Topic: Why is the Occupy movement not immediately embracing bitcoin? - page 6. (Read 17960 times)

Tax evasion will still be illegal.  


If the miner is registered with the government for identification purposes.


  Simply randomly sending a blacklisted coin to a whitelisted address would not blacklist the receiver, once you receive one you simply turn it over to the government.  You would only have an issue if you tried to spend it.  There would be no point in selling your whitelisted account as you would no longer be able to buy so much as a pack of gum in a legitimate business without one.

Illegal purchases will be handled by the criminal justice system exactly as they are now, but with much more ability to track the flow of money.  Buy from a drug dealer and you go down when he does.

Sounds to me like you are guzzling down the cool-aid so I have every expectation that you'll finish up that graduate degree.

Does your curriculum cover trade considerations in times of war?  Or is war thought to be a novelty of history which is impossible in a form involving two powerful belligerents in these modern times?  Or is it assumed that Oceana, Eurasia, and Eastasia will be large enough to allow the 'contract' principles you are learning about operate within?

I see nothing whatsoever wrong with stirring people's imagination with alternate forms of currency generally.  I am sure that at least a fraction of these people have contemplated alternate money systems, and are aware of various efforts, most of which have failed.

The technical hurdles of decentralizing the currency in the way that Satoshi has done, and the skill with which he has done it are actually quite novel,  impressive and interesting.  If that inspires and interest people, what's the harm?

I can say for sure that if I were a protester who had never heard of Bitcoin, I would be very thankful to whoever took the time to inform me of it.

Even without government sanctions, something analogous to a corporation can arise in a free market, either through investment, price fixing, trusts, and so on, especially in a market without the regulations to prevent this from happening. The fact that the government recognizes them makes no difference, except that with government recognition the corporation must pay some taxes (if it actually pays) back to society instead of none at all.

The difference between governments and businesses in laissez-faire societies is that the government starts as a 'monopoly' (although once again, checks, balances, and more protections for citizens can be seen as a way of deconstructing the 'monopoly' a government branch has over public policy), while the business can use collusion, buying up of resources/competitors, and other means to lock itself into a monopoly. The government is still somewhat accountable to voters, the monopolic business is accountable to no one.


Human nature, especially in the forms of government or corporations, leads to corruption. Trying to eliminate any chance for corruption to take hold in government and constantly making a push against the corrupt who come into power is the best means we have of combatting it we have. Letting a corporation or individual in charge of a business do whatever they want will lead to a beast far too similar to a corrupt government, only without all that "accountability" and consent of the people.



Was it education that led you to it, or greed? I'd imagine a large number of Harvard grads buy into libertarianism/free-market capitalism, but since Ivy-League education is often costly, you generally see well-off people going there. In our current society, well-off, well-connected, or well-educated people usually benefit the most from free-market capitalism, therefore would support it.

I think that if everyone was better educated, we'd realize that free-market capitalism often leads to a situation where there are 10 losers for every 1 winner, and we would decide by majority vote that a more socialized society would provide a much more equal society and ensure the most people possible could be content with society's structure.

I'd bet everyone with degrees in Finance is a free-market capitalist, as the lack of regulation our finance system has lets them soak easy money off of labor - why bite the hand that feeds you?
You didn't "learn" something that led you from socialist-democratic principles, you just succumbed to the greedy part of your nature we all have deep down.


"Voting with your wallet" has always been an ineffective strategy against companies who spread out their unfair, manipulative or harmful dealings into shell corporations

It's not that I understand enough to believe this system and my beliefs are better, it's that I understand enough to know that the way things are going with globalization, it's pretty much inevitable. It's not about capital as it is about private contracts, as well as the ability to compete around the world and no longer be tied down to a specific geographical region.

It wears off.  In certain cases at least.  I remember how superior I felt to my anti-globalization friends in the mid-90's because I understood the efficiencies of making trade curves line up and all that.  IIRC, I had just come out of macro-econ class of several hundred with the top score (albeit in a 100 level class at a low end university.)  In fact I had learned nothing more than what the tiny minority of wealthy people wanted me to learn regarding capital and currency and such.  I wish to God that I was still in touch with those friends to I could apologize.  Whether they understood capital better than I at that point I'll never know, but 15 years later I see that their instincts, at least, were much better than those which I had implanted in me in school.

Quit trying to annoy the Occupy Wall Street movement, which is important, with a dying pyramid scheme that has about three months of life left.

^ I am talking about the currency of the United States of America. 


Of course there will be enforcement, where did you get the idea there wouldn't be?  Say you want to buy a car, is the car dealer going to be able to pass on the sales tax in your black market coins?  Nope, so he's not going to take them.  Now that your coins can only be used for a subset of products at illegitimate businesses, they are less valuable than whitelist coins.  Why would anyone take them?

