Bitcoin Forum

http://news.goldseek.com/GATA/1415649749.php

This is a travesty of justice and is a bad ruling for Bitcoin in USA

Within the judges ruling:

"Congress has been permitted “to create a money monopoly, with full powers to outlaw any and all competing
currencies . . . .”

" and if anyone, individual or State, assumes to supplant the medium of exchange adopted by our Government,
or assumes to compete with the United States Government in this regard, a violation of these statutes would follow"

The sentencing hearing will be on December 2nd.
This is the first political prisoner for alternative currency in the USA with not even any allegation of money laundering or any of the more esoteric legal arguments used, merely challenging the authority of the Fed in the issuing of an alternative currency to the US Dollar.


Edit:  I'm sure Bernard would appreciate any support from us.  I just spoke with him on the phone.  It is not a good time.
It also further underscores the wisdom of Satoshi in remaining anonymous.

That is a huge miscarriage of justice to say the least. I wish him well.

Bitcoin kind of solves that issue by being p2p and decentralized. There are no entities to target. 

Rather, it puts a target on every one of us.

There are bitcoin users outside of the US, where Fed cant do anything and I think, that is the majority.

Rather, it puts a target on every one of us.

I think the issue was more that he was creating something that people could potentially think are "real" dollars that were issued by the US government.

I have heard the argument put forth by Funtotry before.
This was supposed to be one reason why Bitcoin was safe as compared to Liberty Dollars.

An earlier FBI press release says this

Following an eight-day trial and less than two hours of deliberation, von NotHaus, the founder and monetary architect of a currency known as the Liberty Dollar, was found guilty by a jury in Statesville, North Carolina, of making coins resembling and similar to United States coins; of issuing, passing, selling, and possessing Liberty Dollar coins; of issuing and passing Liberty Dollar coins intended for use as current money

Von NotHaus designed the Liberty Dollar currency in 1998 and the Liberty coins were marked with the dollar sign ($); the words dollar, USA, Liberty, Trust in God (instead of In God We Trust); and other features associated with legitimate U.S. coinage.

http://www.fbi.gov/charlotte/press-releases/2011/defendant-convicted-of-minting-his-own-currency


This is one reason why (Hopefully) the Government's treatment of Bitcoin should be different. Nobody is going to confuse bitcoins/satoshis with dollars/cents. If the question was over the monopoly of Congress over money, I am sure the government would have taken some action against cryptocurrencies in general. We wouldn't have the IRS clarifying bitcoin's tax status and the feds auctioning bitcoins ever so often.

Tuesday morning at 9:30, a federal judge in North Carolina will gavel his court into session to pronounce a sentence on Bernard von NotHaus. A monetary gadfly in an age of fiat money, Mr. von NotHaus, 70, could be looking at the rest of his life in prison.

Nearly four years ago, a jury convicted Mr. von NotHaus of “uttering”—putting into circulation—coins of pure silver that he called Liberty Dollars. The government is also seeking the forfeiture of 16,000 pounds of coins and precious metals whose value it reckons at $7 million.

The federal prosecutor, Anne Tompkins, put out a news release stating that “attempts to undermine the legitimate currency of this country are simply a unique form of domestic terrorism” and “represent a clear and present danger to the economic stability of this country.”

This is something to think about at a time when the China, the Europeans, the United Nations and various leaders of the World Bank are wondering whether we need a new or better reserve currency. And when Congress is fizzing with disquiet about the dollar.

Mr. von NotHaus suggests that likening him to a terrorist is absurd. “This is the United States government,” he told the New York Times two years ago. “. . . it has nuclear weapons, and it’s worried about some ex-surfer guy making his own money? Give me a break.”

ENLARGE
GETTY IMAGES
Whether Judge Richard Voorhees will—or should—give Mr. von NotHaus a break, this is beyond a newspaperman’s ken. But it can certainly be said that Mr. von NotHaus has, despite his zeal, done a public service by raising serious questions about U.S. currency.

I have no financial interest in his case. I have never owned a Liberty Dollar, and I have met the coin’s creator only once, over a cup of coffee. My interest is journalistic. The scoop is that Mr. von NotHaus’s Liberty Dollar poses the opposite danger of Copernicus ’s famous monetary principle.

