“Visa processed 37 billion transactions in FY2008, or an average of 100 million transactions per day. That many transactions would take 100GB of bandwidth, or the size of 12 DVD or 2 HD quality movies, or about $18 worth of bandwidth at current prices.”
Digital cash systems have been falsely misrepresented as being a cyberpunk/anarchist creation that is outside of the reach of government and was designed as an alternative that could not be controlled.
Systems such as Bitcoin are more easily regulated and controlled than any prior monetary system. Existing regulation within the United States and Europe allow for the control and regulation of digital currencies as digital cash systems.
Know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) regulations are sufficiently powerful to be able to ensure that the United States and Europe can control monetary transactions within its borders even with the rise of digital currency systems such as bitcoin.
Dal Pont recognises three possible categories of agents (G E Dal Pont, Law of Agency (Butterworths, 2001) [1.2]):
(a) those that can create legal relations on behalf of a principal with a third party;
(b) those that can affect legal relations on behalf of a principal with a third party;
(c) a person who has authority to act on behalf of a principal.
Agency applies to open source development groups just as it applies to corporations.
The only consensus mechanism in Bitcoin involves building and disseminating a valid block that others build upon until a depth of 100 blocks has been reached.
Consequently, if your system does not build blocks, it is not a Bitcoin node.
In 2005, MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., 545 US 913 (2005) saw the US Supreme Court decision finding developers are fiduciaries liable for peer-to-peer software.