Monero, the Drug Dealer’s Cryptocurrency of Choice, Is on Fire
Has anyone come up with a general solution yet to the problem of turning cryptocurrency into something you can pay your landlord or grocer with? I haven’t looked much into it, but that always seemed like the most difficult step, especially if the government just decides to up and ban anyone from using cryptocurrency at all.
It’s a solution looking for a problem at the moment. A number of businesses accept Bitcoin, but they solely do so out of novelty.
I can’t pay my electric bills with yen either. There must be an electric company that accepts yen, and that would be nice for Japanese visitors, but nonetheless.
The idea is not to pay your landlord in Bitcoins, as in forcing him to hold or exchange them. Obviously, very few of them are going to want to do that.
But currently, any place that accepts credit/debit cards “accepts yen” because the conversion will be done automatically behind the scenes between the banks.
That’s how I bought a lot of stuff in Russia. Unless I was paying in cash, I didn’t need to convert my money to rubles beforehand, and the business didn’t need to be interested in holding dollars.
I wonder how easy it would be to come up with a way of creating a secure, private cryptocurrency that just gives the government a small cut of each transaction. It sounds really hard, but if someone managed to do it then they would at least be fighting less of an uphill battle.
It sounds really easy to me.
Bitcoin clients already include by default a small transaction fee that goes to the miners (though it’s not strictly necessary to include the fee).
You could easily create a client that would automatically send part of every transaction to a specific account controlled by the government. It wouldn’t make Bitcoin any less anonymous.
The problem would be convincing people to use it.
I mean, if the government gets automatic sales tax on all transactions I’m sure the politicians would find a way to promote it
…that is not actually how things work, at least if we’re talking about the US federal government, which does not very much resemble a business in terms of the way it operates. The interests that motivate the decision-makers don’t look anything like “bring in money as easily as possible.”
Hell, I’m pretty sure that the current Congress would oppose such a technology on principle. Republican legislators oppose anything that makes the process of tax-paying easier and smoother. This is partly because Intuit (the TurboTax company) has a surprising amount of clout, but mostly because Republicans find it ideologically beneficial for taxes to be as stressful and annoying as possible.