That principle, also known as Gresham’s law, holds that bad money drives out good. Mr. von NotHaus has instilled in the government the contrary fear—that good money in the form of silver dollars will drive out the bad money issued by the Federal Reserve.

Since the collapse in 1971 of the Bretton Woods system that since midcentury had tied most industrialized countries’ currencies to gold, the value of the dollar that the Federal Reserve is supposed to protect plunged 90%, to less than 1/15th of an ounce of silver. The Foundation for Monetary Education calls Federal Reserve notes “legal tender irredeemable paper-ticket electronic money.”

These matters were considered by Judge Voorhees, who has been presiding in the von NotHaus case. They were raised most pointedly in an amicus brief by the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, a charity that fights for a constitutional view of money.

That brief argued that Congress lacks the power to prohibit private coinage of money. It argued that the Constitution’s grant of the coinage power to Congress isn’t exclusive. If it were, the Constitution wouldn’t have had separately to deny coinage power to the states.

The fact that the Founders specifically denied coinage power to the states but not to the people means, the line of argument suggests, that private coinage ends up as a right reserved to the people. In fact, private coinage existed long into the 19th century, particularly, but not exclusively, in the West.

Judge Voorhees took a few years to let the post-conviction arguments percolate, but, in the end, he didn’t buy them. In upholding the conviction last month, he conceded that the Constitution doesn’t “expressly state” that the coinage power belongs exclusively to Congress. But he went on to assert that the exclusivity can be “reasonably inferred” because the power is prohibited to the states.

The judge accepted what he characterized as the “jury’s implicit finding” that the “Liberty Dollar is counterfeit despite its intrinsic value.” He was unfazed by the fact that the Liberty Dollars during much of the past decade had been worth more than their face value and more than Mr. von NotHaus sold them for.

One “weakness” in the intrinsic-value argument, Judge Voorhees wrote in sweeping aside the constitutional objections, is that “von NotHaus and his organization were making money off their sales of the Liberty Dollar.” If that’s such a crime, though, what is one going to do about the director of the United States Mint?

The U.S. Mint, after all, is hawking a “50th Anniversary Kennedy 2014 Half-Dollar Gold Proof Coin” for $1,165. The mint boasts that the coin, featuring a relief of the bust of the 35th president, contains “Three-Quarter Ounce of Pure, 24-Karat Gold.” So it’s selling the coin at a 29% premium over the price of gold.

It isn’t my purpose here to suggest putting the director of the Mint in jail. Or even to suggest that Judge Voorhees failed to apply the law. But “if the law supposes” what the judge has found here, then Mr. Bumble in Charles Dickens ’s “ Oliver Twist ” had it about right: “the law is a ass.”

“The worst I wish the law is that his eye may be opened by experience,” Mr. Bumble added. Not bad advice for this astonishing case. If Mr. von NotHaus is sent to prison, justice will have to come from a higher court—or even from Capitol Hill.

Congress, as it turns out, has got the matter in its sights. It is considering H.R. 77, a bill called the “Free Competition in Currency Act” sponsored by Rep. Paul Broun (R., Ga.). It is a radical measure that brings to our laws the ideas of Friedrich Hayek, the Nobel-laureate economist who came to favor the denationalization of money.

H.R. 77 would end the legal-tender laws, repeal the provisions of the federal criminal code used against Mr. von NotHaus and nullify “any previous convictions.” The website govtrack.us reckons that its chances of passage are zero.

Things can change, though. “Audit the Fed,” which started out as a hyper-long shot, passed the House in September in a 333-92 vote. Monetary measures will have better chances in the 114th Congress. And the septuagenarian Mr. von NotHaus, who faces up to 22 years in prison, could yet appeal.

Wow, so judges can make up laws themselves Why do we have written laws at all then?

A court in Stalinist Russia could not have been worse. Disgusting.

I wonder whether the coins could have been quadratic and called Liberty Galleons and he would still have been indicted.  >:(

His age had to factor into it. I don't think many of us young'ns would mind home confinement, if we could work at home and get groceries and toiletries delivered, so we'd be thrown in prison.

http://gata.org/node/14812

Zero prison time.

