Topic: z (Read 4511 times)

LOL I was thinking the same thing.

Most of the ideas here are good attempts but would either cause wider adoption on global basis, a rise in the value of Bitcoins or wind up being irrelevant. One of the more plausible would be cracking down on the exchanges and payment services such as Dwolla, but there is no absolute necessity to convert Bitcoins to any other currency once the incentive to use BTC over EUR/USD/JPY or what-have-you is great enough.

If you take away my livelihood, I'll go make my living somewhere else. In other words: if my money is worthless, I'll use a different money.

There has never been any measure fully successful at outlawing an alternate currency in any nation that has seen its legal, domestic currency lose value. Bitcoin is even more surreptitious and insidious to a government than physical pieces of paper. The usage cost of Bitcoin is so minimal that it completely trumps existing currencies.

If they do this the bitcoin price will rise to almost infinite

So, i hope they do that, i'll become super rich 

This would not work and would cost the government a lot of money... so maybe they'll try it =)

It doesn't work because Bitcoins are infinitely divisible. Short term they're divisible to 8 decimal places, but long term more decimal places can be added. The ramifications of this are quite remarkable really... for  if the gov bought 20 million coins and destroyed them, there would still be 1,000,000 x 1,000,000,000 currency units available (assuming all coins have been mined). Then, two more decimal places can be added and there would be more units than the system started with!

Now, most people get very turned off by that, believing it to be inflation. However, it does not have the adverse effects of "money printing," because the unit values are instantly reflected among all holders of the Bitcoins. When the Gov prints money, your bank account doesn't increase in proportion, thus you've been robbed. When Bitcoins are added through new decimal places, every client reflects this, as do prices, and thus no significant adverse or immoral effect is caused.

So if the Government started buying coins to destroy them, it would send the value sky high, and there would always and forever be enough units of the currency to enable trade. In the same way, it doesn't matter how many people lose their own coins (it's only bad for those people, not for the economy or other holders of the remaining coins).

perhaps the scariest,  have the IRS start auditing dowalla and filter from there for people that transferred to mtgox, tradehill, etc.   that would shut it down or at least partially shut it down for a long time.

that is impossible because the price would rise like crazy.

If the government wanted to destroy bitcoin what they could do is do business with bitcoins and every bitcoin they got, just send to one wallet file and either destroy it or never use it.  This would cause deflation till there were very few bitcoins left.  With the current amount of bitcoins they could go on an exchange and buy them all up pretty easy.

He was just believing that US could keep raising its debt to the infinite by increasing debt ceiling, way beyond any possible payment, without any penalty...

So you're suggesting that they could kill bitcoin by making everyone involved in it rich?

USA wont be downgraded.. look at the companies that do the ratings, they all got handouts in 2008/9.

The "debt crisis" was just a bunch of politics to make the average joe feel like their government is doing something to curb debt spending.

They wouldn't need to buy them all, probably more like a million or so. Yes, it would drive the price up, but it would still be a bargain by US government spending standards.

Every time someone buys a Bitcoin, the next Bitcoin costs them more. If a government tried to buy all the Bitcoins, the first Bitcoin may cost them $13.50, but very last Bitcoin they buy will likely cost them over $100million.

...and because "the World is USA", so "Uncle Sam" would make it illegal and that's it... 
US already has no money to cover its own debt and it's a few hours away from being downgraded to bellow junk (along with consequential USD plummeting), let alone set up another global campaign, like the so called "war on drugs", financing.

Yup, just like music downloads, porn, the war on drugs... That'll work 

Most likly scenario will be that Hackers and scammers will destroy bitcoin, Because there is no way to make sure all the numerous endpoints have correct security mechanisms in place and that they will stay honest over a long period... there lies the very weekness.

Example would be mybitcoin, which for a novice user is like paypal for bitcoin. We need the novice users (investors) to make the currency work. Everytime they get scammed or hacked you loose investor confidence. I lost a large portion of bitcoin.. do i care no.. but most will.

For a government to destroy bitcoin or any large company, they could buy up all the bitcoin and wipeout the martket. us$~100million is not that much for them to loose. Or a corporate entity could lobby governments and have bitcoin declared as illegal.. thus freezing all the bank accounts that are suspected of trading or handling bitcoin.

If u are unable to freely buy and sell bitcoin with physical currency, bitcoin will die.

Oh and one final point to ponder.. how long until someone figures out how to counterfeit a bitcoin...

how about 1/2 a dozen datacenters dedicated to mining rigs setup by the NSA...  after it get's to the point where they have a decent majority of of the mining then they start messing around with double spending, etc etc... 

Most effective i think, would be to just make bitcoin exchange illegal.
Arrest a few people, give them a few years jail-time.
Everybody gets scared, value drops, more people cash out, only a hand full of die-hard hackers/anons keep using it at 0.05USD/BTC

Sorry OP, that "sabotage plan" would only work if you assume something like all (or at least 50%) of the bitcoin users are completely retards.
Gvmts can however shake bitcoin, ie by creating a price bubble and let it blast, do it 3 or 4 times in a row and the community starts to disintegrate due to lack of trust and general high losses (high gains to some but overall a HYIP). Or they can forbid its use... but the experiences about "dry laws" aren't that good, are they?

it is hard to destroy bitcoin but easy for a government to suppress it.

if it is prohibited to sell for bitcoins they have little use for most people.

Agreed... Bitcoin is the elegant idea... MtGox, Tradehill, Dwolla and, for that matter, US dollars, Canadian dollars, Euros and GBPs are but a means to an end.

You're joking right?

Bitcoin doesn't need the TradeHill, Gox, Dwolla. They could all fuck off right now and within a month things would be back to normal. You're assuming those 3 sites ARE Bitcoin. They're not.

Bitcoin is a currency, and it's about those people using it as a currency. It's like saying getting rid of ISOhunt, Pirbatebay and Torrentz would put a stop to pirating. *lol*

TradeHill only exists on the level it does now because Gox was hacked and down for 2 weeks. So what happens if all 3 of those places disappear? More pop up. Those get "bought out", more pop up. People will just make exchanges (someone will open source it) just to get bought up!

Compare it to pirating. Why doesn't the govt just buy all the torrent sites? Could probably get the top 500 torrent sites for maybe 100 million. Problem solved right? Pirating is costing billions if you listen to the music industry. Why don't they just buy up all the torrent sites! Genius!