Bitcoin Forum

Serious question, if they would shut down pokerstars and megaupload for no reason other than someone lobbied or asked them to; what is stopping them from shutting down Mtgox?

Well, it would be bad, but I think the other exchanges could pick up the slack.  Many other exchanges go through extra trouble to meet AML requirements and such (thinking CampBX).

btc-e would go first.

lolwut

The SEC and FINRA are not all-powerful. They can't just go to Japan and shut down Mtgox.


My guess is that btc-e would go last. Eastern Europe is about as far from the clutches of the U.S. government as you can get (well I suppose China is further).

the window has closed for this

Could you elaborate please?

There's a more than 3000 people queue of newly signed up users at mtgox waiting on just being able to verify their account. If they'd want to shut down mtgox, they couldn't do it on the pretense that they are currently breaking any laws. They'd have to pass new laws, and who knows how long that would take or what kind of consequences for Bitcoin and for them doing so in the first place could have. One scenario certainly is that just by intending to pass laws regulating Bitcoin they'd lend so much credibility to Bitcoin that it could easily explode to such a scale that would actually kill their mafia of psychopaths called the government, hence the window might have actually already closed for them.

We've been through the Trusted procedure of MtGox, they take this very serious. They will do all it takes to prevent legal prosecution. You can't just forbid trade.

I also expect there will be a corporate only Bitcoins exchange soon enough, excluding private people.
Like the trade in commercial Uranium or certain chemicals.

This is another reason why we need decentralized bitcoin markets (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145389.0). Shutting down one server
is easy for a lot of people, not just the "they" you are talking about. If we had decentralized
bitcoin markets our lives would be easier and bitcoin would grow around the world.

Nothing. Wait until Gox is in the clutches of the US jurisdiction when Coinlab moves operations to US mainland.

It's my impression that some of the principals involved in moving Gox are naive about political processes and implications as well as basic history.

It's going now. Without any outside influence. Can hardly ever log in.

We definately need many exchanges on every continent of the world to minimalize the impact of government shutdowns. The way MTGOX currently dominates is a slight worry, as it creates a single point of faliure, but bitstamp is catching up for EU i think.

BTW these forums will be one of the first things to go down if bitcoin is made illegal.

Remember Ukash is forbidden to sell to Americans because their vouchers can be used for online gambling. Paysafecard sells a neutered version to americans that cant be used for gambling nobody accepts. Since there is no special bitcoin to prevent gambling its forever a risk of getting shut down when you deal with Americans.

That's my hope also, but we also have to keep the psychopathy in mind.

Psychopaths/sociopaths that have a powerbase have ultimate faith in their own abilities and believe themselves to be smarter than everyone else based on the simple logic of "I must be smarter than everyone else because I'm president/senator/Jamie Dimon/etc". When they're confronted with something they can't control via side channels, they'll regulate it outright. If they can't kill its market through regulation, they'll start disrupting the lives of people involved in making and moving the market, including confiscation of property, arrest and murder.  In Bitcoin's case, this would be developers, large pool operators and publicly known holders of large stashes of btc.

We're still in the "control through side channels" period of contact with TPTB. Moving Gox to the US will give TPTB the ability to attempt to manipulate Bitcoin's price and keep it undervalued. If they can keep the price low they'll be protecting their own gold market, their own favorite manipulated physical asset. If this fails and the price can't be controlled, they might skip the regulation phase and just jump straight to the disruption stage.

I agree. Bitcoin markets should be decentralized, just like bitcoin.

As long as mtgox (or any other xchange for that matter) do not breach laws, they cannot shut down them. DOJ is not almighty either. When they shut down fulltilt and almost did the same with pokerstars, these companies were explicitly vilotating the law. if a certain site allows us players to gamble with btc, it is mtgox that must ban the site. btc cannot just be declared ilegal and banned. the bottomline is that if there are lot of btc users, lot of xchanges, it will become almost impossible to stop btc. so ppl, just promote btc, do everything to help bitconomy. it is our right to have bitcoin.

