Bitcoin discussion and news

[StakerOne]

I'm moving to China for some freedom if this shit goes down here.

Relax. Eventually the government won't be able to see all your transactions - they'll be encrypted. That could be implimented quickly but now would be the wrong time to do so.

In the crypto-topia, the government gets it's taxes, while you keep your privacy from the state.

Zero knowledge proofs will allow you to prove to the government that you aren't a wrongun without giving them much data, only the data they need to establish that fact.

In that world, a government won't have the resources to persecute millions for non-comformity, it's simply not possible.

However ... if the cryptopians don't win, if most of the planet says "yeah but naaah" - then I promise you, we'll get CBDCs imposed on us and they will run on government networks that only the government controls, with no transparency, with full spectrum control over every aspect of our lives.

That's the true back door to tyranny and only the mass adoption of public decentralised blockchains with various forms of money running on them, can stop all of that.

Using cash, writing letters to your MP and protests won't stop them in their tracks.

Only parallel economies that they can't control will stop them.

 

[StakerOne]

Oh, so now you’re suddenly an expert in tax after all?

Tell me about the tax treatment of, oh, let’s say a multinational reinsurance treaty?

Don't need to. The transactions for those insurance products will eventually wind up on the blockchain. Everything will.
From there on in, eventually someone would be able to codefy it as some kind of data schema.

 

[StakerOne]

Sounds completely straightforward. A completely straightforward shooting weekend.

Imagine the nightmare of just having something printed on paper that you sign! Who wants that? Much easier to have an army of programmers and multiple contracts with embedded clauses that can’t be countermanded by the courts.

The whole point of smart contracts is to negate the need for anyone having to take out litigation in court!

A court is who you go to enforce a conventional contract because one or more parties is in breach of that contract.

In the case of a smart contract, it's enforced by thousands of computers - it simply does what the code says. All parties that use smart contracts, should understand that before using them, so none should be dissapointed if the smart contract does what it has been told to do - so there is nothing to enforce.

 

[StakerOne]

not if you use xmr or another privacy coin

But HMRC would be able to see that I sold BTC or ETH for XMR.
They just wouldn't be able to see what I did with it.
You could argue then that I could buy goods from another XMR user with profits, evading the taxman .. but in the long run, I don't believe privacy coins will have a future, because such tech will eventually make it EVM smart contract blockchains that are far more flexible than privacy coins.

There are no technical hurdles to making tranactions with third parties private on Ethereum or baking in privacy to Ethereum.

No one with any sense bothers right now, because now is not the best time to start doing that. The best time to do that is when we know that we can give governments what they want while keeping transactions private.

 

[StakerOne]

OK, but with my banking app I don't need to worry

You can only manage your bank account with your banking app, not the myriad of assets that blockchains can, so I don't see what you're driving at here.

So you are putting trust in a 3rd party centralised system to filter out the crap.

Any wallet that isn't decentralised will eventually be. There's a myriad of documentation that guides projects on how to become fully decentralised.

But with email scams you normally have to reply to the email, or open an attachment, with NFTs you just need to open it and it is not a bug it's a feature. The last 'just open an email bug was fixed decades ago.

Please, you're showing your ignorance of how the technology works.

"Opening" a bad NFT would mean:

1. Reading data from the blockchain
2. Retreiving the media from a web host

1. It's impossible for anything bad to happen by your wallet just reading the blockchain.
2. A malicous website could infect your PC, but that's a general hazard of using the web.

A malicious NFT would need you to actually interact with it in a way that you be writing to the blockchain - and for that, you would have to sign off on a transaction - it doesn't happen without you knowing about it, making it more involved than clicking on an email, so it is in fact more secure than emails.

Anyone who has used Web3 would know better than to trust airdropped or unsolicited tokens turning up in their wallets.

There are now wallets with built in protections against any type of scam. For example, on the Argent wallet, it can be told to refuse to let go of any crypto over a certain amount for at least 24 hours, giving the waller holder time to stop and think about what is going on, preventing anyone from clearing out a potential victim.

Argent wallets can even use trust third party friends and family to stop you from doing something silly, even under duress. If your friends and family don't approve that large transaction, it doesn't go anywhere for at least 24 hours.

 

[kabbes]

This all completely misunderstands the fuzzy way that human laws apply in practice. No, they are not all written down in computers. And they never can be. A lot of it, including tax law, comes down to opinion. Subjective human opinion. And that opinion changes over time based on emerging circumstances.

