Proposal: Legal (Sept)

[demo]

Then why couldn't I hire 100 lawyers (or better yet, just 100 regular actors) to go present my public keys in my stead?

Because it will make your life difficult, it could be costly, and the more lawyers you hire, and the more cheap they are, the more dangerous is for your secret (of cheating in the assembly by hiring 100 lawyers or actors) to be revealed.

Additionaly,

You may also search about proof of identification without revealing your social security number. This can be used for example in order to prove that you own a social security number of a country, without revealing the exact number. This is called zero knowledge proof indetification, and some states (not the US of course) may support this proof for their citizents.

For example a state may give timestamps of signed documents that their citizents ask, without revealing the name of the citizent. Those states may give time stamped blind signatures to their citizents. If this feature is supported by the state, then if I ask you to give me a timestamp at random time, several times, and you manage to fullfill my request everytime and exactly at the time I asked you, and as quick as possible, then this means that you own a social security number of that state. This is enough of course if you are a single person wanting to prove that you belong to the state. if you are two persons, then you both have to prove that the one's zero knowledge social security number is different to the other's. So a more complicated protocol is needed, and the state must support it.

 

[GrandMasterDash]

Thinking about what I said, we don't need to prove individuality, we only need people to declare how many MNs they own. People that declare many MNs would receive a larger than normal reward and posses less voting power per node.... while people declaring small numbers of MNs would receive a smaller reward than normal but posses more voting power per node.... and thus it doesn't matter if people lie, they would simply choose what type of democracy they want by deciding between voting power or profits.

 

[Ryan Taylor]

Ryan,
Just a thought, as US govt becomes progressively more Orwellian(plan on it), wouldn't it make a ton of sense to push aside all this and simply locate operations(?) in some friendlier locale?
I can't see that it could have a negative impact more so than splitting the block reward did temporarily. Americans would still buy and sell via electronic systems. Dash as a whole may be set free.
How does this seem to you?

Laws will apply to the individuals where they live, not where the server operating the masternode is located. My earnings in any other country are taxable in the United States. Also, exchanges located in the US are not going to move themselves to a friendlier locale in order to accept Dash. If we expect people and companies that intend to operate within the law to accept Dash or invest in Dash, we simply need to provide them with guidance about how to operate within the law. For example, if Coinbase were sent a PrivateSend transaction, should it return it? Or is it fine to accept this type of incoming transaction as long as they have no knowledge that it is from an illegal source? Or does that mean the transaction limit is just lower than a regular transaction (e.g., below $1,000 per day per user is a legal money transmitter limit)? I don't know and neither do they.

We could ask every potential business partner in the US to go hire a lawyer to answer these questions many times over, or we could fund it ourselves once and make it that much easier for potential partners to work with us. The idea is that this is more efficient, and overcomes a barrier that many potential partners would be unwilling to fund independently.

 

[demo]

Laws will apply to the individuals where they live, not where the server operating the masternode is located. My earnings in any other country are taxable in the United States.

Yes of course, and the same may happen to people who are outside US. Their earnings in US may be taxable in their countries. Does anybody outside US pays VAT in their country when offering their services for the dash budget? Cryptocoins is a way to avoid tax and VAT, this is well known, and this is the main motivation for using cryptocoins. People around the world are risking when dealing with cryptocoins by ignoring the VAT tax. The US dashers should also take some risks, by not informing US state that they have earnings outside US (some non-US states may not tax earnings outside their territory, in that case you are half illegal and a solution may be to leave US citizenship and become a citizent of that state). Are you trying to make dash US-centric?

Also, exchanges located in the US are not going to move themselves to a friendlier locale in order to accept Dash. If we expect people and companies that intend to operate within the law to accept Dash or invest in Dash, we simply need to provide them with guidance about how to operate within the law. For example, if Coinbase were sent a PrivateSend transaction, should it return it? Or is it fine to accept this type of incoming transaction as long as they have no knowledge that it is from an illegal source? Or does that mean the transaction limit is just lower than a regular transaction (e.g., below $1,000 per day per user is a legal money transmitter limit)? I don't know and neither do they.
We could ask every potential business partner in the US to go hire a lawyer to answer these questions many times over, or we could fund it ourselves once and make it that much easier for potential partners to work with us. The idea is that this is more efficient, and overcomes a barrier that many potential partners would be unwilling to fund independently.

