A Cashless, High-Value, Anonymous Currency: How? 400
jfruh writes "The cashless future is one of those concepts that always seems to be just around the corner, but never quite gets here. There's been a lot of hype around Sweden going almost cashless, but most transactions there use easily traceable credit and debit cards. Bitcoin offers anonymity, but isn't backed by any government and has seen high-profile hacks and collapses in value. Could an experiment called MintChip brewing in Canada finally take us to cashless nirvana?"
Mint Chip? (Score:5, Funny)
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well, I already converted from ubuntu to mint...
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The summary mentions "MintChip brewing", so I assume it's a spearmint chocolate-chip flavoured beer.
Re:Mint Chip? (Score:4, Funny)
So ice cream for currency?
Here in Canada it's winter most of the time, right now my assets are liquidated. :d
Still better than ice cream phones.
Bitcoin hacked? Um no (Score:5, Informative)
Theft, yes. Bitcoin itself ever hacked, no.
No (Score:5, Informative)
If you don't check to see that the transfer has been confirmed, sure, but that's no different than putting a bill on the counter and then snatching it away. It's not a hack, and you can't do it to someone that doesn't allow you to.
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
It is a hack, although not one that might be as clever as you'd like. It's as much a hack as putting tape over a dollar bill, feeding it into a vending machine and ripping it back out. It is a hack that devalues the currency.
Re:No (Score:5, Informative)
It's not a Bitcoin hack because it's only possible if the person on the receiving end doesn't follow the Bitcoin protocol, which is to wait for at least one confirmation before treating a transfer as legitimate, with six confirmations being recommended. Most vendors wait three to six confirmations (30-60 minutes average), which is still a lot better than an ACH transfer at three-plus days, but one is more than enough to offset any reasonable risk of reversal for normal purchases.
If you don't have any confirmations then the transaction isn't part of the block chain, which means it might as well not exist so far as the rest of the Bitcoin network is concerned. At that point the signed transaction is just a declaration of intent, not an accomplished fact.
Re:Bitcoin hacked? Um no (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bitcoin hacked? Um no (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually tracked down who probably stole some bitcoins once. Yes it can be done, however, there are caveats, and they pretty much require the person to have been careless.
The problem is that the account numbers, unlike IPs, are not assigned. They are generated, by the client. A client may generate as many accounts as he likes. How do you track down a random number to the person who generated it?
Yes, you can see the transactions.... you can see both randomly generated numbers but... you don't know who is on each end. Then you have splits of value where the amount goes to two or more accounts (common as the default client generates a new address to send change back to, each time)
For example, when I did it, there was an address the stolen coins came from, and they were sent directly to another account, along with several others. For various reasons relating to how all this came about, I knew that the destination address was connected to an anonymous coin laundering service. No point chasing it forwards from there, as it would have been an unholy mess.... but I knew enough about how it worked to know that the inputs were going to all be the same person or group.... and there were multiple inputs to the address....
So a few quick websearches found that the owner had mixed his coins and one of the addresses was listed in some online posts. A bit more searching found that the person in question fancied himself a hacker. Talking to the person who lost the coins confirmed that the person I trakced down was known to him and considered a likely culprit already.
So can it be done? Yup it can... but its some work, and its often quite hard.
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Gold (Score:5, Insightful)
Gold:
[x] Cashless
[x] High-Value
[x] Anonymous
Re:Gold (Score:5, Insightful)
Gold:
[x] Cashless
[x] High-Value
[x] Anonymous
[ ] Digital
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[ ] Digital
This feature was not included in original requirements. Scope creep!
Re:Gold (Score:5, Interesting)
GLD; but then you blow the anonymous feature. Of course gold is "cash" too, so I don't know what the GP means when he says it's "cashless". If he means, "not requiring government backing to have value", then yeah, sure; but AFAIK the definition of "cash" is tangible money whereas "cashless" to me implies money that is only a ledger entry in electronic form. The ledger entry may be associated with physical hardware; but the hardware itself is not the money, simply a means of proving that there is a unique ledger entry symbolizing money.
