked on to "must-pass" legislation without discussion. All major operators exited the market either voluntarily or through asset forfeiture. It effectively crippled the US share of online poker players. By targeting banks first and foremost, the small operators that were left had to turn to more seizure-conscious batch processing which has turned payment processing into a cruel joke. 2-day ACH drafts are now 8+ week paper checks (many of which bounce) or bank wires; fees are up; withdrawal limits are similar to bitcoin exchanges -- you can't get your fiat out. And this is given the situation where player pools are miniscule compared to pre-2006 and pre-2011 (when domains and bank accounts of the 3 largest operators were seized) levels.

We've already seen how the banking system can be used to attack the operations of bitcoin exhanges. This has been on a very small scale. Payment processing from bitcoin to fiat is already difficult and timely. If any major government targets the banks, shit is going to hit the fan hard. If an already difficult deposit process becomes even more difficult, timely, and shady (as high margin offshore profiteers increasingly become the only source of payment processing), and if withdrawals get even worse than they are..... money dries up quick.

I mean, we in the US are using Russian, Japanese, Slovenian exchanges. We all hope for positive developments in re to regulation. But we are in a very grey legal area... and if we get pushed further into the black market, the next round of operators are going to be far worse even.

I read a comparison of bitcoin with online gambling, and how the US killed that market on its shores. I am finding it far more difficult to turn my fiat into bitcoins, and while that does mean I was protected from the last crash, its not the best way of trying to use a currency!

I have an idea that whatever you might read in documentation and press releases, the governments of the world have a different agenda for bitcoin until it finds a way to have control of this new technology.

My guess is that will will eventually get a visacoin and a mastercoin, all based on the works of Satoshi and this forum. That will only happen when the government are happy with whatever regulations they put in place. 

But I seriously doubt they will be involving us in that discussion!

All jokes aside, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission regulations aren't about Bitcoin, but derivates and futures on Bitcoin, which totally fall into their field of duty, but this implies one very important thing: BTC is accepted as money on a gov scale. Very positive, imo.

guess i need to buy more litecoins then

We cannot escape a fundamental truth about humanity: If something has value, then powerful and wealthy people will seek to acquire and control it.

Therefore Bitcoin has 3 possible futures:
1) Continuously adapt and operate outside of the reach of such control,
2) Give into the control - but possibly under different and better "rules" than centralized currencies, or
3) Become irrelevant and unused and fade into history.



+1 !

For the kind poster on the previous page who accused me of not understanding basic economics, I think you did a pretty good job of illustrating that it is, in fact, yourself who does not understand 

Good/service + government intervention/repression/regulation/etc = lower supply vs same or higher demand = higher price.

You are arguing, so far as I can tell, that the intervention/etc would not not influence supply (not true, since fewer exchanges and higher barrier of entry into a regulated market would make it harder and harder for people to get bitcoins.) Only in bizzaro-world (where everything is the opposite of what it seems) would goods/services, in the vast majority of cases, be THE SAME OR EASIER to get in a repressed market.

You are also arguing, so far as I can tell:
(1) that the utility of bitcoin as an easy cheap way to hop down to the convenience store and buy petrol and cigarettes is more important than its protocol, its decentralized P2P structure, and its potential as a store of value that outperforms and hedges against inflating fiat currencies.
(2) since its features that you consider more important would be the ones affected by government regulation, the demand will therefore go down, completing your "unaffected supply vs lower demand" equation for lower prices.

I disagree. With regulation, supply will go down and demand will go up. Heck, abusive regulation itself is something that bitcoin was practically designed to circumvent. I'm not condoning using bitcoin for any illegal activities (i.e. thwarting regulation) but to think that one of the very problems bitcoin is perfectly suited to work around will cause its demand to be reduced in the face of that very utility being realized - sorry, doesn't work like that. 

Thanks to everyone that posted here who "Got it." There's a bigger picture here - (1) feds are waking up, and (2) a decentralized protocol (like bittorrent) is nearly impossible to effectively regulate.

Noticed many posts were distractions from the real issue of the topic....

Bitcoin is going mainstream, getting the attention of the Feds, and they want to use it for power, revenue or both.

don't people recognize satire when they see it anymore?

in the 50's before govt regulation, satire was everywhere.