Quote from gmst:
See, I like the concept as such. My only worry is and it is a very big worry - what if washington passes a legislation outlawing it. Then as has been said - true use of bitcoin would be left only in illegal activities. Mainstream (Talking about milllions of people) will not accept it for transaction purposes.
You have made your point very well about the good things that the crypto currency can do and I agree. My main concern is above.
I agree, to an extent. I'm learning more as we go. Specifically, regulatory and legal efforts afoot to squash crypto-currencies. From what I can tell, it's difficult, if not impossible, to outlaw any one particular digital currency, like Bitcoin or Litecoin. Reason being, at it's heart, every cryptocurrency has no official name or title afixed to each unit of account. In actuality, each currency unit is just a string of random numeric digits, stored on a computer, being sent between two people that agree on it's value. It's no more as if you and I agreed a rock we picked up off the ground is worth 50 dollars, and we respect that agreement. The agreement of something holding value - which is simply an idea (outlawing ideas....) - cannot be outlawed. Nor can the random string of digits that represents that value be outlawed....They are just numbers. How can we make numbers illegal?
The second problem, is the distributed nature of the network. Each "node" represents one (or many) computers, who are parties to the transaction, or maintain the network. Like Napster, they can attempt to go after nodes, one-by-one, but there's literally millions on the network. As bitcoin grows, instead of millions on the network, there are tens of millions etc. Further, it's extremely difficult - if not impossible - to associate any IP address with a pgp key stored on the blockchain. It doesn't do that, from what I understand.
The other angle, instead of direct prosecution, is vilification. You're right. I think that's the real worry. If the DOJ or whoever can lean on big name internet retailers/banks/money transfer houses to not accept bitcoin, and sort of spin it like the currency of choice for pedophiles and terrorists, then ya. There's a problem.
But here's the rebuttal to all this. Napster back in the day, was one of the first of it's kind, commercially. The music industry leaned on the DOJ and got that shutdown. But then came Limewire, and Kaaza, which they tried to shut down with mixed success. Now Bittorrent is alive and well. Lesson is - with distributed networks, the Feds can't shut it down. The network is just so vast (hundreds of millions of users), they can't even go after a fraction of the people.... The Government simply doesn't have the resources (or capacity) to identify who is doing what, and fund all the lawsuits. So from the legal angle, theres not much of a deterrent.
This is why Bitcoin (and others) are designed to be decentralized. Remember Von Not Hous (Liberty Dollar) and e-gold? They enjoyed wild popularity but they got shut down because they were centralized. The FEDs can pick off any organization that's centralized. But grass-roots, distributed networks, there's no way. Interesting, that the Federal Prosecutor made the argument that Von Not Hous was engaged in financial terrorism because he offered a product that undermine the value of the US Dollar. See, this is big, big shit we're talking about here, and the Government is like a hawk on this stuff.
That said, the Central Banks and their Government lackeys of the world will go to war with Bitcoin if it continues to skyrocket. That's guaranteed. The ability to keep us all on the reservation, so to speak, using US dollars that they can easily print, and thus steal our savings, to fund their own nefarious wars and crap to keep them elected and money rolling in, is the basis of this entire oligarchical system. So it's gonna be a war. Very fascinating to watch.
But the amazing part of all this, and Gip3 is right, this is an age old battle. The American colonies finally rebelled against the British largely because of gun control and King George insisted the colonies use debt-backed english notes.....a tax.... It's financial warfare. Anyway, fascinating. The age-old fight against the bankers has gone digital.
