Bitcoin Forum

It's meant to be a better means of resolving disputes. You can read the charter here (http://polimedia.us/trilema/2012/the-mpex-rota/), and apply to be a Judge if you qualify (also there).

Enough applications have already been filed for the Rota to start hearing cases on December the 15th, so if you have a dispute and can fit it under the causes of action enumerated you can probably sue, then.

Comments probably best directed there, as you have the best chance of a competent answer.

Judges? We don't need no stinking judges.

In seriousness, this is a great way to get a list of people who should be first up against the wall when the Libertopian Revolution happens.  ;)

Well fine, but how do you propose to resolve disputes? Wager of combat to be supplanted in ~ five centuries by assize of novel disseisin?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmRAiUPdRjk  ;D

So now that there are 4 applications already this is definitely a go starting Dec 15th.

Interesting concept.

This part makes me wonder:

So you are saying that you are above everybody else, a sort of world supreme court? If this works out well, will you try to get the UN to implement a similar system?

I get the idea that this system only works for people who are already in the web-of-trust?

I'm a big fan of any type of alternative dispute resolution services.  Glad to see you trying this out. 

Good luck but without men with guns backing up the court its pretty much pointless.

Who says Mr. Popescu doesn't have men with guns backing him up?

Well, philosophically this builds on ideas MP was fleshing out in that article about gpg contracts (http://polimedia.us/trilema/2012/gpg-contracts/). Basically, that a world based on people's word and willing enforcement is better than the currently implemented alternative. In a larger sense, failing to live up to this (and implicitly recognize the superiority of BTC-courts) is the scammy thing to do. It specifically aims to make simple scamming as in 419 stuff and "talking to a lawyer" scamming notionally equivalent.

A very important point is that "you". This isn't about trying or even wanting to institute some sort of MPEx/MP monopoly on the resolution of BTC disputes. This is about sinking some available money and intellectual resources into trying to make a working prototype of a BTC court. Once shown to be working hopefully others will follow, some venues will be ridiculous/fake/scams in themselves, some others will be the BTC-justice equivalent of the Las Vegas marriage chapel, some will be quite respectable and eventually overtake and supersede MPEx's Rota much like the current day courts have overtaken and superseded the Apostolic Tribunal. So, in short, this is a natural and necessary outgrowth of Bitcoin: decentralized Bitcoin courts.


The way it works is that you need a signature to sue, but you can register in the WOT five minutes before you sue, no big deal. You also may only sue people who have a registered signature (in fact you're not even suing people/corporations, you're suing signatures), but this isn't arbitrary: anything else would be meaningless.


Thanks. We're kind of curious how it works out.


At least in theory the "backed by guns" method has failed. Even in practice it's not anything anyone really wants.


Even if he did, the entire point of this is voluntary contracts, voluntary enforcement and voluntarism in general.

Thanks everyone for the interest, and please consider registering (http://polimedia.us/trilema/2012/the-mpex-rota/) if you haven't done so already. The first rolls of Judges will be announced December 15th, so in about one week. If you miss that cut-off there's going to be further rolls every three months.

Nice!

Will probably be better than stare contests and rock-paper-scissors to solve disputes.

Especially seeing how complex some arguments in commercial disputes have become, I think this is both a necessary and unavoidable development. Might even offer a workable solution to the scammer tag problem (as mods have already stated multiple places that they're neither really prepared nor really have the time to hear the various cases).

The first Roll of Judges (http://polimedia.us/trilema/2012/the-first-roll-of-judges-december-2012/) (5 people).

Interested parties may sue at their leisure.

This is actually really cool

And there's a first case (http://polimedia.us/trilema/2013/case-i-wences-vs-mpex-breach-of-fiduciary-duty/) before the Rota.

We seriously need to standardize an armor format for bitcoin signed messages.

