Bitcoin Forum

 So no doubt each country has a laundry list of things that are a no no to have. I've noticed as of late lots of booze and contraband being sold around the "surface web".; ofcourse I figure some of these are straight up bait.  Where as others are straight up fuck the man style listings.

When the party favor market was strictly tor based.  One could argue it wasn't easy to buy. At the moment there are atleast a dozen listings alone on bitmit that are regularly controled by the US goverment.  I understand that to block, censor or control the sale of anything with BTC takes away from a goal of the project.  However I'd like to keep useing coins.

Ii feel if no community policeing is done someone else will attempt to do it for us.  They won't be so nice about it and the penalty will apply to everyone.  I propose we restrict ourselves from allowing contraband, booze or tobacco products in areas of the world they maybe controled in.

Long story short;

Don't make it easy for some 11 year old kid to fuck everything up buying party favors to get laid off bitmit

OMG, really, alchohol can be bought with bitcoins. This is terrible ..... hard drugs on SR isn't a problem because nobody knows about that but alcopops on the regular web. I had no idea that kind of activity was going on. Let's get it banned immediately before it takes down bitcoin

Whilst doing that, ban cash as well 'cos I know kidz buy alcopops with that as well from the street, not to mention drugs ...

"To enjoy freedom, [...] we have of course to control ourselves." --Virginia Woolf

Empoweoqwj, you're not really adding to the discussion here.  It turns out that the world is a complicated place.  When Bitcoin users are persecuted by association or Bitcoin itself is attacked on the basis of its unlawful use by some of its users that hurts all the users of Bitcoin including those who aren't engaging in those activities.   Because none of us use Bitcoin in isolation we all have a responsibility to our fellow users to execute our freedoms with consideration and minimize the collateral damage to others.  Even when that damage comes from places that are believed to be unjust or misguided, it is no less _real_ and does no less harm to people. Special care is required when an activity is very profitable to you, since that can create biases that help you ignore the costs/risks your justifiable-to-you actions indirectly impose on everyone— including a lot of people who aren't sharing in your profits.

In my view one of the limitations in popular libertarian philosophy is that it takes an overly limited view of violence against others, because a more complete perspective must acknowledge how very difficult and limiting completely avoiding harming others through your actions can be.

I would imagine that a lot of that stuff is just pure ignorance. In any developed place on earth the number of laws and regulations makes their scope beyond any single person's ability to comprehend them.  While some are enforced more frequently than others, it's not actually that surprising to encounter people who are not aware of the rules they may be violating. Even something like selling alcohol— in the US its normal for supermarkets to have beer and wine (and liquor in many places), it's not hard to imagine that someone might think it to be no big deal to sell some on Bitmit.

A possible course of action would be to just politely contact the people selling this stuff (or the sites hosting it) when you run into something that you're aware is problematic and express your concern. ... if people can't handle a little nagging and tattling by other community members they're surely not going to enjoy some state agency breathing down their throat.

Valid point,  bullshit is everywhere.  It will be purchased with anything of value.  However my point is not to get rid of it. Just police it.  My state goverment does not allow for importing of booze by mail.  Nor tobacco.  Bootlegging is heavily punished if caught.  It's easy money.

At some point this will be a topic from hell.  Ways exist to atleast cover our ass enough wher we can continue to use bitcoin in the lower 48. If you don't believe the press doesn't already have screen shots of the blokes selling weed on bitmit apparently out of las vegas.  You are up in the night.  They smear BTC as is. Imagine the 700 club useing the political jesus tool to go.  L@@K it's SIN. 

I'm steering to ignorance.  It's folks that live close to dispensers.  So I'm sure if it's legit and not a."plant" they are figureing it will move quick. I believe certain things need filtering.  Not all in the states care of you ship booze.  Bit the laws as you know are tricky.  Scares me really

Every time something like this is mentioned, I literally facepalm.

Why? It's simple:

This is possible, albeit harder, to do with fiat. Who cares? The vendor should be put responsible – not Bitcoin.

Buying Alcohol from non-regulated vendors on any other site like ebay or whatever would yield the same result.

Edit: words

Less charitably, in my view Libertarians have a tendency toward a very self-centered conception of the world.  This is in fact a clinical marker for autism and it is interesting to observe people like Rand Paul who display other characteristics of the malady.  The point is that many Libertarians seem to completely lack the native ability to see the nuances and limitations of 'freedom' since they cannot put themselves into another parties frame of mind.

Libertarians often have the right sort of basic intuitions about a lot of things such as liberty, freedom, war, etc, but to a large degree these are no-brainers to run-of-the-mill left wing progressives like myself.  These things are good, but nothing special.  I distrust a lot of Libertarians because I bet that if/when the shit hits the fan they would find some way to justify any role they wish to play.  Many of them do seem to convert into totalitarianism quite rapidly (and amusingly) when given power over things.  OTOH, so would a lot of progressives, and a fair number of Libertarians would probably stick to their philosophical principles in their actions as well.  So maybe it's a wash.  Hopefully we'll not find out for a while.

You can buy meth and heroin off of SR. Who cares if some 11 year old gets drunk. He can go through his parents' liquor cabinet for that anyways.

And at this current time, drugs and gambling make up the bulk of the bitcoin economy, so blocking vices does more harm than good...

+1

We must be wise in how we choose to use Bitcoin. Businesses bqeing totally hands off regarding how they let others use their services could lead to consequences they did not predict nor desire. That could bring unwarranted restrictions for all of us.

