The simplest way, as I can see it, is in refusing to purchase from businesses which do not refund their customers when they have done wrong.  I believe it is better for all of us that we ensure once money is transmitted from one party to another, it is done so with the confidence that the receiving member is trustworthy.  This causes people to be conscious about the decisions they make, and to not be impulsive with their purchases.  This roots out businesses which do not play nicely (since their reputation is at complete state), with the effect of causing startups to find it more difficult to begin.

So what we're really seeking is a system to ensure new business has a chance to grow in the trust of its clients, while providing protection to its clients in the event of it not being able to provide quality service.  This can be setup through the use of escrow, in which a trusted third party holds the money devoted to the company in question until said company can ship their product to the individual, whereupon the individual receiving the item can give the OK to the escrow party to release funds to the company.  If, as in the case of BFL, the company fails to deliver on its promises, the individual can then request their money back from the escrow party.  This process can be repeated for as long as necessary until the company is established and trusted to issue their own refunds when need be.  Although we may never know if a business will suddenly fail to perform or refund, it becomes much less likely the more the entity trades successfully.

The core quality we must consider is in people being careless with their money; the illusion of security dictates that we can ship our money wherever we please with a guarantee that nothing will ever go wrong.  People are trained to be careless; I believe it's best that we be far more prudent with who we trust.  In this transition between now and then, people would be wise to ask that business work with escrow services if it is security they seek; this helps to ensure fairness and protection between both the business and the individual.  As unfortunate as it is that BFL has made the decisions it has, this is an important lesson to us all as to who we give our money to.

Now, an automated escrow service, such as in the case of a modified business wallet, could be feasible, but I don't see it working without the trusted third party to oversee the process, nor would I trust a lone, appointed entity to act as the authority of this process; as we have learned, centralization is a doorway to abuse, and if people are given any room for abuse, they tend to take the opportunity, as we're always working in our own favor.  Likewise, the agency would be unable to enforce who can operate and cannot without political power; without political power, the agency is pointless, and with political power, the agency is bound to abuse its power.  Instead of resorting to these abstractions, I would encourage people to simply be careful with who handles their money, and to stay connected as to which businesses are trustworthy and which are not.  Even when considering BFL, it was, albeit without many knowing, a risk, and with all risks, you sometimes lose out.  There is no such thing as safety or security without knowledge and cautiousness.

So in this case, had BFL agreed to use an escrow service at its customer's demand (in an alternate universe anyhow), people would have their money in hand and the grief would be long over.  The moral of the story is to weigh trust with convenience, and give benefit to trust for it often outweighs the convenience.

No; a bank of Thailand said it wasn't explicitly legal, but the Thai government AFAIK hasn't spoken against it.

Because they will lie

Surely there are better things to do with one's time than fall prey to these sorts of things.

These are my sentiments exactly; this is one of Bitcoin's better qualities, I don't believe we should work to remove it.  I don't want my Bitcoin with strings attached to them.

Thanks for reminding me about this; I used to have a relay setup but reformatted and forgot about the whole thing.

This man writes about literally nothing that would ever remotely matter.

I hope feminists have learned by now that segregation in the name of equality doesn't change the fact that segregation creates inequality.  Both men and women face many of the same challenges, pointing out that women have issues doesn't mean a thing to me.  You cannot explain to the racist that blacks are as human as whites (or vice versa), for these are arational beliefs; there's nothing to discuss.  All you can do is be who you are and fuck anyone who thinks you're lesser for what you cannot control.  At this point, I see feminism only as a form of masculism, just with the genders reversed; of course we all want equal rights, we're not doing ourselves a favor by advocating rights for just one group of people.  Instead, we must ensure rights are not different for anyone, not for race, gender or age; we do this not by pointing out that we want rights for our specific gender, but we want rights for everyone; this is the inherent flaw in feminism, it advocates only for rights for a specific set of people.  A right which is not universal is nothing, if not a glorified privilege.

With that said, we can begin the healing process by fixing the imbalances of marriage.

They shouldn't be persecuting these people to begin with.  I hope Bitcoin makes it impossible for them to enforce unjust laws; no good has ever come from the prohibition of personal property; consequentialism at its worst: "He could use those drugs and then eat a puppy and stab a man, therefore we should charge him with a lesser crime so he does not commit the greater crime."  Rather than try a man for his potential actions (fortune tellers would make the best law enforcers if this were feasible--what was that movie called?), we should judge a man for his actual actions, since his actions have a special property called "actual", and consequentially, cannot be "potential", due to being real, and not imaginary.

