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some hobbyist observations, please correct me if I'm wrong: >I’m still trying to piece together what exactly how much control governments really lose under Bit

by ffwd 6y ago

some hobbyist observations, please correct me if I'm wrong: >I’m still trying to piece together what exactly how much control governments really lose under Bitcoin, whether I can see that as a positive or a negative, and whether I agree with Dalio that governments would (or could) take action to prevent it. I don't think they could control it at all, as I will get into in the next post >The enforcement of debt and the ability to track money seem, to me, like some of its most important properties I don't think you could track money at all, because I think in a world where bitcoin is dominant, you can bet that you would have many other cryptocurrencies as well. And you can today exchange btc for monero, ethereum or whatever and back again and it's virtually untrackable who owns it or where it came from. Because of this, governments could no longer do any automated taxation, they could no longer have any verification of who owns what, and so they would have to manually tax everyone based on manual observation of physical assets, as they probably couldn't look into most peoples actual financial records either, unless it was voluntary. This is untenable of course >I’m also interested in what a world with a fixed amount of currency really looks like. It wouldn't be fixed in reality, and nobody would really know how much money exists and each currency and inflation would have to be determined individually and you would have booms and crashes based on just how individual markets supply/demand progresses (i think?)

analog31 6y ago
>>> Because of this, governments could no longer do any automated taxation, they could no longer have any verification of who owns what, and so they would have to manually tax everyone based on manual observation of physical assets, as they probably couldn't look into most peoples actual financial records either, unless it was voluntary. This is untenable of course They could tax you by a percentage of each asset. At the end of the year, you might owe 31 bitcoins, 0.0125 acre of land, and a chicken. Ironically, this is why money was invented in the first place -- an asset that represents value rather than having inherent value (such as, the inherent value of a chicken is one chicken).
madamelic 6y ago
>you can today exchange btc for monero, ethereum or whatever and back again and it's virtually untrackable who owns it or where it came from. I don't get why people buy into this idea that BTC is super-hacker-cash that can't be traced. BTC can be traced. That's the point of an open ledger. If you want 'untraceable' BTC, you have an big burden to do so (buy it for cash in a parking lot with no cameras and using an alias). The problem is the second you start buying things with the BTC and sending them to your house, your anonymity is shot. There are coins (like Monero) whose purpose is to make transactions more untraceable but BTC is intended to be traced.
- alwillis 6y ago
  If you want 'untraceable' BTC, you have an big burden to do so (buy it for cash in a parking lot with no cameras and using an alias). How about a decentralized peer-to-peer exchange that runs over Tor? There's an app for that: https://bisq.network https://bisq.network
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> And you can today exchange btc for monero, ethereum or whatever and back again and it's virtually untrackable who owns it or where it came from. This doesn't sound any different from cash. Which is why existing systems of taxation don't rely exclusively on the banking system. When you buy a television, you don't self-report the purchase and pay sales tax at the end of the year, the vendor charges it up front. When you're paid a salary, the employer withholds income tax. The businesses, in turn, have their own income tax, and want to report the employee's wages to be able to deduct them from their own taxes. They want to report sales in order to be able to legally deliver those profits to shareholders. So what's different about cryptocurrency here?
alwillis 6y ago
It wouldn't be fixed in reality, and nobody would really know how much money exists Yes, it would be fixed. Each bitcoin is currently divisible to 100 million satoshis and it could be further subdivided if necessary. Regarding not knowing how much exists, at least with Bitcoin, that's not true. Anyone running a full node has a complete copy of every transaction going back to 2009. And the generation of each and every block that contains newly created bitcoin. We would know exactly how much money exists if we were on a Bitcoin standard.

by ffwd 6y ago

analog31 6y ago

>>> Because of this, governments could no longer do any automated taxation, they could no longer have any verification of who owns what, and so they would have to manually tax everyone based on manual observation of physical assets, as they probably couldn't look into most peoples actual financial records either, unless it was voluntary. This is untenable of course They could tax you by a percentage of each asset. At the end of the year, you might owe 31 bitcoins, 0.0125 acre of land, and a chicken. Ironically, this is why money was invented in the first place -- an asset that represents value rather than having inherent value (such as, the inherent value of a chicken is one chicken).

madamelic 6y ago

>you can today exchange btc for monero, ethereum or whatever and back again and it's virtually untrackable who owns it or where it came from. I don't get why people buy into this idea that BTC is super-hacker-cash that can't be traced. BTC can be traced. That's the point of an open ledger. If you want 'untraceable' BTC, you have an big burden to do so (buy it for cash in a parking lot with no cameras and using an alias). The problem is the second you start buying things with the BTC and sending them to your house, your anonymity is shot. There are coins (like Monero) whose purpose is to make transactions more untraceable but BTC is intended to be traced.

alwillis 6y ago
If you want 'untraceable' BTC, you have an big burden to do so (buy it for cash in a parking lot with no cameras and using an alias). How about a decentralized peer-to-peer exchange that runs over Tor? There's an app for that: https://bisq.network https://bisq.network

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

> And you can today exchange btc for monero, ethereum or whatever and back again and it's virtually untrackable who owns it or where it came from. This doesn't sound any different from cash. Which is why existing systems of taxation don't rely exclusively on the banking system. When you buy a television, you don't self-report the purchase and pay sales tax at the end of the year, the vendor charges it up front. When you're paid a salary, the employer withholds income tax. The businesses, in turn, have their own income tax, and want to report the employee's wages to be able to deduct them from their own taxes. They want to report sales in order to be able to legally deliver those profits to shareholders. So what's different about cryptocurrency here?

alwillis 6y ago

It wouldn't be fixed in reality, and nobody would really know how much money exists Yes, it would be fixed. Each bitcoin is currently divisible to 100 million satoshis and it could be further subdivided if necessary. Regarding not knowing how much exists, at least with Bitcoin, that's not true. Anyone running a full node has a complete copy of every transaction going back to 2009. And the generation of each and every block that contains newly created bitcoin. We would know exactly how much money exists if we were on a Bitcoin standard.