Topic: Do we want to work with money regulators, or keep Bitcoin unregulated? - page 17. (Read 19192 times)

If there is ANY kind of change to bitcoin that serves more regulation, I am OUT of bitcoin.

Until the devs fork it and say: "Here is the regulated Bitcoin 2.0 which will be worth 10000USD because of big company involvement, if you don't want use it then use the unregulated Bitcoin 1.0 for illegal activities which will be worth about 2USD."

Looking at the majority of people involved in Bitcoin i'd place my money on that everybody would go for 2.0. Of course, the Bitcoin Foundation together with other large companies (paypal, banks etc), will make a plan to slowly manipulate us into believing that a regulated Bitcoin will be much better for everyone. If you ask me, it has already begun.

Bitcoin will remain unregulated.  It doesnt matter if people in the community want it regulated or if government(s) want it regulated.  Bitcoin, by nature, is unregulated.  They cannot seize your btc unless under duress, etc.  You are your own bank.

Coercion of innocent parties is wrong. No amount of grandstanding or excuses about "we're protecting everyone" changes that.

I think Bitcoin can handle both regulated scenarios and unregulated scenarios, just like paper money is handled legally and illegally today.

Full traceability will be the norm for everyday consumers and businesses using green addresses or some other trust mechanism, but with the possibility of being used anonymously with enough caution. The FBI, IRS, or equivalent would step at the same time and in the same way as if they are catching millions of paper US dollars going across the border.

The question is, at what quantity of 'anonymous' Bitcoins does the regulation begin? I think for USD bills it starts raising eyebrows with $6,000-10,000 moving around...

What purpose would any sort of regulation have besides transferring a percentage of Bitcoin's value to the self-appointed people who came up with the idea?

I trust the software behind it, not anyone trying to control it.

Couldn't care less if Paypal and other giants get an unfair cut of this resource. There are many currencies, perhaps we should try a free currency for a change, as an experiment for comparison.

Your subject is kind of a backwards way of thinking; it assumes you have control over making regulations. Personally I’d like to keep firearms from being regulated but that hasn’t worked out well for me so far.

the regulators main function is to preserve the status of the USD monetary system since most of them are captured by the banking system today.  since Bitcoin collides with that system in just about every possible way, you can expect them to try and change Bitcoin in the ways the OP outlined.  that will not be acceptable to just about every Bitcoin supporter in existence today.

its becoming apparent that they will try and attack the developers of the Bitcoin system to force them to insert unfavorable changes in due time.  if the developers capitulate to these demands they can be assured that either Bitcoin will be forked or other developers will take their place.

What's slippery is you anti-privacy lot never once mentioning how the massive blockchain you keep on pushing will result in bloat that even Gavin thinks will soon make operating a node cost $100/month. You'll have no choice but to move to a big data center with a fast connection right out in the open, and users will have no alternatives other than continuing to have every transaction they make recorded publicly for regulators to analyze.

Good luck keeping the regulators away under those conditions. Moving your blacklisted coins will be a matter of hoping that the few, if any, pools still running that don't follow AML know your customer regulations aren't busy trying to find another country to set up shop in.


Funny how the core developers seem to mostly agree with him, with the exception of Gavin. Guess who's getting their salary paid by big businesses?

Peter is damn right to say that we need technology that keeps Bitcoin regulators away from the core of Bitcoin. FWIW I think you should just submit a pull request to the foundation bylaws, and add a section on anonymity and decentralization. See how they respond, if at all.

The OP's post is very slippery. It's written as if it's describing the situation from a neutral stance, but it's full of political games.

Let's start with the topic:


This obviously not the choice. The regulators are going to regulate Bitcoin use whatever the foundation, or anyone else does. The question is whether we think the foundation should lobby money regulators to reduce unhelpful regulation.

Then we get this:


Who is advocating any of that? In any case, the foundation can't do that, because if they did people would just use different versions of the software, or if necessary fork the whole thing.


OK, you might have missed it for the straw men, but there's an actual thing in there. Retep is opposed to improving scalability so transactions can remain on the blockchain. He has some opinions about what the blockchain should be used for, and he wants to cap the network at 7 transactions per second, and blow fees through the roof so that most of the current uses of Bitcoin will have to go somewhere else.

