And then I was hoping this Darth Lord Soros was afraid of Bitcoin. Maybe next time

"Forcing" could be a too strong of a word. How about "delicately whispered nudging"?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=194780.0

... private companies to accept Bitcoin.

Yes we, most of us, and even the FUD sprayers are invested emotionally to this amazing global experimentation. Bullying anyone to death to get them to accept something they do not fully understand how to integrate it in their business model yet is like forcing millions of people jump into a law no one understands but forced to pay for it. Oh! Wait...
There is a fine balance between a promotion and a baseball bat slamming down on your skull. There is a strong campaign targeting Dropbox. Yes I want everyone to accept bitcoin everywhere NOW. But if everyone has freedom of choice in the 'real' free market, why the need of pushing anyone toward what our collected ego wants and not becoming exactly what we are trying to stay away from?

The 'natural laws of gravity or snow ball' worked well for many companies, concepts, etc on the free market. This is not a critic or to slow down the acceptance of bitcoin but "If you built it, they will come" is what we should be more focus on. I believe this to be the case. Coinbase looks like another example of a run away success for bitcoin in the US (if nothing from DC/Wall Street comes crashing the party down).

I just hope we keep focusing on the bigger picture, the fact this is for the very long run, when years from now a dropbox or a wordpress may very well be as vibrant as brands as Plymouth or Datsun are today.

The Subversion Factor, Part 1: Moles In High Places
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASbmBsE7mU0


The Subversion Factor, Part 2: The Open Gates of Troy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVQQCbL6Xy0


But then 9/11 happened. The rest, is our reality now.
I was not aware of all those facts. I better understand why the pendulum went swinging back with a vengeance & why I recognized all those so called demonstrations of today.

By the way when are we marching against the man's big ears? I thought so.

This is pretty funny actually. Global warming is science fact according to him, that is why it will be one of his priority. GMO is also science fact there is nothing wrong with them....

This dude gives a bad name to sock puppets.

http://rt.com/usa/california-man-13-prison-banks-237/

Jeff Olson, the 40-year-old man who is being prosecuted for scrawling anti-megabank messages on sidewalks in water-soluble chalk last year now faces a 13-year jail sentence. A judge has barred his attorney from mentioning freedom of speech during trial.

According to the San Diego Reader, which reported on Tuesday that a judge had opted to prevent Olson’s attorney from "mentioning the First Amendment, free speech, free expression, public forum, expressive conduct, or political speech during the trial,” Olson must now stand trial for on 13 counts of vandalism.

In addition to possibly spending years in jail, Olson will also be held liable for fines of up to $13,000 over the anti-big-bank slogans that were left using washable children's chalk on a sidewalk outside of three San Diego, California branches of Bank of America, the massive conglomerate that received $45 billion in interest-free loans from the US government in 2008-2009 in a bid to keep it solvent after bad bets went south.

The Reader reports that Olson’s hearing had gone as poorly as his attorney might have expected, with Judge Howard Shore, who is presiding over the case, granting Deputy City Attorney Paige Hazard's motion to prohibit attorney Tom Tosdal from mentioning the United States' fundamental First Amendment rights.

"The State's Vandalism Statute does not mention First Amendment rights," ruled Judge Shore on Tuesday.

Upon exiting the courtroom Olson seemed to be in disbelief.

"Oh my gosh," he said. "I can't believe this is happening."

Tosdal, who exited the courtroom shortly after his client, seemed equally bewildered.

"I've never heard that before, that a court can prohibit an argument of First Amendment rights," said Tosdal.

Olson, who worked as a former staffer for a US Senator from Washington state, was said to involve himself in political activism in tandem with the growth of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

On October 3, 2011, Olson first appeared outside of a Bank of America branch in San Diego, along with a homemade sign. Eight days later Olson and his partner, Stephen Daniels, during preparations for National Bank Transfer Day, the two were confronted by Darell Freeman, the Vice President of Bank of America’s Global Corporate Security.

A former police officer, Freeman accused Olson and Daniels of “running a business outside of the bank,” evidently in reference to the National Bank Transfer Day activities, which was a consumer activism initiative that sought to promote Americans to switch from commercial banks, like Bank of America, to not-for-profit credit unions.