It’s the importance of subjectivity that all of this crypto-nonsense misses. It comes from an ultra-naive place of assuming that there is an objective reality that is frame-of-reference neutral. But reality is recreated moment to moment through the first-person perspective. Nothing you codify will be correct for more than five minutes or for more than a handful of people. That’s why we need courts. That’s why legislation comes with guidance, which is regularly updated.

This is all about coders with literally zero expertise in sociology, psychology, geography, philosophy, politics, law, tax, economics or finance assuming that because they don’t know about it, it doesn’t matter. Well guess what, it does matter. People have been studying this stuff for hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of years for good reason. Stop being so arrogant and build some expertise outside your bubble before telling everybody else how you can do it better.

 

[BigTom]

computers understand complex tasks and can do them easily, what tey lack is the desire.And his is where humans come in. Humans are desiring creatures.

Humans input their desire into the blockchain by signaling through the purchase of tokens. Tokens which are representation of value, not in the spot money price, but in the potential price baked into the values of that protocol.We, collectively as humanity, need to have better desires...less desire for crap immediate individual pleasures, and more desire for long term collective investments, like clean air and rich forests.

One day the machines will desire too, and we better hope we taught them well.

crypto incentivises long term collective thinking rather than the narrow function of spot price. Those who chase spot prices get rekt, those that stay with the vision get rewarded. Bitcoin/crypto is a revolution dressed up as a get rich quick scheme. Its a revolution that funds itself, it doesnt need donors, or sponsors or advertisers.

Computers understand maths, and are fricking amazing at doing mathematical calculations. They are logic machines and yes the can do very complex tasks, fucking amazing stuff sometimes like I'm blown away by AI art and Music. That doesn't mean you can just handwave a problem away saying "computers will do it perfectly, instantly and for free" . (although I don't think StakerOne has said it would be free it's a common theme in cryptoland ime)

As and when we get to a general AI it has to include desires for sure. I definitely worry about how the AI gets taught. The existing situation with narrow AI doesn't give me a lot of hope tbh. The fetishisation of STEM and dismissal of humanities in the programming/crpyto world isn't going to help with this.

I just can't agree with you last paragraph. I see far more short-term "to the moon" chasing than anything else, if there's a revolution it's to hyper-capitalism, which fosters individualism and short termism, not long term collective outcomes. Even just the fact that you call them investments speaks to the way you see this as a capitalist function.

It has been funded by all those people who have got rekt, and anyone investing in mining computers as well I guess.

Today, in isolation, if you did that right now, after you've withdrawn the money from your bank account, yes they would lock you up.

My point is in the context of a government that tries to take the piss with everyone by trying to tax us all unreasonably. If millions of us did that (And it would be legal, I'm no expert in common law or taxation law), there is definately a law that allows citizens to declare that the goverment is being unjust and that payment of taxes are being witheld. BUT you are expected to eventually pay such taxes.

It comes back to what I call the government's cost to persecute an individual.

1. It costs a lot of money to arrest someone, try them and chuck them in prison - which is the only option if the money is hidden.
2. It costs some time and money to seize someone's bank account.
3. It will cost them peanuts to seize CBDCs potentially without much oversight or recourse.

I'd live with scenario 1.

Yeah? Definitely?
Go on then - legislation.gov.uk
Tell me what law specifically allows you to withhold taxes by declaring the government is unjust.

Do you remember the poll tax? Because lots and lots of people refused to pay the poll tax saying it was unjust. Do you know what happened to those people?

I want to note here with point 1 that on the one hand you say the money is hidden, but elsewhere you talk about the blockchain being completely open, government knowing what you have done with your crypto. You can't have things both ways.

The situation around Tornado Cash concerns criminality in the form of state sponsered hack attacks from hostile states such as North Korea who have used the service to frustrate the authorities in their quest to hunt down the money.

That is a wildly different scenario than people not paying their taxes. They see the former as a national security issue.

The FBI has blacklisted wallets that used by the actual Tornado Cash project NOT the wallets of people who have used Tornado Cash.

They aren't threatening to blacklist the wallets of people who use Tornado Cash in such a way, that other people aren't to do business with them.