There is at least one exchange that cannot be shut down as easily as Mt. Gox:

https://localbitcoins.com

They can shut down the site but not the market itself. As decentralized as it gets.

There is a huge difference between usd-btc exchanges and currency exchanges. btc-e does usd-rur and usd-eur.  That is a big no-no.  Exchanging between currencies with zero information about your customers is highly illegal, and it does not matter where they are located.  I cant believe they haven't been shut down yet.  It is only a matter of time.

Passing a law dealing with money is a trivial thing for those with a monopoly on currency, credit and force here in the good ol' US of A.

I have more faith in cooperation (networks) than I do in force (government) but we do have to be realistic about who we're dealing with. "Law" means nothing to government because they own it. Laws are only for us, not for them.

Yeah just like all those websites and forums where one can talk about illegal drugs and filesharing don't exist.  Wait a minute...

For now :).  Plus, you can only make money one way there. Things are improving.

You're saying it's highly illegal to do usd-eur exchange. Do you also think it's highly illegal to steal ? What if the government steals ? Is that making stealing legal ? You know what happened to Cyprus (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=153630.0) recently ?

Legal/illegal - it doesn't really matter much. The only things that matters from the perspective of the policy and law makers are what THEY think is legal or illegal.

If a government decided it was illegal for you to buy grapefruits tomorrow, they could do so. Do you see the stupidity of this system ?

If a person has EUR, USD or any other currency, he should be able to exchange this with whoever he wants, whenever he wants, whereever he wants.

I agree with you, but that wont make your coins reappear once the government shuts down the website.

Russians have been running currency exchanges for decades nothing is going to happen to BTC-e lol. They can convert USD-EUR all they want without licenses just like the other hundreds of WMZ, PM, LR and yandex exchangers do

You're right. The largest forum on bitcoin is safe from all law enforcement.

Japan could always pull a USA, and create some anti money laundering act (those terrorists.. gotta watch out for them) targeting unauthorised money exchanges, or some such. Then surprise surprise MtGox isn't allowed authorisation.

Your spot on I have voiced these very issues to Mt Gox and Co

see their response


I think Mt Gox et.al are very politically niave, I mean they asked for a ruling from CNY govt official before the knew the answer....!

Mt. Gox seem to have no conception of what the effects of Bit coin are politically, and historically what happens in this situation.

Bottom line is, the Army wants to get paid/reman and will howitzer your bit coin severs out of the ground if it comes to

Thier strategy is crazy unless...they already know it going to end and want to milk it for as much us fiat as they can until this happens.....


this maybe why LTC takes over as no ascis thus not centralised thus hard to stop!!!

I might suggest that leaving your coins in _any_ centralized server may be a tactical error. We have seen service after service collapse or disappear with the loot, and that is even before considering some governmental authority.

Pro tip laws change, they will change the law until what you are doing is criminal

cough cough prohibition
war on drugs etc etc

Haha - yeah and how it really works:

If a govt. really is pissed at you and want to take you down, they'll turn every page in the lawbook until they find something that sticks. If they can't find anything, they'll charge you anyway, and exhaust you with legal proceedings, lawyer fees and so on, untill you're broken.

L I N K  (http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2011/03/globalists-worst-nightmare.html)

They don't need to change any laws as nobody stops them from breaking them.

I don't know what planet you guys live on but the United States here on Earth (that's in the Solar System, Milky Way, Virgo Super Cluster) have given up any rule of law years ago.

They can openly break any national and international law without anyone even complaining. They kidnap, torture and kill without any proof, a lawyer, a judge or a trial.

