Yep. Any time a politician talks about child porn or terrorism, you want to ask yourself, "what are they really trying to achieve here?"
My guess is that the film lobby is trying to get the government to push the cost of preventing piracy onto Internet firmshere. The end user will pay for it and have a more restricted Internet.
These companies go to great lengths to avoid US tax jurisdiction, employing an army of accountants and lawyers to avoid giving money to the IRS. Perhaps they could work with the same dedication to avoid giving their users data to the NSA.
That is true, but numbers matter. There's a big difference between the NSA serving 10 FAA702/FISA orders a year on Microsoft for Skype intercepts vs. 10 million. It's targeted vs. wholesale surveillance. We know from companies' disclosures the upper bound is on the order of thousands, and is likely to be far less.
Put another way, there are some actual terrorists/spies/etc. out there, even if the number of terrorists is far lower than the government would like you to believe. If the NSA serves Microsoft with, say, 10 or 100 lawful orders a year to eavesdrop on those communications, is that something worthy of working with "dedication" to prevent? Probably not.
What the companies should be doing is encrypting what they can to frustrate wholesale surveillance. Which Microsoft isn't doing. Which I wrote about here:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57590389-38/
No, the Internet companies have said that's not what's happening. Facebook has said, for instance, it has received a total of requests covering 18,000 accounts over a 6-month period, which includes NSA requests and local cops trying to find a missing person:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589461-38/facebook-micro...
While I agree with you that numbers matter, having the infrastructure in place and a secret court system which simply passes almost every request allows this to be used as much as the NSA decides is reasonable, and for that use to increase exponentially over time. That in itself is dangerous, because we have no idea what future administrations would use the data for.
A manual process would ensure that the number of requests is kept reasonable.
Tax structures are intentionally written to leave openings (like the double irish), courtesy of lobbyists. And it doesn't take much effort to do it. For every politician that wants to bust Google for dodging taxes, there's one that wants to give them huge tax breaks for putting a data center in their state, and so on.
When it comes to jurisdiction, the US Government has essentially no power, via the tax code or otherwise, to force Google to pay taxes on foreign profits unless the money is repatriated.
The same is not true about national security. Political alignment is almost entirely on the side of giving the government more power for 'security' purposes.
When it comes to national security laws, and having your corporation located in the US, you can forget about fighting back and winning. The laws are in place, and they can not be rolled back without a fundamental culture / attitude shift among Americans. It's arguable, in my opinion, that it's dangerous to fight the government on these issues (eg Joe Nacchio / Qwest). That's not to say someone shouldn't do it, but when your personal well being may be at risk, very few executives are likely to put their comfortable living on the line.
Lobbying about taxes? Half the government is likely to be on your side when you do. Nobody really cares if you do that by comparison to national security issues.
The price of Bitcoin won't stabilise. The best you could hope for would be a similar volatility to a commodity like gold or silver. So products and services will never be priced in Bitcoin while there is a better alternative like the dollar which is relatively stable.
A mistake 'economists' make with bitcoin is to draw macroecomic conclusions based on theories suited to single currency economies. Actually we need theories that allow for multiple currencies circulating that have different strengths to understand the effects.
Tl;dr Bitcoin won't change the way we price things, it just provides another option to transfer wealth.
What we're seeing there is competitive devaluations through printing and recently confiscations. Fixed supply commodities like gold fare well, but their existence doesn't drag the world into a deflationary spiral. Bitcoin's existence won't have macroeconomic implications either.
Also, as Bitcoin matures, you'll see businesses pop up that will insure against the risk for a small portion of the transaction allowing near instant confirmation for merchants.
I love that over time people start coming up with solutions to the same damn problems that other payment schemes have already come up with, and that last week they were saying were evil because someone else was doing it.
It's not unique to bitcoin, you see it in all sorts of places, it is funny though.
The difference is competition. Nothing fancy, nothing new and shiny. Just something that has been proven to work time and time again in lowering prices.
The barrier to entry in the payment card industry is simply too high to allow much competition. Entering the business of bitcoin payment processing has an extremely low barrier to entry; all the hard stuff has been done already!
Bitcoin is first and foremost a currency, not a payment scheme. You can use it like cash with no (or minimal) fees, or you can layer schemes with various properties on top of it.
But when people then layer payment schemes and payment-scheme type-assurances, services and (of course) fees on top of it, is it wrong to make this comparison?
Because at the moment you see a lot of people touting the 'no fees' part as the reason it wins over credit/debit cards, but when the weaknesses of that are pointed out someone like yourself inevitably pops up to tell us that of course it's not meant for that, but payment systems can be layered over the top, with a fee structure. Or it's silly to expect that because it's just like cash, when the expectation is in response to a BTC advocates claim that it's the best thing evar for the problem domain.
Basically it can't be both ways and I am kinda tired of the constant claims that it is.
The biggest advantage of Bitcoin is being able to transfer funds globally without an intermidiary. Think of it as a payment method rather than a currency for the time being and you'll be better served.
This is about developing filters to prevent piracy. You'll see.