It's simple. If you are a US citizen and you use Tornado Cash, you may be prosecuted. There has been NO threat to blacklist the wallets of those that don't comply, HOWEVER, as night follows day, you can bet that no centralised exchange that has operations in the US, will do business with anyone who uses Tornado cash from yesterday onwards.

People have no practical way of checking which governments around the world have blacklisted what wallets, however, if my own government says "You all need to stop using Tornado Cash or else." - then of course, it's easy for me to follow that dictate.

How would the US government blacklist millions of wallets of people that it's pissed off with and seriously expect everyone around the world to comply? That's not going to happen. The US govt would never try and pull that kind of a stunt because they know that citizens around the world would see them as the problem, not Korean hackers.

On the other end of it, if Tornado Cash has any sense, they'll be blocking US IP addresses from their websites.

By the by, the FBI wouldn't have bothered going after Tornado Cash if it was properly decentralised. Many say that they aren't.

You are trusting a government not to become more authoritarian - they'll only do this if they think it's for national security - whilst at the same time decrying the invasiveness of a govt with a CBDC. You can't have it both ways. Either governments are constantly seeking to become more authoritarian and will do that with blockchains in whatever way they can, or they aren't and will only do it for issues of national security in which case that's the same with a CBDC.

"we're stopping dangerous criminals from making money" .. idk if they could pull it off from a PR point of view, the USA for instance doesn't seem to have a problem overall with their crazy asset forfeiture laws.
In terms of a practical way of checking, that's easily solved with a blockchain isn't it? I mean it's not a very complex task to input a wallet address to search a database to see if it's listed there, a database such as the one they need to list all the blacklisted wallets... and now everything is on bridged blockchains, piece of piss to search all the ones that are relevant to you surely.
And if someone dusts your wallet with tainted crypto, the solution is easy - you just send the value of that crypto to the specified govt. agency wallet using one of their smart contracts and your wallet is removed from the blacklist.

The whole point of smart contracts is to negate the need for anyone having to take out litigation in court!

A court is who you go to enforce a conventional contract because one or more parties is in breach of that contract.

In the case of a smart contract, it's enforced by thousands of computers - it simply does what the code says. All parties that use smart contracts, should understand that before using them, so none should be dissapointed if the smart contract does what it has been told to do - so there is nothing to enforce.

We have a smart contract for me to supply you with 50 widgets. I say I've supplied them, you say I haven't. How does a smart contract resolve that without the need for some kind of court?

But HMRC would be able to see that I sold BTC or ETH for XMR.
They just wouldn't be able to see what I did with it.
You could argue then that I could buy goods from another XMR user with profits, evading the taxman .. but in the long run, I don't believe privacy coins will have a future, because such tech will eventually make it EVM smart contract blockchains that are far more flexible than privacy coins.

There are no technical hurdles to making tranactions with third parties private on Ethereum or baking in privacy to Ethereum.

No one with any sense bothers right now, because now is not the best time to start doing that. The best time to do that is when we know that we can give governments what they want while keeping transactions private.

My whole business is in XMR so I'm not going out of BTC or ETH or anything else, and from what you've said you're clear that works but you think it'll be outclassed by a better way of hiding transactions. As long as there are people who are doing things the state doesn't like, or wanting to hide income to not pay taxes, there will be privacy coins or something totally equivalent.

You can't keep transactions private from HMRC to pay taxes, HMRC need to know what you've spent the money on and where you bought it from (geographically) to be able to calculate your taxes as someone who is self-employed or as a business.

 

[Supine]

 

[BigTom]

I just feel like sharing an issue I'm having at the moment to show why computers aren't necessarily better at performing complex tasks than humans.

Recently a new road was built parallel to mine.
At the moment I am receiving all the packages from Amazon for "X New Road" because I live at "X Old Road". The names aren't even very similar and we have different postcodes.
Royal Mail have no problem here. They deliver their letters correctly.

Why? Because Amazon's satnavs haven't been updated yet and Amazon drivers are instructed to strictly "trust the code" and their satnav directs them to me. It's been months. It's on google maps, but not uber or amazon.
The postie on the other hand can actually read the address and know that "New Road" is a different road to "Old Road" and are allowed to use their own judgement to ensure a correct delivery.

If code and data isn't perfect, it's going to execute badly. Humans ain't perfect either but the idea that code can or will be is very far fetched imo. There will always be places where we want human overrides available.

