Bitcoin Forum

I'm not totally trying to rub salt in any wounds because hubris is a bitch, but...

The guy did name his service 'MYbitcoin.com' so from his perspective, there is an element of truth in advertising.  A cursory glance at things indicates to me that the best bet at people being made whole is if the guy is a Bitcoin enthusiast trying to make a point to people about the importance of watching one's ass.

I am throughly enjoying the rough raw frontier that is Bitcoin.   Bitcoin strikes me as a very sharp knife.  Very useful in some situations which I anticipate as possible on the horizon, but something to handle with a _lot_ of care in the mean time.

There is a genuine silver lining in all of this IMHO.  If Bitcoin goes anywhere, whoever it was that made the comment that we are all early adopters at this point is probably right.  The good part of all of the hassles is that everyone who is currently involved will, by necessity, be learning a fair amount about such things as:

  * the mechanics and properties of BTC
  * computer security
  * human nature
  * markets

etc, etc, etc. and thus will be much better prepared to have a positive impact in facilitating wider adoption...or formulating our own implementations of scams as the case may be.

In the here and now, a bunch of early entrepreneurships are establishing a fairly strong and hopefully fairly accurate picture of themselves.  It's at least a mixed blessing, in my mind, that there are situations which provide some contrast.

The cool thing for me, is that by and large, the economy is mostly legit and people are honest. There have been some major dumb mistakes, but that's mostly due to bumbling incompetence rather than outright dishonesty.

My guess is that the mybitcoin guy simply fucked up (was cracked) and disappeared.

+1 agreed.

-1 disagreed. Many people open accounts outside the US, because the US tries to interfere with and steal from their legitimate business. Now, perhaps MyBitcoin is a total catastrophe, and perhaps the owner was ill-intentioned all along, but please don't vilify honest people who simply don't want the tyrannical US Gov't interfering with them.

Good point.

If mybitcoin.com is a scam, it is one hell of a sophisticated scam.

Screwup is a hell lot more likely.

Sophisticated Screwup?

why in the world can't mybitcoin.com release some sort of statement?! ANY SORT OF STATEMENT!?!?!?!

Probably run by the same folks who pull Dwolla's strings?

You can disregard immoral unethical laws.  You know that the vast majority of Americans were against the bank bailouts, but congress did it anyway?  And that the vast majority of Americans are against the illegal wars, but congress does it anyway?

You have no voice in The System except as a milk cow from which they extract your substance.  Come on, man!  Grow some cajones and don't cooperate with an immoral system.

What if the population choose an unethical and evil action? You could vote against it but half of the population already choose to do EVIL!

Democracy doesn't fix things, just give voice to a larger population of people, who may or may not choose wisely.

Agree strongly, and find it heartening.


Would not rule it out, but I doubt it.

Do we really need YET ANOTHER duplicate thread on the same topic?

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

People are welcome to participate in civil disobedience. It's a perfectly valid way to challenge the laws.

If someone was using a Nevis LLC for tax protest then they have bear all the consequences, for example random strangers on the internet calling them out for income tax fraud, because that's part of civil disobedience.


Rest assured I have the cajones to go against the system. The rest of my family don't, and they rely on me to put food on the table.

Between 200 million Americans evading taxes, and 200 million American voting for a constitutional amendment repelling the income tax, which one do you think will change the system?

So what exactly do you disagree with? The amount you are paying? Or the fact that alot of it is for offensive military operations?  In Canada we pay more percentage but it is not used as evilly as I am aware. Move up north.

The former. In most states, people don't get to vote on U.S. constitutional amendments.

I already mentioned it twice in the post you quoted, but I'll say it again: collecting tax based on citizenship is wrong. It's just plain wrong for a country to tax someone who have never set foot on its soil.

IMHO taxes should only be used to fund defense and infrastructures and nothing else. Fighting 3 wars on the other side of the world is not defense as far as I am concerned.

What 'same topic'?  Seems like the thread has diverged in several directions already.

As the OP, I can say that I had hoped that the thread would expand into a kind of general conversation about the types of endeavors that would pop up and the necessity for people to be careful than thoughtful about them.

But the OP has on a limited amount of control over the direction of a thread in the best of cases.  They tend to expand into areas of immediate interest it seems, and one of the things I noticed in the intro material is that this forum is defined to be relatively less controlled than a lot of others.

People vote for congressmen and senators who will vote for constitutional amendments. That's pretty much how representative democracy work.

