Topic: Do we want to work with money regulators, or keep Bitcoin unregulated? - page 18. (Read 19192 times)

Well the foundation is fundamentally pro-regulation. What that means is entirely unclear to me and even as a member I cannot get answers other than attacks by the leadership. I would really appreciate Peter spending the time to leave a thread with his vision for regulation. Instead of just personal attacks or claims we don't "contribute" enough to deserve a voice in bitcoin.

I think that most of the people 'in the government' are just trying to do their jobs.  Also that a lot of their jobs are important.  At this point I see a lot of reasonable rational behind many of the laws and regulations and it seems to me reasonable to make a good faith effort to lend assistance and advice.

I also think that a lot of the heads of various parts of at least my government (US) are already fairly rotten from the effects of money in politics and that that situation is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

I strongly favor a situation where 'bitcoin' operates from a position of power.  That is to say, we 'do the right thing' when it makes sense but retain the option of withdrawing from cooperative arrangements if/when they become it makes sense to do so.

More than anything I am an 'anti-fascist' and look with great alarm at the merger of state and corporate power.  More and more the words 'state' and 'corporate' are words that can be used interchangeably.  With that said:

Two things interfere with the option to operate from a position of power:

 - Attachment to the same forces which corrupt our governments (specifically corporate and financial interests.)

 - Reliance on irreplaceable resources which are provided at the pleasure of corp/gov.  This is the main reason why I am SO negative about 'centralization' and so dead-set on wishing Bitcoin to remain as fully 'peer2peer' as possible.

The bitcoin community will self-regulate.

DOS attacks? The community learned quickly to hold tight when they happen, and they've already stopped.

Wallet theft? Don't store your damn wallet on a remote server. Learn to secure it properly.

Money laundering/criminal activity? Please, you get that with every currency. You cannot stop black markets from existing.

It is not the regulators' jobs to protect us from any of this. It is our job.

Also remember: If you give them an inch, they will take a mile.

What's even the point of Bitcoin if it's just another government-managed currency? I guess it'd be a little better than dollars, and Bitcoin investors would make a ton of money if any version of Bitcoin became very popular, but it wouldn't be world-changing. I'd be very reluctant to accept any pro-government compromises; too many of them would destroy Bitcoin's real value.

What is the benefit to regulation? Do gold and silver buyers have regulation? In my opinion, Bitcoin green addresses, whitelisting, colored coins, government provided deterministic wallets, and other schemes can offer full traceability. All there need to be is an incentive to use them.

Indeed.

Myself, I want to see the foundation improve the ability of the Bitcoin technology to resist attempts to regulate it, while at the same time working to keep the legal framework regulating Bitcoin as minimal as possible.

Look at the Tor project: they do a great job keeping Tor anonymous by ensuring that governments and law enforcement around the world see that it's valuable, and at the same time improving the technology to ensure that even if they tried there is little they could do to stop it anyway.

After all, the foundation isn't Bitcoin. I'm a member myself, and I want to know what their views are so I can decide if I should be sending my membership fees to them, or somewhere else.

WTF do you need Bitcoin for if you can tax it, regulate it, track and seize coins, and on top of all of that fight deflation!?  People, was Bitcoin really made for this? Feels to me like we're executing a u-turn.

I am very much anti-regulation, but we live in the real world.  Regulation is coming.  Who is going to write it?  Well it won't be politicians, because politicians don't write regulations.  They don't even write legislation.

Special interest groups write legislation which is then approved by legislators.  This legislation creates new goverment offices or expands the scope of existing offices.

These offices are the people who decide what regulation will exist.  Usually they write the regulations, but quite often they allow special interest groups to help write the regulations.

So what does this mean for bitcoin?  It means that the regulations will be written primarily by special interest groups.  The question is whether the banks will be the ones writing the regulations, or whether the Bitcoin Foundation will be writing the regulations.

Thus I would support an effort by the Bitcoin Foundation to aggressively pursue regulation.  This is despite the fact that I am very much opposed to regulation.

Of course the entire point of helping to write the regulation is to reduce the severity of the regulation.  Anything where we help them collect taxes or blacklist addresses is simply unacceptable.

There was an interesting post on the Bitcoin Foundation's private forum today:

-Bitcoin Foundation board meeting agenda requests (only viewable by foundation members)


You know, Bitcoin is at an interesting stage of it's development. We've got a lot of money flowing in to the ecosystem and for the first time we're seeing interest from big businesses - even PayPal and Western Union are looking into accepting Bitcoin.

We're also under a lot of attack; big heavily protected exchanges and other websites like Mt. Gox, blockchain.info, and The Silk Road are getting DDoSed; services like Instawallet and mining pools are having funds stolen; exchanges getting shutdown by regulators; (including Mt. Gox suddenly shutting down their off-chain payment service) even child porn related data being uploaded to the blockchain:

-Jeff Garzik

The Bitcoin Foundation itself is in a difficult position: we all know who it's funded by, and everyone involved is publicly known. This can be a problem: in the last round of grant proposals at one point Gavin suggested someone submit a grant for a trust-free mixer service to help people make the coins in their wallet more anonymous by mixing them with a large pool of other users. I asked Gavin about that later, and he said the foundation lawyers nixed the idea because efforts to make Bitcoin users more anonymous could be seen to be aiding money laundering, especially if the foundation itself was paying for development and to run the servers.


We can work with regulators to make sure Bitcoin is acceptable to them. For instance we can ensure that it remains possible to track the flow of money through Bitcoin. We can also ensure that there are options if certain funds need to be frozen and blacklisted, due to fraud, theft, or because they encode illegal data. We can work with them to find ways to apply AML rules to Bitcoin transactions and to the exchanges. There are ways to put taxation into Bitcoin itself, so that taxes are automatically applied when a transaction is made. Maybe even one day we'll be required to prevent dangerous levels of deflation. A lot of these changes are technical, such as improving scalability so transactions can remain on the blockchain, developing P2P blacklist technologies, and preventing deflation.

We can also go the other route, and give Bitcoin users even more tools to remain anonymous and transact on their own terms. Technologies like mixing and off-chain transactions to let you make transactions without revealing where the coins came from, technologies like P2Pool to ensure mining stays decentralized, and colored coins to let us trade our assets without involving third party exchanges.

I think this discussion needs to happen out in the open, and we need to have it now. I'm sure you have a pretty good idea what I think, but what does the rest of the community think?