It doesn't acknowledge the underlying problem of why medicine needs a price fix to ensure it's fair; it sounds as though there are protections for the developers of medicine to keep the methods on creating such medicine secret to prevent others from profiting, which sounds inherent in the systems of copyright and patenting.

Instead of controlling the problem through the very methods that created the problem, we should instead move to unravel the problem at its core so we can find a real solution.

Bitmit

You can find lots of offers on Bitmit like this, look around some on there and see if you can find something to your liking.

Ripple?

This really opened my eyes; I knew it was bad but not this bad.  Thank you for sharing this, I would've never seen it otherwise.  Time to save up in Bitcoin...

Edit:  Also, it seems Maloney does not consider Bitcoin a money, but a currency; I can see why he would believe this, since Bitcoin, in its simplest form, is nothing more than a distributed ledger (numbers in a system as one might call it), but I believe the aspect which makes Bitcoin a money is the fact that its supply cannot be increased (without consensus anyway), which does make it suitable as a store of wealth, unlike a currency.

A shame, but from his standing point, if you're invested primarily in gold and silver, you'll want others invested in it as well.  I'm the same way with Bitcoin.

Perhaps developers now have an incentive to start developing for Linux

The mods also don't really like short responses, either; there was some trouble a little while back where "+1" and "^this" was placed under scrutiny for it being so common and not contributing much to threads, so now those types of responses are deleted.

See, if people could get over this one simple thing, we would actually have the energy to move forward and do something productive.  Religion (and politics) has proven to be the greatest black hole of human thought thus far, where nobody is ever wrong but nobody is ever right.

The question is whether the post was on-topic to the off-topic thread; if we made a thread named "List your favorite pizza toppings" and you answered "Rock & Roll", then it's unrelated to the thread that's unrelated to Bitcoin

What Bitcoin has taught me: decentralize all the things!

Out of curiosity, how many people are just now finding out they're libertarian?  Really, I think most people, especially those who don't want to involve themselves in popular politics, will find they're libertarian; anyone who simply believes in being and letting be counts as a good person to me.  The only difference is whether the person self-identifies as libertarian or not; considering the amount of dissenters toward the increasingly authoritarian America, it is quite easy to see, we at least generally agree that we don't want what's become.

Anyhow, here's how I scored:



LIBERTY!!!


In libertarian socialism (i.e. anarchism), private property is considered tyranny and hierarchies in business are viewed as unwanted, just as hierarchies are viewed in government.  Though I personally believe this is a natural shift, it really depends on the society in question; a person can consider their land as personal property (as opposed to private property), and will consider trespassing on said land as an aggression against him; this is the right.  On the other hand, the left will believe that the earth belongs to everyone, and to attack a person who enters the land he owns (which is all of it, collectively) will be an aggression against him.  This is a classic distinction, no matter if it's libertarian or authoritarian.  I have two minds on this matter: I believe forcibly taking control of an area of land and then paying people to work it is unfair, because those people could've worked it on their own without someone owning the land; it is only a method for the wealthy to remain wealthy, which I believe is perfectly fine if the person is deserving, but not when he's setting up a situation where he deprives his peers of wealth to increase his own; in this way, I see working the earth's natural resources as something which can be done together, not as one owner with wage slaves.

However, I also believe people should be able to have their private space, such as a house; I can see we'll not get along well if we can't have the right to privacy, which naturally entails owning an area of land on which to live on.  So now we must figure out what "my house" is, since we can technically define all of the USA as the state's "house" with us as guests living upon it (it's funny thinking about this; the only true free people are those behind government, the rest of us live off this fantasy of authority.)  The way I see it, whatever you can afford to protect is fine; I see this as naturally limiting what a person can consider his home (no more than his vision can carry anyway), while also making large spots of land where one might work unfeasible for one owner to protect reliably; if we can define even the smallest space of personal property as the one we're currently existing in, then I see no reason why we cannot reserve a certain amount of space to work, while allowing others this same right; I see no reason for the ownership of large swathes of land here, so even capitalism, in its most natural form, is naturally self-limiting without the subsidies to protection provided by the state.

Frankly, the way I see political standing is as a triangle; the top two points lead to authoritarian right and authoritarian left, but the closer you get to liberty, the less it really matters what you believe in since we can't enforce it anyway; we naturally move toward the best system for us, whatever it may be; it's hard to say since I don't live in such a society.  The distinctions between right and left make perfect sense now, but I believe, once in a state of freedom, these distinctions melt away, else we resort to authority again to ensure these distinctions remain (e.g. "I don't like those socialists, let's get 'em!", followed by "Well I don't like those fascists, let's get 'em!")