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Guest Post: The Future Of Bitcoin Is In Asia...
Submitted by Simon Black of Sovereign Man blog,
Senator Tom Carper (Delaware) is confused about Bitcoin.
As Chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, this is how Carper framed his opening remarks yesterday at a hearing about digital currencies– with complete, incoherent confusion.
Carper’s hearing went on for several hours as one witness after another testified about the potential evils of digital currencies. They hailed from agencies and organizations like:
- The Homeland Security committee
- Criminal Division of the US Attorney General’s Office
- US Secret Service Criminal Investigative Division
- The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network
- The International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children
Based on the way they stacked the witness list, the message they’re sending is clear: digital currencies like Bitoin equate to crime, terrorism, and child exploitation.
But the height of absurdity in yesterday’s hearing probably came during the testimony from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), in which the agency’s chief cited the BENEFITS of digital currencies, including:
- anonymity
- simple, easy to navigate
- lower fees than the conventional financial system
- globally accessible
- can be used as both a store of value and medium of exchange
- security
etc.
Yet in listing all of these benefits, FinCEN’s chief was actually trying to make a case AGAINST Bitcoin! In her mind, only criminal terrorists want low-fee, secure, globally accessible money.
All of these politicians and bureaucrats can’t wait to get their arms around digital currency to regulate the hell out of it. They don’t understand it… therefore they think it’s dangerous.
Even the World Bank president (a US government-appointed stooge) weighed in on digital currencies. It’s obvious they’re all afraid.
And their entire argument begins with the deeply flawed premise that financial privacy is somehow wrong, immoral, and nefarious.
There’s no sense trying to convince them otherwise. Government’s mission is to obstruct… particularly a government in decline.
So we can expect more hearings, more regulation, more disclosures. At least, in the Land of the Free.
Over here on the other side of the world, though, they’re not afraid of Bitcoin.
Places like Hong Kong and Singapore understand that they have a role to play as preeminent international financial centers in becoming financial hubs for digital currencies.
If the US wants to shoot itself in the foot (again) and shut itself out of the market, so be it. But Asia is embracing its potential role in the marketplace, complete with all the risks and rewards.
It wasn’t but a few weeks ago that a Hong Kong-based bitcoin exchange ran off with a few million dollars of customer money. But that hasn’t cooled demand in the region… nor has it sparked a wave of debilitating regulations to clamp down on digital currencies.
What this ultimately means is that all the new businesses and intellectual capital associated with digital currencies will flock to Asia… just in the same way that all the cutting edge precious metals firms are now basing themselves in Singapore.
The US government is sharpening its steak knives in anticipation of a great digital currency roast. But they’ll find out very soon that Bitcoin has left the building… and moved on to greener, safer pastures in Asia.
This is good news, especially for second generation digital currencies and related firms like litecoin, ripple, and ven.
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K.
Hold your bitcoins then and see what happens.
Portugal's most famous fraudster, Alves Reis, did just that in the 20s: he faked a printing order and took delivery of 200k "real" 500 PTE notes (100mil PTE - almost 1% of GDP), with duplicated serial numbers from previous series. It didn't end as expected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alves_dos_Reis
Bitcoin has the advantage of being the most well known and accepted digital currency at present. Kind of like Amazon and Ebay. In theory you could create a new company identical to Amazon, with identical inventory and prices. But why would anyone switch over to this new company unless there is some advantage to it?
On the other hand, Bitcoin is very new. We have all seen how quickly technology advances and how the latest technomarvels quickly become old hat. In particular, the transaction verification time for Bitcoin seems a bit high for retail purposes. So I think Bitcoin might be in danger from some of the newer digital currencies that offer faster transaction verification. Also, Bitcoin really doesn't offer privacy. All transactions are recorded on a publically available blockchain. It is true that the addresses are not directly tied to individuals. But a government could certainly trace the machine that broadcasts a particular transaction associated with a specific Bitcoin address and probably link that machine to an owner (unless the person is very careful and computer-knowledgable).
Bitcoin hasn't gained universal acceptablity yet, so it is certainly vulnerable to being displaced by a superior digital currency technology.
the whole of the btc phenomena can probably co-opted 100 different ways btc investors could never conceive.
No thanks, and God bless you gamblers on your tulip bubble rewards...
