Alchemy is not Chemistry
Tags: Hackernoon Top Story, Coupon, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Law

When you take a step back from the Emperor’s New Clothes practice of permuting words and make an insight jump as Lambur clearly has, you inevitably ask simple, fundamental questions like, “Why is it that store coupons worth $100 do not require KYC/AML, but Etherium tokens to manage them do?” The answer is KYC/AML doesn’t apply to coupons because coupons are not money. Neither are Amazon Gift Cards or iTunes Gift Cards or any of the thousands of other tools like them on sale all over the world, all ordered and managed on databases.

The next thing people say is “Etherium is not a database”. I’m sorry to break the news to you, but Etherium (and Bitcoin) are nothing more than databases that store strings of numbers. There is no intrinsic difference between a MySQL database and Bitcoin.

10…9…8…7…5…4…3…2…1…0…..

Is this a hexdump from one of Bitcoin’s database files, or a hexdump of something else? You can’t tell, because you’re not a machine. If you were a machine, you would know that there is no difference between strings; all strings are of exactly the same nature. http://it.tuxie.eu/?p=316

Immediately when I make this statement of fact, they run into a problem; these people don’t know what MySQL is. In order to know why the the statement that, “Bitcoin is no different to MySQL” is true, you need to know what MySQL is, and if you don’t then these words go in one ear and out of the other.

Bitcoin and all derivatives of it are nothing more than databases with different underlying rules. Once you understand this, then statements like these:

Clearly make no sense. Coupons and Gift Cards do not attract regulation, are all controlled by databases, are privately issued and redeemable for cash, discounts or services. It is not relevant that the coupon has a value ascribed to it by the issuer, it also isn’t relevant that people “See value” whatever that means. It is also irrelevant what sort of database they’re using to keep track of which coupon has been redeemed. Coupons are all printed with a unique number on them, so that they can’t be redeemed twice.

Once again, these gentlemen are not citing any law. They’re simply permuting hearsay, and then building application rules and making business decisions based purely on hearsay.

Using terms like “bearer instrument” makes no sense when talking about store coupons, and all the people in these threads would concede that, but why does the “bearer instrument” suddenly make sense if the purpose of the string or the database used to keep track of them is different? They have no answer for this that is not prosaic or that takes into account what’s going on under the hood. The term “bearer instrument” is a clue to how people are thinking.

“Coupon Cutters” store hundreds of coupons in books like this worth thousands of dollars. None of this activity is regulated or monitored in any way. Why? If this cutter lost this book, she would lose thousands of dollars. What if the issuer goes out of business? No one asks this about coupons. Why not? You should ask these questions yourself, and not gloss over it with a shrug of your shoulders or prosaic waving of the hands, idioglossia or run on sentences.

What these people are claiming is that coupon cutters are engaging in financial activity, and if so, that they should be paying taxes on their “financial gains” made by using coupons which are a form of money. The next argument people make is that because it is done in a computer on software that the nature of the activity suddenly changes to something else, because an app is used to manage the process.