Senator Demands Complete U.S. Ban On Bitcoin

canna said:
Now I understand why nobody has drugs or fights over their profits, because the government banned them! :rolleyes::rolleyes:
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Not the same. If crypto had no value due to bans or regulations so heavy that they had effectively no value then you'd be trading something as valuable as dirt.
 
Patriot Act hard at work.... when did [[H]ard working]America vote that in?



P.s. Why is it that in this day and age Intelligent humanity is deemed a threat requiring punishment while-I'm just going to stop that thought right there actually. Long live freedom for all.
 
Some senators need to shut up and deal with more serious issues like fixing our healthcare system and economy. Bitcoins are the LAST thing they should be worried about.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
Sheep and an electric car...lol! Sounds like a book written for that Blade Runner movie. Anyway, did this someone convert the bitcoins to another system of money or buy their stuff directly using bitcoins? If it wasn't done with bitcoins directly, the animal and the car weren't bought with bitcoins, but with some other money.
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I am dissapoint COG

you been living under a rock?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=378936.0
 
1) Bitcoins (litecoins actually) mess up gaming video card prices. (People exchange litecoins to bitcoins then to fait currencies)

2) I know a number of mining groups in my campus who are drawing abnormal amounts of electrical power using public resources and causing heating, electrical loads that would otherwise not exist. I don't run campus wide utilities operations and only am part of one lab group on campus and already fixed/disposed/recycled/removed illicit mining equipment/software (Must really screw up their payback calculations). (Some students seem to think they can take advantage of resources which other students are paying and use a massive amount of it relative to the rest)

3) A number of botnets found on our machines also have miners that slow machines to a crawl and cause hardware failures as many machines are garbage to start with and were never built to run at full load, some rooms don't even have ventilation so you can imagine what would happen. (They become power viruses and stop legitimate uses of processing power in our areas, IT is so fragmented on universities and it is an easy target when the same room has two IT departments and split network access you can see how problems can crop up)

4) Even if someone is using their own power, air-conditioning any proof of work currency isn't actually based on nothing it is based on using power to create a random but algorithmically proven number. However crypto currencies is unlike fiat currencies which in digital form take little to no energy to create or move crypto currencies must be verified and mined (other than the initial seeding which is exactly like printing money).

5) Basically a waste of energy when regular currencies require far less and don't get "harder" to make. (You also can't mine a fiat currency currently, this is probably why so many people are into it as you can be your own money press except instead of being based on the government backing it is the inflated hopes of a bunch of people on the internet that keeps the value afloat, plus china (banned from banks though)) It is a very interesting psychological experiment and you can watch people become so emotionally/mentally entrenched after spending a few thousand dollars on dedicated mining hardware only to burst their bubble's when they try to steal electricity.

In essence cryptocurrencies take far more time, energy without actually being a physical thing (They try to emulate something like mining gold but a bitcoin isn't an physical element and it never can be).

Fiat currencies can be made for very little energy and in digital form require far less energy and time. For bitcoin's and their like to ever work they would need just as many or more digital security measures as it is a digital and decentralized system which can't be reversed and has no central authority with the power to just do things on a whim. (The fact there is control can provide many critical functions, amount of money available, verification, traceability, rollback, interest rates, ...)

Currency is meant not to have any intrinsic value but to just be an transparent as possible medium to exchange goods of value without resorting to bartering commodities or trading items. Having a cheap to make currency which is fast and requires little time to perform a transaction are critical to being used in every day usage. Price volatility alone kill's bitcoin from being used in everyday usage as if you hold onto any amount even for a short period you may have wildly different purchasing powers to the point where even an hour could prevent/allow you to buy/pay for a service/product.

In terms of verification and ease of use bitcoin's and their similar brothers also fail as for a transaction to be well proven it has to be integrated into the blockchain and undergo many verifications before it is rock solid and considered immutable. The size of the blockchain can vary with some users (nodes) needing to host the entire chain to bootstrap other users and this can make it difficult to participate directly in verifying transactions as the memory space requirements can vary depending on what is occurring in the economy as a whole. (People could artificially inflate the required part of the block chain by making the cleanup not function by preventing coins in possession from ever being fully spent)

The paper also makes an absolutely horrible assumption that moore's law is a physical law and not a marketing term intel already is calling dead now. (RAM is assumed to increase in size of 1.2GB per year) I doubt many users will be willing to devote a large portion of their system memory and hard drive/SSD to run a full node and then as the network grows the number of people running the full nodes drops and the power consolidates according to the computing power of the nodes. Regular users won't be able to run full nodes and even running small portions may be impossible without an intermediary.

