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It means they'll pass or enforce laws that require citizens to pay taxes, exchanges to file paperwork & pay fees, etc. It means if you're caught not abiding by
by jaekwon 13y ago
It means they'll pass or enforce laws that require citizens to pay taxes, exchanges to file paperwork & pay fees, etc. It means if you're caught not abiding by the law, then you will get punished.
Obviously they don't have natural jurisdiction over and above crypto-anarchy, unless they have the capacity to wage war against the protocol. They probably do. There will be workarounds. So it goes.
I believe the ponzi pirate PirateAt40 should be punished, not because Bitcoin falls under the jurisdiction of government as money, but rather because the pirate defrauded people. You can defraud people with beanie babies or baseball cards as well.
- betterunix 13y agoWhy would the government bother attacking the protocol? I am sure the NSA has the necessary resources, but there would be no point. Failing to pay taxes is jail time. Failing to pay fees as an exchange means your business is shuttered, and continuing after that means jail time. Maybe other countries will be more lenient but US Bitcoin users will be in trouble. It is also very likely that any taxes or fees associated with Bitcoin will have to be paid in dollars. If there are no legal avenues for exchanging Bitcoin for dollars then it would be illegal to do business in Bitcoin at all. You may personally skirt the law on that, but your local supermarket will not, and neither will your apartment complex, your auto dealership, or any of the dozens of other businesses you deal with in your daily life.
- jaekwon 13y agoI guess people who want to avoid paying taxes will have to find other local businesses that do the same. What matters to bitcoin users is whether the transaction goes through or not.
- betterunix 13y agoHow many businesses do you know of that pay no taxes at all? Even mafia fronts pay some taxes (having your front shut down for failing to pay property taxes tends to work out poorly). There is also the matter of where those businesses will get their supplies -- eventually they are going to have to deal with someone who pays taxes. What this boils down to is this: how much faith you have in the government's ability to enforce the law, particularly those laws related to money. I have quite a bit of faith in the government's ability to enforce the tax code; even people who cheat on their taxes are rarely bold enough to not bother to pay any taxes.
- jaekwon 13y agoThey can enforce it within their powers. Confiscating bitcoins like they confiscate wages is not within their powers. They can jail you for evading taxes apparently. C'est la vie.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> Confiscating bitcoins like they confiscate wages is not within their powers. The government confiscates wages by sending legally binding orders to people who they believe might owe you wages directing them to remit the owed wages to the remit them to the government instead. They obviously can do the same thing with bitcoins. The only current difficulty with doing that with bitcoins now is that bitcoins are currently used for so few transactions for so few people that its not likely to be worth the governments effort to find out who is likely to owe you bitcoins to serve them with such orders. If bitcoin were to become widely used, that would change.
- jaekwon 13y ago> They obviously can do the same thing with bitcoins How? They can't confiscate bitcoins without the private key. It's not like Bitcoin is run by a bank with an internal central ledger.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> How? I suggest you reread the sentence that precedes the one you quoted (and which is the one that "the same thing" refers to.) Because it answers your question.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]