- <div class="entry">
- <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a></div>
- <div class="date">2010-12-11 15:10</div>
- <div class="body">
-<p>As I continue to explore
-<a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
-what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
-and regulations here in Norway. Here are some random notes.</p>
-
-<p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
-verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
-is known to everyone. This means that if a BitCoin address has been
-published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
-possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
-that address. There is even a web service to look at the details for
-all transactions. There I can see that my address
-<a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
-have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
-<a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
-address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
-<a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
-of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far. Thank you to each and
-every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
-fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
-address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
-generate and hand out a new address for each transaction. I'm told
-there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
-organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
-themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
-
-<p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
-regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
-without declaring it. There are money laundering, tax and accounting
-laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
-If the Skolelinux foundation
-(<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
-Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
-normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
-Given that it is impossible to know if money can across the border or
-not, should everything or nothing be declared? What exchange rate
-should be used when calculating taxes? Would receivers have to pay
-income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
-BitCoin? I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
-
-<p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
-accepted by a lot of users. It must be possible to get easy access to
-the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
-easy to spend it. At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
-access to, but there are very few places to spend it. I am not really
-a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
-so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins. I
-would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
-and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
-if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
-to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular. I'm sure they
-will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
-probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
-believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
-currencies.</p>
-
-<p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
-CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
-competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
-to see which one get the next lump of cash). The "winner" get 50
-BitCoin when this happen. Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
-join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
-by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
-and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
-BitCoins. Check out
-<a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
-if this sounds interesting. I have not had time to try to set up a
-machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
-own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
-yet.</p>
-
-<p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
-href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
-criticism</a> of bitcoin. Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
-it was interesting to read. The arguments presented seem to be
-equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
-</div>
- <div class="tags">
-
-
-
- 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>.
-
- </div>
- </div>
- <div class="padding"></div>
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