This whole topic is silly anyway. The summary implies that a cashless society is "nirvana" which in the west we synonmize with "paradise" or "heaven". For many, myself included, the vsion of cashless is "hell", which for our Hindu and Islamic friends I do not know how to translate. Dystopia. I think we can all understand that.
For me, heaven was when I was a kid and adults still paid for a lot of things with coins because they actually had some purchasing power. We could bring back this bit of heaven by simply striking new coins of the same composition with 10X the value. A "new penny" would carry a value of $0.10, a "new nickle" $0.50, etc. Pocket change would be worth something again, the zinc lobby would be OK with it (only reason we still have the penny is the zinc mining lobby), the vending machine people wouldn't have such a hard time accomodating this, and we would effectively and painlessly introduce dollar coins in the form of dimes instead of bulkier coins that people hate.
Of course there would be some resistance at first; but society ran just fine when a dime had a purchasing power equivalent of $2.00 today!
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Real typers use Kelvin
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[x] Does not scale.
Re:Gold (Score:4, Informative)
And that's precisely why it holds value.
Re:Gold (Score:4, Insightful)
Money that is deflationary encourages hoarding, which only worsens the deflationary trend. That is why currency needs to at least scale with a growing population.
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1. Has all the same problems as cash (theft, controlled production by someone else etc.), with the added downside that if you 'lose' gold (say in the world trade centre or a sunken ship). If you had gold in a WTC vault you might have been years getting it back, and if it's lost at sea you might never get it back or you might only get back part of its value. Cash? Burned up, bottom of the ocean etc? No problem, the government can just print more to make up for it.
Has only value anyone ascribes to it, wh
Re:Gold (Score:5, Interesting)
World GDP is up to 60 trillion dollars BECAUSE the dollar is not backed by gold anymore. The money supply has been inflated, which devalues the currency.
Correct. Progress. Were not for fiat currency the US would have been bankrupted by the french and Swiss in the 70's demanding repayment for all outstanding debts in gold, china would still be horribly impoverished as rich countries hoarded gold and kept it away from the chinese etc. And we'd still have world GDP would be significantly smaller, everyone would have less wealth and less money flowing through their hands. This is perhaps the greatest success of ditching metal as a currency dramatically improving peoples lives. If it weren't for that the UK could theoretically still be buried with 200 or 300% of GDP in debt in gold that it could never pay back from WW2, leaving it a shell of a country.
Devaluing the currency removes the incentive to save, and forces people to 'invest'
Yep, that's probably the most profoundly useful thing about fiat currency. Gold sitting in a vault isn't flowing into the economy. Investing, even into boring government debt at least keeps the money moving around. Admittedly I probably should have clarified that I was talking about a crude approximation on the velocity factor in economic theory. It makes a huge difference. Sitting on money in a vault is pretty much the most useless thing you can do with it, and deprives everyone else of access to it, contracting the economy as a whole.
If gold was still used by everyone as money, politicians couldn't promise things they can't afford, and bankers couldn't endlessly inflate the money supply, forcing everyone to 'invest' with them.
Right. That's the situation Greece is in. They don't control the supply of euro's any more than they would control the supply of gold. They have 160 or so percent of GDP in debt, can't get investment (euro's or gold) so they need to devalue, which, when you have euro's and gold basically spirals the country deeper into debt that it can't pay off. If they could print more money, say an inflation target of 4% they would be devaluing greek labour relative to say germany, which would fairly quickly make greece a good investment opportunity for business (decreasing relative labour costs), a cheaper vacation spot as time goes on etc. And all that debt they had would start to chip away. They'd still be 10 years getting to 100% of GDP in debt, but as it is in 10 years greece is going to have 170 or 180% of GDP, if not more (unless they go bankrupt obviously) in debt, a population that's fleeing and they're going to face a complete economic disaster. In that sense the Euro and Gold are no different. Note that I'm explicitly not saying the US dollar is the same way, since the US has a federal system that doesn't cut health spending or pensions in florida just because there was a housing crash in florida. By that reasoning another option for the Euro is a more federal state where certain things (pensions, healthcare, justice, education, state ownership of pan euro corporations, such as the bank bailouts, would be trans Eurozone). But that's a whole other topic.
