Topic: Do we want to work with money regulators, or keep Bitcoin unregulated? - page 13. (Read 19192 times)

Okay, so we've learned deflation can be dangerous.

Just to be clear I in no way support changing bitcoin to include regulatory features. Following the rules should be up to the user, just like other laws.

Yeah, people doing business as ''states'', ''regulators'' are merely acting like mafia that gained monopoly over legislation and justice enforcement. ''Justice'' here is a misnomer  

I do not think people providing excellent service as Bitcoin Foundation should engage in talks with mafia.

+1

Wait. All of you posters who seem to be supporting government regulation being built into Bitcoin itself should clarify what you are supporting here.

Which of these things, exactly, are you posting in support of?

It seems to me that not working with regulators is a sure path to the most onerous regulations.

The latter is legalized (ironically by the very same people who collect those taxes).

No I have not. Neither have you. There are no ''regulator'' object class on this planet.


What I think you should have meant is these folks are individual men and women providing their service at gun point to people who may not want that service at all.

This is how it works: if you do not pay taxes, you get a letter from people doing business as (DBA) IRS. When you ignore it, you get a letter from people DBA judges to appear in a building called a court for a trial. When you ignore a letter to appear in a court, people DBA police show up at your door. If you ignore them because you may have better stuff to do, e.g. watch TV, they will brake into your house. If you object phisically, you'll get grounded and shit will be beaten out of you, your legs and hands will be broken. Then when in jail, if you want to go out home, you will be shot dead by a guy DBA prison guard.

Tell me what are factual differences (if any) between theft under threat of killing and taxes?


Where did you get the idea I or you employ a regulator. Do you have any facts or evidence to prove it?

Of course not.  Have you ever met a regulator?

Most are good folks just trying to do their job against people that earn 100 or even 1000 times as much as them.

Regulators are employed by us, we can do more working together.  Namely showing the competitive advantages that bitcoin gives that country, and allowing them to have input into good ways to leverage that. 

Please tell me you are joking.

Essentially, I envision keeping your savings on the BTC 1.0 "gold fork" and converting it to the BTC 2.0 "fiat fork" when needed for spending.


The private "gold fork" would be BTC as we know it today outside of government regulation and used by people as a store of value and for "other purposes".

The big brother "fiat fork" would be like the US dollar (and other fiat) with complete government regulation and endorsement. It would be like fiat on steroids. Every transaction would be monitored and taxed at various rates depending on the transaction type. Salaries would be paid in BTC 2.0 with income taxes, social security taxes, medicare taxes being levied. All addresses of businesses and individuals would be known and registered with the authorities. The supply of BTC 2.0 would be managed by the central BTC bank. Etc.

BTC 1.0 would not disappear and its exchange rate would rise in value compared to BTC 2.0.

All in all, this change won't spell the end of Bitcoin but rather mean the conversion of fiat to an all digital currency.
 

1. I suggest everyone who thinks that the so called government regulation is good or can be good should have a look at this website http://marcstevens.net/ I recommend Call of Shame - this is real fun http://marcstevens.net/cos

2. I also suggest people who think a government exists or a state exists watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdEUR-Xhob8 a government = unicorn = bizarre delusion

3. People who thinks there is evidence that regulations / constitutions apply to him should watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngpsJKQR_ZE&list=UUFeK8ZdHbCqAq3gekWs8aEQ&index=35

4. Allowing people calling themselves a government or USA to mess with Bitcoin = end of Bitcoin.

5. Developers should be paid by Bitcoin system users for work the developers provide; if users want new features in Bitcoin-Qt they crowd-finance such features. I personally do not mind paying a few BTC per year.

6. If point 5 is achieved there is no need for Bitcoin Foundation to do anything therefore people who call themselves a government have nobody to talk to, and no so called regulation can be imposed.

GIVE ME FREEDOM OR GIVE ME DEATH!

exactly.

As usual, I have to ask: What is this "we" business?

i thought you said you didn't care about my money?  on the contrary, i think you do (metaphorically speaking  ).

this is going to come down to, quite simply, your attitude .

what i was trying to say in our rather heated github debate was that the majority opinion on various Bitcoin issues should guide your actions, contrary to what you said about the importance of minority opinion of the devs on the Press Center debate.  i think the outcome of that debate should be a lesson to you.  

i think that you are confused as to how to handle yourself.  you devs are being scrutinized closely by the entire Bitcoin community and you can't afford to ignore the opinions of users, merchants, miners, and speculators.   you seem to think that by keeping one foot in the real world arena (regulation, political correctness) that some big money institution will come along and fund you.  that's not going to happen anytime soon b/c of Bitcoin's decentralization and economic tenets.

in case you hadn't noticed, there is plenty of money floating around within the Bitcoin community to fund your dev activities.  look at the $5M that Coinbase just got, or the $1M for BitPay, or the $500K for CoinLab, etc, etc.  if you insist on ignoring the majority opinion of the community, money will not flow to you.  the reason this money is flowing to these ppl is that it likes the principles upon which Bitcoin is built and these ppl are upholding that.  and yes, that means it challenges the State.

once you realize this, you will be much better off.  my advice to you is to voluntarily continue to work hard to improve on the concepts of the original Satoshi code.  as tvbcof said, it doesn't take much since Satoshi seems to have gotten all the economic concepts right.  then build/sell add on services or products on top of Bitcoin, much like etotheipi has done with Armory.  his plan is to eventually monetize that concept and i'm sure he will be successful.  things to be learned from him are: don't be too political, try to determine the majority opinion, help ppl often, treat ppl well, and make a good product.  profit.

money will then flow to you w/o any resistance.  not to mention your Bitcoin value will go up as well.

I favor halting development of Bitcoin right now (and I wish it happened sooner) and just focusing on hardening and dealing with bugs.  In that case there need not be more than a few highly talented people spending a modest amount of time on things.

I do not believe that this would severely limit the 'growth' of the system in terms of user-base though obviously it would change the trajectory.

As I said in the silly thread about who takes over for Gavin, I think it would make sense to attempt to enlist a person from 'outside' based on a long history of credibility whether or not they have had much to do with Bitcoin itself to weigh in with community direction recommendations.  Bitcoin is important and interesting enough that it may be able to attract some very promising candidates.  If that someone was already highly regarded for their past exploits (i.e., Kaminski or Shnier) and especially if they had taken a vow of poverty (a-la Stallman) I personally would feel a lot more confidence in following their suggestions and staying with the herd.

Assuming money from those interested in a decentralized Bitcoin was available, what suggestions do you have from getting that money from those people to developers in a reasonable way that respects that decentralization? It seems to me that is a big part of the problem by itself. The Dread Pirate may be rich, but if he pops up funding things many would not take his money.

One must also be careful not to distort natural incentives, or at least to weigh the damage against the gain.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

... this has a sad ring of truth to it ... pioneers don't tend to hang around when the maddening throngs show up.

I was talking about core technology - for that it is mostly an OR decision strongly based on decentralization. Heck, I would have followed it up with something similar to this pull request but John went of and did it first.


Probably one of the hardest things we may face is that even just working on those technologies and having your name linked to doing so isn't something one should take lightly - yet, building trust in software is difficult enough when the people involved are known publicly, and a key non-monetary reason people work on opensource software is recognition.

Beyond that, there are always foundations, but I can't think of a single one that has operated anonymously.