Here's a site with information on 142 alternate coins for you to enjoy:
http://com-http.us/
Here's an exchange for trading bitcoins for alternate coins:
https://coinex.pw/
bitcoins won't be fully mined for another 100 years or so, so no big worry there. If you mean run out of new buyers, that's another issue. The chips for mining bitcoins are specific to SHA-256, while litecoin uses Scrypt, so you cannot use the same hardware.
Their minds can not conceive of a currency that is not subject to their inflation tax
Meanwhile the most important news today: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-19/gold-benchmarks-said-to-be-under-review-by-u-k-as-probe-widens.html
The USA Politicians haven't yet figured out how to 'fuck and tax' crypto-currency, I will not use that word BTC(bitcoin), because it is only one of 100's if not 1,000's of crypto-currency's.
The good news is the one that the USA embraces may very well be BTC, then they can have it, and the us anarchists can they move over to litecoin, or where ever free men transfer money.
I'm certain the Chinese would be happy to have foreign assets move to China.
Once they calculate there is a certain threshold on shore, they'll force conversion to Yuan.
Stop the talk about 'coin', by definition of the creator a coin is just a 'chain letter'.
It's a pyramid scam where the first in, get the loot. Ok, but what's important is SATOSHI proved the concept, that it was possible, now we move on to true Peer-2-Peer money, with no fucking 'pools', or 'exchanges'.
The 'pools' and 'exchanges' are the weak-link that will be controlled by the god damn fucking US government.
***
"We define an electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures." - satoshi
[1] W. Dai, "b-money," http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt, 1998.
[2] H. Massias, X.S. Avila, and J.-J. Quisquater, "Design of a secure timestamping service with minimal
trust requirements," In 20th Symposium on Information Theory in the Benelux, May 1999.
[3] S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, "How to time-stamp a digital document," In Journal of Cryptology, vol 3, no
2, pages 99-111, 1991.
[4] D. Bayer, S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, "Improving the efficiency and reliability of digital time-stamping,"
In Sequences II: Methods in Communication, Security and Computer Science, pages 329-334, 1993.
[5] S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, "Secure names for bit-strings," In Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conference
on Computer and Communications Security, pages 28-35, April 1997.
[6] A. Back, "Hashcash - a denial of service counter-measure,"
http://www.hashcash.org/papers/hashcash.pdf, 2002.
[7] R.C. Merkle, "Protocols for public key cryptosystems," In Proc. 1980 Symposium on Security and
Privacy, IEEE Computer Society, pages 122-133, April 1980.
[8] W. Feller, "An introduction to probability theory and its applications," 1957.
9
My theory is Wei Dai, whom you referenced, is Satoshi Nakamoto. He's worked in cryptography, developed Bitcoin's precurser BMoney, and wrote the crypto libraries the first verson of the Bitcoin software used. Still doesn't change the fact that your post is stupid.
Personally I don't give a fuck WHO Satoshi is, a man behind a Mask, just like V for Vendetta, what matters is his ideas.
What don't you like that I said? Against toll booths?
I stand by what I said, bitcoin.org has fucked the Satoshi ideas in the ASS, and created a goldman-sacks toll gate.
Arrest the Financial Terrorists: Blankfein, Dimon and Yellen. Throw them into prisons.
They are like pedophiles. They won't stop until they are captured.
All digital currency is a trap
All FIAT is now digital currency.
Right? Some +90% of all USD or EURO is transferred electronically, and is never in anyone's dirty hand.
They used the word "global" about 200x in the hearing yesterday. Anyone notice that?
These digital currencies smell like rotten fish. Why is ZH promoting this? That is the question.
yep,
bait & switch,
now the btc paradigm is proven,
the US gubmint know their USD if fucked,
so the us gubmint say's trust-us, we'll take the guys who developed obama-care, and make the best btc-clone sw on the planet, and you all can trade in YTC's ( yellen coin's )
Yep, the GUY that can create a new world currency, is going to be KING, and everybody knows it, ... its like a 'race' in the sense of free land back in the 1800's USA,
The US gubmint can not control it, so they MUST create it,..
SO you have to ask why is the MSM promoting BTC? Why is little msm like zero-head promoting BTC?
If you hear an orchestra, look for a conductor.
"Why is ZH promoting this? That is the question."
The obvious answer is that it brings ad revenue. There is also the possibility that Tyler has done due diligence and has come to separate conclusions then yours, or he's just plain smarter. On the other hand I don't see outright promotion. I see reports of events and facts as they happen, some background info, opinions of guest commentators, etc.
