>> Rename to Bytecoins
"Unregulated peer-to-peer crypto currency".
>> I have a wallet service on my desktop. It holds information that I want to keep private and has nothing to do with any form of virtual currency.
So what? Kill/heavily regulate the online wallet services and make mining illegal. Not really all that hard. Hard to identify who's doing it, perhaps, but not hard to legislate.
>> In order to apply financial rules they have to recognise it as a currency which would, in effect, legitimise it.
Not if they also made it illegal. Look at what happened with Liberty dollars - recognised as a competing currency and shut down as a result (competing physical currencies are not allowed). Again, BTC would be *technically* harder to shutdown, but not legislatively harder.
>> Yes. That is why there are so many lawyers and why every law passed ends up being amended and/or superseded. Lawmakers find it difficult to successfully define physical objects and processes, never mind virtual ones.
Yet here we are with all these laws and enforcement agencies that will shut you down if (for instance) you make a business of selling illegal items like heroin. Seems that some things can be legislated.
>> All the miners do, by the way, is generate a SHA-256 hash to sign a block of data with. How easy do you think the lawmakers would find it to stop people signing a bitcoin data block without having any side effects on everything else that uses SHA-256?
Very easy indeed. "For the purposes of mining and/or processing transactions in unregulated peer-to-peer crypto currencies".