Quote from: proudhon on May 02, 2013, 11:57:51 AM

Quote from: Brushan on May 02, 2013, 07:48:37 AM

Quote from: QuantumQrack on May 02, 2013, 07:17:07 AM

Bitcoin will remain unregulated. It doesnt matter if people in the community want it regulated or if government(s) want it regulated. Bitcoin, by nature, is unregulated. They cannot seize your btc unless under duress, etc. You are your own bank.

Until the devs fork it and say: "Here is the regulated Bitcoin 2.0 which will be worth 10000USD because of big company involvement, if you don't want use it then use the unregulated Bitcoin 1.0 for illegal activities which will be worth about 2USD."

Looking at the majority of people involved in Bitcoin i'd place my money on that everybody would go for 2.0. Of course, the Bitcoin Foundation together with other large companies (paypal, banks etc), will make a plan to slowly manipulate us into believing that a regulated Bitcoin will be much better for everyone. If you ask me, it has already begun.

I'm still confused by this whole discussion, and I think people aren't thinking this through and are failing to appreciate the nuance of what it would even mean to regulate bitcoin, or any other payment system built on the distributed, blockchain model.

Can we all pause for a moment and try to explain what it would even mean to "regulate bitcoin"? By its nature, a distributed, majority rules rule, blockchain system is resistant to top-down, state imposed regulation of itself. In that sense, neither bitcoin, nor litecoin, nor any other system based on this model can simply be regulated upon in the sense that some authority declares it should behave a certain way and then it is so. Again, the system is resistant to that by design. I get the sense that people are worried that the system will be regulated in this sense. It practically cannot be.

On the other hand, points of contact with the traditional financial system (e.g. banks) can be regulated upon in a top-down authoritarian way. Regulation at these points of contact is practically impossible to prevent. In some cases regulation in this sense may even be desirable.

Can we please get clear about which sense of regulation we're talking about here.

I have no problem with regulating exchanges whatsoever, I think it is actually a good thing. But I do have a strong problem with the following:

Quote from: 100x on May 01, 2013, 11:27:02 PM

Quote from: retep on May 01, 2013, 11:10:26 PM

In the last round of grant proposals at one point Gavin suggested someone submit a grant for a trust-free mixer service to help people make the coins in their wallet more anonymous by mixing them with a large pool of other users. I asked Gavin about that later, and he said the foundation lawyers nixed the idea because efforts to make Bitcoin users more anonymous could be seen to be aiding money laundering, especially if the foundation itself was paying for development and to run the servers.

We can work with regulators to make sure Bitcoin is acceptable to them. For instance we can ensure that it remains possible to track the flow of money through Bitcoin. We can also ensure that there are options if certain funds need to be frozen and blacklisted, due to fraud, theft, or because they encode illegal data. We can work with them to find ways to apply AML rules to Bitcoin transactions and to the exchanges. There are ways to put taxation into Bitcoin itself, so that taxes are automatically applied when a transaction is made. Maybe even one day we'll be required to prevent dangerous levels of deflation. A lot of these changes are technical, such as improving scalability so transactions can remain on the blockchain, developing P2P blacklist technologies, and preventing deflation.

Sounds freakin' dandy. Count me out if it goes this direction.