11:30p GMT Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

We have it only through a reliable intermediary that Liberty Dollar founder Bernard von Not Haus, oonvicted(sic) rather strangely almost four years ago of counterfeiting for issuing silver coins worth more than the originals they were supposed to be imitating, received a lenient sentence today from Judge Richard Voorhees in U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina -- six months of home confinement and three years of probation.

It's said that the judge observed that von Not Haus' motivation with the Liberty Dollar was philosophical rather than criminal. It's also said that the judge ordered the federal government to return to its owners the millions of dollars of metal held by Liberty Dollar for its clients.

A lawyer representing GATA appeared in court today to argue for leniency for von Not Haus.

More as it becomes available.

does Liberty Dollar have a crypto yet?

Nobody confused Liberty Dollars with US Dollars either.

The "$" never appeared on any US dollar prior to its use by the Liberty Dollar (However it WAS used on Mexican Peso).
The FBI press release is pure BS.  These were not the arguments used in deciding the case, nor were they the reasons for the judges decision.

There were no victims of this "fraud" of minting a competing currency.  The government does not have a constitutional monopoly on money creation, cases like this are an attempt to fabricate it where it doesn't exist in the law.

Read the court filing:
http://www.gata.org/files/VonNotHausOrder-Nov-10-2014.pdf

Apparently the prosecution persuaded the court that they'd had trained people to do things like mixing Liberty Dollars into change and dropping it into their hands so they didn't notice, and telling them things like "This is the new $10 silver". The court also decided that making coins while intending them to be used like that counted as counterfeiting as the law defined it.

I can't say whether they really did that or whether the court's reading of the law is right, but if they did it doesn't actually sound like a victimless crime: If I thought I was getting normal US Dollars in change I'd be narked off if I was really getting 10 US Dollars worth of silver which I then have to work out what to do with, and even more so if I was getting what they seem to have been pushing here, which is a coin with less than 10 US Dollars worth of silver in it.

Obviously none of this stuff applies to bitcoin because nobody's pretending bitcoins are dollars, and neither does the other thing they nailed this guy for which was minting metallic coins, which Congress has apparently passed a daft-but-constitutional law against.

The government does not have a constitutional monopoly on money creation, cases like this are an attempt to fabricate it where it doesn't exist in the law.

IANAL and I hate to nitpick but reading the judgement nobody seems to be saying that that government has a constitutional monopoly on money creation. What the court ruled was that the government has the constitutional power to grant itself a _statutory_ monopoly on money creation - in this case specifically metal coins intended for general circulation. (That last bit is presumably the difference with the collectible replica cases.)

Applying it to our situation, I suppose it also means that Congress could pass a law banning bitcoins if they wanted to. This law would be dumb and probably ineffective, but it would be constitutional. But did anyone ever doubt that in the first place?

In United States v.Gellman, 44 F. Supp. 360 (D. Minn. 1942) the court went further and said that Congress had such a law that bars us if 1) it is for use as current money and 2) competes with US currency. 

Yes, law is fortunately still constrained by political geography.

"The Justice Department asserted that von NotHaus was placing gold, and silver coins, along with precious metals currency into circulation with the purpose of mixing them “into the current money of the United States.”. In short, the government accused von NotHaus of counterfeiting."
http://libertycrier.com/bernard-von-nothaus-architect-liberty-dollar-sentenced/

I've seen the video where this fellow passed a Liberty Dollar off to an unsuspecting street vendor as money. Apparently, doing so is counterfeiting. Where is this injustice you claim? If you don't like the law, change it. OP's hyperbolic anti-government ranting is childish, not to mention dishonest.

Wow, so judges can make up laws themselves Why do we have written laws at all then?

It is amazing that he will actually get the precious metals back as well. The judge in this case would be an asset in a higher court. The original conviction was an absolute travesty though.

“in consultation with” the Attorney General and Secretary of State, to make a determination that an person or entity has “materially … provided … technological support for, or goods or services in support of any” of these malicious attacks.