It would be as easy as adding an -a to the command line but the problem with ascii armored messages is that they're not readily readable to the naked eye. Does c/p-ing into gpg fail for you on the snippets in that article? Or is it just the gray cruft that bothers?

The GPG messages, I don't usually bother validating.  I've done enough of those that I know that I can, given a little fiddling around.  Unless it is a dramatic revelation, or important to me personally (like my mpex STATs), I just assume that someone will point out if it doesn't work.

That bitcoin signed message from Wences, on the other hand, I got nothing.  I don't know where it starts, I don't know where it stops, I don't know if the linebreaks are real or not, nor what character they are.  If anyone managed to validate that signature, my hat is off to them.  I gave up after trying about a dozen combinations.

++ 2


BTC\LTC need some form of very light oversight

I think a more community based process instead of appointed judges would be better

Everybody couldbe a judge and also people would upvote others weight in the voting process based upon previous & percieved "Judgyness"

i.E similar to the OTC trust factor... so some peoples vote would be weighted greater than others etc

Oh, that. Yes, bitcoin signed stuff is a mess atm. Needs standardization first and foremost (hey, Bitcoin Foundation, how hard would a -----BEGIN BITCOINd SIGNED MESSAGE----- header have been? But from the get go, cause we're not the sort of idiots who release unencrypted wallets, at least not anymore, yes?) and armoring too.

In any case, pigeons was saying it checks out for him.


You know, anyone could be a judge as it is, the original article linked in the original post reads


What's better, it's a paid job.


You really should read the whole article, I think.

Of course, even anarchists (which despise law and order) can apply to be a judge. The process to select a judge is quite a joke.

...and that background photo of Mircea Popescu reading a newspaper with a serious expression in his face is so funny.

Just imagine a serious court of law with an photo of a business man reading newspaper behind the judge seat.

First case almost closed: Case I - Wences vs MPEx, Breach of fiduciary duty (http://polimedia.us/trilema/2013/case-i-wences-vs-mpex-breach-of-fiduciary-duty/). MPEx lost.

And it's dead (http://polimedia.us/trilema/2013/rota-post-mortem/). Or is it?

Too bad Rota turned into Epic Fail.

Hey, why is the IGNORE link on your posts brown, Mr. P?

So, MP lost the first case, which any sane person would have judged against him, and rather than changing policies so that this would not happen again (I actually think he did this, by changing the wording of his terms?) or learning from the experience and being nicer to people in the future, he throw a fit and shuts down the whole court? Seems rather odd.

Already dead?

What I just said yesterday?

Mircea Popescu allowed anarchists to be judges. So it is not a surprise to discover that the judges not even required forensic examination of the evidence to understand what really happened. It is like to go after the politics & society section and ask for the user Myrkul (which is a delusional self-declared anarchist) to settle a dispute. There will be no fair sentence because anarchists despise the very essence of justice. They even consider that data cannot be owned or stolen, including Bitcoins!

By the way, my compliments to Mircea Popescu by the funny time I had following the ROTA (Route Of Total Amusement)!

Now that's funny.

I suspect you haven't fully read about the matter.


If a political angle must be placed on it (which seems dubious) it'd be moreover that he allowed socialists to be judges, and "let's redistribute wealth from the perceived rich to the perceived needy because that's what institutions are for" sort of nonsense soon followed.

But you're welcome. After all, we're here to serve.


In a dead babies sort of way.

Well, if I ever considered investing with MPEX reading this case has disabused me of the notion.  If someone sends you 130BTC and forgets the bitdust it is morally flawed to just keep it.  Return it or at a very minimum donate it to a charity.  You are taking the route modern banks take whereby they gain the majority of their profits from the charges they levy on the mistakes of their customers.  But you are even worse.  If I send a bank wire to a bad address, it comes back to me eventually.  A situation where the institution's gain is the customer's loss soon sets the institution against its own customers and is a recipe for failure since it violates the basic idea of mutual benefit that underlies contract law and capitalist economic theory.

