Bitcoin - Part 2
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Found this story about the auction: http://www.chicagotribune.com/busine...,4038036.story Quote:
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Hmm--interesting. This whole thing is a bit weird to me. Wasn't Bitcoin supposed to be untraceable, uncontrollable, unable to be confiscated, un-taxable, and outside the reach of any government? Or maybe all that was simply empty hype? |
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But the transfer of Bitcoins between wallets is completely transparent and easily traceable. If they find out which wallet is yours (such as checking whose bank account is being used to buy more or sell off the Bitcoins in that account), they can easily watch how many Bitcoins are passing through your wallet and where they're going. (There are anonymous services that can disguise where the Bitcoins are coming from and going to, but they charge a fee, and there's no way to be sure they won't keep all your Bitcoins for themselves.) If the government gets hold of your computer, and your wallet is on it (and not password protected) they can just pretend to be you and transfer the Bitcoins to a government wallet. If it is password protected, they can always try to crack the password or, more simply, pressure you to hand over the password with threats of pressing extra charges. The only way to be absolutely sure your Bitcoins are safe is to keep the wallet on a storage device or piece of paper and hide it somewhere they'll never find it. But that's inconvenient for you, because you'd have to retrieve it every time you want to use it, and they could always pressure you to reveal its location. If you keep your Bitcoins in an exchange, its easy for them to get hold of them, they just have to force the exchange to turn over your account, exactly as they would with a bank account. |
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http://www.coindesk.com/18-million-w...us-government/ |
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Hmmm - so this thread is no longer about "The Most Important Creation In The History Of Man".
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This issues isn't specific to bitcoin but to personal secret data. It's truly possible to encrypt data st no rational amount of processing power can decrypt it w/o the key. It's always possible that some future mathematician will devise a clever way to crack these crypts more rapidly, but that's tentative and even dubious in the case of certain crypts. So imagine that you carefully manage the key that controls your bitcoin identity or other secret data. The day you get arrested/kidnapped you destroy the key. Now it's impossible for anyone to access the encrypted data. No one can obtain this data. Quote:
Truly destroying recorded data is another issue - but not unreachable. |
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The EU (EBA, European Banking Authority) agrees with me that an officially regulated virtual currency (VC) is needed:
"A governance authority may, at first, appear incompatible with the conceptual origins of VCs as a decentralised scheme that does not require the involvement of a central bank or government. However, the mandatory creation of a scheme governance body does not imply that VC units have to be centrally issued. This function can remain decentralised and be run through, for example, a protocol and a transaction ledger." -- EBA Opinion on ‘virtual currencies’ pp. 40 -- http://www.eba.europa.eu/documents/1...Currencies.pdf |
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You've also made it sound like they've taken you up on your suggestion rather than you happening to share the same view. |
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Until a comprehensive regulatory regime is developed, (if it is developed at all), only those risks can be mitigated that arise in the interaction between VC schemes and the regulated financial services sector (but not those that arise from activities within or between VC schemes). This would include risks of money laundering and financial crime, the risks to conventional payment systems, and some risks to individual users. To that end, the EBA recommends that national supervisory authorities discourage credit institutions, payment institutions, and e-money institutions from buying, holding or selling VCs, thereby 'shielding' regulated financial services from VCs. |
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If you get arrested (or kidnapped!), there's no guaranteed grace period where you get a chance to delete your stuff. |
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You simply make it so that if you do not regularly (24 ? 48 h) it automatically delete your stuff, and rewrite with random data. |
That sounds safe. You end up in hospital or end up in jail over some petty stuff. Boom, your drug fortune is gone..
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Share the key between a number of people. divide it in to say 4 parts then tell 8 people who don't know each other a part of the key. That way each part is copied twice (in case one of your people loses it or isn't available.
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Yawn. Nothing new here; they're laying off the volatility risk on Coinbase, same as Overstock.com did. If a big company decided to accept Bitcoins directly, then you'd have news.
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Bitcoin prices have been ho-humming along in the $550 to $650 range for over 2 months now (will it never get down to $150? :D).
This is a clear indication that it is not a major news item ATM and that I have not made any predictions on its price for over 2 months. |
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-0...-payments.html Looks like that dumb old Bitcoin just keeps on shrinking and falling apart, now they're "down" to being picked up by billion-dollar mainstream companies. |
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Oh, and the price has dropped to $470. |
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So tell me again what it's "down to?" |
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If not, it is not a currency. It is a speculative fantasy. |
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Are you the next to pick up the wooden sword? |
Bitcoin is one of the accepted payment methods for purchasing compromised credit card numbers at rescator.cc
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The value of a Bitcoin is barely connected to the number of Bitcoins in circulation. It's wildly fluctuating value is based on wildly fluctuating desire. That makes it an almost purely speculative fantasy. An investment commodity. Property, not currency.
Dutch tulips. |
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Legally, it is classified as a virtual currency in the US so that it falls under FinCEN regulations. Other countries may classify it as not-a-currency because it is not a debt instrument and is not issued by a government. For practical purposes, it is a currency if you can buy things with it, otherwise not. IOW who cares? |
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Money also needs to be relatively scarce, which is a way of saying it has high value in compact form. As compared with say, sand. Or snickers. Gold does pretty well, as with silver or platinum - but Bitcoins come out just fine there too. This is strange hyperbole - I mean, you can do all manner of transactions with bitcoins, even get people killed! Apparently. From these criminal charges on Silk Road. I don't think I can recall of a hit being done with payment in snickers. So why say such a thing? |
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