I’m new here, from Adelaide, and work in cryptocurrency full time, so was interested to see the policy discussion on digital currencies. I was prodded on IRC to create this thread so we can discuss it further.
The #1 issue right now is clearly the double taxation, which has already seen the closure of new businesses such as Living Room of Satoshi. This situation has been previously overcome in the UK.
I was kind of surprised about the level of discussion regarding the possibility of an AUDCoin, as the whole purpose of Bitcoin is that it allows the Government’s monopoly on currency issuance to be broken. This was Jon Matonis’ take on Canada’s attempt with MintChip.
Last month, the highly regarded Andreas Antonopoulos presented to the Canadian Senate Committee on Banking, Trade, and Commerce on Bitcoin.
I myself also recently presented to the Australian Computer Society YIT group on Bitcoin and CryptoAnarchy.
Hi IAmNotDoritos. Thanks for your post on this topic that is of great interest to me.
I am reading your links and watching the videos in full and will get back to you for a serious discussion on the topic by this weekend if not before.
Andreas Antonopoulos is giving a talk in Sydney on Nov 25 during bitcoin meet up.
Although the venue was booked out in matter of hours, there would be life stream and recording available.
Zhoe, event organiser:
We’re happy to announce that we will be livestreaming and video recording The Bitcoin Address, and using the sli.do Q&A platform. This means that this event will be accessible by anyone globally, and they can also participate in Q&A. Details for those will be posted up soon. We’ve also added a 50 person overflow room in Atlassian so we can accommodate for more attendees, those on the wait list will be offered these spots. The talk will be livestreamed to this room and mingling will be possible between talks.
@IAmNotDoritos I think that with the inclusion of sidechains, something like AUDCoin, even though it goes against most of the accumulated values that Bitcoin has been attributed with, is much more possible, and can be pegged against the current Bitcoin network too, and it would allow the government to have some limited autonomy in that area.
Sorry it took a while to get back to you. Busy life and you did give me a 2 hour video and a 70 page PDF to absorb, but I’ve gone through all that now and here I am back to discuss.
Firstly, I would like to invite you along to the next Policy Development Working Group online meeting tomorrow night (Monday 17th, at 8:30pm Sydney time). If not that one, there will be another in two weeks time.
It’s held online in the IRC #ppau-pdc channel. You will be most welcome.
Alternatively, just contact me and arrange a time to chat online,
I’m quite keen to get along to the Andreas Antonopoulos meeting in Sydney on the 25th that Alex has referenced below in this topic. Arrangements may be made and I live in Sydney, so it can’t be too hard.
The double taxation issue you mention seems pretty clear and we already knew about it. My reading of that situation, is that the tax department is currently making a judgement based on current law as to how it can be treated. It is not a strategic considered government position in law. It’s just broken and the law needs to catch up.
You may be aware of the outstanding government inquiry into digital currencies at: http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Economics/Digital_currency/Terms_of_Reference
From what I can see, the interested businesses are already making a strong case on this specific issue.
I’m not sure why you are surprised about our discussion of the possibility of an AUDCoin.
The concept there was NOT to do anything like the MintChip (although that sounds tastier).
The concept was to do something a lot more like Bitcoin. The issuance issue is not about who issues it, but how certain we can be about supply. This is exactly the point in Bitcoin as I understand it. You don’t care who the miners are. You don’t need to trust them, so why should you care if it was a government?
On the flip side of that, an AUDCoin could be tied to the AUD to produce less volatility in the short term. It could also be used to add a massive improvement to government payment and receipt systems.
Longer term, as Bitcoin stabilises (because of higher market cap) and is more broadly accepted (in stores etc), the AUDCoin would probably become irrelevant as we all move to whatever global crypto-currency is winning.
Also, in the short to medium term, an AUDCoin could create a lot of local impetus for development of crypto-economic systems and solutions here in Australia (by people like yourself I presume)…
Andreas Antonopoulos actually mentions the possibility of such a thing at around minute 34 of the video you linked of his representation to the Canadian Senate committee.
In the last meetup, we started discussing taxation and what it should apply to.
You can see the discussion from 03-Nov pasted in http://pad.pirateparty.org.au/p/DigitalCurrencyPolicy
Also of interest is the comments by MarkG (our resident economist)
given the potential for DOS and 51% attacks to affect the value of alt currency, what is you opinion of the Proof of Stake validation as used by FairCoin among others.
On a slighlty different note, you may be interested in the story here about using blockchains as a system to secure transactions on the net.
Naive Proof of Stake implementations suffer from what is known as “Nothing at Stake”, ie as there is no economic cost for following a particular fork, nodes are incentivized to maintain all forks.