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Comment by joering2 | Hacker News Reader

The more that I am wrapping my head around it, the more I realize this all may not be an accident.

My conspiracy theories side tells me this: imagine that you own a bank that is not guarded by any rules laws or regulations, that most money is deposited anonymously or semi-anonymously, and it is deposited in unmarked banknotes. And its worth $500k.

Now, fast forward to today and you keep keys to $400,000,000 vault. Only rules haven't changed. Now, given the overall complexity of bitcoins algorithm, the fact that mt gox is (afaik) not even registered in a country with solid laws, wouldn't you grab the money and "run", even though running means only pointing out there was a glitch in the system and filing for bankruptcy protection?

If any of this is true, then here is your (sad) reasoning why we need government oversight when it comes to dealing with someones property, being it even bits on someones hard drive.

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How is Japan not "a country with solid laws".

I read it as saying that Japan was not a country with solid laws that relate to Bitcoin. One requirement for having solid laws, would be some sort of compulsory security audit of the code by independent experts. Japanese law did not require this, so did not have solid laws relating to Bitcoin exchanges.

> One requirement for having solid laws, would be some sort of compulsory security audit of the code by independent experts.

This doesn't exist in the U.S. financial system. Maybe it should, but honestly it is such a stronger requirement than anything close to what we have currently, and I imagine it would be impossible to enact on a resistant market (try defining "independent security experts"... oy).

"solid" being compared with the holy crap of regulations the US have.

I (a German) laugh my behind off when I read that as a mail-order business one is expected (and fined if noncompliant to the letter) to the tax codes of villages so small that they would not even count as a village in Germany. And if you're shipping inside the European Union, well, just properly declare the VAT and be done with it.

As a German, you may want to brush up on your understanding of U.S. law. First, if you're a mail order business in California you don't have to pay attention to any other state's sales or use tax laws unless you have a business presence (such as an office) in that state. As a California shipper shipping in-state you need to look up the destination zip code's tax rate, true, but it's county-by-county and you can do it for free here: https://maps.gis.ca.gov/boe/TaxRates/

Second, if you want to avoid even this annoyance, you can start your business in one of the five states with no sales taxes including New Hampshire or Oregon, meaning you never have to collect any sales taxes. Third, if you do have offices in other states, you can buy some relatively cheap software that takes care of billing for you.

I'm not saying this system is perfect or even that it'll continue given the pro-Internet tax forces in Congress, but nevertheless I don't think your description is accurate.

Yelling "government" when we can't find an obvious solution to a complex problem is a childish habit that everyone seriously needs to break.

In this case there is even plenty of evidence that it won't work: Government regulated banks have simply discovered less obvious means to run off with the plunder.

What we really need is strong stance from the bitcoin foundation against any service that offers to hold user's wallet keys.

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