This is a tough argument for him to win and making transactions cost $1 or $10 or $100 would not be very popular, so when the core developers try to scale the network up he's trying to make you think that it's part of some kind of pro-government plot involving the Bitcoin foundation.

That goes without saying.  Every cryptocurrency is immune to regulation with respect to physical cash transactions.  But, hopefully it's obvious enough that I don't mean to include ordinary physical cash transactions when I speak of interacting with the traditional financial system.  I'm referring to things like online exchanges.  And in the case of online exchanges I'm referring to those that use banks to store and move customers state money funds.  

quick lesson for the OP

money regulators regulate money.

money is a type of currency owned by governments.

virtual currency is not money. its another type of currency

money is the laymans term for FIAT

money regulators only care about money (FIAT) so don't worry about them trying to control bitcoin. they only want to control money (FIAT).

if the government cared about other types of currency then they would have ensured that they stopped the sexual favours and cigarettes trading that happens in prisons. which is alot easier to manage and control in comparison to bitcoin

so if you don't want money regulators involved with bitcoin then you don't want to ever turn your bitcoin into fiat

Not if you transact in cash--actual Federal Reserve Notes.

Or no fork.  There is no cryptocurrency variant that is immune to regulation where it transacts with the traditional financial system.  Forking bitcoin or creating new alt-coins simply will not solve the problem, to the extent that is a problem, of regulation at points of contact with the traditional system.  Users can already go both routes.  If you choose to only transact in bitcoin, then you can effectively choose to transact within an unregulated system.  If you want to move into and out of bitcoin and the methods you choose to do so interact directly enough with the traditional financial system, then you'll likely brush up about regulations.

If Bitcoin heads in this direction, surely there will be a hard fork.  The whole point of Bitcoin for a lot of users is to have a currency that functions independently of the world's most heinous criminals--the bankers and politicians--and makes their destructive, self-serving policies/regulations/legislation irrelevant.  Each of us should be free to transact in whatever currency has the features and characteristics that we want and individually choose.  Similar to religion (in the USA at least), a currency should not be imposed on us.  It's obvious there isn't going to be a one-size-fits-all cryptocurrency as we move forward.


We can go both routes.  It's as simple as a hard fork.

Maybe litecoin is looking better and better? Seriously, bitcoin is decentralised and distributed. Putting it into the hands of a few people is opposite to the original intent.

Gavin comes across as a NSA Trojan Horse.

Now that BTC has hit $1.3 billion in market cap...
Now is the time to purge the Foundation...
Pack it with radicals and take the hard, radical road of Satoshi's Vision.

Bitcoin just got important enough to be noticed...
Govt agencies wanna strangle BTC in it's crib...
Paypal, WU wanna co-opt BTC, neuter it, and take over the Cryptocurrency Space.

When people like David Marcus and Eric Schmidt talk about Bitcoin...
You should shudder and turn away...
They represent everything that Bitcoiners find abhorrent.

The one place I would give a little is on AML and tax evasion...
BTC must stay independent while moving away from being a criminal vehicle.

Someone wants to regulate bitcoin? ... as jgarzik, luke-jr and gmaxwell have aptly stated and demonstrated ...

SUBMIT a PULL REQUEST on GITHUB with your changes and we'll get back to ya 

Regulation of bitcoin in some sense is inevitable and probably desirable, but it's important to recognize that the only sense in which bitcoin can be realistically regulated has to do with the ways that bitcoin interfaces with the traditional financial system.  So, exchanges, like MtGox, can be compelled to behave in certain ways by the financial regulations of their jurisdictions.  They can be held to standards of accounting and reporting, say, and face fines or interference for not complying.

A unique aspect of bitcoin is that transacting only in the bitcoin ecosystem, away from points of contact with the traditional financial system, is to transact in a system that is pretty strongly resistant to typical top-down regulation from entities like states.  Users can more easily choose whether they operate in the regulated space or the unregulated space.

In a discussion on regulation, I think it's important to make this distinction.  If somebody, like some members of the Foundation, are pro-regulation, it doesn't necessarily mean they believe that bitcoin itself should or will be regulated - it probably just can't be regulated in a practical way.  What they are likely talking about are regulations to do with certain ways that bitcoin comes in contact with traditional financial systems where states already enforce regulations.

WTF...  Stupid discussion.  Period.