At the time, Bank of America’s debit card fees were among one of the triggers that led Occupy Wall Street members to promote the transfer day.

"It was just an empty threat," says Olson of Freeman’s accusations. "He was trying to scare me away. To be honest, it did at first. I even called my bank and they said he couldn't do anything like that."

Olson continued to protest outside of Bank of America. In February 2012, he came across a box of chalk at a local pharmacy and decided to begin leaving his mark with written statements.

"I thought it was a perfect way to get my message out there. Much better than handing out leaflets or holding a sign," says Olson.

Over the course of the next six months Olson visited the Bank of America branch a few days per week, leaving behind scribbled slogans such as "Stop big banks" and "Stop Bank Blight.com."

According to Olson, who spoke with local broadcaster KGTV, one Bank of America branch claimed it had cost $6,000 to clean up the chalk writing.

Public records obtained by the Reader show that Freeman continued to pressure members of San Diego’s Gang Unit on behalf of Bank of America until the matter was forwarded to the City Attorney’s office.

On April 15, Deputy City Attorney Paige Hazard contacted Freeman with a response on his persistent queries.

"I wanted to let you know that we will be filing 13 counts of vandalism as a result of the incidents you reported," said Hazard.

Arguments for Olson’s case are set to be heard Wednesday morning, following jury selection.

 

That could be the solution for the blockchain shared across the universe, if someone crack that "code".

 

Courtney Brown, Ph.D., presenting a scientific explanation of why remote viewing works at the 2012 annual meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE) in Boulder, Colorado. The science of remote viewing is based on the superposition principle of quantum mechanics, and this presentation explains how it all fits together.

For more information on remote viewing, see http://www.farsight.org/
For more information on Courtney Brown, see http://www.courtneybrown.com/
For more information on the SSE, see http://www.scientificexploration.org/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hm5L8z34sNg

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/10112717/First-Bitcoin-baby-is-a-girl-born-last-year.html

The world's first baby "bought" with Bitcoin is a girl born in California who was conceived when a doctor's offer of discounted fertility treatment if parents paid with the digital currency was accepted by an unnamed couple.

The parents didn't use Bitcoin themselves but agreed to pay with the online currency in return for a 50 per cent discount, according to their California-based fertility specialist Dr C. Terence Lee.
Dr Lee told The Telegraph today the baby, a girl, was born late in 2012, but refused to name the infant without the parents' permission.
Referring to a photo released of the "Bitcoin baby", Dr Lee added: "That's actually a girl. Eveybody thinks it's a boy but it's actually a girl."
Bitcoin is a virtual currency whereby each bitcoin piece is composed of a specially generated code. The digital coins are usually spent through transactions on the peer-to-peer network or online shops.
Bitcoins are not commonly used for offline spending and Dr Lee believes this is the first fertility treatment paid for with the currency.

http://www.scienceworldreport.com/articles/7398/20130609/first-experimental-proof-super-fast-quantum-algorithm-published.htm

It's only three lines of simple math for a human, but a small victory for a quantum computer. Researchers in China report in Physical Review Letters that they can solve two linear equations by manipulating four entangled photons. Their demonstration-the rough equivalent of solving for x and y in the equations 4x+3y=6 and 3x+2y=3-is the first proof that a quantum algorithm proposed in 2009, which promised exponential speed-up compared to one run on a normal CPU, can be implemented in the lab.

Few quantum algorithms are actually faster than their classical counterparts. The most famous example in which quantum mechanics wins is an algorithm for factoring large numbers proposed by mathematician Peter Shor in 1994. But four years ago, theorists showed that a quantum algorithm for solving a set of linear equations could also be exponentially faster that any classical algorithm, provided you only needed to know probabilistic information about the solution-and not the exact solution itself.

To implement this algorithm, Xindong Cai, at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, and colleagues used a laser to prepare two pairs of entangled photons, which they spatially separated and sent down four different paths. Passing the photons through a series of logic gates effectively corresponded to the steps of solving two linear equations: inverting a 2×2 matrix, multiplying it through, and calculating the two independent variables. The quantum computer is overkill for solving only two linear equations; the real advantages would come as the number of equations grows. -- Jessica Thomas

http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html

U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program

......The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.