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Gold:
[x] Cashless
[x] High-Value
[x] Anonymous
But only if you deal in actual, physical gold which is not what 99% of the gold market does. In practice people don't actually take possession of it, it's just stored in an approved vault and they don't issue cashier's checks that you can pass around anonymously so you're even less anonymous than cash. And even if you do get physical gold it usually comes with a certificate like this [wikipedia.org] which you can see is numbered. Maybe that's okay if you got it anonymously but if you bought it some other way you'll have to
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Gold:
[_] Cashless
[x] High-Value
[x] Anonymous
You're really referring to fiat currency and not cash-carrying in a broad sense. Although given that the penny's metal now has intrinsically more value than its decree, anything can change. Imagine how valuable paper bills would become if some catastrophe destroyed the world's forests? (Let's assume it also destroys book scanners. ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krugerrand#History [wikipedia.org]
http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2011/07/13/bernanke-fights-ron-paul-in-congress-golds-not-money/ [forbes.com]
http://archive.mises.org [mises.org]
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For the masses gold is always "overpriced", its always the "wrong time to buy" no matter what the price is.
Gold is not in a mania phase, if it was in a mania phase you'd see "Gold 4 Cash" not "Cash 4 Gold".
Gold, and silver to a lesser extent is a terrible investment. Gold (and silver to a lesser extent) is money. Only other than holding US dollars, Euros, Swiss Francs, etc. governments can't print more at
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If the value of precious metals is static, and the USD price of gold is going through the roof, wouldn't that mean the value of the dollar is getting lower all the time? If the dollar was in a "bubble", then a dollar would buy more and more gold, not less, correct?
This is a legitimate question. I'm neither an economist nor currency expert.
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Re:Gold (Score:4, Insightful)
The value of precious metals is static, it's the value of the fiat currency against which they are measured that changes.
Bullshit.
Precious metals are subject to the same forces of supply and demand as everything else in the world. That they are MORE STABLE than fiat currencies is not the same thing as them being static.
Disney Dollar (Score:4, Funny)
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we should bring back S&H green stamps as anon currency.
(goml!)
Cashless == untraceable? (Score:3, Insightful)
There's been a lot of hype around Sweden going almost cashless, but most transactions there use easily traceable credit and debit cards
Since when does "cashless" mean "untraceable"?
Re:Cashless == untraceable? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's been a lot of hype around Sweden going almost cashless, but most transactions there use easily traceable credit and debit cards
Since when does "cashless" mean "untraceable"?
It doesn't, and your quotation does not in any normal linguistic sense imply that it does. Effectively, it is a statement of the form: "Sweden tried a currency with property X, but it still lacks another desirable property Y." (If you're slow, X = "cashlessness," while Y = "anonymity.")
If you read the title to the bloody post at the top of the page, "A Cashless, High-Value, Anonymous Currency: How?" you might realize that this is a question about achieving currency with not one, nor two, but THREE distinct properties.
Sheesh. The fact that this has been modded insightful worries me.
Nobody really knows ... (Score:5, Insightful)
... what the best way will be, any anybody who professes omniscience on this is lying to you. We'll have to experiment to find the best solution.
If you're in the US, ask your legislators to support a short act [opencongress.org] to make such experiments legal. Right now, trying to figure this out is a good way to land in prison.
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Nothing. But this involves technology so it must be better. If you're not thinking of convoluted ways to do something simple, you're too old.
It's all about technology and how we can insulate ourselves from having to communicate or gasp! interact with other people.
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It's all about technology and how we can insulate ourselves from having to communicate or gasp! interact with other people.
But... we are communicating and interacting right now.
