The Legality of Crypto-Currency Holdings

[tungfa]

The Legality of Crypto-Currency Holdings

http://dashpaymagazine.com/index.php/20 ... -holdings/

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on Dec. 10, 1948 at the Palais de Chaillot, Paris. Its Article 17 proclaims:
(1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others;
(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
Crypto-currencies are, in their nature, properties, personal use assets. Transactions with DASH, Bitcoin (BTC) or any other crypto-currency is akin to any barter arrangement.
As such, crypto-currencies also have similar tax treatment. (see The Australian Taxation Office statement or the IRS’ Virtual Currency Guidance stating the “virtual currency is treated as property for U.S. Federal Tax Purposes.”
In Germany, Bitcoin is “private money” which can be used in “multilateral clearing circles.”
The acceptance and legality of Bitcoin is subjective worldwide, with the pendulum swinging to the greatest extremes, with some countries moving toward an outright ban in use (e.g. Russia) while others (e.g. U.K.) are shifting toward progressive policy-making to try and adapt.
Consulting legislation and tax rules and regulations in your respective countries is important.

Nevertheless, our right to mine the crypto-currency, to own and/or to exchange it for other assets, including for fiat money issued by governmental or quasi-governmental central banks, is an undeniable human right.
We also have a right:
“to be left alone” in our (legal, legitimate, non-harmful to others) lives and activities, as U.S. Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in his famous dissent in Olmstead v. United States (1928). Brandeis defined the “right to be left alone” as “the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized men.”
“Philosophers and ethicists have described privacy as an indispensable characteristic of personal freedom. Privacy is associated with autonomy, dignity, spirituality, trust, and liberty. References to the value of private life may be found in the Bible, the history of Periclean Athens, as well as the history and culture of many people around the world,” writes Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
The UDHR, agrees with both Rotenberg and Justice Brandais in its Article 12, stipulating: “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.”
In his pivotal work, titled Framework for Securities Regulation of Crypto-currencies, Peter Van Valkenburg wrote:
“Bitcoin and follow-on crypto-currencies [like DASH; our remark] are open source innovations. There is no gatekeeper determining who may and who may not build these networks, and modifying them or building them from scratch requires nothing more than an Internet-connected machine. This permission-less ecosystem for invention is one of the reasons we should celebrate and support the technology: it helps to break down many of the structural barriers that divide us, whether as producers and consumers, banked and unbanked, or rich and poor.”
He then continues:
“At root, units of a cryptocurrency are scarce items that can be exchanged and may have value despite the fact that they have no institutional issuer or legally-promised redemption.
In this sense, cryptocurrencies are somewhat like valuable commodities (e.g. gold or platinum). However, unlike gold or platinum, cryptocurrencies are entirely non-tangible. That is not to say, however, that they exist only in the minds or promises of men and women. In a literal sense, a bitcoin [or DASH; our remark] is a unique answer to a math problem and proof that you solved that problem or else had the unique record of the solution transferred to your control.”
So, not only that at the present moment owning DASH or other cryptocurrencies is legal (or should be legal), the power of such disruptive technologies according Bitcoin writer, Noel Jones, “can supplant state institutions, and allow for all people of the world to economically and politically unite in [the] 21st century, but only if we struggle to make it so.”
Jones continued: ”We can create an international digital syndicate that will allow for the free economic and information exchange of all people around the globe as a single political body.”

The ongoing mind-blowing success of The DAO, “a decentralized autonomous organization established in April 2016 that invests in other businesses” and has since, in less than a month, raised over $150 million from over 10,000 anonymous people all over the world, proves the above correct — at least, in the meantime.

The Next Hundred Years
In their article titled, The Next Hundred Years, The New York Times, in 1996, was prophetic: “Privacy will be to the information economy of the next century what consumer protection and environmental concerns have been to the industrial society of the 20th century.”
In his 1912 Theory of Money and Credit, book, Ludwig von Mises “outlined the redistributive effects of inflation; those who get the new money first (typically politically connected cronies and the institutions they control) will gain in real purchasing power, while those to whom the new money spreads last will lose.”
Crypto-currencies are independent of any central issuer (although different organizations administer the technical protocols of each crypto-currency) and so are not vulnerable to such redistributive inflationary pressures induced by political considerations. And some are, like DASH, offering that coveted privacy within private, secure transactions.
An owner of a DASH masternode is also an owner of a scarce asset. The owner is compensated for running a masternode, for providing valuable transactional services and security to the Dash network.
The civilization of the mind in Cyberspace, as outlined by John Perry Barlow so beautifully in his monumental Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, might now be possible since the Internet has its own money and sovereignty.