 

[StakerOne]

This all completely misunderstands the fuzzy way that human laws apply in practice.

And that is the optimal way of doing things?
To have laws done in a fuzzy way?

No, they are not all written down in computers. And they never can be.

Are you saying there is UK law that doesn't exist outside of text books? That isn't online anywhere? Legislation.gov.uk implies it's all online.

A lot of it, including tax law, comes down to opinion. Subjective human opinion. And that opinion changes over time based on emerging circumstances.

Like who HMRC are investigating and whether they are good eggs?

It’s the importance of subjectivity that all of this crypto-nonsense misses.

Are you saying that subjectivity is desired or a reality that blockchains fail to address. If all the transational data is on the blockchain, subjectivity isn't a problem - it's all there, it's real, it's in black and white and all that's left to do, is for a DAPP & Smart Contract to calculate what it is owed.

That's far better than a team of human beings who can easily be clouded by their own shortcomings and prejudices about the taxpayer when deciding on "subjective" matters that a DAPP / smart contract wouldn't even know about.

But reality is recreated moment to moment through the first-person perspective.

So we should work on what we percive our bank account balances to be rather than trusting computers to decide whether we are entitled to an overdraft or not?

You said earlier that tax office computers around the world, can quantify risk. By your own logic, if computers can't calculate tax, surely then they can't calculate risk coz reality is recreated to moment through moment through first person perspectives - an all that.

Also, Has this "subjective reality" philosophy of yours go anything to do with post modernism or Marxism? It's an honest question.

Nothing you codify will be correct for more than five minutes or for more than a handful of people.

So we make it all up as we go along? That sounds very familiar and very unfair. No wonder we can't tax the rich!
Besides, I wouldn't be codifying it, HMRC would outsource to work to those that can.

That’s why we need courts.

Not if we simplified taxation and let the computers get on with it, then we wouldn't need courts to get involved in matters pertaining to tax.

That's the whole point of smart contracts, we let the code decide based on clear rules, not mud that only highly paid lawyers can decide depending on what mood they're in and who they are dealing with.

This is all about coders with literally zero expertise in sociology, psychology, geography, philosophy, politics, law, tax, economics or finance assuming that because they don’t know about it, it doesn’t matter.

Please. Neither me or you are experts in all of those fields, if we were, we would have better things to do than debate this one out.
Many crypto projects hire people with crossover skills, for example with a project that involves taxation, they would hire lawyers who can actually code in Javascript and Solidity - yes they exist and they would be paid the Earth.

People have been studying this stuff for hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of years for good reason.

And?

Stop being so arrogant and build some expertise outside your bubble before telling everybody else how you can do it better.

I don't need to. I'm not coding a blockchain based tax payments system.

All I have done, is offer you an opinion based on a genuine belief that one day, every financial transaction will be on one of a number of public blockhains.

It's not arrogant to hold the belief that the government would seize an opportunity to make a much better taxation system that is much more transparant, fairer, simpler and easier is to pay.

You want society to employ lawyers costing the Earth, forever more, to be the oracles we must base taxation around, just to keep them in work.

Sorry, but you believe that lawyers and the legal professional are beyond disruption just because ... they're lawyers not librarians, taxi cab drivers or IT workers, then that's arrogant.

If society has been reshaped by blockchain and that tech makes it easier and cheaper to collect taxes without involving expensive lawyers, in a fairer more transparent way, where people can't be fucked over down to whatever mood officials are in, then quite simply the government will change taxation laws in order to make it all work.

 

[kabbes]

Fuck me, it’s just a doubling-down on ignorance. “I don’t know about that stuff so I’m just going to say it isn’t true or doesn’t matter.”

Insurers looked at blockchain about 10 years ago because on the face of it, it seems like a natural use case. They all decided against, though, apart from very limited situations. This is because no matter how much insurers try to specify exactly what is covered by insurance contracts — and they spend millions and millions trying to do exactly that — things always crop up that nobody envisaged when the contract was written. You then have to have courts decide what the intent was off the insurer, what the buyer understood they were buying, what is reasonable, how it should be interpreted for this circumstance. One court might decide one way, an appeal court decides another. And this is a good thing. Since it is impossible to imagine every future scenario, you need this flexibility and reinterpretation built into the system. The idea that you can code for every possible branching possibility is simply wrong, and the professionals that actually work in these areas know that, regardless of what clueless, interfering-outside-their-sphere coders want to imagine to be the case.