What government's whitelist/blacklists?  Do you believe that two waring states are going to honor one another's lists?  Or are you anticipating a one-world government as a foregone conclusion?  Or extreamely difficult to implement travel and international trade restrictions?  Or what?

Rassah <- Used to be socialist democrat. Got Bachelors in business Finance. Now finishing up Master's in Business finance with concentration on globalization. Classes based off of materials from Harvard Business School, and university is in top 20 in the world, so not just some crappy college. As education kept increasing, and understanding of business and economics kept improving, became more and more economically conservative to the point of being pretty much free-market capitalist (still very left-leaning on social issues though).

So, regarding education, be careful what you wish for.

There is no need to stop anyone from sending Bitcoin wherever they want.  It's just that any Bitcoin received from a non-whitelisted address will not be recognized as currency by the government.  What would stop people from using such blacklisted coins is that no legitimate business would want to accept a currency that is only usable on the black market since it inherently has less value than a clean Bitcoin.  It might as well be counterfeit. 

To get the right people in office, we need better checks and balances in government, we need to start respecting credentials in choosing our leaders over "military records" or "sexy Alaskan looks" or money or celebrity, and we need to put heavy reigns on the money in politics; hopefully these will lead to people more driven by ideals or the desire to improve society to seek public office over people who get into politics for money or power, since the money and absolute or relative power would be dampened.

I've always been an advocate for spreading information on how marginal tax rates, progression taxation, etc work and informing them about them. The best indicators of how likely someone is to be politically informed and make the best choices for themselves are their level of education. Perhaps, part of the solution to have a more intelligent, informed voting population that can collectively vote in their best interests over bread and circuses is to provide them with a robust education while they are growing up so they are equipped to make those choices later on. Deregulating society, not requiring education to be provided for children by the whole of the population, etc gives people an even greater chance of making poor decisions for themselves and others.

The funny thing about OWS is it is full of people who did make reasonably good choices, like students who invested in themselves (and indirectly, in the society they will work in) by getting an education, union workers who organized their skilled labor to prevent themselves by being taken advantage of by their employers and so on, yet realize that the system is still fucking them hard. Since America is pretty close to what I'd call laissez faire as a whole (see everything large corporations can get away with both here and foreign countries, unrestrained finance, credit, insurance, and banking markets), I'm still pretty sure the actual way to even the playing field a bit is better education and social support for laborers and more regulation to prevent the eternal pattern in America of capitalists constantly trying to soak up every bit of resources they can, most that they will never used, just so they can be 'richer' or more powerful than their neighbors.

Well you wouldn't be able to legally use bitcoins that are in an illegal address...

This is partially true as well, which is why people soak up ideas like 'low taxes' which sound like a good idea up front.

Also I'd say the number of people 'not paying the bills' is only around ~70-80 million, which is roughly the number of people 17 and under. Don't forget, even people who don't pay income taxes still pay sales tax, which accounts for a much larger portion of their income that sales tax incurs on someone who can afford to save or invest a significant amount of their income instead of buying thing.

^ How many are children or retired?


  You need zero control of the network.  The whitelist is a government list, all you do is check the transactions against the bitcoin log.  You understand we already have tax policies and financial regulations, right?  It doesn't result in your fever dreamed dystopia.  You don't have to go prying into people's affairs to look at their transactions when they are all publicly available in the transaction log.

Anonymity is pointless because an anonymous address is automatically not considered valid by the government.

Unfortunately this is a very inefficient and unfair way to structure the world, and is certainly something we should have evolved about as a species. We certainly have the ability to regulate around this kinda of Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest (fittest being the one that starts with the most means for profiting) primal system we've built, but everyone convinces themselves that they deserve to be and are intelligent enough to be the person on top one day, and think they should wield disproportionate power over their peers for it.

We are literally no better than our primate ancestors, though by this point, we should be.

The voters who decide whether they keep their jobs come next election cycle.

Also remember that efficiency means that after collecting all taxes you want to spend as much of it as possible, anything not being spent social services should be invested into infrastructure to improve future efficiency or value for the citizenship. Nothing should truly be left over as "profit" - If you do collect more than you spend and don't need infrastructure, you add it to the social safety safety net in case future years do not have as good tax revenues.

'Profit' implies that the value of revenue is greater than the at-cost (including labor) value of services provided, which is not the government's place to do since we are not so much 'investing' in the government as if it were a business but are collectively pooling our resources as a state/population to ensure the continuity and stability of our society.

Why?  All of those words are present in any government ever, having laws and police doesn't make something a police state.

Well I guess the system isn't fair at all then