The block chain's growth depends on the number of transactions not the amount of currency in circulation (fixed) which is opposite of normal currencies which have a controlled number of currency and no care other than for tax purposes on the previous transactions. Banks don't need to trace the entire history of your dollar to the last unspent cent to verify it which is a stark difference in usability and scalability.

The very fact prices for video cards jumps up when they have good mining properties makes the crypto-currencies not real currencies as they affect particular markets in an unbalanced way (Nvidia/AMD) because fiat currencies are not tied to any particular industry but the country as a whole it serves as a good low energy and fast medium. If you want something that is far safer than bitcoin just buy/mine some gold. (Other plus is gold is real and actually finite, bitcoin is modeled after it with so many features/names copied over (mining like gold mining, difficulty increase modelling resource depletion, arb finite limit, ...) without the one critical aspect that Gold is the element Au and doesn't corrode normally, is shiny, conducts heat/electricity well, and doesn't depend on the strength of a algorithm to exist but the bonds of an atom which is a bit more fundamental to the universe than our digital systems which assume their security)

All this makes me think that bit coin's and their like are an interesting experiment but not a currency in any sense. Plus if banned it will make the currency widely fluctuate even more and efforts to un-ban it will cause massive rapid changes which people could greatly profit off of. (Bitcoin = Virtual Gold Rush) also making asics just to solve a mining problem is pretty dumb and a waste of resources. (Go mine gold at least you can use it in the mfg of a electronic part)
 
Red Squirrel said:
I'm not surprised at all, I knew it was a matter of time till they ban or try to ban it. We all know it will eventually happen. The government does not like things they can't easily control.
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Hemp crop comes to mind

and no, hemp isn't fucking marijuana
 
Big surprise. If they can't control it then you don't deserve to have access to it. Fuck you Senator fuckhead.
 
Knowing how these guys work, his "demand" is probably driven by three factors:
  1. Primarily, he saw an opportunity for publicity-whoring. "Ohh, look, a trending, in-the-news issue I can get out in front with!"
  2. Cryptocurrency's very public connection with sketchy interwebz stuff and money laundering. This also ties in with #1, as he can pull a "look at me, I'm tough on crime/won't somebody think of the children?!?" number. Works well with voters who don't understand squat either.
  3. He has little to no understanding of either cryptocurrency OR the economy, and thinks the former could be a threat to the stability of the latter. Again, works well with a voter base even more ignorant than he is.
All in all, just another talking head trying to earn re-election points by jumping feet-first into something neither he nor the general public has any understanding of. No surprises here . . .

-Tuthmose
 
The reason the government would get involved in regulating bitcoins has absolutely nothing to do with seeing it as a threat to the dollar. It has everything to do with exchanges being run by people who have no economic or financial background. There is also very little regulation within the exchanges. There is absolutely nothing stopping the exchanges from taking all of your bitcoins to use to cover their expenses and when the money runs out they fold and go through bankruptcy returning pennies on the dollar. All the people bashing politicians and corporate America why don't you ask your favorite exchange what it is paying its President/ CEO? I bet its a ridiculous salary above and beyond any reasonable profit stream that will likely occur. The lack of regulation and real people losing money is what concerns politicians. The rest of the arguments are the same shitty arguments the gold backers have been making for decades.
 
Stiletto said:
Manchin is a pathetic fucking joke who only gets re-elected by flooding his state with "I'm conservative" bullshit before elections. Sadly, WV is filled with low-information voters.
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Thanks for the background! I don't think WV is alone on that score, unfortunately. Too many people vote for politicians for all the wrong reasons. Good thing about the upcoming elections is that no one believes they'll be getting any free lunches from Washington, anymore, at least not the freebies that those low-caliber voters thought Obama would be sending their way. I think Washington has become bizarro world, though: the place is so out of touch with basic America that it might as well be in another dimension.

Did you get that idiot Harken the other day talking up the wonders of poverty-stricken, blighted Cuba? I'd like to see Congress forced down to Cuba for its medical care, I really would...;) Harken could take Manchin with him. It's difficult to wrap your mind around grown, US-college-educated adults being such morons, isn't it? Definitely tells us a lot about their alma maters....
 
