</div>
<div class="padding"></div>
+<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 show 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.</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>
+
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="12.rss"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/xml.gif" alt="RSS Feed" width="36" height="14"></a></p>
<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
-<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (4)</a></li>
+<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (5)</a></li>
</ul></li>
<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
- <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (1)</a></li>
+ <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (2)</a></li>
<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (10)</a></li>
- <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (44)</a></li>
+ <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (45)</a></li>
<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (52)</a></li>
- <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (75)</a></li>
+ <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (76)</a></li>
<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (1)</a></li>
<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (18)</a></li>
- <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (29)</a></li>
+ <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (30)</a></li>
<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
- <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (21)</a></li>
+ <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (22)</a></li>
<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (3)</a></li>
projects / homepage.git / blobdiff