Get some fucking humility

 

[StakerOne]

I just feel like sharing an issue I'm having at the moment to show why computers aren't necessarily better at performing complex tasks than humans.

Recently a new road was built parallel to mine.
At the moment I am receiving all the packages from Amazon for "X New Road" because I live at "X Old Road". The names aren't even very similar and we have different postcodes.
Royal Mail have no problem here. They deliver their letters correctly.

Why? Because Amazon's satnavs haven't been updated yet and Amazon drivers are instructed to strictly "trust the code" and their satnav directs them to me. It's been months. It's on google maps, but not uber or amazon.
The postie on the other hand can actually read the address and know that "New Road" is a different road to "Old Road" and are allowed to use their own judgement to ensure a correct delivery.

If code and data isn't perfect, it's going to execute badly. Humans ain't perfect either but the idea that code can or will be is very far fetched imo. There will always be places where we want human overrides available.

Yet Amazon is quite happy to use their system.
That one isn't a showstopper.
Besides, if between the land registry, the ordinance survey and the local authority, that data was published to a blockchain, Amazon would have access to up to date data.

 

[kabbes]

Oh, and:

Please. Neither me or you are experts in all of those fields, if we were, we would have better things to do than debate this one out.

I am an expert in two of them and have regular professional involvement in another two. Not that you care, because you know everything.

 

[BigTom]

Yet Amazon is quite happy to use their system.
That one isn't a showstopper.
Besides, if between the land registry, the ordinance survey and the local authority, that data was published to a blockchain, Amazon would have access to up to date data.

Since google maps is up to date, amazon could also be if they wanted to. It makes no difference whether it's published on a blockchain or not. Amazon and Uber have decided that they don't need to update their maps so regularly. That's not a technology issue that's stopping them.
This is something you just don't seem to understand. Blockchain changes nothing here, amazon choose not to update their satnavs now, they will choose not to do it if it was all on a blockchain. Humans can solve this problem but not when they are forced to "trust the code".

 

[Supine]

Google maps definitely isn’t always correct. It showed me a path that literally went over the white cliffs of Dover a few weeks ago. If I’d followed it i would be dead.

As said, the world is too complicated to turn it into simple binary in many circumstances. Blockchain does not help with many things, unless you’re interested in environmental damage.

 

[Smangus]

Tax laws are complex largely because people are greedy and want to push boundaries to minimise their tax risk or interpret them in a way that is against the spirit of the law to pay less or nothing. Sometimes the law is badly written and open to different meanings which is why we have tribunals and cases that result in precedent so that the meaning is confirmed in law. As Kabbes says - subjective interpretation.

What starts as a simple concept eg - pay 20% income tax becomes very complex because people don't want to pay it or gvts fiddlen with it to favour certain parts of the population etc.

Your auto-utopia takes no account of peoples behaviour when it come to paying taxes. Whatever system is in place will always be under attack by avoidance, boundary pushing or evasion. Due to peoples greed.

 

[StakerOne]

Fuck me, it’s just a doubling-down on ignorance. “I don’t know about that stuff so I’m just going to say it isn’t true or doesn’t matter.”

Insurers looked at blockchain about 10 years ago because on the face of it, it seems like a natural use case. They all decided against, though, apart from very limited situations. This is because no matter how much insurers try to specify exactly what is covered by insurance contracts — and they spend millions and millions trying to do exactly that — things always crop up that nobody envisaged when the contract was written. You then have to have courts decide what the intent was off the insurer, what the buyer understood they were buying, what is reasonable, how it should be interpreted for this circumstance. One court might decide one way, an appeal court decides another. And this is a good thing. Since it is impossible to imagine every future scenario, you need this flexibility and reinterpretation built into the system. The idea that you can code for every possible branching possibility is simply wrong, and the professionals that actually work in these areas know that, regardless of what clueless, interfering-outside-their-sphere coders want to imagine to be the case.

Get some fucking humility

I haven't addressed general insurance at all in any of the arguments I have made with you.
The closest I have come to that subject, is smart contract insurance.
That exists and is working and because it's decentralised it has NOTHING to do with the conventional insurance market.

Thinking out loud, conventiomnal insurance can be put on the blockchain, but humans would still be in the loop and there would not be any benefit to either the insurance company or the consumer, which is why they haven't bothered to - I wouldn't.

