On Fri, 2010-12-31 at 11:52 +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote: > Le jeudi 30 décembre 2010 à 23:01 +0100, Petter Reinholdtsen a écrit : > > But it might be interesting to support the bitcoin system by accepting > > donations, and give users of bitcoin more to spend their bitcoins > > on. :) > > I don’t think it is a good idea to promote and support a system that is > designed from the start to make tax evasion and money laundering easier. Any new money transfer system can be accused of that, as the tax authorities are basically reactive. Bitcoin's public keys can be anonymous, but you have to use the same key to spend the money you've received. The transaction history is public so it should still be possible to trace flows of money around the system. I doubt the currency exchangers will be anonymising *their* records. (Though, speaking of money laundering, this has the same 'feature' of e-gold that transactions are non-repudiable, which will be great for criminals with botnets if bitcoin ever becomes popular.) However, so far it does look like an exercise in crypto wanking and not a useful currency. There are currently about 1.3 million issued bitcoins (and the protocol limits the total number to only 21 million). The market value of a bitcoin is about USD 0.3 and there are no bitcoin-denominated bank accounts, bonds, etc., so the money supply is a mere USD 390,000. Further, out of the traders listed at <http://www.bitcoin.org/trade>, I can't see any being useful to Debian. Ben. -- Ben Hutchings Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it makes it worse.
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