Is this tired old trope still doing the rounds? A Bitpay employee let slip that the majority of their coins go straight to OTC buyers who are waiting for them.

I've always found that attitude something of a stretch.

'Hey, I can't pay my mortgage this month. My kids are starving and I'm wearing rags. Should I sell my car to survive so I can't work or transport us ever again or those bitcoins that are sitting doing nothing awaiting a possible future that may never come? Boy, that's a quandary.  

There are no Bitcoin 'investment' options without unacceptable risks. I'd look elsewhere if I were you.

What on Earth are the folks who try to link astoundingly unrelated world events to Bitcoin on?

Even attempts to link it to things that really should be linked to it look rather sad.  

I don't think it's that clear cut. The Airbnb/ Uber model only lives because even though they often fly in the face of regulation, it's not something the average legislator cares all that much about.

It's a whole different ball game when there's money involved. You may have noticed that you're instantly buried under a mountain of onerous requirements.

Bitstamp have always been particularly meticulous about being nosy. I've heard they've asked for tax documents in the past for no apparent reason. I'd be shopping elsewhere.

If anyone is that dim to waste so much of their life on something that's available instantly for a tad over $300 then perhaps it's better that that's keeping them occupied rather than stinking up the wider world.

They're all self moderated threads and I think chmod opens most of the threads in the press section. I guess he's cleaning things up. Nothing to do with bots or mods.

Is there much call for dark markets sales from terrorists? I would've thought they'd prefer to use the same old channels through Eastern Europe. After the present strife dark markets will be even more heaving with law enforcement than before.

It would be convenient for those who already hold but nothing more. I think the empirical evidence points towards merchant acceptance being a bit of a non event. There's still no reason why anyone would choose BTC over their regular cards.

Depends on whether we get a few trillion District 9 style arrivals who are all ready to work hard transforming the rest of the solar system. By my calculations the odds of that happening before February 12th 2037 are around 76.1% so you could be golden.

Ask a more established member to quote your post and the images will show up.

So citizenship depends on keeping your subscriptions paid up? What are said people supposed to do if they become stateless? At this rate the world's population will be living on barges in international waters pining at the unreachable lands they were born in.

Can we have a dedicated sub forum devoted entirely to totally unrelated world events and the effect they might have on a microscopic market that almost the entire world doesn't know or care about?

There are plenty of people serving time for long forgotten crimes and rightly so. It's not a popularity contest. If he'll be remembered for anything it'll be for unleashing a whole world of inconvenience for law enforcement types. I don't think anyone'll be in a forgiving mood.

Well, I seriously doubt there would've have been any sales had he not been escrowing them so every single transaction had his hand in it and that's the type of volume most drug dealers could only dream of.

But it applies to every area of life. Car manufacturers aren't culpable if someone's using their product to deliver drugs or run people over.

If Mr Ulbricht had just designed a site that allowed vendors and sellers to meet and integrated an escrow system and set it free for anyone to use he'd be fine. It would be the actual operator of the site who was jailed. In that case it was him.

I agree that his sentence is ludicrous. I also believe he deserved to be nailed.

Bitplastic.com is a Bitcoin Visa card that's run by moriartybitcoin who a lot of people claim to be a scammer. They are out there.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1151501.0

He was directly participating in drug deals by escrowing and actively creating and hosting a community explicitly for that purpose.

That's a long old way from just providing a neutral platform that's used for nefarious reasons. Openbazaar will no doubt have a druggy section. Its creators won't be culpable because all they're doing is providing software that they have no control over.

The creator of Bittorrent has never been charged for anything because he hasn't done anything wrong. It's the users who are breaking laws.

Coinbase and Xapo are going to be the biggest. There are plenty of normal companies issuing prepaid cards I've never heard of and there've been companies announcing Mastercard collaborations only for Mastercard to say they've never heard of them.

Doesn't look too hard according to this - http://smallbusiness.chron.com/start-prepaid-credit-card-company-20594.html