Quote from: willphase on September 02, 2013, 10:15:49 AM

There is a key difference here between engaging with legislators and educating them that bitcoin does not need heavy handed regulation (as the foundation has done last week in Washington), from just shunning governments entirely and hoping that they will leave us alone saying 'na na you can't shut us down because you can't turn off the internet!!'. This is the path to destruction, so any candidate that engages with regulators and government would get my vote.

In that case, you might be interested to hear more about what Joerg Platzer has to say. Joerg's ongoing dialogue with the German authorities, particularly with lawmaker Frank Schäffler, recently resulted in the German finance ministry officially recognizing bitcoins as a unit of account, what many consider a major milestone here in Europe.

Here's Joerg's no-holds-barred take on regulation vis-a-vis proactively educating authorities about Bitcoin as he has been doing for the past three years here in Berlin:

Quote from: https://bitcoinfoundation.org/forum/index.php?/topic/344-individual-candidate-joerg-platzer/#entry4161

The absurdity of trying to regulate Bitcoin

> Imagine Gutenberg going to Rome to lobby for the printing press with the Pope!

There is an obvious divide going right through the Bitcoin community, more like a canyon than like a gap: for and against trying to get regulation and compliance of Bitcoin.

I am clearly taking a side on this issue: lobbying for Bitcoin and trying to implement it into the regulatory framework of the legacy financial system is an absurd, unreasonable and irresponsible waste of resources.

I would like to lift this discussion away from Bitcoin to the level of crypto-currency altogether. It is possible, even though now hardly imaginable, that Bitcoin could be co-opted on a political level and turned into something controllable. That is what the people on the regulatory side will ultimatively want and it means the implementation of transaction-reversibility, black- or whitelisting and KYC and AML on every level, even for human to human transactions. The regulators will not stop at getting the exchanges regulated (which is fine by the way as long as people can choose not to use them). Regulators and governments do not stop at half way or at 99% control, they want 100% control, always. 'A little regulated' is as much possible as 'a little pregnant'. Everybody who stands for 'compromising with the government' sounds like a dreamer to me as I have never seen a government 'compromise' with its subjects.

But even in the unlikely event of Bitcoin being turned into Paypal 2.0 that would not stop but merely delay the rise of crypto-currency as the next, more resilient one is waiting just around the corner. Even if the pope would have gained control over Gutenberg's first printing press and turned it into a machine that can only print bibles in Latin the next free printing press would have been built the next day by someone else.

The printing press and crypto-currency both are the kind of invention that change things forever. The first took away the church's monopoly on the contents of books and the second took away the government's monopoly on the creation of money. This kind of thing cannot be turned back, the technology is out and will never be collectively forgotten again.

Therefore and beyond all unnecessary and highly ideological arguments: you cannot regulate the unregulatable so let's stop wasting energy on this absurd undertaking please.

We can merely try to inform and educate governments and people about the changes coming up in order to help smooth the transition from our world to the rising crypto-economy so that this transition will be as painless and with as few victims and as little collateral damage as possible.

Quote from: https://bitcoinfoundation.org/forum/index.php?/topic/344-individual-candidate-joerg-platzer/page__st__20#entry4164

Please don't missunderstand what you call my 'goals'. When I say that Bitcoin will regulate the regulators and that the state has just lost one of the mechanisms from which it derives its most power, namely the monopoly on the creation of money, then these are not my goals. It doesn't even matter if I like that or not or if you or Obama or Merkel like that or not. It is simply what is happening.

So I am rather the messenger here reporting the obvious than someone demanding these things.

We should react to this new reality instead of playing around with our old mechanisms and organisations and my goal is probably to achieve that.