Quote from: tvbcof on March 22, 2015, 08:30:48 PM

Quote from: cypherdoc on March 22, 2015, 07:05:32 PM

the thing is, the gvt is not going to get involved in a situation where drug dealers steal coin from other drug dealers and then try to sell them off on an anonymous exchange in Bulgaria. they only care if they themselves can get their hands on the BTC which in this Evo case, they cannot. so they'll just let the community shoot it out and the final result will be just like every other theft in Bitcoinland since Day 1; nothing.

The govt's role is super simple:

- Mandate a license and enforce it on key retailers and service providers of the on-line wallet type (e.g., Coinbase...who probably won't take much convincing...)

- Charter a service (e.g., CoinValidation) or two which do validation.

The licensee just uses a simple API from the validator.

When this occurs I will require that if you want to send me BTC, you do it through my Coinbase account. Yes, I'm vehemently opposed to the whole system, but I'm not going to take a bullet by absorbing your unvalidated BTC which I may not be able to spend and have to trade to someone else who will also will value unvalidated BTC at a lower rate.

To make matters worse, anyone who is enough of a chump to accept unvalidated BTC will find people wishing to dump them beating a path to one's door.

I would also caution against assuming that a validation solution cannot work because of the difficulty of the task. Validation need not be anything remotely precise or even accurate. I think we'll find that the amount of liability protection afforded to a validating service in association with their charter would make the vaccine manufactures blush.

TPTB have a good friend in Mr. Andresen and thus a very strong hand. I won't go into the game theory, but there are still a bunch of ways to overplay the hand that they have here. A person who is on the ball, and who has a bit of luck, may be able to come out of this thing fairly well.

the problem is this; you don't understand the game theory.

the cat is out of the bag on this one. Bitcoin is global and growing rapidly overseas. take the worse case scenario; the US turns off its internet to short circuit Bitcoin. ok, big whoop. the rest of the world continues on. and given their clear tendencies, China and Russia may even embrace Bitcoin once they figure out they can't stop it and embracing could mean the end of the USD hegemony. many of us would route around or tunnel thru via VPN's. first off, turning off the internet will never happen. second, if it did, it would last probably <24 hrs as the banks themselves cry Uncle from the immediate destruction of their daily business and confidence. stock, bond, and USD markets would plummet.

there is something called accountability and credibility that the US gvt must adhere to to a degree despite what you might think. they just got done auctioning off the 3rd tranche of BTC for cold, hard cash that they gladly accepted with open hands. they just got done making it legal via Fincen, the IRS via tax law, the NYDFS via BitLicense, the Senate Banking Hearings, the FEC donations, and various other state laws.

the good news is that the technology is good enough fundamentally to actually make the US eventually want to use it to maintain an upper hand in world finance. perhaps as backing for the USD.