Bitcoin on the rise

[bryan]

On the whole I think he is mostly right.. Seems like he's researched the stuff and speaks intelligently about it, but maybe just the surface level stuff. Any specific points you were wondering about? Him knocking Estonia was pretty daft and an indication that perhaps he maybe can't see any forest here.

I think he's flatly wrong that crypto-currency original, main (only?!) use is using the money in a way others don't want you to. Sure that's a big feature (kind of like other monies, no?), but the actual reason was simply that we've been wanting digital money since the 80s and it's never worked. If the governments, banks, whoever had provided something that worked and could be built upon, we would have adopted it (Paypal (Thiel, Musk, etc) wanted to introduce something like this but.. meh). He says correctly that Bitcoin was a solution to "Byzantine Generals Problem" (I'm sure he read the quora answer one of my friends wrote years ago.. think I shared that somewhere here) i.e. trusting, sharing, and interacting with a ledger with those you can't completely trust. He doesn't really divide miners, full nodes, or users and how they each have consensus roles to play in the network (to be fair, neither did Bitcoin software; and miners do have the clearing/mining power after all). Him thinking miner A could just assign miner B's new block to herself as long as her cartel friends backed her is flatly wrong (for Bitcoin, at least).

"private innovates, public appropriates" seems correct. I think governments, banks, whoever will roll out their own digital currencies or public ledgers. You can be sure it won't be Proof-of-Work. Honestly a direct democracy coin/ledger has seemed to me an excellent solution; I may move to whatever country, corporation introduces it . And of course there is the whole privacy, anonymous thing to consider..

[jennypenny]

Thanks bryan.

[BRUTE]

Honestly a direct democracy coin/ledger has seemed to me an excellent solution; I may move to whatever country, corporation introduces it

brute's thesis: as soon as an actual, effective technical solution for Democracy is implemented, humans will finally realize what a dumb idea it really is. it's just mob rule with lipstick on it.

[suomalainen]

@brute - what's a better governmental / societal / organizational design?

[BRUTE]

brute isn't convinced those are context-independent. he certainly likes the Republic part better than the Democracy part. as a libertarian, brute believes humans telling him what to do is bad. doesn't matter if those humans are kings, popes, gods, The People, or representatives thereof. the part brute doesn't enjoy is being told what to do.

brute likes the idea of anarcho-capitalism, but believes it wouldn't work right now. maybe there's something to the whole Marxian idea of historic necessity/determinism. maybe dictatorships and tyranny have to happen in certain contexts. maybe democracies have to happen in others. maybe, one day, humans will be advanced enough for anarcho-capitalism. or something else that's good.

brute thinks that, in the political/organizational sense, civilization is the average distance from "human likes A therefore human will take A" (violence/theft) and "human B is like human A so human A likes human B" (tribalism). animals have a very low capacity to recognize the long-term benefits of denying current pleasure for more future pleasure, eg. having a society with specialization of labor instead of clubbing each other over the head for food. humans are not born with this ability, but can build it over many generations. the current generation of humans is clearly not advanced enough to even perform democracy right - and maybe there isn't a way to perform democracy right.

brute thinks that there are certain things humans like (food, shelter, roads, protection from other humans), and there are various ways to get those. which way is the best depends on many factors, among them technology, circumstance, terrain, population, and culture.

it's obvious to most humans that the government is not the best way to feed humans. it's clear to many humans that the USPS is not the best way to deliver mail. it's conceivable to some humans that the government might not be the best way to provide roads and protection under all circumstances.

if dividing the power of government into 3 branches is good, why isn't it better to have more branches? and instead of sharding by category ("horizontally"), powers could be sharded in thin vertical slices (competing law enforcement agencies with their own ruleset) or any other combination. it could be a matrix, where certain law enforcement agencies use the rulesets of certain legislative bodies, combined with the adjudication of certain judges or agencies.

brute doesn't have a very strong opinion on "that one system is clearly the best!", but it seems obvious to him that the way to get to a better system involves competition, iteration, and experimentation.

[suomalainen]

oh christ, if you're gonna go all agile on me, i think i might vomit

edit: sorry, sorry, that was harsh. bringing work home with me. kicking the dog. anyway, to be more substantive in responding, isn't The Republic (and all other forms of government) exactly that - the product of experimentation, iteration, competition? Boiled down, my take is that all forms of rule are "bad", so separation of powers is the best (so far) that you're gonna get. But even with separation of powers, humans gonna humanize, which means it's still gonna be shitshow...just with 3 (or more...or I guess only 2 nowadays) competing odors rather than just 1.

