Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Do we want to work with money regulators, or keep Bitcoin unregulated?
by
jdillon
on 02/05/2013, 03:08:33 UTC
The OP's post is very slippery. It's written as if it's describing the situation from a neutral stance, but it's full of political games.

OK, you might have missed it for the straw men, but there's an actual thing in there. Retep is opposed to improving scalability so transactions can remain on the blockchain. He has some opinions about what the blockchain should be used for, and he wants to cap the network at 7 transactions per second, and blow fees through the roof so that most of the current uses of Bitcoin will have to go somewhere else.

What's slippery is you anti-privacy lot never once mentioning how the massive blockchain you keep on pushing will result in bloat that even Gavin thinks will soon make operating a node cost $100/month. You'll have no choice but to move to a big data center with a fast connection right out in the open, and users will have no alternatives other than continuing to have every transaction they make recorded publicly for regulators to analyze.

Good luck keeping the regulators away under those conditions. Moving your blacklisted coins will be a matter of hoping that the few, if any, pools still running that don't follow AML know your customer regulations aren't busy trying to find another country to set up shop in.

This is a tough argument for him to win and making transactions cost $1 or $10 or $100 would not be very popular, so when the core developers try to scale the network up he's trying to make you think that it's part of some kind of pro-government plot involving the Bitcoin foundation.

Funny how the core developers seem to mostly agree with him, with the exception of Gavin. Guess who's getting their salary paid by big businesses?

Peter is damn right to say that we need technology that keeps Bitcoin regulators away from the core of Bitcoin. FWIW I think you should just submit a pull request to the foundation bylaws, and add a section on anonymity and decentralization. See how they respond, if at all.