Bitcoin Revolution -- BITCOIN Gives We The People FREEDOM from FEAR of NSA

Bitcoin doesn't meet the definition of a currency or even an electronic payment form in Finland, where the central bank has instead decided to categorize the software as a commodity.


"Considering the definition of an official currency as set out in law, it's not that. It's also not a payment instrument, because the law stipulates that a payment instrument must have an issuer responsible for its operation," Paeivi Heikkinen, head of oversight at the Bank of Finland in Helsinki, said in a Jan. 16 phone interview. "At this stage it's more comparable to a commodity."

Finland is the latest country to try to come to grips with the advent of virtual currencies that aren't controlled by any central bank or government. As regulators in Europe warn of the risks associated with using such software as a substitute for real money, authorities are struggling to design frameworks to protect consumers and businesses from potential losses they have no legal means of recouping.

Globally, Bitcoin has had a mixed reception, with China's central bank banning lenders from handling the virtual money. The U.S. Internal Revenue Service hasn't offered guidance on Bitcoin beyond saying it's working on the issue and that it has been monitoring digital currencies and transactions since 2007. Meanwhile, Texas Senate candidate Steve Stockman is accepting Bitcoin campaign donations.

Britain is reviewing the tax treatment of Bitcoin, a virtual currency that governments fear can be used for tax evasion and money laundering.

HM Revenue and Customs has advised traders that it is looking at alternatives to the current 20 per cent value added tax on purchases of the coin, which is regarded as a voucher rather than a currency. Traders complained that the VAT made their businesses globally uncompetitive and was forcing them to look at moving to more favourable jurisdictions.

The review comes as tax authorities around the world seek to capture revenues from Bitcoin and minimise risks of tax avoidance and evasion. The value of the world's stock of Bitcoin has risen from $150m to $10bn over the past year, adding urgency to regulators' efforts to clarify its status.

The nearly boozy Bitcoin rallies and crashes of 2013 led to endless media coverage, rising mass market knowledge of its existence, and piece by piece, the growing maturity of its underlying network.

No asset that regularly loses or gains 50% in a day can be treated as anything more than a speculative tool, and an incredibly risky one at that. However, in the new year, as the media firestorm has mostly abated around Bitcoin and its network of buyers and sellers has continued to improve and expand, something interesting has happened: Bitcoin has found and stuck to a trading range. bitcoin litecoin "max keiser"  "accept bitcoin"
Now, compared to more traditional currencies, Bitcoin still moves around too much for the good digestion of those close to it. At the same time, over the past nearly two weeks, it has shown remarkable flatness, meaning that those wishing to use and accept it for commerce have had a period in which they could trust their sales and purchases to not swing to wild profit or loss by whim of the market.



The Bitcoin D1 chart remains as humorous as ever (in this case, D1 means that every chart point represents one day's trading):

There are many reasons to be excited about bitcoin: it could enable totally new business and technology models; it resembles the internet in the early '90s in the sense that it is a network that no-one owns and everyone can contribute to; it could revolutionise legal concepts of ownership; it could disrupt the payments industry; it could even become a tax haven. It could also flop.