Topic: What prevents govt from forcing online retailer to give up your shippingaddress? (Read 628 times)

There is nothing to prevent a govt from forcing an online retailer to give up your shipping address if they're willing to change or ignore the laws to accomplish that.  This is not a weakness of bitcoin, it is a weakness of having no anonymizing intermediary between the shipper and the recipient.   Too bad bitdrop didn't take off.

Yes, as the maxim goes "No one spends your money more wisely than you."
As one of the basic premises of libertarian-type philosophy, taxation of individuals for "required social services" is akin to
saying "give me money to help you, or I will throw you in jail."

What prevents the government from forcing Shire Silver to give up shipping addresses is that we routinely delete old fulfilled orders. Its called database maintenance 

Plus we're agorist and even if they come to us with a warrant we'll just tell them to pound sand. Yes, I'm willing to go to jail for that, and we have contingency plans in place if that happens.

That's true, just because something is shipped to you're home doesn't imply ownership.

Yes. I rather pay directly. Then I'd know for sure where my resources are going. Better that than taxes and blind faith. If all taxes paid for where those services taxes could be lowered.

What's wrong with paying value added taxes? Is it unfair that you should have to pay for social services like governance, education, police, roading, etc?

You mean: this would make it impossible for the government to actually impose this law.

Servers in neutral country isn't even necessary, stuff can simply be kept in encrypted storage that can't even be recognized as such (plausible deniability).

Seriously, I'd like to see how the govt thinks they can enforce this rule.

Nothing at all. 

But since most lawmakers still do not even use e-mail I think it might be safe until someone buys a school massacre gun from Silkroad.

Nothing prevents the gov from forcing an online retailer to give up your shipping info. If the retailer keeps their customer databases encrypted on servers in a neutral country without extradition agreements, it could make it more difficult for the retailer to comply with their requests. Recent political developments in the US indicate that the Treasury Dept. will probably start "regulating" (eg, taxing, infiltrating etc.) anyone who exchanges bitcoins for central-bank fiat notes.
Here's a solution:
 Don't cash out into fiat currency. Cash out into physical precious metals. Use one of the trusted online "BTC for silver" dealers.
Get to know your local precious metals dealer. Ask them if they'd be willing to receive a shipment from xxxx.company and hold it for you until you come in to pick it up. Obviously, you'll have to reward them...
OR even better, talk to your local dealer about accepting bitcoins.
Obviously, right now precious metals are not as liquid as fiat notes (well...in some parts of the US they are perfectly accepted in a variety of transactions...Rocky Mountain States with a history of mining), but until owning precious metals becomes illegal (which is probably when using bitcoins will too), this could be a way to avoid coming under the new regulations...

Sorry, I meant physical shipping address...like where your DVD player will be shipped to

Recognize it?

how can they prove the purchaser and receiver are the one and the same?

I don't know. Honestly like I said when I wrote this thread it even confuses ME

But I was wondering if the "anonymous" factor for the buyer goes out the window once you give your shipping address.

Does that make sense?
Is there anyone here that knows or runs online businesses and can see if I'm actually making sense here? (as in a potential problem for buyers)

How do they calculate the taxes on an unrecognized currency?

You know what I mean?

Say they want to collect taxes. Could they just force the retailer to give up your shipping address & amount of the purchase in an effort to collect taxes?

This topic might be confusing but what I'm trying to say is the anonymous factor goes out the window when you give the company an address to ship the item to.