[ExI] tyranny by 16th amendmen

[Dan]

On Friday, May 24, 2013 12:12 AM Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com> wrote:
> One advantage of mining Bitcoins, as opposed to buying them on an
> exchange, is that the government never has to know you have them
> (under the current rules). So the IRS has no interest in them until
> converted to dollars or another currency. 

That's true, but your parenthetic comment is very important here. (And the rules will differ in other countries. Let's not just think about the US. Bitcoin is, after all, not confined to the US.) Changing the rules here would be relatively easy and I can imagine the IRS simply seeing this as applying their mandate here -- unless and until there's a legal challenge to that, in which case, then the Congress will just pass legislation allowing this to be taxed is my guess. (Under what auspices? Well, that criminals -- including tax evaders -- might use Bitcoin.)

Also, mining them would almost certainly eventually end in trading them for something else. At that point, the transaction would likely fall under current rules.

> As to the rest of your rant, I could not agree more. However, I would
> have to add that the other "secret" court system, the Juvenile Court
> system that deals with DCFS, Foster Care and non-criminal child
> abuse and neglect is just as corrupt if not more than the IRS, as
> frightening as that is.

Governments are frightening in general. The sad commentary here is that it takes a ridiculous scandal like this to make people aware that something might be wrong -- and even then almost all misdiagnose it as something new and extraordinary instead of something old, routine, and in the nature of the beast -- as something one should expect. (Again, give people power, and expect them to use and abuse it. I would say the surprising thing is the power isn't more abused, but then I that's more because I'm just not aware of all the abuse.)

Regards,


Dan
 See my SF short story "Residue":
http://www.amazon.com/Residue-ebook/dp/B00BS3T0RM/ -- US
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00BS3T0RM -- UK 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20130523/4ef76868/attachment.html>