Unifying online and offline payments (Score:3, Insightful)
That anecdote illustrates the problem. On the one hand, we have a cheap, anonymous, private way to make payments (cash), but it requires us to have physical paper or coins in our pockets. On the other hand, we have electronic methods that require a connection to an online transaction processor, which res
Re:Unifying online and offline payments (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Unifying online and offline payments (Score:5, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chaum [wikipedia.org]
Real digital cash involves an issuing authority, which can be a bank or a government, but which neither knows who it has issued any specific token to nor when or where that token has been spent (well, strictly, it only requires this if it is to be both scalable and support offline payments). Real digital cash allows transactions to happen offline i.e. requiring no parties other than the two parties involved in the transaction. That is what Chaum and many other cryptographers spent lots of time developing.
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Cash isn't hugely problematic except that cash transactions can dodge tax, and move large amounts of money around (especially in the EU when they have 500 euro notes) for criminal enterprise without government oversight.
The main things with cash that people don't like is that government can simply print more of it to devalue it, so holding physical cash for any length of time gradually loses the relative value of the cash, and that cash can be 'lost' due to fire theft etc. and it's inherently hard to secure
Prostitutes and drugs (Score:2)
How is one supposed to pay for these things with digital currency? Pimps and drug dealers love paper trails!
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Watts (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Watts (Score:5, Funny)
Laptop batteries already accidentally start fires from overheating. If something like you're proposing overloads we could be missing a city block or two.
Corrections (Score:5, Insightful)
"Bitcoin offers anonymity, but isn't backed by any government and has seen high-profile hacks and collapses in value."
"...isn't backed by any government..."
Sounds good to me. Certainly true anyway.
"...has seen high-profile hacks..."
Bitcoin hasn't been hacked, some Bitcoin websites have been hacked.
"...collapses in value."
There was certainly that big bubble, but other than that it's been fairly stable. Certainly for the last many months.
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#tgCzm1g10zm2g25 [bitcoincharts.com]
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"...isn't backed by any government..."
Sounds good to me. Certainly true anyway.
So what creates the demand for Bitcoin? See, that's the difference between monopoly money and government backed money: a government backing a currency creates a substantial demand for that currency -- the courts will base damage awards and property value assessments on that currency (by extension, loans will be issued and must be repaid using that currency), taxes must be paid in that currency, and the general legal structure surrounding the currency makes it safer to use in a transaction. Now, if you
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You also need to know how much money is where for many economic reasons.
Lets say you have a million but bucks, or what ever. How much of that is available for lending? what is consumer spending doing? Interest? Currency swaps?
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Not being "backed" by any government is nothing less than the very first prerequisite of anonymity
So that's the reast I know exactly who held the dollar bill in my pocket before I received it...
Not backed by a government... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not backed by a government... (Score:4, Insightful)
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No, it's a massive flaw.
There is more to money then you buying a soda.
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The only reason why fake (fiat) currencies are popular is that it allows you to pay the thugs (government) the money they rob from you (taxation). Other than that, physical things like precious metals, copper, etc. are much, much better.
Bitcoin is an interesting experiment in cryptography, but isn't backed by anything. Why would I accept bitcoin?
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What's the difference, in terms of backing? None. The real difference is that those metals are both hard to find and industrially useful. The first means that the
hm.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Not going to happen (Score:5, Insightful)
With the currency troubles in Greece and Spain, a "cashless society" is much further off. One plan for Greece is to suddenly convert the bank account of everyone in Greece from euros to drachma, then immediately devalue the drachma. Since this is well known, everyone with any money is pulling it out of Greek banks.
Keeping money in "the cloud" means someone else controls it. For a good laugh, read the EULA of WePay [wepay.com], a wannabe PayPal competitor. Or those of Dwolla [dwolla.com], which is a pseudo financial institution run out of a hacker space in Iowa. The terms offered by most psuedo-banks in the "cloud" are awful.
bitcoin hacks? (Score:3)
Bitcoin offers anonymity, but isn't backed by any government and has seen high-profile hacks and collapses in value
Clever wording there. Yes, you could say bitcoin "has seen high-profile hacks," but you couldn't say that bitcoin has been hacked.
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I can say that if it gets popular enough, it will be.
Better Question: (Score:4, Insightful)
Why?