Whilst I agree with the first part, but I think you underestimate the number of people using bitcoin in legally accepted ways.

Pulling numbers out of...you know / wink /wink

Silk Road has 1.22 million pounds (as in currency) worth of purchases made every month. That's 14.64 million a year.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/01/silk-road-crackdown (Note that this article is not purely about SR's revenue)

The bitcoin economy is worth 822,435,072 pounds total (Bitcoin Watch).

That means that SR in one year, which is one website, is worth 1.8% of the entire bitcoin economy (and that article refers to a 2012 study when bitcoins were lower). When the figures come up for this year, I'm sure that SR will take up a much larger portion.

And of course, SR is not the only illegal site using bitcoins.

And keep in mind that there are legal sites too. Bitcoins are used to buy alcohol and tobacco, and there's gambling.

we have had sellers come and try to sell illegal products on our site coingig.com (http://coingig.com) but we simply just remove them and notify the buyer that they are not allowed in our inventory.

I always thought you were a hard-core Libertarian.  Or maybe there was another person with a very similar username some time back who was.  Or I'm just remembering things wrong...there are a lot of Libertarians here to try to keep track of.

Or maybe (shudder) you are one of the very unusual people (and almost unheard of for Libertarians) who can analyze their own ideological system and recognize 'faults' and generally amusing properties of it and those who share it.

Bitcoin is an effect of the control of e right wrong Christian agenda

After the article today on Forbes, in their upcoming issue, SR will have a bigger light shinning on bitcoin underworld.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/meet-the-dread-pirate-roberts-the-man-behind-booming-black-market-drug-website-silk-road/



Oh on another note: I bought my dinner tonight with bitcoins. Ordered a pizza from Pizzahut through pizza for coins!

Wow. Nice to know what you really think of people with different political views than you.

(Reminds me of my ultraconservative friends who quite literally believe that serious progressives suffer from some sort of drug-induced brain damage, or some form of PTSD from childhood at the very least. Sheesh.)

Wow this degenerated into name calling rather quickly...

So getting back to it, a person's perception is their reality.  Some questions: Do we as a community have a responsibility to shape perception if we care about bitcoin?  If so, how do we do that?  I'm asking because 99% percent of media stories about bitcoin mention Silk Road whether relevant to the story or not.  People's perceptions, outside the bitcoin community, are being shaped by such tidbits.  How do we get away from that? My co-workers, for example, are familiar with bitcoin and dismiss it as nothing more than a way to buy illicit products anonymously.  That's a real problem long term.  I acknowledge there are no easy answers.  Hoping to hear constructive input...

how will your exmaple "fuck everything up" and why do we need to be careful. the government cannot easily shut off bitcoin... if it could, it would have already.

I actually did not mean that statement to be as offensive as it may sound, though I did anticipate that it would be taken that way by most people.  Oh well.  It would not be terribly offensive to me, but I am unusual in that regard.

In actual fact, though I only have a minimal understanding of neuroscience, I find the concept of self awareness pretty fascinating.  If you prick your finger, it simulates activity associated with pain in a certain part of your brain.  If I watch you prick your finger, it stimulates activity in the same part of MY brain but to a lesser degree.  This actually makes sense for complex creatures who's life-ways are normally social.  There is neurological wiring that explain this phenomenon and obviously a lot of individual variation in how active the circuits are.  On one end of the spectrum there is a genuine malady which is genuinely disabling.  I conjecture that this set of neurological systems is tied to 'empathy', and is also associated with the ability to see things from a different point of view.  Or 'self centered' in short-hand.

My hypothesis is that one will find statistically different degrees of neurological activity in populations who describe themselves as being of one political group or another.  That is not really a 'dis in my mind, but again I can understand how others would take it as such.

To be frank, the entire INTP personality type matches up very well with autism.  I know I'm guilty of throwing around "autism" too, but it seems the more I learn about this condition, the more I realize it's not; or at least, the qualifiers for autism are loose enough to apply to a naturally-born 3% of any given population.  We're not going to call Alby autistic, are we?  He was different, certainly, but he wasn't the victim to any psychological condition, not that I'm aware of anyhow.

As for libertarians; it seems there's a divide between American libertarianism and...I guess that "other" libertarianism which acts as the direct opposite of authoritarianism.  You people and your semantics!  One day, liberal might actually mean liberal again.

I'm pretty sure any attempts to sell alcohol or drugs over the internet through bitcoins would be shut down pretty quickly.

From when it started until the beginning of this month, Satoshi-Dice had been responsible for 54% of all Bitcoin transactions.
So I think it is a pretty safe statement that drugs and gambling make up the bulk of bitcoin transactions.
For the more general statement, it depends how you define economy.

OP: I'm not sure what, if anything, you're proposing. There's a long history of people coming up with policing measures like address blacklists etc., which I think you may find some readers here will assume you're talking about as well. It's not a popular idea, and anything even whiffing of reduced freedom on a protocol level gets people really agitated.

Maybe you're just making the point it pays to be prudent. That's entirely true, and worth keeping in mind, but I think it's kind of assumed any serious business will have enough self-preservation instincts to keep their names from being linked to anything illegal. The ones that don't, won't be around long.

As for keeping Bitcoin's image clean, ultimately there's not much any one here can do to stop illegal activity, so a better course of action is to work on building benign businesses.

Very True..

of course its must