I am happy to announce the launch of Block^Shift Cryptocurrency Services. As I have loudly preached adoption of Bitcoin since the beginning of this year, I am now making it easily accessible to you.
The first product available through Block^Shift is a simple Bitcoin starter pack. In exchange for your ZAR(R) or GBP(£), Block^Shift will provide you with a digital wallet containing your Bitcoins. Within 48 hours you will have access to your own Bitcoin wallet, pin protected and backed up (forever on the blockchain) by a recovery phrase. All security features will come with a detailed explanation of why each is required and how they work.
Other currencies can be catered for, however, they will be exposed to forex charges.
**As of July 2017 now accepting EUR(€).
For further details, including full fee structure and process, please email: block.shift@icloud.com
CRYPTOAVLI 
1)How will Bitcoin and Blockchain technologies be safe from regulation in the future? (considering financial institution will seek to exert control)
2)If the Blockchain technology is designed to keep growing, won’t it be too large to download at some point?
LikeLike
Hey Stav
Thanks for your questions.
I want to separate my answers for your first Q:
a) Blockchain is a technology that is now widely studied and relatively well understood. It is a theory and method of record keeping. For a government or institution to try and regulate it is like saying people can’t use multiplication anymore because it’s a useful method for solving math problems. So I don’t think there is any concern of regulation against blockchain being introduced.
b) Bitcoin uses blockchain tech but, more specifically, it is the use case of Bitcoin as a currency that poses a threat to governments, central banks and major financial institutions. Regulation is certain to come (especially from the US) and the established powers will certainly do all they can to destroy or control it. China was in the news earlier this year attempting do just this. They forced all the Chinese exchanges to halt withdrawals so that they could gather data on all the market participants using the exchanges. New York has also introduced legislation, called the BitLicense, which effectively annihilated the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency industry and forced entrepreneurs to leave the state.
So if regulation is certain to come then what becomes more important to predict is the effect that the regulation will have on Bitcoin. This is hard to predict.
Governments would probably prefer to prohibit the use of Bitcoin altogether. However, Bitcoin is already too widespread and there is sufficient security and anonymity built into the system which protects market participants, and makes it infeasible for any government to effectively police. Decentralization is the number 1 defense that Bitcoin has to protect itself from being banned or controlled by any single entity. Since the network operates over 10’s of 1000’s of computers located in hundreds of different geo-locations it is practically impossible to shutdown.
Therefore the next contentious issue that arises is taxation. I believe that governments will realize that Bitcoin is unstoppable and so will seek to regulate it in a far more collaborative way. Many countries are currently analyzing Bitcoin and are deciding how best to describe it financially. A full summary of the legal status of Bitcoin in every country can be found here: https://coin.dance/poli (scroll down) Is it a financial instrument, a commodity, or a currency? The answer could easily be all three which makes it even more confusing at times. Be sure though, that if anyone is found to be evading tax, through Bitcoin, they will be prosecuted. But, until a definition is agreed upon and tax legislation is introduced, this remains a grey area.
Andreas Antonopoulos earns all his income in Bitcoin and declares tax like he would if he were earning normal dollars. It’s worth searching some of his videos on YouTube.
I think Banks are also realizing that the technology is highly effective and cannot be completely ignored. Banks have started to innovate with blockchain tech, but as far as Bitcoin is concerned Banks haven’t taken much action against it. Perhaps they don’t see it as an existential threat or they think the threat is too long term to worry about it now, i’m not sure. Just remember that as soon you deposit your money in any bank they control it. Cypriots know this all too well and I’m sure I don’t need to explain more about this to you. Probably their best tool to preventing Bitcoin adoption is by stopping any transactions of government money from flowing into crypto exchanges, thus making it impossible to use internet transfers to buy cryptocurrencies. Which leaves us with cash, which again, they can limit our access to.
My general opinion is that regulation is inevitable but the system is strong enough to overcome any laws that are unjust or prohibitive.
Q. 2
This is a genuine concern. As the amount of data contained in the blockchain grows & grows, it becomes harder for new miners and nodes to support the network (weakening decentralization). This was a problem that Satoshi was aware of during development. Currently it is also causing scalability problems (unable to handle large numbers of transactions in a small space of time) for the network but Satoshi had huge faith in Moore’s Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law) and trusted that as the network encountered problems the open-source nature of the software would allow for collaboration and would ultimately find solutions to any problem facing the network.
LikeLike