Forgive me if I'm just being ignorant on the matter (I'm not super familiar with Bitcoin), but wasn't one of the founding principles of Bitcoin the idea that it wasn't/wouldn't be regulated?
Starting from the above, an extended game of Telephone resulted in some people thinking that Bitcoin can't be regulated at all. This is a silly belief.
I'm not sure where would you get this definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation
> Regulation may refer to the following:
> A process of the promulgation, monitoring, and enforcement of rules, established by primary and/or delegated legislation.
> A written instrument containing rules having the force of law.
In this context they talk about monitoring and enforcing companies' use of bitcoins within legal system.
As `mrb said here, it is not very clear since it explicitly is dealing with bitcoin exchanges: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6238754
In this respect, this is no different than most things government regulates, including money-in-the-form-of-coins-and-scraps-of-paper.
Mmm, they kinda can: they can deploy a large cluster, let's say 90% of capacity, hoard mined coins, then release them at once - booms, effect is not that different from printing.
1. Mix coins with others to make it impossible to trace where he spends them.
2. Pay someone for labour.
3. Buy any digital product or service online from anyone in the world.
4. Buy something delivered to his door via postal service.
5. Pay for small purchases like with cash.
6. Buy some assets in another country.
Each of these activities are really hard to monitor or affect.
Some activities are easier to regulate. If you are going to buy some AAPL shares or a house, you'd have to tell government something about yourself or the source of your income.
As an individual trading and accepting bitcoins for goods with other individuals, you would be out of the scope of regulation, and because of the nature of bitcoins, you could make it scale to business like levels.
This do happen in real life quite often when people are not paid in cash.
In this case the blockchain is visible for all to see, including the governments, and they only have to resolve the true identity of someone once to be right for all time.
But for individuals, one can create as many wallets as they wish, use as many laundering clients over tor, to remain out of reach. Which is exactly why governments have to set up honey pots to confiscate bitcoins on sites like the silk road (which end up not being effective deterrents and end up being outed as such by the community that relies/favors on reputable past trades). I suspect business/organizations can employ similar technologies to reduce their taxation and how much they declare.
Yes, that is what the state does.
As an individual trading and accepting bitcoins for goods with other individuals, you would be out of the scope of regulation, and because of the nature of bitcoins, you could make it scale to business like levels.
Yeah but your chances of running such a business and, say, not collecting the sales taxes for your area just went down a few notches. Bitcoin transactions are public, more public than, say, paper currency transactions.
And to answer the gp's original question, this does contradict the original intention of bitcoins. Failed or succesful, bitcoins are losing the specialness that was their original pull. Well, suck on it. The original intention was a la, la land phantasy, a fundamentally impossible Libertarian Party wet-dream.
Bitcoinist never figured out whether their cry was "they can't stop us", "they won't (try to) stop us" or "they shouldn't stop us". The result - the state clearly can stop bitcoin but so prefers to just control it.
I had imagined the whole thing would just collapse but I suppose it may just wind-up a fully regulated cash transfer system. But money still depends on the state.
Think of waiters receiving cash tips.