MP, your precedent and abuse argument is specious.  If the number of mistaken deposits becomes an issue, solve it via a fee that discourages abuse but still loses MPEX money.  Because its your d*mn system and if customers can't follow it then losing a bit of YOUR money encourages you to fix it!

And I frankly can't believe you wasted everybody's time on this stupid case.  If I was a judge I would have charged you a penalty.  A penalty for being forced to do the right thing instead of just doing it yourself.

I'm not going to go read the thread again, but I don't recall any mention of an attempt by the plaintiff to resolve the matter prior to initiating the rota process.

My first thought was that sending cookies coded in the amount field was silly, and that mpex should stop that yesterday.  But it does allow full transparency.  Anyone that wants to can look at that address and see exactly how much money has come in.  The value of such transparency is quite considerable, and I understand why mpex would want to keep it.

I think the judges made a mistake here.  And I can understand why that mistake would signal the failure of the idea.  Having a good reputation for completing trades in OTC is not the same thing as having a good reputation as a fair judge.  Only by judging cases fairly can you develop that reputation, and who would want to put themselves at risk to provide that experience?

The idea of encoding some data in bitdust is great.  But if someone messes it up, you do not get to keep their 2250 bucks.  In my book that's stealing regardless of what your TOS says.

+1

I don't know about stealing* exactly, but I agree that everyone has a duty to return things they know don't belong to them.  The extent of that duty varies a bit, but generally an involuntary bailee is held to a very low standard of duty, sometimes not much more than merely not injuring bystanders while they dispose of it.  In the case of an entity taking deposits, I think that most people would consider the bailment to be at least a tiny bit voluntary, and the duty somewhat higher.  How much higher is open to question.

But, I don't see any mention of the plaintiff taking any steps at all to rectify his mistake.  Would mpex have returned the money if asked?  We have no idea.  Perhaps the judges saw more evidence than I did, but based purely on the public part of the record, the punishment was not justified.

Perhaps we need a rota of appeals, and a supreme rota.  But I can't see how to get there from here, mostly because it compounds the reputation problem.  In the real world, this problem is mooted by simply having someone with the authority to impose obedience by force, an option that we clearly do not have.

* It is clearly unjust, and in most places, illegal.  I may very well have argued in the past for or against attaching the label of "stealing".  That is a matter of philosophy relating to intention, but is not important to my point.  I only make this footnote because I don't want people jumping on my in case I've contradicted any of my old posts.

Really?

About 30 years ago there was a scam going on for a while in Germany where people just sent stuff to other random people. Stuff that was never ordered. Then they sent an invoice for the random stuff and people rather paid the invoice for stuff they never wanted because sending it back would have been even more expensive, and going to court would have been even more more expensive.

This only changed when the law was amended so when you send out stuff to someone who did not order it, the recipient is allowed to keep it. Period.

Which is essentially exactly what MP is doing. Keeping stuff he never asked for that was sent to him.

Now why the MP-Jury consisted of a bunch of bleeding hearts instead of people versed in law is another matter entirely and was not only foreseeable but totally MPs own fault for accepting these people in the first place for jury duty.

Practically speaking it's this sort of dumbassery that has cost people like you ("the community", if you wish to hold on to that mistaken notion) any chance of being involved in the process for the future. Which... you know, anyone's guess if it's a loss or not in the end.


Yeah.


Yeah.


Except there's no duties in BTC. Nor customs. Nor etc.


No, actually, the case was quite agreeably brought before the court, it was more of a "here's a chance for you boys to prove you have some basic understanding of the matters involved" rather than a sort of "omg I KILL HIM".


MP has stated the only way forward is for actual law students to take this up as a summer project.


'Twas either because MP is a blooming idiot who didn't foresee the possibility or else because MP is an evil mastermind who did foresee it but aims to derive whatever unforeseeable profits and benefits from it. I'd guess the former but nobody'd believe me anyway.