Anyway, sorry to drag off topic. Blockchain blockchain blockchain.

[bryan]

Honestly a direct democracy coin/ledger has seemed to me an excellent solution; I may move to whatever country, corporation introduces it

brute's thesis: as soon as an actual, effective technical solution for Democracy is implemented, humans will finally realize what a dumb idea it really is. it's just mob rule with lipstick on it.

Well initially I was just thinking of a direct democracy money. Basically the state or corp is doing the identification of participants (easiest that way and there's already a lot of infrastructure for that) and everyone else participates in the one-person-one-chance "mining" lottery. This distributes the power/network more. But yeah, once you have the blockchain for that, you could do all sorts of governance things with it (and have oracles run by perhaps direct democracy licensed parties?). Would be a nice experiment, I think.

[BRUTE]

brute is all for trying it. blockchain sure seems better vetted than voting machines lol. it might just move the problems, though - now joe shmoe has to ensure he hasn't been hacked by russian vote manipulators instead of just reading their propaganda. in a sense, the whole middleman/representative systems (both in banking and politics) protects the voter from having to learn that stuff.

[bryan]

Him thinking miner A could just assign miner B's new block to herself as long as her cartel friends backed her is flatly wrong (for Bitcoin, at least).

I would just add that although it is wrong on its face, you could argue semantics. Important parts of the (probabilistic) Bitcoin security model do rely on the assumption that the majority of miners are not coordinating in specific ways. Specifically for the example of miner's "stealing" blocks, you could have a mining cartel A of 75% that coordinates against other miners B by ignoring, say, half of B's valid new blocks, with the end result of A creating more blocks (and rewards) than their mining capability warrants. So yes be concerned about 51% attacks (either from miners or capital represented by full nodes). Plenty of people think Bitcoin is not decentralized enough.

[Jason]

I would argue that the country is no longer separated by the three branches but has in fact disintegrated into an oblique administrative state of innumerable competitors. The legislation branch no longer makes the laws. They are farmed out and subsequently formulated to non-elected agencies that surpass the number of stars in the sky. No one actually knows how many of these agencies exist. This is symbolized in the architectural status of Washington DC i.e. the number of impersonal office buildings dwarfing the number of original structures designating specific branches. Furthermore, the most significant laws are now decided by the judicial branch which was not its original, designated purpose. It really was supposed to be a place to try important crimes, not to pass laws in the guise of court decisions. Congress has essentially outsourced and/or passed to another branch their original and primary function. The branch the founders thought would be most significant, is now a distant third in influence. My understanding is that most libertarians want a return to the tripartite system as originally intended and to torpedo the vast array of agencies that have usurped the three branches' powers. For those maintaining a Judeo/Christian understanding of it, it is doubly significant as the system was designed to replicate the king, the judge, and the lawgiver found in the Godhead.

In my recent involvement with bitcoin miners, their understanding is that its here to stay simply because its implosion would cause too much damage. There is just too much Wall Street, PE and public money in it at this point. It's just a matter of working with Caesar to see how he gets paid.

[bryan]

In my recent involvement with bitcoin miners, their understanding is that its here to stay simply because its implosion would cause too much damage. There is just too much Wall Street, PE and public money in it at this point. It's just a matter of working with Caesar to see how he gets paid.

That Bitcoin is here to stay? That qualifies as delusion, to me I wouldn't trust anyone that made that statement and only backed it up with "too much Wall Street, PE, and public money..". Bitcoin itself hadn't been embedded into nearly enough systems to have such a claim (antithetically, just a while ago I tried to buy something from a major merchant online with Bitcoin and ended up just using credit card because the two largest Bitcoin-as-payment companies (taking either side of the transaction, in this case) don't want to work with each other, it seems. I didn't have any other Bitcoin wallet at-the-ready to make the payment from..).

[Jason]

Your prerogative, although personally I am more inclined to listen to those people than some guy named Bryan who refutes said idea with some personal micro-anecdote about having a bad experience with a few vendors.

Insatiable institutional greed > current technology issues. Sometimes it takes a while before the ultimate players emerge and things get rigged properly.