BUT - when all financial transactions are on blockchains, then there should be a business case to put conventional insurance onto blockchains and such insurance would probably still involve human beings making decisions and interacting along the way.

Insurance is way different than taxation, because the data needed for taxation is on chain but for insurance, a human being might need to review photographic and media evidence before a claim could proceed.

Therefore insurance smart contracts could never make decisions, at least until AI Oracles can do the job better than humans. When that happens, the smart contract would simpy ask the AI oracle to decide who is at fault based on the video or photographic evidence.

I'm not an AI expert, so wouldn't like to predict when we'd get to that stage.

 

[BigTom]

Tax laws are complex largely because people are greedy and want to push boundaries to minimise their tax risk or interpret them in a way that is against the spirit of the law to pay less or nothing. Sometimes the law is badly written and open to different meanings which is why we have tribunals and cases that result in precedent so that the meaning is confirmed in law. As Kabbes says - subjective interpretation.

What starts as a simple concept eg - pay 20% income tax becomes very complex because people don't want to pay it or gvts fiddlen with it to favour certain parts of the population etc.

Your auto-utopia takes no account of peoples behaviour when it come to paying taxes. Whatever system is in place will always be under attack by avoidance, boundary pushing or evasion. Due to peoples greed.

Yep. Structured tax avoidance is all about using the letter of the law to circumvent the spirit/intention of the law.

 

[StakerOne]

Google maps definitely isn’t always correct. It showed me a path that literally went over the white cliffs of Dover a few weeks ago. If I’d followed it i would be dead.

As said, the world is too complicated to turn it into simple binary in many circumstances. Blockchain does not help with many things, unless you’re interested in environmental damage.

I'm not talking about every circumstance.

Please can you elaborate:

Blockchain does not help with many things, unless you’re interested in environmental damage.

 

[StakerOne]

Tax laws are complex largely because people are greedy and want to push boundaries to minimise their tax risk or interpret them in a way that is against the spirit of the law to pay less or nothing. Sometimes the law is badly written and open to different meanings which is why we have tribunals and cases that result in precedent so that the meaning is confirmed in law. As Kabbes says - subjective interpretation.

What starts as a simple concept eg - pay 20% income tax becomes very complex because people don't want to pay it or gvts fiddlen with it to favour certain parts of the population etc.

Your auto-utopia takes no account of peoples behaviour when it come to paying taxes. Whatever system is in place will always be under attack by avoidance, boundary pushing or evasion. Due to peoples greed.

With all due respect, you haven't read (or taken onboard) the whys and therefores of my original argument.

If ALL financial transactions are on the blockchain, human behavior is very limited - you would visit the HMRC website, you would login to it via web3 and it will tell you what your tax bill is.

Your behaviour is limited, you pay the bill or you don't.

You don't get to declare or hide anything because the second you signed into the site and authorised the assement, the HMRC website got access to ALL of your transcations and calculated your bill.

That's it. Details of your private transactions aren't passed to HMRC - everything is calculated in memory.

HMRC would be confident that you paid the correct amount based on your personal economic activity.

Pay up or not. That's the ONLY human behavior involved.

 

[StakerOne]

Yep. Structured tax avoidance is all about using the letter of the law to circumvent the spirit/intention of the law.

Which is why the law needs to be simplified ....
... and it can be simplified when all transactions are on blockchains, because at that point, tax can be collected cheaply and fairly via Web3, especially if the laws are updated to accomodate that.

The government won't keep complex laws on the statute books if Web3 tech makes it very easy for taxpayers to pay their tax bills!

So far the only argument against that I've heard is "But we have complex tax laws" yeah of course we do! For now..

 

[Shippou-Sensei]

If ALL financial transactions are on the blockchain, human behavior is very limited -

That's a fucking huge IF.

 

[StakerOne]

That's a fucking huge IF.

The trend is my friend, my friend!

 

[Shippou-Sensei]

I for one invested everything when I thought we were moving to a POG based economy.

Still in a dip at the moment but my forecast horizon is 80 years so I'm still predicting growth.

 

[BigTom]

Which is why the law needs to be simplified ....
... and it can be simplified when all transactions are on blockchains, because at that point, tax can be collected cheaply and fairly via Web3, especially if the laws are updated to accomodate that.