If anonymity is that important to your transaction, cash is still the way to go. If digital anonymity is what you want, then you need an escrow holder that will take cash and convert it to some form of one-shot unique digital account without any personal information involved.
If you want digital, anonymity, and convenient, well good luck with that. The combination of the 3 just screams "counterfeit". Like the old saying goes, pick two.
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If you want digital, anonymity, and convenient, well good luck with that. The combination of the 3 just screams "counterfeit". Like the old saying goes, pick two.
Except that we have ways to deal with that. Chaumiam systems, for instance, will de-anonymize anyone who tries to double-spend their money (the equivalent of counterfeiting; true counterfeiting is hard because of the properties of digital signatures).
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"If anonymity is that important to your transaction, cash is still the way to go."
Al Capone used cash.
Contrary to most peoples opinion, cash isn't really that anonymous in any practical way.
Headline in the form of a question. Answer is NO. (Score:2)
> "Could an experiment called MintChip brewing in Canada finally take us to cashless nirvana?"
When you see a headline in the form of a question, the answer is always "no".
It means the writer doesn't have enough (any?) evidence to back up a conclusion, but the conclusion will attract readers, so he posits it in the form of a question.
Bullwinkle plan (Score:3)
"Hey Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit outta my hat!"
"But that trick never works!"
"This time for sure!"
what is currency (Score:5, Insightful)
It is an abstract representation of value that only has meaning in the context of a society.
It has no meaning or value in and of itself: can't do much with a sack of gold in the middle of the Sahara, unless you meet some tauregs, which brings us back to the point: whatever you agree is a medium of exchange has to derive meaning in terms of what other people think of as value.
Gold has ancient meaning, but ones and zeroes have to stand for something else: a sack of gold in a bank somewhere.
Which implies accountability, traceability, authority.
Without those things, no one in their right mind will accept your currency.
You have to know what currency actually means, and you can't design currency that defies those meanings, or what you have isn't really currency. Except amongst other idealistic clueless fanboys of alternacurrency, but this is a fringe group playing silly games, not actually making something that will replace real currency at large.
There is no trust in the parameters you have outlined. And with no trust, no trade.
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You can't. (Score:2)
Never happen. Having a currency out of bounds means there is no way to know what's going on with the currency. Is someone counterfeiting it? hording it?
And cash isn't really anonymous, never has been. Ask Al Capone.
How do I knw this? bcasue I was on a team that did it. Create a smart card system(first to be used by a financial entity) and you could use it to pay a shop keeper, get paid from a shop keeper, and use it for bank transaction.
So what happened, like in a day, was that people stopped using banks.
Stop demonizing bitcoin (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not sure that's a bad thing anymore given what governments around the world are doing to people these days. I wish it was feasible to move all my money to bitcoin, honestly. Banks and governments can't freeze it at will.
This is misleading as all hell. Bitcoin itself has never been hacked. And pretty much every non-electronic currency collapsed in value in 2008. I'm not sure bitcoin did. It's new, but it's totally usable and stable enough.
Having used bitcoin personally for several things, I have nothing bad to say about it except that it's a little bit slow for transfers to happen. Still way faster than a bank and it operates 24/365.
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I wish it was feasible to move all my money to bitcoin, honestly.
What are you going to do when some idiot crashes his car into your living room? You are going to go to court and have a judge resolve things, because in all likelihood, the idiot is not going to fix the damage on his own. You know what the court ruling will be in terms of? Your nation's currency, because that is how courts work.
Governments do actually provide useful services, like courts. Those services must be paid for, like anything else, and governments collect taxes to pay for those services.
Why not zoidberg? (Score:2)
once again, the sandwich heavy portfolio pays off for the hungy investor. - Z
The problem with cashless (Score:2)
I'm personally a big supporter of using cash. I use it at every opportunity, even if that means going out of my way to go to an ATM.
I havn't heard a convincing argument for cashless yet. Cashless isn't anonymous, requires both parties to use special devices or services,, and ties us into the banking system and thus gives an already overinfluential sector more power than it deserves.