You should focus on worldwide businesses that sell products and services and are willing to make exchanges directly in cryptocoins with their customers. You should focus on real people offering services and products eachother, and are willing to exchange cryptocoins for these. Offering services and products directly in cryptocoins without passing through a state's coin or a state's legislation, it is a way to avoid VAT and taxation. This is not legal of course, but this is the power of dash and the rest cryptocoins, that you can avoid laws, tax and VAT. If dash is tottaly recognised by all laws internationally, then it will be taxed, and then why not using dollars or euros or yuan instead of dash? By asking dash to conform totally to the law, you destroy any motivation of using dash.

You have to explain this to the businesses, that by offering services and products directly in cryptocoins, this is a way to avoid VAT and tax issued by the states. And this is the real power of cryptocoins. Because this makes their products and services cheaper to the customers. If dash conforms only to the US law, and at the same time you ignore the laws of the non-US states (like VAT is), then you are using dash as a medium in order to conquer those rest states by destroying their economical "ecosystem".

Let you all be dash nation patriots. If you separate between people who want to conform to US laws and people who want to conform to the non-US states laws (that often contradict to the US) , then dash is doomed. Laws contradict eachother among states (VAT is one very good case of it) and if you try to conform to all international and local laws, this will tear dash apart. If you try to conform only to the US laws, this will tear dashers apart.

This is my "legal" advice. No need to pay 1500 dash to a lawyer to tell you the same thing! If you liked my advice, just give your tip to the universal dividend foundation.

 

[demo]

Why the forum is asking me a captcha in order to edit the above post?
When the captcha is confirmed, the html page crashes.
And most important, this happens ONLY with the above post, not with this one.

Does anyone knows why this is happening? Is it because of the url links I provided in my message?

 

[demo]

Regarding the lack of VAT in the US, let me inform you also about the new arriving so called "Amazon" Tax.

VAT starts invading US, so if you are living in one of these 28 US states, beware! Probably you are illegal when you are offering goods or services (defined in the dash budget system) without giving the appropriate VAT(or "Amazon") tax, similar to what he is almost everyone else living in the rest of the world (were VAT is compulsory for both goods and services).

This is my "legal" advice. No need to pay 1500 dash to a lawyer to tell you the same thing! If you liked my advice, just give your tip to the universal dividend foundation.

 

[demo]

So what is the solution to all these? DONT MESS WITH LAWS AND LAWYERS. Encourage businesses you want them to support dash, to create gift cards. Then set a dash affiliated business of buying and selling those gift cards, then encourage people to buy the gift cards by paying in dash. Similar to what bitcoin is doing with amazon.

This is my "legal" advice. No need to pay 1500 dash to a lawyer to tell you the same thing! If you liked my advice, just give your tip to the universal dividend foundation.

 

[Ryan Taylor]

Ryan,
I am a very reasonable older man. Hopefully someone you would respect if you knew me. I feel I need to tell you that I trust and respect you just based on the interview with Amanda. That out of the way I feel very uncomfortable with your vision of becoming a alt-bank. Sure it's a great dreamy idea but you will entangle us all in a sea of legality which I don't believe the community would have a tolerance for if they knew what it entailed. The US gov and it banker handlers are not your friend. Sorry. I doubt it is workable as you state it. Dash will not be allowed or accepted because we threaten the staus quo.
Better to strategically relocate the center of the Dash world at the expense of the US holder and save the future of the coin. The us holder, of which I am one, will find their own way to navigate.

Put aside the rabbit hole lawyer proposal and find a way to spend that value somewhere else

I'm not sure they have a choice any more than they have a choice about the existence of any software they may find undesirable running on the internet. Like with Bitcoin, they may not like it, but they recognize they cannot stop it. So they do the next best thing, which is try to regulate the businesses that interact with it. By assisting them with this regulation, we make it easier for businesses to integrate with us.