The government won't keep complex laws on the statute books if Web3 tech makes it very easy for taxpayers to pay their tax bills!

So far the only argument against that I've heard is "But we have complex tax laws" yeah of course we do! For now..

Why do you think we have complex tax laws?

And for an employed person, what could be easier than PAYE? For a business you then have the issue that HMRC need to know what you have bought and where from in order to know how to tax it properly. You seem to think you can hide this information whilst at the same allowing HMRC to calculate your tax. It's not possible.

You don't get to declare or hide anything because the second you signed into the site and authorised the assement, the HMRC website got access to ALL of your transcations and calculated your bill.

Is for me pretty scary authoritarian stuff that I don't want to see. I don't want the govt to be able to see every transaction I do. What if I want to do something the government doesn't like?

 

[NoXion]

I've still got no idea how the little guy is supposed to get a remedy when (not if) they get scammed by a maliciously-constructed smart contract while living in a government-free crypto dystopia. Or is it the idea that we're going to be too busy slaving away in the Amazon mines to be bothering with that contract nonsense? Because I doubt that company scrip is going to be accepted by privatised "justice" systems.

 

[StakerOne]

Why do you think we have complex tax laws?

Pack it in Fred, with your silly GPS navigation device that has a screen. Why do you think the law forbids screens in the front of vehicle drivers? It's not viable, ya silly bugger!

 

[Smangus]

With all due respect, you haven't read (or taken onboard) the whys and therefores of my original argument.

If ALL financial transactions are on the blockchain, human behavior is very limited - you would visit the HMRC website, you would login to it via web3 and it will tell you what your tax bill is.

Your behaviour is limited, you pay the bill or you don't.

You don't get to declare or hide anything because the second you signed into the site and authorised the assement, the HMRC website got access to ALL of your transcations and calculated your bill.

That's it. Details of your private transactions aren't passed to HMRC - everything is calculated in memory.

HMRC would be confident that you paid the correct amount based on your personal economic activity.

Pay up or not. That's the ONLY human behavior involved.

Oh I have, I just think you oversimplify a massively complex area with sweeping statements. For example if A computer calculates my tax using my transactions in blockchain and HMRC never see my transactions that it uses to calculate how much I owe how can I be confident that I have not overpaid?

One of HMRC's functions is to repay overpaid tax.

How are my tax affairs auditable? You just assume it will be right when we all know computers are not infallible.

Also whatever system is on place people will try to manipulate/circumvent it to reduce tax liabiliy. Regardless of whether it is automated or not. Nothing is 100% proof.

 

[Storm Fox]

This all completely misunderstands the fuzzy way that human laws apply in practice. No, they are not all written down in computers. And they never can be. A lot of it, including tax law, comes down to opinion. Subjective human opinion. And that opinion changes over time based on emerging circumstances.

And that is the optimal way of doing things?
To have laws done in a fuzzy way?

This is a very immature/reductionist reading of human nature.
Take one example the Edward Clouson statue court case. The defendants were clearly guilty of the crime. They pushed the statue into the water, Criminal Damage. But the jury acquitted them due to a lot of extenuating circumstances and was the more just outcome. How would this figure in the digital justice system?

2000AD, Judge Dredd and 1984 were warning for this, not a guidebook. you seem to be arguing for a totally deterministic tax and justice system while at the same time it will set up free.

 

[prunus]

Professional developers would actually publish 2 smart contracts instead of one.

The first is the one that the public are made aware of. It's a proxy contract that simply takes in the data and commands.

On the first proxy contract, there is a special state value that only the owner of that smart contract can set - that state value points towards the second smart contract that does all the real work.

It's impossible for the first smart contract to go run wrong because all it does is call the second passing through the data.

So it's only the second real contract or the ones it relies on that can go wrong. (Remember the contracts it relies on, are also going to be proxies)

if the second one goes wrong, they simply create a new smart contract with the fixes and point the proxy smart contract towards it.

There are security solutions developers can pay for to monitor the memory pool for the blockchain for any suspecious activity .. if it see's it, then it can simply submit competing transactions that would cancel out the rougue ones.

And on case actual money is lost, there are a number of decentralised insurance solutions out there.

Some developers even go so far as to offer decentralised insurance on the blockchain to new customers of their DeFi products.

Well that all definitely sounds simpler and more efficient than just giving a tenner to the newsagent.