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by icebraining 4836 days ago
While it's true that a lot of (small) shops don't accept bank cards, this is mostly immaterial. The threat in Cyprus was that the government could seize a good percentage of all the money deposited, including whole life savings.

In that view, keeping most of your money in a non-seizable currency (Bitcoin or not) and just some "hand money" in the bank makes perfect sense. As a Portuguese, I'm considering it myself.
1 comments
sc0rb 4835 days ago
If what you say about the gov seizing money is true, why wouldn't they try and take some sort of legislative control over BTC? Why wouldn't they make it illegal or do some other thing with the law to make it harder to use without running the risk of a knock on the door? No country is just going to stand by and let a new currency disrupt them.
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icebraining 4834 days ago
If what you say about the gov seizing money is true

Well, it's not exactly a conspiracy theory, it's all over the news about Cyprus that the Parliament voted (and rejected) that measure[1], which was proposed by the Eurogroup (and others, IIRC).

why wouldn't they try and take some sort of legislative control over BTC? Why wouldn't they make it illegal or do some other thing with the law to make it harder to use without running the risk of a knock on the door? No country is just going to stand by and let a new currency disrupt them.

My argument wasn't just about Bitcoin, but in any case, I certainly wasn't suggesting a situation where half the population or so would suddenly turn to BTC.

That said, while they could illegalize Bitcoins, preventing people from actually using them would be much harder than just telling a few banks what to do. To buy Bitcoins you just need to make an online payment to some exchange (e.g. Mtgox) - you don't even need to run the Bitcoin client.

So to enforce that illegalization, it would take up much more time and effort to implement the technical and legal counter-measures, and it would either be largely ineffective (see "fight against file sharing") or politically hard to implement (e.g. very large number of arrests).

Finally, this is all mostly irrelevant, because the real reason this measure was proposed wasn't because the money from Cypriots, but because there's a lot of money from wealthy Russian business men which would get seized as well, and which definitively won't be using Bitcoins.

[1]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/plan-to-seize-deposit...

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