Excellent, we get to embarrass US senators now.

Bring it on.
 
WaltC said:
Did you get that idiot Harken the other day talking up the wonders of poverty-stricken, blighted Cuba? I'd like to see Congress forced down to Cuba for its medical care, I really would...;) Harken could take Manchin with him. It's difficult to wrap your mind around grown, US-college-educated adults being such morons, isn't it? Definitely tells us a lot about their alma maters....
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Speaking of, here's a great article about a blogger's recent visit to Cuba. A nice refresher as to the reality of that dying state. There's more parts later, particularly about Che Guevara and the Cuban idolization of him.
 
Clearly this Congress has shown complete fiscal responsibility, enough to know when something or someone is a risk to the US economy:
420px-FederalDebt1940to2012.svg.png
 
^^ U.S. federal debt held by the public as a percentage of GDP, from 1940 to 2012.
 
Fuck, he is my governor.


I should donate $1000 to his campaign explicitly citing that it came from bitcoins.
 
If it is any consolation we are giving the senator exactly what he wanted (publicity) ... getting our technically illiterate and irreconcilable Congress to tackle Bitcoins has zero chance of success unless they actually link it to Al Qeda or something (terrorism is about the only thing our Congress can agree on) ... the Federal Reserve couldn't care less about BTC or any other crypto currency and they can't do anything (even if they did) unless Congress authorizes them to ... nothing here other than a typical Washington politician getting a little free press on an issue that his voters care nothing about :D
 
kbrickley said:
If it is any consolation we are giving the senator exactly what he wanted (publicity) ... getting our technically illiterate and irreconcilable Congress to tackle Bitcoins has zero chance of success unless they actually link it to Al Qeda or something (terrorism is about the only thing our Congress can agree on) ... the Federal Reserve couldn't care less about BTC or any other crypto currency and they can't do anything (even if they did) unless Congress authorizes them to ... nothing here other than a typical Washington politician getting a little free press on an issue that his voters care nothing about :D
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It's sort of like the weather channel sensationalizing snow by giving the clouds that make it a really scary name. But people are pretty much like that. Look at how excited the bitcoin threads are getting in this forum. Sure most of the world doesn't care so bitcoins are sort of like the oculus rift in the fact that they're only meaningful to a few people, but those people are very, very likely to get all snarly about it.
 
Also one of his main campaign supporters is JP Morgan. He is just another puppet.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
It's sort of like the weather channel sensationalizing snow by giving the clouds that make it a really scary name. But people are pretty much like that. Look at how excited the bitcoin threads are getting in this forum. Sure most of the world doesn't care so bitcoins are sort of like the oculus rift in the fact that they're only meaningful to a few people, but those people are very, very likely to get all snarly about it.
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We're just correcting a very deliberate disinformation campaign.
 
I demand a complete ban on political bribes, err, lobbying.
I demand honest candidates instead of lawyers who got to where they are by screwing everyone over.
I demand DC comic movies that aren't Batman reboots or heroes I could care less about.
I demand politicians pass an IQ test before they can run for office.
 
Bitcoins buy real world items which in turn get sold for real world money.....

What is not to understand?

Oh wait, you not getting your tax dollars from the items sold, never mind :p
 
I would laugh my ass off bad if there was a US government sanctioned ban of Bitcoin and punishment for businesses who accept it. Good ol' Winklemoron twins would certainly lose every dime they've put in to it which would allow me to probably die of laughter.
 
Krenum said:
Bitcoins buy real world items which in turn get sold for real world money.....

What is not to understand?

Oh wait, you not getting your tax dollars from the items sold, never mind :p
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Nah, brah. DRUGS. GUNS. KIDDY PORN!!!!!! :eek::eek::eek:
 
SGA76 said:
I demand politicians pass an IQ test before they can run for office.
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Need a better way to gauge someones intelligence than a lousy / exploitable test such as that, and politicians know damn well how to go around and exploit things for sure.
 
classic power move.

If you cannot control it, ban it.

I don't see how bitcoin is any different than any other monetary system. Heck some towns/business's have their own currency.

I'm afraid this guy is just blowing smoke, the U.S. will not ban bit coin. Even if they tried to, it would take them over 4-5 years just to do that or the rate our congress actually does anything.
 
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