 

[Ryan Taylor]

What happens if the overall legal response is not very healthy / positive? We will adapt, right? How will we adapt? - we will comply or we will rebel? And so this is the problem; MNOs have been voting for projects but we've never been asked about the overall strategic goals.. do we want a compliant system that works with government, or will we accept to break rules so that we can re-imagine money? The answer to that question would help us enormously in deciding for this proposal and the other related proposals e.g. ATM Master Compliance Program etc. We are potentially sleepwalking into danger by doing this one proposal at a time.

On a related note, I am concerned that a small number of MNOs are effectively pooling their votes to push these things through. If that is true (or can be imagined as true in the future), then I think we need to move to a MNO registration scheme and reject any nodes not registered against a MNO. I wouldn't want that but how else can we stop a select few from controlling a significant share of the votes?

The "off the cuff" answer from the law firm is that a heavily unfavorable opinion is unlikely. For example, similar to the tor network, it's likely that (because masternode mixing can be used for either legal or illegal activity), as long as the MN operator is unaware of any illegal activity taking place through his masternode, the owner would not be liable for that activity. However, if an acquaintance came to you and said "Hey, I'm selling drugs on this darkweb website and want to mix my coins, but I want to ensure I use nodes I trust don't belong to the government. What masternode is yours?" And you then give them your IP address... I suspect now you are exposing yourself to criminal liability. The guidance is likely to be in that vein.

As @David pointed out, the main value of these legal opinions is to demonstrate that operators and business partners have done their due diligence with a reputable firm and did our best to comply with the law. That would protect all of us should the IRS or LE choose to interpret the laws more stringently in the future, helping to mitigate risks.

 

[Ryan Taylor]

Sorry, I probably didn't explain well enough. I wasn't thinking one person one vote... I was thinking more of a sliding scale, that a person with 100% of nodes would have zero votes and a person with one node would have one equal vote. Thus, MNOs would be forced to choose between profits or politics (provided we could determine unique humans).

I say this because the last I looked (a very long time ago), Evan had well over 300 nodes and, in theory, a compounding of nodes (profits generating new nodes), would eventually lead to domination.

Interesting idea... however, I'd like to point out that even if a holder were to not sell any Dash, since masternode owners only receive 45% of the rewards, their share of the network slowly declines over time (as 55% is going to "someone else" like miners or contractors to the network). While someone who held on to their rewards would see their absolute number of masternodes increase, their share of the network would continue to decrease. This is by design, by the way. It is impossible to increase your share of the network without constantly buying more masternodes than the block rewards can produce.

 

[Ryan Taylor]

Are you trying to make dash US-centric?

Absolutely not. I think we explained well our reasoning for starting with the US market, but that doesn't mean we feel other markets are not equally important. It is just that the US market offers the most to gain from a legal opinion standpoint, and we have to prioritize and start somewhere.

 

[Ryan Taylor]

Why the forum is asking me a captcha in order to edit the above post?
When the captcha is confirmed, the html page crashes.
And most important, this happens ONLY with the above post, not with this one.

Does anyone knows why this is happening? Is it because of the url links I provided in my message?

@moocowmoo I was having the same issue. And it only seems to be that post... It wouldn't allow me to quote it either and was crashing.

 

[demo]

Absolutely not. I think we explained well our reasoning for starting with the US market, but that doesn't mean we feel other markets are not equally important. It is just that the US market offers the most to gain from a legal opinion standpoint, and we have to prioritize and start somewhere.

I already told you, searching the laws around US is trolling. The laws contradict eachother among US states (for example have a look at the Amazon Tax.)
What are you going to do in the case one law says you go north, and another says you go south? You cannot serve concurrently two laws that contradict eachother! If you mess with this, the dash community may tear apart. You have better leave US, and go have your seat to an offshore, to a country that has straight forward laws. So this is the first question you have to ask your lawyers. What is the country that best fits to the dash needs?

Having a safe harbour, you can then approach US or any other market. Either directly if this is legal according to the laws (note that laws differ in the federal and in the local level, so legality is relative). Or if there is a law mess, then you can approach any market indirectly by convincing merchants to offer gift cards which the final consumer can buy in dash in the internet e.t.c.