Stealing BTC is a crime, that's complete and utter BS.
Can you give me a link to the legal act that covers this? You know: something saying that one can own a bitcoin and he's protected.
Of course all countries work on a legal solution for digital currencies, but the ones I know about struggle to even define the ownership.
Basically, I went through some pages after previous post and it seems that, as you've said, there is some legislation in North America that covers bitcoins - mostly for the purpose of taxation.
Mind you, what I've seen suggests that in Canada it's treated as intangible asset (software), not as money.
Another option, that some countries test now, is treating it as copyright...
Still, as imperfect as it is, US law on BTC is way more precise than the average on the planet.
However, while US wants to tax your BTC, it doesn't want to protect it. Digital currency deposits are not covered by FDIC (money deposits in US are covered up to $250k).
You can insure BTC (I even did it at one point).
What exactly did you insure? Because insurance covers a risk (a possible event). So did the insurance cover someone getting access to your passwords? Or you losing that access? Or what?
And 4.) is simply dealt with by autoconverters. Steam accepts BTC for gosh sake.
Steam can accept tomatoes as long as they can price them (in USD, not BTC) and defend that.
As I said earlier: generally BTC is not a currency, it's not money. At best it's like a prepaid mobile plan. Your phone says you have $10, but it's not money - you've already spent that. You're left with just a right to get phone calls worth that much.
At this point I really got interested in this. I'll have to check some sources. Honestly, if my company started accepting bitcoin, I'd have no clue what to do with it. :-D
It is best as a currency transport, like paypal.
The issue here is that your paypal account's value is constant in your currency. You deposit and extract the same amount of USD.
Bitcoin's value changes. Technically it's a lot like trading on FOREX, but it's not a currency.
What do you think powers bitcoin? Fairy dust? There's a HUGE INDUSTRY behind it.
Nope. There's a huge industry behind using it, behind operations. There is no industry behind it's value. Owning a BTC, you don't have any rights.
It would be different if Bitcoin hadn't been created as something purely virtual. Someone could gather billions of USD and make it a base for the BTC. People would mine and spend it just like they do now, but it would have a fixed exchange rate to USD, resulting in a well-defined value - basically similar to a gold standard that currencies had a while ago.
BTC is just an agreement without any fundaments.
Here's an analogy.
You and your friend often go to a pub - each time one of you pays the bill to make things simpler. Because you drink a lot and it's hard to keep track of the balance, you create a currency called "Abeer" worth 1 beer. You can even make a shared online spreadsheet to keep track of the balance - now you can easily check how many free beers you can get next time. Basically, you've created a virtual currency.
To you and your friend Abeers are worth a lot - they're based on your friendship and trust. To everyone else it's worth totally nothing.
Since there are no underlying assets, if your friend dies or catches you kissing his wife, your Abeers instantly lose all their value.
Normal currencies and stocks always have an underlying asset - the company or the country usually owns something. Even if it goes bankrupt, there's usually something to salvage (or you can start suing the owner/management/government if they lied to you in financial statements).
. In Europe we're not very attached to cash compared to Americans.)
Bitcoin and stock markets have little in common.