The Washington Post last year described in detail how the president is having a meeting with some super secret service guys every week at which he gets suggestions who in the world should die, then makes his choice and and then his soldiers are sending out drones and wipe out whole villages. This is not possible in even the craziest dictatorships we have here otherwise. Even the governments of countries like China and Iran at least have to pretend to somehow follow the rule of law (which of course is their law) while in the United States / Earth the population willingly accepts a leadership that arbitrarily kills whoever they feel like killing. Funnily enough the population there accepts that even though they are heavily armed because their constitution allows them to carry arms to resist an invasive government, but which they sadly only use to shoot each other in school yards.

Here on our planet we developed a thing called 'habeas corpus' more than 800 years ago but under the present leadership our judical system has been driven back to a time long before that (a time that was called 'the dark middle ages').

I am, however, happy to hear that somewhere out there there is a planet with 'United States' that still give a fuck about laws and human rights and stuff like that. From wherabout in the universe are you guys?

Joe

Is there a torrent with all the content of these forums produced every few months? Losing all the knowledge here would be a tremendous blow.

The database should be being backed (http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/Backup_-_How_do_I_save_the_database_data) up by the webmasters. Simple machines forums use them with PHPmyadmin, like so many.

It is backed up daily.  I can't find the specific post I'm thinking of that spells it out, but there's plenty of posts by theymos mentioning backups.

See https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=104347.msg1143880#msg1143880

Great. Thanks for the link.

Pretty soon Google is going to be the government.  The intelligent web censors will shut down all non sanctioned communications on the net. 

Till then do what ThePiratebay did and decentralize.  I don't know how that would work for an exchange. 

But technically folks this is a game that is played just like any other mmorpg.  People build stuff with their computers and other people want to buy it.  Trading in Warcraft skills or buying Evony accounts, or whatever other game this is no different.  It is an online, purely digital commodity.

I doubt they'd go to a lot of trouble to create a bunch of nefarious laws, but the Japanese authorities are easily confused when it comes to online business. Even if MtGox are theoretically in compliance with everything (which sounds like quite a heroic endeavor) it's perfectly possible that the police will show up at MtGox headquarters one day and start impounding things.

One related case to watch is the lawsuit by a company called Mirai Kensaku Brazil, which is targeted for its connections to the 2-chan website. They're currently suing the Japanese police for damages for illegally impounding their stuff.
http://www.itmedia.co.jp/news/articles/1302/25/news117.html [Japanese]
(They report their losses from having a bunch of servers seized at only $2000, which suggests they have excellent backups as well as big balls.)

I hope and expect MtGox have contingency plans for this; It's quite encouraging that they seem to be setting up in the US as well, rather than keeping all their eggs in the Japan basket.

Someone needs to create a peer-to-peer based trading and trade-listing app, and then only list available trades on a server, but with wallets hosted on people's computers, with no middle-man in the trade.

My thoughts exactly.  Placign Mtgox within the reach of the USSA was the stupidest move they ever made.   I'd be setting up other options outside of Mtgox right now.

Mtgox will be the first likely target.

To think they won't attack the exchanges is just being ignorant.  When they do I'm going to be buying like crazy on the dip.

BUT...

Long-term, we simply gotta setup a viable decentralized exchanged.

Developers, programmers, where are you?  Lets get this thing operational before it's necessary.

It's not exactly a software development problem. An exchange needs to electronically transfer legal tender ($USD, $CAD, etc.). That's not possible without reliance on 'traditional' infrastructure. For example MtGox relies on Dwolla.. I'm not saying the US govt. wants to kill MtGox, but if they did then that's the weak point. No matter what service or technique you use, if you want to electronically transfer legal tender you will have the same kind of weak point.

The closest thing to a decentralized exchange is manual bank deposits between individuals, but then that's basically what localbitcoins.com is.

Right, we if we could use traditional currencies online in a cheap, fast, decentralized and censorship-resistant way we wouldn't need Bitcoin in the first place...

I just found this article it explains at length what I stated in an earlier post.


http://bitcoinmagazine.com/fincen-bitcoin-users-not-regulated-exchanges-are/