Quote from: JorgeStolfi on May 21, 2014, 02:33:08 PM

Quote from: JayJuanGee on May 21, 2014, 09:06:50 AM

Jorge retains some fantasy illusion that his posts affect the behavior of some marginal newbies

Rua Santa Ifigênia is the traditional "electronics street" of São Paulo, some 5-10 blocks with tiny to medium-sized shops selling from transistors to consumer electronics, with sidewalks lined with street merchant stalls selling all sorts of accessories, cartridges, software, etc.. A large part of it is contraband, pirated, or counterfeit (you can surely find a "legitimate" copy of Photoshop or Autocad there for a few bucks). Once in a while the police raids the place, confiscates a couple of tons of merchandise, gves out fines and maybe some arrests, just to justify their salaries; but that is all "priced in" as you might say.

Some 10-15 years ago a Ph.D. student of mine bought for her project a Sony camera that had a CD burner built-in and recorded images directly on small 3" CD-Rs. (There was a short time window when that camera made sense, because flash memory cards had about the same capacity as those CD-Rs but were much more expensive.) She was running out of the original supply of CD-Rs, and could not find then in Campinas; so one day we happened to be in São Paulo we thought of checking at Sta. Ifigiênia.

When you buy anything in Brazil the store is supposed to give you a "fiscal note", an official serially numbered receipt, of which they keep a copy. Those receipts are used by tax auditors to check whether the state sales tax is being paid. Obviously street merchants and stores selling contraband don't give no friggin' fiscal notes, especially for a small purchase like a box of blank CDs; but since we were paying with federal grant money we needed the fiscal notes, and moreover we had to pay with a check from the government account. We had to walk the whole street, asking at half a dozen computer supply shops, until we found a store that had those 3" CD-Rs, accepted the check, and gave us a fiscal note.

While we were walking back, people started shouting "tax inspectors, tax inspectors" all over the place. In ten minutes (no exaggeration) half the small shops in the entire street closed their doors, and all the sidewalk stalls had been hastily folded and thrown into vans that disappeared from view. For, you see, they had spotted two odd-looking people entering random shops and asking to buy some trinket with a fiscal note -- what else could they be?

So: don't underestimate.

So don't underestimate the fear people have of the tax authorities? I don't think most bit-coiners do. Aren't you undermining your own argument a bit - if half of *all the traders there* didn't want your dirty fiat because they were operating in the grey economy - what makes you think they won't be interested in cryptographically secure, potentially anonymous value transmission, whether thats BTC or something else. Maybe you should get yourself a bitcoin and see what you can buy on the Rua Santa Ifigênia now