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I also want to give you another example. We know lots of people cheat taxes. Most of the time, they do so by hiding their money. If all money was a cryptocurren

I also want to give you another example. We know lots of people cheat taxes. Most of the time, they do so by hiding their money. If all money was a cryptocurrency, you could encode in the transaction rules that automatically on any transaction 10% is moved to the IRS wallet. Or you could have it that automatically at the tax due date, everyone's income for the year is talkies up and money from their wallet is transfered to the IRS. If you don't have enough money, an automatic dept could apply to you where 5% of all future income goes to payback what you owe. Etc. That's the fancy automated stuff. At a minimum, it means there's be a truthful trusted ledger of how much money everyone made and that would make it very very hard for someone to cheat and hide their money. So that's another example of how the tech could limit fraud in our system. It be the same system, but harder to cheat at, possibly easier to automate and scale.

karpierz 5y ago
> Most of the time, they do so by hiding their money. They hide their money, in legal way. Specifically by misclassification. For example, you claim that a residence is your primary residence for tax purposes, but don't live in it. Or they claim a tax deduction on an art piece that was overvalued. The issue isn't that the IRS can't collect money, the issue is that the tax code is complicated and cannot be automated. It requires interpretation, which is what lawyers do for a living. For the average low-income person, the IRS could automatically do their taxes, but they don't. Not for lack of technical ability, but because of lobbying, which I'm not sure how blockchain would address.
SahAssar 5y ago
But that's not about representing physical objects on a blockchain, which is what the article (and at least in my mind the discussion) is about. Keeping digital objects (like bitcoin) on a digital system is of course easier than keeping physical objects on a digital system but it also brings a whole load of it's own complexity. I also keep getting back to what does the blockchain actually give you here? Even in this example you need someone or something to have privileged access to the chain to handle things like bankruptcy, inheritance, seizure and so on. Your pitch is for applying programmable logic to money. That'd be great, but also extremely complex and I just don't get why the blockchain is needed.
notafraudster 5y ago
Without a blockchain, couldn't this be done simply by empowering the IRS to do it (e.g. by requiring banks to give oracle access to bank accounts or requiring all employers to list complete transaction outflows?) Like, you solved an incomplete information problem by saying suppose the state had complete information. If you're willing to do that, we wouldn't have a problem blockchain or no blockchain.
- didibus 5y ago
  Well, it depends, I think people are privacy conscious, maybe you don't want people to know what you spend money on or how you make it. A cryptocurrency could technically keep things anonymous, while still taking the appropriate tax money from the wallet and transactions. But yes, this is similar to Uber and Google Search, and any other software technology, it doesn't allow doing things we couldn't before, it just enables doing them in possibly new ways, that might be more convenient, efficient, trustworthy, cheaper, etc. How exactly, well this is what people are trying to crack. Similar to how everyone wish they had put the iPhone together first, companies and people are trying to figure out what is the right combination of features and use case for a blockchain based offering to go big and drastically change the way something is done today. Now, are we better off for using cars? Are we better off for using telephones? Are we better off for using the internet? You can argue most technologies just changed things from how they used to be done to just being done differently and that it didn't really make anyone one of us more fulfilled and happy in our life. So you could say the same for blockchain, but I don't think that matters to a startup, you just want to disrupt and capture a new or existing market.

karpierz 5y ago

> Most of the time, they do so by hiding their money. They hide their money, in legal way. Specifically by misclassification. For example, you claim that a residence is your primary residence for tax purposes, but don't live in it. Or they claim a tax deduction on an art piece that was overvalued. The issue isn't that the IRS can't collect money, the issue is that the tax code is complicated and cannot be automated. It requires interpretation, which is what lawyers do for a living. For the average low-income person, the IRS could automatically do their taxes, but they don't. Not for lack of technical ability, but because of lobbying, which I'm not sure how blockchain would address.

SahAssar 5y ago

But that's not about representing physical objects on a blockchain, which is what the article (and at least in my mind the discussion) is about. Keeping digital objects (like bitcoin) on a digital system is of course easier than keeping physical objects on a digital system but it also brings a whole load of it's own complexity. I also keep getting back to what does the blockchain actually give you here? Even in this example you need someone or something to have privileged access to the chain to handle things like bankruptcy, inheritance, seizure and so on. Your pitch is for applying programmable logic to money. That'd be great, but also extremely complex and I just don't get why the blockchain is needed.

notafraudster 5y ago

Without a blockchain, couldn't this be done simply by empowering the IRS to do it (e.g. by requiring banks to give oracle access to bank accounts or requiring all employers to list complete transaction outflows?) Like, you solved an incomplete information problem by saying suppose the state had complete information. If you're willing to do that, we wouldn't have a problem blockchain or no blockchain.

didibus 5y ago
Well, it depends, I think people are privacy conscious, maybe you don't want people to know what you spend money on or how you make it. A cryptocurrency could technically keep things anonymous, while still taking the appropriate tax money from the wallet and transactions. But yes, this is similar to Uber and Google Search, and any other software technology, it doesn't allow doing things we couldn't before, it just enables doing them in possibly new ways, that might be more convenient, efficient, trustworthy, cheaper, etc. How exactly, well this is what people are trying to crack. Similar to how everyone wish they had put the iPhone together first, companies and people are trying to figure out what is the right combination of features and use case for a blockchain based offering to go big and drastically change the way something is done today. Now, are we better off for using cars? Are we better off for using telephones? Are we better off for using the internet? You can argue most technologies just changed things from how they used to be done to just being done differently and that it didn't really make anyone one of us more fulfilled and happy in our life. So you could say the same for blockchain, but I don't think that matters to a startup, you just want to disrupt and capture a new or existing market.