[bryan]

Calling my recent experience a "micro-anecdote" seems pretty disingenuous.

So how much "Wall Street, PE, and public" money is "in it" at this point? And of these market actors, are all parties making the same bets?

Greed is a powerful motivator, and it seems good for snowballing the acceptance of something like Bitcoin, but I don't see how it means Bitcoin is here to stay.

Also, what do you have against guys named Bryan?

[Mister Imperceptible]

Jason the Douchebag is BACK!!!

[Jason]

I can attest that I was sincere when I referred to your experience as a "micro-anecdote". If you believe your experience to be otherwise, its mostly likely a result of differing views of your basic significance in the universe, which is wholly understandable in this context. If your experience was to be found as one that many other Bitcoin users are also having (which I would have to believe is the case), it would no doubt impute an added dimension, at which point I would remove the "micro" affixation.

Now, to clarify. I didn't say Bitcoin is here to stay. Its' what I was told by some people who are investing in it. I honestly have no idea if its going to stay. But when confronted with two disparate views on the topic, I am personally going to lean towards the one that takes into account a powerful, heavily invested minority lurking in the background as opposed to the one based on a less than satisfactory consumer experience.

RE: your name. I'm assuming that you understand that it's use was employed for effect as opposed to an expression of a real feeling or belief towards those who find themselves going through life reflexively turning their heads when hearing it. That being said, in order not to appear disingenuous, your question leads me to admit that I do hold an irrational bias against those with the name, a bias that apparently increases when it is discovered that a person bearing said name utilizes the "y" as opposed to the "i" when spelling it out.

[bryan]

[bryan]

So did anyone report Bitcoin transactions on their taxes this year? I was able to use bitcoin.tax for free, for some reason (used it at end of last year... maybe they set it as free during that time), and it did a mostly good job.

I filed an extension (plus payment) so I'm still debating on how to handle reporting the gains. 8949 box F _seems_ to be the way for me, but do I really have to put every single transaction or can it just be an aggregation? I know IRS has guidance here, but wonder about it in practice... how would they penalize me for not understanding? And do I have to say "Bitcoin sell" or could I say something like "sell of digital assets" or "currency exchange" or simply "sell of capital assets" to avoid government searching/filtering for "bitcoin" or "crypto" etc. but also avoid undue scrutiny.

[Mister Imperceptible]

Shhh!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m3dZl3yfGpc

[BlueNote]

I did a relatives taxes recently who had bought a low 4 figure amount of bitcoin in Canada, transferred the bitcoin to an exchange in Boston USA and then traded some of the bitcoin for other crypto currencies. He made a profit but it was all luck of course. The problem from a tax perspective is that, based on Canadian tax conventions, crypto currency transactions are considered barter for him. This means that every trade where he had a gain goes to his taxes as a capital gain. Another crap deal is that if he buys stuff with crypto there's a potential for cap gain/loss and also the sales tax aspect. Luckily he didn't do this, thanks goodness. The Boston exchange he used had crappy history on his trades and shitty reporting. They didn't have any report that even kept a running balance in BTC of all his transactions. Looked like the site was slapped together with duct tape and coffee by a couple of over caffeinated code monkeys who could care less about tax accounting, go figure. They denominated all of his trades in BTC (bit coin) but couldn't produce a history of daily bitcoin to USD rates on the exchange for 2017. I was required to convert his transactions into bitcoin (using at lease daily rates) then into USD and finally to CAD. I had to download a history of bitcoin prices in USD from another site and use that as an estimate. Doing his bitcoin transactions took me longer than doing both my and my wife taxes, probably twice as long. I told him he'd need pay to have a different accountant do his taxes next year. I am not doing that crap again, I am not a tax accountant. I told him I'd fill out the forms but he'd need to submit the taxes under his own name and would take full responsibility for the figures. I even plugged the numbers into two different tax software packages to makes sure the end result was the same. If he gets audited it's going to be a grey area that cannot be resolved easily without just accepting some assumptions which tax auditors won't like to do, could be a huge time suck for him.

[bryan]

My sympathies.

I'm pretty pleased with https://bitcoin.tax honestly. I would recommend it to anyone that doesn't want to handle it themselves, even though it might cost a bit. I found it pretty fast, accurate, and clear. I assume Intuit or a similar company might eventually acquire it or make their own.