2013-04-23

Quick Thoughts

One of the major benefits of being out of town on business, for me anyway, is that I spend most of my mental energy missing my wife and wishing I were home. That makes the world of appalling infractions on our civil liberties feel significantly smaller. Hence, not only am I busier while out of town - and thus less-able to provide quality blog content - I am also less capable of focusing on the kinds of things I would typically blog about. I'd rather just be home, but I can't be. My mind goes back-and-forth on this for a while, and then I lose the will to post about anything interesting.

As somewhat of a side-benefit, however, the things that do happen to catch my interest aren't the goings-on in Boston, which everyone else is discussing, but this new internet sales tax that Congress is going to successfully pass (just you wait and see).

And again, what's popping into my head isn't outrage or indignation, but rather this: It occurs to me that now is a good time to buy some Bitcoins. If I am correct in my assumptions, then a new internet sales tax is going to drive more e-commerce into the shadows of the untraceable Bitcoin market. There, people are free to transact however they see fit, free from sales taxes. As this has the potential to save both consumers and producers a lot of transaction costs, we can assume that there will be a modest uptick in Bitcoin values. (Whether that uptick cancels out the tax avoidance benefits, as a free market analysis might suggest is fodder for someone more economically astute than I.) Hence, there looks to be some arbitrage opportunity coming down the pipeline.

Of course, the pessimistic view would be that the internet sales tax legislation (which I have not read, and likely never will read) will be crafted in such a way as to make transacting in Bitcoins all the more difficult, thereby discouraging their use and toppling over the digital currency before it has a chance to undermine the inflationary US dollar.

But who wants to be a pessimist?

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