The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before. Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy. Even late last year, when critics of the foreign intelligence statute argued for changes, the only members of Congress who know about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues. …

The technology companies, which participate knowingly in PRISM operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley. They are listed on a roster that bears their logos in order of entry into the program: “Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” PalTalk, although much smaller, has hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war.

......But the PRISM program appears more nearly to resemble the most controversial of the warrantless surveillance orders issued by President George W. Bush after the al-Qaeda attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Its history, in which President Obama presided over “exponential growth” in a program that candidate Obama criticized, shows how fundamentally surveillance law and practice have shifted away from individual suspicion in favor of systematic, mass collection techniques.

The PRISM program is not a dragnet, exactly. From inside a company’s data stream the NSA is capable of pulling out anything it likes, but under current rules the agency does not try to collect it all.

Analysts who use the system from a Web portal at Fort Meade key in “selectors,” or search terms, that are designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s “foreignness.” That is not a very stringent test. Training materials obtained by the Post instruct new analysts to submit accidentally collected U.S. content for a quarterly report, “but it’s nothing to worry about.”

......An internal presentation on the Silicon Valley operation, intended for senior analysts in the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, described the new tool as the most prolific contributor to the President’s Daily Brief, which cited PRISM data in 1,477 articles last year. According to the briefing slides, obtained by The Washington Post, “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.

http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/06/apple-files-imoney-patent-for-virtual-currency-digital-wallet-and-free-stuff/


Who needs money when you can have iMoney?
Apple has applied for a patent on a combined virtual currency and digital wallet technology that would allow you to store money in the cloud, make payments with your iPhone, and — just maybe — communicate with point-of-sale terminals via NFC.
And, make money by viewing ads.
The patent application, published today by the  U.S. Patent and Trademark Organization, details how iPhone users could walk into a store, pay for goods with their phone, and walk out with their merchandise. All of this is possible today, of course, but Apple’s patent application mentions — although does not require — NFC, something that Apple has long resisted adding to the iPhone. NFC facilitates digital wallets and cashless purchasing by wirelessly transmitting payment credentials and pricing information.

Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/06/apple-files-imoney-patent-for-virtual-currency-digital-wallet-and-free-stuff/#YeTLopY7LK1zuUe8.99

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/06/feds-say-they-can-search-your-laptop-at-the-border-but-wont-say-why/

Under the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, Americans are generally protected from unreasonable searches and seizures by government agents. But we generally have less privacy at the border—usually when entering the United States from abroad.

At present, border agents do not have to provide a warrant or have reasonable suspicion to search your laptop—they essentially just need a hunch. For some time now, civil liberties groups have been pressing to change that policy. At the very least, these groups would like to compel the government to explain its legal rationale.

Back in February 2013, the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released an executive summary (PDF) of its findings to justify warrantless border searches of laptops. However, that summary did not include any substantial analysis of the reasoning the government provides.

On Wednesday, though, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the DHS released (PDF) its complete December 2011 Civil Rights/Civil Liberties Impact Assessment.

The assessment first counters by noting:

The issue is an important one even though it affects only a very small proportion of the many millions of travelers who enter the United States each month. The table below summarizes the relevant statistics; as it shows, only a few hundred people each month are subjected to any kind of electronic device search (which vary in their comprehensiveness), and of that number, only a small minority have their electronic devices detained for any length of time.
According to the government’s own figures, there were only 302 travelers subject to electronic device searches in 2009 and 383 in 2010. Still, that raises the question: what is the government’s constitutionally based reasoning for such searches? Frankly, we don’t know. A lot of it is redacted.

On Page 18 of the 52-page document under the section entitled “First Amendment,” several paragraphs are completely blacked out. They simply end with the sentence: “The laptop border searches in the [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and [Customs and Border Protection] do not violate travelers’ First Amendment rights as defined by the courts."

Because we say so

The DHS also says that it definitely can’t change its policies to be “suspicion-based,” as that would be “operationally harmful.” Why?