The answer is they're getting Bitcoin donations, and now they see this paper wealth, and its in their personal interest to pump it up, and then when its all gone, they'll be the first to moan.
Tyler's for god's SAKE SELL IT ALL NOW WHY YOU STILL CAN.
Asia prospers for ONE fucking reason, prior to April 2013, mining ( running sw to find a bitcoin block ) was egalitarian, but in April the chinese started making ASIC-USB chip-sets that plug into a computer that let mining go up 100X for that machine, ... so 'mining' was no longer egalitarian, by the end of April mining 'solo' was kaput, today the chinese have server farm's of ASIC's, so in effect the chinese are doing all the fucking mining.
Solution has been to start lite-coin, which is bitcoin sw, but uses a different crypto-algo ( hash scrypt ), as opposed to sha-256(NSA). The NSA algo was ideal for ASIC, and thus by going to 'Scyrpt' its a memory hog and only works on PC's, ... so that put's everyone and his PC back on parity, but the chinese also make the fucking server farms of GPUS ( game graphic boards ), so now this so called fucking 'mining' for HASH's the game will be won by the chinese, cuz they're always going to have the cheapest, and fastest HW on the low end, way before the white hair-lip in the USA, or EURO.
The asian win's the MINING game, ... but here's the fucking problem, the orginal crypto-currency 'bitcoin' had no fucking mining, ... that was created by fuck-heads.
The next crypto-currency will go back to the orginal SATOSHI design, and be pure 100% p2p as he wanted.
Excellent write-up Carlin. I also don't think Simon understands one fuckwit about Hong Kong. The colonial model the Brits left in place was basically maintained by the incoming Commie-friendly regimes. Hong Kong is basically a cartel economy where barely any economic activity is conducted outside the influence sphere and / or ownership of one of a handful of cartels. Free market my ass. All land is owned by the government, one can only lease-hold for a term of 99 years; nearly 50% of the population live in public housing. Wealth in Hong Kong is highly correlated to property ownership. The cartels gip on the economy means little competition, zero innovation, massive overspending on redudant endless large construction projects, artificially high prices for basic consumer services and so on. The only "free" thing in hong Kong is the flow of money, and the lax government oversight. No wonder insurance behemoths and investment banks love it here. Now the mainland hordes have started invading in earnest i'm plotting my exit strategy. As Hong Kong slowly transforms into another mainland shithole its liveability declines in lockstep.
I live in rural southern himalayan china, ... I do go to HK, from time to time, and I speak most languages having been here for 30+ years.
I think HK is exciting and safe, and love the fact that all the cop's are gorgeous chicks +9's in my book.
Now of course shanghai and Beijing, offer the same as HK, ...
What you say is true, ... but those who bought early those fucking flats in HK, or shanghai are now paper millionaires,...not unlike frisco or nyc or seattle really,
It's still quite easy for a foriegner to walk into any bank in china(or hk) and open an account,
Funny even SNOWDEN ran to HK, first..
All I can say is there is ONE NAZI hell on earth, and the cops are ugly fucking assholes, and all sucks dick and is evil, and that is the USA.
Is Bitcoin circle-jerk for crypto-nerds?
Are you lonesome tonight?
I think the +90% of crypto-nerds are 100% against bitcoin.org,
The orginal 'founder' Satoshi, wouldn't even recognize his baby now,
The people who PUMP BTC are msm alt-talking heads
It's the 'new gold' for the wacky libertarian left, but make no mistake those of us with advanced math degrees that have been involved in discrete-math all along, know that BTC is a fraud.
It will be the mother of all crashes when China bans bitcoin.
Keep some dry powder on hand just in case.
China likes Bitcoin. A lot. The Chinese government knows it's a long term threat to the Federal Reserve and European banks. Bitcoin is no threat to China's money system. Being tied to other currencies, the renminbii is far more flexible than the Federal Reserve Note.
Everyone seems to forget that the Chinese invented paper money. We're playing their game straight to our crashnburn.
The Hayekian ChiCom government is promoting underground Bitcoin economy because...
What a ludicrous idea.
Bitcoin...meet the new boogie man.
Meanwhile if you want to launder ill gotten gains, why bother with the Bitcoin headache when you can go to any TBTF Bank?
And BTFW, opacity and anonimity is just fine as long as you do it in the Grand Caymans or Luxembourg.
Just keep it under 8k and use mules to move it...give em 10% on every thousand.
