Minutes/Policy Development Committee Meeting/2014-10-22

Meeting Minutes This document is a record of a meeting. Do not edit this document without contacting the relevant group first.

Attendees

• Andrew Downing (Chair)
• Daniel Judge
• Sunny Kalsi
• David Crafti
• Bill McLean
• Mark Gibbons

Absent

• Ben Fairless
• Mozart Olbrycht-Palmer (Inquiries Officer)

Apologies

• Fletcher Boyd: Apologies for being late AndrewD, I'm still having issues with AEDT >_>

Agenda

1. Mozart status report on submissions.

   Mozart absent. No report today.

2. Progress reports from WG's.

Universal Health Care WG

BillM has started trying to draft the health policy preamble. Would like to work on it a bit more before putting it on the etherpad.
A meeting for the health WG is scheduled for Tuesday next week

Digital Currencies Policy WG:

http://pad.pirateparty.org.au/p/DigitalCurrencyPolicy

WG Meeting Skipped

Digital Currencies WG meetup skipped this week, due to family commitments. Email was sent. Nobody semed to notice and just turned up anyway.

New Government Enquiry:

I did find some time to do more reading around the Senate Standing Committees on Economics: Digital currency Inquiry - Submissions close on 28 November 2014.
http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Economics/Digital_currency
It seems that this inquiry was prompted by complaints that the ATO pilocy on bitcoin was going to be just awful for Bitcoin businesses in Australia
Exchanges say they wll just have to close up shop. The essential problem, is that transactions get double taxed.
e.g. You want to buy something with bitcoin, then you have to buy the coin (+1GST) and then you use it to buy your product (+1GST)
This is because they're not really treating bitcoin as a currency, but rather as a commodity.
Bitcoin exchanges in Australia are just saying they can't operate like this. They will have to go overseas or stop trading.
Overseas exchange will not charge GST. Hence the competitive problem
ATO says it's not their fault. They can't find any legitimate way to tread Bitcoin as currency under current legislation.
Also of interest is the line in the terms of reference " incorporates digital currencies into Australia's national security framework"
They are worried that it will be used for money laundering and to finance "TERRORISM", which it could be, but so will $AUD and we don't ban that.

Acceptance as Currency?

   dcrafti: If bitcoin were accepted as an official currency of any country, then bitcoin would be a foreign currency here, not subject to GST. Could our policy be to lobby some other country to accept bitcoin as an official currency? :-)
   AndrewD: Britain already does.  They apparently initially did what we did, then 2 months layer changed their minds, but it's not an official currency of the country, just recognised as a currency.
   dcrafti: An easier policy proposal is to just change our currency act to recognise AUD, the currency of any other country *or bitcoin*, where bitcoin could be replaced by a exception of its properties, with a minimum market cap.

Other Crypto-Currencies

   MarkG:   What about the other cryptos?
   AndrewD: Yes, well there are new crypto coins invented daily. There's even a Create Your own Coin site, that just auto-creates new currencies
   MarkG:   There's no particular reason to single one out
   dcrafti: Not single one out, but set guidelines for adoption

Government Stance:

   AndrewD: What worries me a bit, is that reading through the various reportings etc. I can find, they seem a bit head-in-the-ground.
            Things like "Bitcoin already has traceability built in for everyone to see, in the block chain",  which is both true and irrelevant.
            e.g. https://www.darkwallet.is/   ==  "Stealth payments + CoinJoin mixing = Bitcoin Anonymity" and other similar things, just mix it all up, so it's not possible to track and associate to individuals as owners

Hypothetical Enforement Discussion:

   dcrafti: Things like darkwallet will probably end up banned, because their purpose is to provide privacy, which, when dealing with money, would likely violate AML and KYC laws.
   AndrewD: I'm not aware of any precedence for banning software applications How would they even enforce that?
   dcrafti: PGP exports in the 90s?
   AndrewD: PGP export restrictions did not work. 
            As they said at the time "You could buy strong crypto on the streets of Russia" and then there were the TShirts with PGP code printed on them just to mock
   dcrafti: It could be enforced by going after anyone whose money could be traced back to the mixing site. If you get money straight from it, then you're prima facie in breach.
   AndrewD: There is no mixing site. It's distributed wallet cooperation and autogeneration of payment addresses.
   dcrafti: There is a service that combines coins and redistributes them. Using something with those protectors could be criminalised
            At some point a payment has to come out to a normal wallet, which can be traced
   AndrewD: Sure, but it would not help. The wallet thing does not need such a service to exist or work
   dcrafti: I'm not saying that anonymity should be criminalised. I'm just saying it could be done.
            At some point, you spend your bitcoin. AFP trace those coins, attributable to you, back to an address they have flagged.
   AndrewD: There is no blockchain distinction between a normal wallet and the dark wallet. They are just addresses. They can't tell which software you used in your client.
            That's the point of dark wallet. It blends the transactions together and anonymises the destination addresses by generating new ones every time
   dcrafti: You can push coins around and mix them up, but if the burden of proof is changed to make a person justify that they're not being dodgy, it's game over.
   AndrewD: Prove that your last cash transaction was not dodgy.
            You can't reverse the burden of proof of honesty for all transactions. It's like proving negatives
   dcrafti: There's no law that says I need to, but there could be one introduced. Notes, at least, have serial numbers. Make everyone log them at transaction time, or have them confiscated.
            It all comes down to how scared the government gets. How scared would you say they've been so far?
            Prove you weren't in Syria to fight with ISIS.
   AndrewD: I don't think they understand it well enough to be as scared as they should be, but making people prove negatives is an extraordinary burden

Next Digital Currencies WG meeting:

   3rd Nov 2014, 8:30pm in #ppau-pdc IRC channel.

Libraries and Culture WG:

   sunnyk:  We had a meeting a couple of mondays ago. We are still working on it.
            We're still in the rough stages of the work, and mostly in the pre-bit
            We don't have strong policy directions which we will probably do next Monday
            Mostly we're about trying to make libraries open cultural spaces, a demilitarised zone where people can exchange and do things that may be considered infringement
            The idea is to go to a library and become enriched.
            There's also ideas about underutilised areas being utilised for art and communities and libraries generally "asking" for money and it being distributed by an independent body based on a bunch of criteria and community consensus
   AndrewD: yes - there was much talk about funding models, triggered by Discourse question, 
   sunnyK:  Most of this thinking came from Casimirri's (sp?) comment on discourse

Member Engagement with Policy Development

   AndrewD: That was a nice example of some member engagement in PDC via Discourse.
            I want to encourage more of that
   sunnyk:  I think members will want to engage more "once we're done". 
            If we have a policy we're thinking of and saying "this is what we want to put forward" I think people will get in on that time
            After we've got a first writing done we can call that the first review
   AndrewD: Could be. I think we need to explore a bit to find the best engagement model.
   DanielJ: It seems to me that people are more likely to engage and contribute if there is sometthing already done and they are then either disagreeing with an aspect, or providing improvements or alternatives to existing aspects...
            Not that that is based on any real empirical evidence per se
   AndrewD: It's always easier to say what is wrong with a plan, than to come up with a plan
            It's like software development. Users can always tell you what's bad about the software you give them, but find it really hard to tell you how it should be before you make it.

Corporate Stalking WG

   dcrafti: Had long work days. Haven't done anything. I've got some twitter DMs from Liam look at, but I haven't read them yet.

3. Interim General Policy Meeting?

Brendan has prompted a couple of times with something along the lines of "How about an interim General Policy Meeting sometime>" This would mean having actual policy proposals to put forward Progress is slow so far this year.

   BillM:   What is a General Policy Meeting?
   AndrewD: It's like a Congress meeting, but just doing new Policy proposals. No change of NC or other such annual happenings
            It is online, but also physical
            We did one a couple of years back if I recall correctly, in the Irish Club in Sydney, near Central station
   DanielJ: Normally we need an Annual Congress to adopt policies (ie party wide into the platform) but these allow us to do it without holding a full congress, it arose primarily so we could adopt policies prior to the election.
            It makes sense to do when needed. Means we dont have to wait a full year to add stuff tio the platform
            The intent is more 'we have policies in the pipe that can be adopted, lets do this so we can get them sorted without awaiting for the congress' rather than lock it in every year etc
            We don't have any good to go at this stage... has he mentioned a ballpark intended date for such a thing this time round?
   AndrewD: He said December.
   sunnyk:  Doesn't that sound like a bad month?  it's the holiday month
   dcrafti: I think I need the motivator of a deadline...
   AndrewD: sunnyk: That was my thinking too. December/January is a terrible time for getting things completed. Just availability of people is bad
   DanielJ: One benefit though, is that if there are controversial polices that end up with amendments on the floor etc. or need to go away and be brought back after refining, having a policy meeting means there is not the 12 month turnaround on that
            I cannot imagine any weekend in December where i would be physically free enough to attend such a thing
   AndrewD: How about we aimed for such a meeting in February
   <... general agreement to Feb/March timeframe... >

4. General Discussion

   Nothing. Meeting ended 9:45pm.