First, commonplace decisions to search electronic devices might be opened to litigation challenging the reasons for the search. In addition to interfering with a carefully constructed border security system, the litigation could directly undermine national security by requiring the government to produce sensitive investigative and national security information to justify some of the most critical searches. Even a policy change entirely unenforceable by courts might be problematic; we have been presented with some noteworthy CBP and ICE success stories based on hard-to-articulate intuitions or hunches based on officer experience and judgment. Under a reasonable suspicion requirement, officers might hesitate to search an individual's device without the presence of articulable factors capable of being formally defended, despite having an intuition or hunch based on experience that justified a search.
However, the government did provide a pointed response to arguments that ICE and CBP should revert to a 1986 policy. That legislation allowed agents to “briefly peruse” a traveler’s possessions to determine if there was probable cause or a reasonable suspicion for a further seizure.

This approach is not tenable in the context of modern electronic devices. Gigabytes of information may be stored in password-protected files, encrypted portions of hard drives, or in a manner intended to obscure information from observation. An on-the-spot perusal of electronic devices following the procedures established in 1986 could well result in a delay of days or weeks; even a cursory examination of the contents of a laptop might require a team of officers to spend days or weeks skimming the voluminous contents of the device. At the same time, a firm time limit for completing a search risks allowing a wrongdoer to "run out the clock" by encrypting and password-protecting his device, or traveling with voluminous amounts of documents, or other measures to make the search very time consuming.
Not surprisingly, the ACLU takes issue with this line of reasoning. In a blog post on Wednesday, Brian Hauss, a legal fellow at the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, wrote:

To be sure, rummaging around through people's personal papers may well turn up the occasional bad guy, but that is not the only consideration. No doubt law enforcement agents would also find it useful to walk into people's homes at will, but we don't allow them to do so because that would intrude on our reasonable expectation of privacy in our homes. And just as we reasonably expect privacy in our homes, so, too, do we expect that border agents will not base their decisions to search through our electronic information on a whim or a hunch. Put another way, requiring law enforcement agents to possess objective reasons for a search is a feature of our constitutional framework, not a bug.

Yes, not the same DNA. One was evil and the other one promises to never let itself become one.

But what about 6 years from now?

Some people collects stamps, baseball cards and spend a lot of time selling them, buying them. Are those people unlicensed money transmitter too?

Is the higher frequency of exchange from fiat to bitcoin the main reason to be considered a money transmitter?

The part that could be of concern:

"But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

In the Bitcoin Bible who's gonna be Adam, Eve?

Oh and don't forget the serpent. He was the cause of us being all here talking about bitcoin on a forum instead of playing around naked in Paradise...

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1

[...] Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

For the NSA, overflowing with tens of billions of dollars in post-9/11 budget awards, the cryptanalysis breakthrough came at a time of explosive growth, in size as well as in power. Established as an arm of the Department of Defense following Pearl Harbor, with the primary purpose of preventing another surprise assault, the NSA suffered a series of humiliations in the post-Cold War years. Caught offguard by an escalating series of terrorist attacks—the first World Trade Center bombing, the blowing up of US embassies in East Africa, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, and finally the devastation of 9/11—some began questioning the agency’s very reason for being. In response, the NSA has quietly been reborn. And while there is little indication that its actual effectiveness has improved—after all, despite numerous pieces of evidence and intelligence-gathering opportunities, it missed the near-disastrous attempted attacks by the underwear bomber on a flight to Detroit in 2009 and by the car bomber in Times Square in 2010—there is no doubt that it has transformed itself into the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created.

In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever. [...]

Inside, the facility will consist of four 25,000-square-foot halls filled with servers, complete with raised floor space for cables and storage. In addition, there will be more than 900,000 square feet for technical support and administration. The entire site will be self-sustaining, with fuel tanks large enough to power the backup generators for three days in an emergency, water storage with the capability of pumping 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day, as well as a sewage system and massive air-conditioning system to keep all those servers cool. Electricity will come from the center’s own substation built by Rocky Mountain Power to satisfy the 65-megawatt power demand. Such a mammoth amount of energy comes with a mammoth price tag—about $40 million a year, according to one estimate.

They may send more XRP for free to boost the system so don't despair yet. I was expecting to get nothing.