Every time there's a bitcoin story, I come here to relish in the flood of angry, embittered nerds. Too old to have picked up on the "next greatest thing," now they just rage, trolling a technology they don't know and missed out on.

Bitcoin was supposed to die years ago. Right? But it didn't. And now big names are getting on board. Shouldn't you start learning a little bit about how this works? eBay is looking at it, after all, and the founder of PayPal is watching.

If only you had bought in early, you could be taking a trip to space on Virgin Galactic, like that flight attendant from Hawaii who was Branson's first public bitcoin customer. Ouch.

Not if the card is stolen, or the person reports the card as stolen. These are both significant problems for merchants, which cannot happen with bitcoin transactions.<br><br>Something a lot of people don't understand about payment networks is that credit card transactions are not "confirmed" for several months. The merchant is on the hook for the full amount of the charge for this entire time period. The customer can call and dispute a charge several months after the fact, resulting in a chargeback to the merchant.<br><br>Bitcoin, once the transaction has been confirmed, is permanent. What does this take, 10 minutes max if you include a reasonable fee? (a fee which is still vastly less than that charged by credit card companies...) Imagine being able to account for EVERY POSSIBLE "CHARGEBACK" by 10 minutes after closing that day? That's what bitcoin is.

Not at all. BitPay is entirely merchant-side.

Businesses are required to report bitcoin transactions as income like any other. In this regard, there is no difference between accepting bitcoin and accepting cash...except that there is considerably more tracking related to bitcoin. In particular, every transaction is public and permanently visible, and there is significant tracking and monitoring of the bitcoin/fiat exchange points.

Bitcoin spent for daily purchases are not considered taxable as capital gains.<br><br>I'm not a tax lawyer (but I have one).

The mechanism is the courts. And damages based on pollution are well-established in law. In fact, the only reason we don't ALREADY use this mechanism to keep corporations from ruining our water and land is because these corporations have STATUTORY PROTECTION for their damages.

The greatest twist to the supposed "environmental regulations" is that companies have statutory protection from lawsuits as long as they comply with the regulations. There are some exceptions, but it is quite hard to sue a company for damages if they are complying with applicable regulations.

So "environmental regulations" are not constrictions on business. They are licenses to pollute. They say how much you can pollute and still be protected by the law. The question of whether people are being hurt is secondary.

The court solution is focused around whether people are being hurt. If someone is hurt (or their property damaged), it doesn't matter how much "regulatory compliance" you have, you are liable for the damage. And in the case of industrial pollution, the damage is often astronomically high. No company will remotely approach the possibility of a serious industrial leak or dump if they do not have statutory protection to shield them from its effects. Problem solved.

It would force them to spend a fortune. A fortune they perhaps might not want to spend, considering that it would occupy their treasury, men, and equipment in a world suddenly full of hostile, motivated, angry countries.

Still a win, to have an armed citizenry.

Based on your reply, you probably think that the solution to overly-centralized wealth and power is ... even more centralized power.

And your argument is a strawman fallacy. We can prosecute right now for the harm caused by the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels, completely outside of any global warming concern. In reality, if the only oil/gas extraction and consumption were done in a way that did not infringe on people's property or their health, then we would be burning FAR less of it. Indeed, we would probably be burning so much less of it that global warming would not be a concern at all. But that is a matter of degree: perhaps it would just be *less* of a concern.

Either way, win. And many orders of magnitude better than the current system (or any other proposed system such as the ludicrous "carbon tax.")

Thank you very much. I don't read Russian well (yet). I appreciate you taking the time to explain.

How many people have read even ten words that Hitler actually wrote or spoke? Nobody knows who the Nazis actually were, or what they actually did. I am convinced that if a National Socialist party were started in the US, people would flock to it without realizing for a moment what it actually was. They'd have to change a few nouns, perhaps substitute Muslims for Jews, but the rhetoric would be terribly seductive.

(Modern Neo-Nazis have very little in common with the German Nazis of the 1930s.)

I would really like a citation for this, or at least a point to continue some research. I have an amateur interest in history, and have been attempting for a long time now to figure out how the Russian experiment in Communism went so badly wrong. Marx was an adamant supporter of individual ownership of firearms, but somehow that didn't make it into practice in any Communist experiment.

So if you have some information regarding civilian firearms ownership in Soviet Russia, I would love to know.

Strawman fallacy. Libertarianism is not anarchy. Libertarians absolutely believe in the existence of a centralized government, which would handle enforcement of property rights. Pollution qualifies as encroachment/infringement on others' property rights.

The sentence is not garbled. "Damages" is a monetary value. If your pollution (including CO2 emissions) harms other people or their property, you are liable to make restitution or restoration. If you burn fossil fuels in an urban environment, you are part liable for the respiratory and circulatory illnesses caused in part by your actions. Don't like it? Don't burn fossil fuels. Problem solved, earth saved.

You are completely correct. But something I think you may be missing is that the armed citizenry is not a replacement for the military, it is an augmentation. One that the Ukraine is sorely missing.

That's because we've already solved all the other problems. Why talk about it when the problem has been discussed and solved?

The problem we haven't solved is how to achieve an actual free market so those solutions can start saving the world. That's why we talk about it.

The Libertarian solution makes every person burning fossil fuels liable for the damages caused by increased CO2 emissions. Just like a carbon tax, but with some critical differences.

1) It applies damages directly to the parties responsible, whereas a carbon tax goes into government pockets.

2) Because it applies directly to the people causing the damage, it creates direct motivation to mitigate and avoid damaging behavior. A carbon tax relies on government decrees (always too little and too late) to induce change.