I wonder why no one has bothered to try and make a REAL democracy yet? Like where they make sure every single citizen has an electronic, verifiable, publicly audited vote on everything?

Average IQ is 100, and half the population is dumber than that.  I'm fine with a loosely representative corporate police state until something better comes along.  I can participate by timely buying a piece of the correct entities.

A pure democracy would be horrifying.

It doesnt matter what 300 million people want as its up to the 5 people on the supreme court.

Their opinion on what the constitution says is the final arbiter so really there is no 'will of the people'.

The average IQ will always be 100.

Arguably (and fascinatingly) untrue:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

IQ tests are updated periodically.

Constitutional amendments have nothing to do with the supreme court. A successful constitutional amendment requires two-thirds majority in both houses and ratification in 38 states. It does not involve the supreme court at all, so their opinion is irrelevant in the subject matter.



Nothing in that article contradicts kiba's statement. In fact, in the first paragraph it clearly states: "by convention the average of the test results is set to 100".

Just after calibration, it is 100 (by convention).  Between calibrations it drifts.  It probably drifted downward at certain times (e.g., in Cambodia when the intellectuals were knocked off.)

Anyway, that is my interpretation of the Flynn Effect, and as I said, it's arguable.  And I sense that Flynn kind of dedicated his career to rendering the notion of IQ useless for whatever reason.  One way or another it's terribly pertinent to Bitcoin (although that is arguable too I suppose.)

The average police officer, we'll call him Flynn, effectively has an IQ of less than 100. On the other side of the (bit)coin, the average rocket scientist is not capable of going to, let alone finding, a McDonalds and ordering a Big Mac. Imagine the look on their face when first asked, "Would you like that super sized?"

Even more horrifying than the current status quo? I used to agree with you, but the recent years it seems that "representative democracy" is not representative anymore in any way. Politicians change their mind much faster than the period between votes, and the world changes much faster than the period between votes. The system needs an overhaul for this fast, digital age, with zillions of different interest groups.

hehe...that thought brings a smile to my face.

Firstly, I'd love to also see this system in place. Attach it to our mobile phones or something. Citizen -> register phone number -> setup super passwords etc -> off you go. We would be able to run a referendum on pretty much everything.

Secondly, this would probably never happen in practice. Democracies are horrible, as most people just don't know or care about the stuff politicians talk about all day. If you really wanted to decide what the laws of your country are, you would go into politics, law and/or business. Governments, corporate structures, and military ranks exist partly because people want to abdicate responsibility and decision making, which can be a very tiresome thing. Most people, when looking at their little referendum question will not know the difference on whether to lift the debt ceiling or not, and will look at their friends, or favourite information sources and just do whatever they say they're doing. As such, the vote will always follow the network of friendships and information, rather than a true individual assessment of the question.

Democracy is impossible for the human being.

It's been done before, the Athenian democracy coming to mind.

It's a beautiful idea in theory, every man having a voice. In reality, it's as described: "two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner".


Yes. People are stupid, and pure democracy is a mob rule (see above quote, commonly attributed to Franklin but I don't believe it's his).

The only thing that's really wrong with the current system? Well first of all the two party thing polarizes everything and it encourages people to vote on one particular emotional issue (ie, I know of a few people who vote the opposite of everything else they believe in solely based on how they feel about issues of reproduction). Second, we must remove the influence of money somehow. The founding fathers believed in every man having an equal voice in one house, and every state having an equal voice in the other... I don't believe at any point did they factor in bank balances (other than that I know a few of them were very insistent on politicians making enough while in office so that it wouldn't be a case of only the idle elite would bother to run).

But a representative democracy has it's own charms - the reason for lengthy elected terms is the exact same reason Bitcoin doesn't recalculate the difficulty every 30 minutes... it smooths things out and makes the output more rational (in theory).

This isn't true. A US citizen cannot simply denounce their citizenship and be guaranteed that they no longer have to pay any US taxes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expatriation_Tax

I believe the US is the only country to have laws that say even if you aren't a US citizen, do not live in the US, do not have a business in the US, or make money out of the US, you still owe us tax dollars. They also have the right to seize any assets in the US that you may own.

There is no democracy in this world of false flags , END OF.

Hearing reports of the polish exchange losing all btc etc.
http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2828445 not finding much that is translated.

Seems it up for sale @ 17,000 EUR
any takers ?