Hey, its a livin and better than workin for it, its almost like charity ;-)
A few years ago I saw a video of a man who somehow had what was worth over 100 k in bitcoin that he could view the value of, but sadly had lost some needed code to extract it or cashe it in. That was back when bitcoin was perhaps $5. now at over $500 that sad man must be doubly sad not being able to access over 10 million in bitcoin value.
Even when he is right, Simon comes off as a douche.
So the question remains, will you buy a btc while it's worth less than an apple stock or an ounce of gold or after...
www.getbitcoins.tk
Sure gimme 1000!
I'll re-buy (that is, I owned it and sold it) it after it drops another 70%.
Have a nice day.
One has to wonder, what good would a bit coin be in this situation.:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mxvx9gQ8k0
Or, as is being expected, gamed and planned for; what if a CME from the slingshot passage of ISON causes a real actual uncontrollable take down of the electric grid? What if this is being planned for maybe, the end of this month or maybe next month? Is there is something in the debris trail as we pass through it on Dec 26th?
Hummm...kinda interesting to see this digi-money-god gingerly move into the chinese realm. Like those babylonian globalists maruce strong that have moved to the big modern cites there in china had nothing to do with an electronic digital traceable taxable and controllable world currency that might be left after all the others were wiped off the map. Funny thing is, how would that happen if most of the world/s populations were without power for say maybe a year, or so?
Well, I've invested $475 in bitcoin mining equipment since last March. Today, I took delivery of 1/2oz of gold purchased directly with bitcoins and I still have all the mining equipment.
Within eight months, I recovered my original investment and am now earning $0.005 bitcoins per day at a cost of 60 watts per hour. I'll never get rich from it, but I'll enjoy quite few good dinners and my modest booze bill is paid for.
2.5 cents a day, less commission and other cost, and your thinking that 60W light bulb heater is free? Then there is the cost to your system, as excessive heat is strain and will kill the system eventually.
Nobody makes money mining since April, that was the peak, after that the ASIC's took over, even before may very well be hearsay,... as its an urban myth that BTC's came from mining, ... most were just there as early 'share' give aways by good old boys, .. aka bitcoin.org.
Your losing money, at 2.5 cents a day that is $9 USD a year, and mining just started in the last few years, most just jumped on post April. You say you bought 1/2 oz of gold at say $600, and that would make your six month income $1200/year, rather than $9/year.
Maybe sarcasm I suspect. Remember you can google 'bitcoin hack inject hash blocks' and get free software that lets you create your own BTC's rather than mine them, and you'll probably make more than 2 cents a day, ... less utility charge.
I think they understand:it is a threat to their funny money monopoly. Print it and force the slaves to use it and have first knowledge about wether a bubble or a bust is coming.
hahahaha, round eyes, all your gorld and bitcoins are belong to us.
*****
Washington, (AP)
Premier Hussein Backdoor has announced the sale of the US to China. The Premier made the announcement today, after returning from his honeymoon with his new husband, Reggie.
"I got us a good price. If you like your stuff, you can keep your stuff."
The sale is being contested by his ex-wife, Wookie, who wants California as part of the divorce settlement.
I know everyone is very enthusiastic towards the Chinese demand of Bitcoin which implies Bitcoin will have a much bigger role in Chinese economy in the future.
WRONG.
It is just a speculative fad and if you know what Chinese has speculated in the recent past (iPhone, iPad, Infant Formula, stamps, Chinese wine, French wine, you name it) then you will have no surprise that they turn their latest attention to Bitcoin. But it is just speculation and Chinese government will have a massive clamp down on it if it ever gets to a meaningful scale because that threatens the control on capital flow (along with other woes).
the government worker is an expensive welfare recipient producing NOTHING of value...
Does anyone else have concerns that the recent volitility in BTC is a result of Chinese INvestors jumping on board and playing the ramp game? Those who got in first, are making the dough, the rest of the folks are just climbing a pyramid. Recent "thefts" of BTC and those pesky "encrypted" wallets that no one can get into, not to mention the acclaimed "limited availability" are all designed to create something digital that simply doesn't exist.
The emperor has no clothes. Those who get theirs and get out will be laughing at all the suckers who tried to get in and didn't get out. It's the best ponzi of all, people are paying fiat to get in and accepting digital cyphers in exchange. Congrats to those who made hay, your horse came in. For the rest of you, you get what you paid for.