As as been repeatedly demonstrated to you, holding cash is unsafe, because it can be seized by the government without you ever having committed a crime.
> what does adding a cryptocurrency give you?
As has been repeatedly demonstrated to you, you have protection from it being seized through the insidious civil asset forfeiture procedure.
> the government needs the authority to confirm that transactions are properly accounted for.
Ludicrously false. You clearly have no idea how the law works. You must think you live in a police state. In spite of what you might think, if you live in a western democracy, you don't. You fill in your little boxes on the form and you pay your taxes. You may be asked to justify the numbers in the boxes.
You seem to have a bizarre belief that something illegal or wrong is occuring. You realize you're not a slave, right? You realize you have rights, right? You know what a right is, right? You realize the law is a list of things you can't do, not a permission list of what you can do, right?
I'm actually confident that America will eventually get it right. I expect that America, when backed into it, will legislate your rights to protect the fruits of your labour. And then they'll have the moral authority again. They're just going to have to work harder in diplomacy. Which they are quite capable of doing at times. Underrated? Treaty with Iran. Iran ain't really in the news of late? That is better.
But to your question, keeping $1 million in cash, all legitimately acquired, in your house, which could be seized under the flimiest of pretenses, is madness. Bank? Gold? No thanks.
It's going to happen eventually. You might as well figure out how to get used to it. In spite of how the US sometimes is, they have inevitably come down on the right side of history.
> How did anything get into those wallets in the first place?
I think you misunderstand the nature of freedom and rights. I don't have to explain what I did with my money. I have the presumption of innocence. You don't get to trawl through my financial records looking for a crime. You have to have probable cause that I have committed a crime, and then seek supporting evidence for it.
I think it's funny that the country with the first and second amendment is the one that has, for decades, pushed the restriction of rights in money. Americans seem to have forgotten what a right even is. With the first amendment, people aren't legally 'allowed' to say what they want. The government doesn't have the right to stop you saying what you want. With the second amendment, people aren't legally 'allowed' to have guns. The government doesn't have the right to take them away from you. For too long the surveillance state has crept in, and now there are people that believe that you have to prove your innocence. Incorrect. You have to prove I have a case to answer, and I get to protect myself from self-incrimination, and you have to prove that case beyond reasonable doubt.
That is what is so insidious about civil asset forfeiture. It is civil. Instead of proving beyond reasonable doubt that you have committed a crime, all they have to prove is the balance of probabilities. You are treated like a criminal, but it isn't you who is the criminal, it is your assets. When they don't know your assets, nor have access to your assets, because they can't just confiscate the cash out of your car, your house, or your bank, you are protecting yourself.
If you find it exploitative, you are free to create and use your own crypto instrument without these properties that you take offense to. All of the code is available for you to modify as you see fit, as it is open source. If you believe it has value, all you need to do is to convince others of the superior nature of your implementation, and surely they will adopt your solution for their crypto needs.
Interesting. I'm clearly getting this message from oracle, so it's not a problem on my end. Perhaps a routing problem? It has been giving me this message for an hour.
I wouldn't be surprised, but I don't think this will have been at the direction of the US government, and not in a coordinated way. I would expect they have identified funds that have come from known hacks, and blacklisted them. But as I said, it wouldn't surprise me that much. If it hasn't happened already, it's going to. Only a matter of time.
I think it's one of the reasons why they have been so against some of the other crypto technologies like segwit and lightning. It removes them from the possibility of having that oversight role. I'm not the conspiracy type really, but it wouldn't come as a surprise that they have already had these discussions with regulatory authorities. Common sense really. The only real question is whether they have been encouraged to support or undermine technologies based upon those hypothetical discussions. They are who they are, and they work in that regulatory environment. It's not to be negative about them. They have a hand dealt to them, they play it.
Bitcoin is just a chain of transactions. This address to this address to this address to this address, right back to the block it was created in. It is not terribly difficult to validate whether the payment you're currently looking at existed as bitcoin in that address at some point or another. Like I said though, even the ability of that is likely to be undermined over the next 3-4 years.
The secret to bitcoins success is that if you cry wolf enough times, and take away peoples freedom to such an extent that they are impoverished by the wealthy, they will find a way to exert their power. This is what happens when you lose the moral high-ground.
Freedom is hard. Actually requiring probable cause before being subjected to the justice system used to be a thing. Then the US government started stealing peoples money without ever even charging them with a crime. So now we have crypto. So the government can't do it anymore. "But but but what if they are committing a crime!" they say. Prove it i say. You know. Rule of law. That's what democracies are supposed to be about aren't they?