Here in the UK, banks and credit card companies charge a percentage to the retailer for using a card machine, which of course c
It's a TRAP (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh great. (Score:3)
Awe some. Security through obscurity. What's to go wrong?
Only available on Windows, Android and Blackberry. Well Blackberry is over. I wouldn't trust a payment system on my cell phone and I am never ever going to use Windows again. Besides as the MPAA proved with Blu-ray there is no better platform to lose you security with than Windows. Not to mention that this mean the mint is out sourcing control of the money supply to the US as there will be no Canadian companies involved.
Why government backing is needed: Tax payment (Score:3, Insightful)
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No no, you're missindurstanding – both are negatives. The fact that it's not gvmnt backed gives all the draw backs you pointed out, the fact that it's anonymous means that scammers and launderers have a field day.
Prepaid means no legal tender required (Score:5, Insightful)
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Stupid people choose not to learn.
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Legal tender only means that you have to accept it for debts denoted in that currency. For example, if I send you a bill for 100 US dollars you can pay for it in any way you want so long as it is legal tender and I cannot sue you for non-payment, whether that is 10 rolls of quarters, a single $100 bill, or 2 $50 bills. However, when someone is ringing you up at a cash register, no debt has occurred. Meaning the person at the cash register can refuse payment in legal tender and might accept only gold
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Technically, the cash register person who refuses the $50 bill must, in legal terms, be refusing to make the sale to you, rather than refusing to accept the legal tender after the sale is made. Perhaps though you could legally argue that it was discriminatory in some way for them to refuse to enter into the selling transaction with you.
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And that the government which represents ~ 40% of most economies will pay you in their own currencies.
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You "fixed" it to "but and", huh.
Re:Gold pressed Latinum. (Score:4, Interesting)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chaum [wikipedia.org]
Re:Gold pressed Latinum. (Score:5, Informative)
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At least my hypothetical non-sense has more of a chance of happening than BitCoin.
Re:Gold pressed Latinum. (Score:5, Informative)
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I'm pretty sure that, in common law jurisdictions, it would be found that there is a common law right (established by tradition) to make payments using anonymous currency.
Whether the anonymous currency is metal or bits is immaterial ! :-) (to the legality of using anonymous currency)
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So because the very first airplane ever made didn't fly, it was proof that powered flight is impossible?
Worse (Score:3, Insightful)
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Some issues with Bitcoin need to be resolved and they are kind of hard to resolve.
A) You need trusted and secure exchanges. Letting any douche who can throw up a web site run an exchange handling significant quantities of cash would seem doomed to fail. Banks are douches too but at least there are bank regulators who occassionally check up on them and shut them down when they veer in to fraud or incompetence resulting in insolvency. Our regulators have proved to not work well but its better than none at
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It probably can be done. But then would be explicitly undone by governments and insurance companies by reporting requirements. In effect that is the same as cash transactions. Lots of countries (notably in the Caribbean) take US dollars cash for transactions, the governments fix their exchange rates to US dollars, but when you pay your cabbie 100 USD he's certainly not declaring 100 USD on his income tax.
Prove to me that you only had 50k in income with a perfectly anonymous transaction system. Prove to
Re:Gold pressed Latinum. (Score:5, Insightful)
What part of the last 10 years did you miss where judges have been letting the U.S. government literally get away with murder. They sure haven't been any kind of brake on stopping the government from spying on its citizens.
Judges aren't saints, they are political appointees and they aren't any more reliable or trustworthy than the politicians who appoint them. If you put them on 3, 5 or 9 judge panels they get a little more reliable but if you manage to pack a 9 person court with 5 corrupted or partisan judges, all voting together, you are still screwed.
You should have zero confidence in letting one judge control anything important.
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Really? You can buy debit/prepaid cards at pretty much any major retailer in the United States. I'll submit that a lot of people outside the first world probably have limited access to bank accounts and credit cards.
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Lack of a credit card is more common, but they are also easy to get (if you don't have ridiculously bad credit). Example: my little brother who has no bills in his name and works at Walmart part-time w