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  13        <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
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  18
  19  <p>Entries tagged "bitcoin".</p>
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  25  <div class="title">
  26  <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
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  28  <div class="date">
  29   2010-12-11 15:10
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  32  <div class="body">
  33
  34 <p>As I continue to explore
  35 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
  36 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
  37 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
  38
  39 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
  40 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
  41 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
  42 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
  43 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
  44 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
  45 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
  46 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
  47 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
  48 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
  49 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
  50 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
  51 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
  52 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
  53 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
  54 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
  55 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
  56 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
  57 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
  58 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
  59
  60 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
  61 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
  62 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
  63 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
  64 If the Skolelinux foundation
  65 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
  66 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
  67 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
  68 Given that it is impossible to know if money can across the border or
  69 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
  70 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
  71 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
  72 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
  73
  74 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
  75 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
  76 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
  77 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
  78 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
  79 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
  80 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
  81 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
  82 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
  83 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
  84 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
  85 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
  86 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
  87 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
  88 currencies.</p>
  89
  90 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
  91 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
  92 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
  93 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
  94 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
  95 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
  96 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
  97 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
  98 BitCoins.  Check out
  99 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
 100 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
 101 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
 102 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
 103 yet.</p>
 104
 105 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
 106 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
 107 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
 108 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
 109 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
 110
 111  </div>
 112  <div class="tags">
 113
 114
 115
 116   Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
 117
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 123
 124
 125
 126
 127 <div id="sidebar">
 128
 129 <h2>Archive</h2>
 130 <ul>
 131
 132 <li>2010
 133 <ul>
 134
 135 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
 136
 137 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
 138
 139 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
 140
 141 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
 142
 143 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
 144
 145 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
 146
 147 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
 148
 149 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
 150
 151 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
 152
 153 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
 154
 155 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
 156
 157 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (5)</a></li>
 158
 159 </ul></li>
 160
 161 <li>2009
 162 <ul>
 163
 164 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
 165
 166 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
 167
 168 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
 169
 170 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
 171
 172 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
 173
 174 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
 175
 176 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
 177
 178 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
 179
 180 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
 181
 182 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
 183
 184 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
 185
 186 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
 187
 188 </ul></li>
 189
 190 <li>2008
 191 <ul>
 192
 193 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
 194
 195 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
 196
 197 </ul></li>
 198
 199 </ul>
 200
 201
 202
 203 <h2>Tags</h2>
 204 <ul>
 205
 206  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (13)</a></li>
 207
 208  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
 209
 210  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
 211
 212  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (1)</a></li>
 213
 214  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (10)</a></li>
 215
 216  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (45)</a></li>
 217
 218  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (53)</a></li>
 219
 220  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (76)</a></li>
 221
 222  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (1)</a></li>
 223
 224  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (11)</a></li>
 225
 226  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (5)</a></li>
 227
 228  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (8)</a></li>
 229
 230  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (4)</a></li>
 231
 232  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
 233
 234  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (11)</a></li>
 235
 236  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (93)</a></li>
 237
 238  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (114)</a></li>
 239
 240  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (18)</a></li>
 241
 242  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (29)</a></li>
 243
 244  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
 245
 246  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (4)</a></li>
 247
 248  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
 249
 250  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (21)</a></li>
 251
 252  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (3)</a></li>
 253
 254  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (16)</a></li>
 255
 256  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (1)</a></li>
 257
 258  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (16)</a></li>
 259
 260  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (1)</a></li>
 261
 262  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (14)</a></li>
 263
 264 </ul>
 265
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