But for the record, the sum in question was returned etc. For the future however, the FAQ is quite clear:

greyhawk, there are critical differences.  First, law rests on intention.  Second, there is an implicit contract between MPEX as a service provider and the customer.  So this is not strangers forcing you into an interaction.  Third, contract law rests on mutual exchange of value/benefit because that concept underlies successful capitalist economic theory.  That's why CEOs (who make $ on options) still pay themselves 1 dollar instead of working for free.  So that new clause is probably not enforceable in most jurisdictions because there is no mutual benefit.

What MPEX is doing is more like if your credit card bill is $20.53 and you wire just $20 the company just keeps the $ and still claims you owe them the full $20.53.


MPOE-PR I'm not really interested in responding to your ad hominem attacks.  You make strange comments about my future contributions but you don't know anything about me.

So let me simply suggest that if you really think this is the right thing, then don't hide your beliefs deep inside the TOS but instead put your red quoted modification right above your bitcoin deposit address where it cannot be missed by anyone thinking to use your service.  Stand by your ideas and see how many new customers agree with them.

Then don't. Fuckwit.


Then again, maybe I do. You don't know whether I do or I don't, you'd just like to assume that anyone who'd know would think more of you than I do. What you'd like to assume is not worth money.


Why don't you quote what it actually says "above the bitcoin deposit address"? Just to show that you're not the sort of idiot who talks out of his ass for lack of a head to talk out of. Hm?

Fuckwit.

The reason it's so hard to come up with a system for voluntarily resolving disputes is because most of the population is literally brain damaged (http://fdrurl.com/bib).

Most people start out in infancy having obedience extracted from them by force and threat instead of mutual negotiation. Those early experiences permanently impair their ability to resolve differences peacefully or have successful voluntary relationships.

Look, they are forming an Aristocracy, to rule over the peasants  ::)

When your argument has no sound basis you can always resort to name calling... not sure if it is effective but it sure feels good!

This is actually likely true. Cheaper to threaten kids innit.


Hallo down there. How goes it?  ;D

Sorry about necroing this thread but I've spoken to the OP and he's shown me a photo and said he personally knows the guy in the black overall in the middle of this photo:

http://polimedia.us/trilema/2013/the-stuff-all-good-conspiracy-theories-start-with/

WTF is this about you ask? Well, it looks like the OP is at a dinner party with the enterpreneur Wences Casares (http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/11/bitcoin/).

So in real life, he happens to know this Wences guy, and in ROTA he then allows someone named Wences (of all names!) to be the plaintiff in the first (and what seems like last) BTC trial? LOL?

The trial was long before that dinner took place (full disclosure: I was there, too). And you clearly have much to learn if you really think lawsuits make mortal enemies or something.

I think that he was trying to go the other way with this conspiracy theory: Since they are friends, the only reason the case was brought before the Rota was because MP wanted it so, the whole thing was a made up excuse to hold the trial and get publicity for MP's little Rota experiment?

Yeah, I figured it might have played out the way you describe - trial first, dinner later. The only reason I became interested in this matter is I recently had some coins stolen from my MtGox account and they are now in this wallet here:

https://blockchain.info/address/19GBbg2dLgXC57mN9hx4PEqyN11PNqqg42

From there I can trace the transactions back (and yes I know it does not really prove anything) to this address:

http://blockchain.info/fb/19stxp

It is the same address that Mr. Wences used to send the "erroneous" 130BTC to Mpex in the ROTA case. And it holds no chump change, usually, either.

And really I'm just grasping at straws here, no need to lecture me on how the real world works....

Feel free to submit a case to Rota, then.

Not sure if serious, but made me laugh either way. :D

Overall the idea that someone controls all the addresses they send BTC to is about as strong as the idea that someone is in cahoots with anyone they ever interact with.

Mpex now being "in cahoots" with their former plaintiff (with whom you previously only "ever interacted" via Rota) proves it's not such a weak idea after all. :P