That attack on freedom now has crypto as a response. The thing that it is counter-intuitive about crypto, is that the solution to electronic anonymous and censorship resistant money, turned out being record everything forever. When someone can flick a switch and take everything from you, you don't have freedom. When you can access the ledger from anyone, prove that it it is valid, and be able to send your money to anyone, for whatever purpose, you do. This technology has been developed as a direct response to the insidious and anti-democratic implementation of AML/KYC laws on a global scale over the past 30 years. The extrapolation of these laws, given a long enough timeline, is slavery. Not figurative slavery, actual slavery.
Bitcoin is the technical response to that problem.
I'm surprised that it is taking as long as it is taking for this to occur. It's also one of the reasons why it is going to be virtually impossible to stop.
Over the past year there has been a corporate hijack attempt of the bitcoin consensus rules. The thing that is painfully obvious is how totally disorganised and incompetent the attack was. Anyone who understands how the technology works has listened to armies of get-rich-quick junkies explaining how their new fandangled blockchainz are gonna takeova da cryptoz. In reality, bitcoin is now stronger than it was six months ago, as its nodes are even more decentralized, and it is apparent to anyone who cares to look, that the threat of a PoW change that started being bandied about in bitcoin, actually made the corporate types slam on the brakes before they got crushed.
But when state actors get involved, that is going to be an entirely different story. I expect that at some point over the next couple of years, governments (like the US) will black-list bitcoin addresses, which undermines the ability to shift funds. They'll go to coinbase, or every other exchange in western nations, and tell them which addresses they want payments halted in. Which is why technologies such as lightning have been developed, to further decentralize value transfers in the system. It will even allow for the routing of payments through a multiple of different blockchains if a route can't be found between participants.
When any state actor decides that they want to start utilizing this value transfer system for things like oil, it will be trivially easy to circumvent sanctions. The greater the value of the market capitalization, the easier it will be to do this. I make no comment on whether it is good or bad. In many diplomatic arguments, sanctions are indeed a perfectly reasonable and effective way of addressing issues. They worked perfectly well in Iraq until the US invaded them anyway. They worked extremely well in the former Yugoslavia, and have curbed many of the worst excesses of Iran. But that only works when you control the money supply. The US, unfortunately, has abused that privilege for completely unrelated reasons, and now there is a method of permanently removing that control. It is what it is.
The fireworks haven't even started in this space yet.
? It is deflationary because it is known what the total number will be, and coins will be permanently lost over time.
> Any user who joins the network
They do this out of free choice do they not? No one is coerced into acquiring bitcoin. There isn't even a coordinating body, like a company, that controls the issuance or exchange of tokens. I would encourage any person that invests in anything to understand what they are investing in before they commit their funds to it. Bitcoin is extremely unforgiving if you don't manage your security well.
None of this has anything to do with your incorrect usage of words though. You can't just invent new definitions of words because you don't like something, and you think it would be nice to assign that word to it. You don't like it. Fair enough. Don't invest in it.
Yes, I remember when that law was introduced. I vaguely remember that it was in response to a child being murdered after being picked up while waiting for a bus.
It's certainly a different world now. But I have a 10-year-old, and he goes to the shops around the corner to buy milk and/or bread. There'd be no way I could trust him to make public transport decisions at this stage though. Maybe a year or two more.
I suspect that all cryptos that want to survive will need to implement this technology in their blockchain at some point or another. Already, there has been chain trading between litecoin, decred, and bitcoin that I know of. I'm sure there will be more going forward.
The problem is that our existing financial system probably had an intention of using inflation to encourage commerce and trade, but over the past 40 years, that focus shifted from using debt for the funding of productive enterprises to debt being used for the bidding up of fixed assets like houses, but also stocks. The only thing that mattered to this bidding process was capital growth. The solution to these bubbles wasn't to reign in debt creation, or to force the targeting of debt creation to productivity, but to simply increase it. Bubble after bubble after bubble, crisis after crisis after crisis. But not only that, a death in productive capacity, which is all too apparent to the middle-income demographic.
Because of this irresponsibility of the finance world, crypto-currency technology was developed to allow people to park their productive gains in inflation resistant financial instruments. So in order to get these people to part with their inflation resistant instrument, you will have to convince them that you will give a better return than inflation, and that means by increasing productivity. You can no longer just create more debt, because the only thing that will do is increase the value of the deflationary asset, by decreasing the value of the inflationary one. That means if you want to survive as a national currency, you better start working on education and building productive capacity, because you'll no longer be able to fleece your populace whenever banking execs are looking to buy a new bentley.