Quote from: breandan81 on February 28, 2011, 09:12:08 PM

This is pretty much my point, if you are a mainstream business person, that is identifiable in real life, you need to observe local laws. You (the customer) don't have to care about that at all, but you can't set up some sort of bitcoin community law in order to do business using the currency. In fact, this is sort of a nonsensical discussion anyway, since you have no authority and no ability to enforce such a system, and a system of voluntary contracts would only be enforceable through local courts. Mainstream businesses will need to do business according to their local laws, that includes bankruptcy protection and all the risk that comes with it, private individuals can rely on bitcoin to be more or less like cash, and simply rely on being under the radar if they choose. The idea of having a separate system of economic regulations for the bitcoin community is not feasible, however, and if widely supported would just alienate mainstream businesses, because they cannot comply with such a system while still obeying their own laws. For arguments sake Amazon could accept bitcoin at some point in the future, and it would be fantastic for the currency, but they have business licenses, tax IDs in almost ever US state and lots of other countries, if you think you can somehow make them comply with some sort of bitcoin community law before their other obligations, which are enforced with monopoly of violence in real geographic jurisdictions, you are delusional. If bitcoin works well, such a parallel legal system will be unenforceable for private transactions as well. So while I understand the ideals behind this whole discussion, I think it's misguided. I should add that if you simply mean to set up some sort of community standards system in which reputation counts and violation of the "laws" cause a lowering of "credit rating" that's fine... that's totally doable, and in fact is already being done at bitcoin-otc.

It isn't unfeasible because some of us are not "mainstream business". We rely solely on our reputation.