FROM THIS POINT ON, WE SHOULD BE LESS TRUSTY OF GAVIN'S (or any other) CODE COMMITS TO THE BITCOIN CODE REPOSITORY.
I'm still running version 0.3.19 and I have never tried Gavin's version. I'll wait a few more months. |
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A lot of great comments, everyone. I must say this news make me feel excited. I dont know if this news is a good thing or a bad thing. I dont know if this is the beginning of the end for bitcoin or if this marks the beginning of the widespread adoption of bitcoin. I dont know if the government will squash bitcoin like a bug, or if the government might end up accepting bitcoin as legal tender and for payment of taxes. I dont know if bitcoin will destroy the US or if bitcoin will "save" the US. I do know that there are uncertainties and that I am proud to be alive at this historic time and part of the bitcoin community.
This is a ridiculously emphatic comment, and yet I feel exactly the same.  2. Governments will still be able to exist and tax its citizens even with universal adoption of bitcoin as the sole legal currency. ever heard of property tax or head tax?
True. We should say that more often. 3. If bitcoin has some fatal flaw and if the government chooses to take action against bitcoin and succeds in destroying it, then that means that bitcoin is not good enough. Survival of the fittest, and it fails. Learn from mistakes and live on to try something better.
Sad, but also true. |
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Colby's article was probably about as balanced as you can be when the immediate, direct audience is the anti-money laundering crowd and those tasked with compliance. I think it's great that the web address is moneylaundering.com instead of antimoneylaundering.com.
Money laundering is a pejorative term to begin with because it insinuates that the participants do not have certain inherent rights to financial privacy. The Jews "laundered" their money to Switzerland in order to escape Hitler's holocaust. Come on, people! Financial privacy is a fundamental human right that has been consistently eroded and violated by governments. We must take a step back and comprehend that "secrecy" does not mean "concealment", but rather that "secrecy" means "privacy" in its most basic sense.
Amen to that, +1. Let's bring back the "radical" old idea that a man's financial affairs are his alone, private and nothing to do with the state. The facist creep away from economic freedom has set back advancement of humanity immeasurably in untold ways. +10 +1 (don't want to inflate the rating so I stick to +1, not +10 nor +100) |
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Because we have nothing to hide?
I sense much of the community members mentality have some irrational extremist hate against the government. Any slight injustice is taken to the extreme and paranoia rules their logic.
That's not the point. Why should we give precious information to these people? What have they done to deserve it? When you discover something cool, you want to share it with other people. But then if you ask yourself "who should I tell it to?", the CIA members are certainly not the first kind of people that come up to mind! |
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Why would we want additional people in the CIA to understand bitcoin?
Finally someone who shares my view about this! |
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Quite frankly Bitcoin is very hard to explain correctly. I have never watched or listened to a Bitcoin presentation that did a good job at explaining it. The only reason I understand it is because I read the white paper and have a crypto background.
Bitcoin is not that difficult to understand, really. I also understood it only once I red Satoshi's paper, but it's because this document is very well written. I understood it after reading it only three or four times, and yet I don't have any particular background. I'm just the average linux nerd and I used wikipedia to learn the concepts I didn't know. That's also why I keep wondering what they need Gavin for exactly. |
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Not if they openly approached him. If they weren't going to play nice, they wouldn't have bothered with a ruse. Like I said, openly inviting him to speak and offering him a speaker's fee tells me that they intend to play nice. It's a very bullish signal.
Yeah, I wasn't too serious. We can indeed be happy that things happened this way. |
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* Support for full-precision bitcoin amounts. You can now send, and
bitcoin will display, bitcoin amounts smaller than 0.01. However,
sending fewer than 0.01 bitcoins still requires a 0.01 bitcoin fee (so
you can send 1.0001 bitcoins without a fee, but you will be asked to
pay a fee if you try to send 0.0001).
Hang on. Am I the only one who thinks this is big news? |
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Quite seriously, I could see the CIA using bitcoins to transfer funds to their agents, or an intelligence source buried deep in a foreign government somewhere.
You might actually be right. How weird that would be, though. |
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I wouldn't be too surprised if, instead of a 3,000USD cheque, Gavin would receive some nice bracelets once he arrives there:  |
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I should obviously be an alpaca, but it should be well drawn, as are Tux or the GNU logo.   Here is your model guys:  Try to draw something nice from this PS. I don't tell how much I pledge. It will depend on how good the result looks. But if some people want to pledge for a precise amount, please do so. |
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There are very little websites where one can buy pictured T-shirts directly with bitcoins.
What about you make one? Meaning that you would not only sell bitcoin-related T-shirts, but also FSF ones, or any other kinds?
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Finally someone did it. Dude, I think you are going to make a huge amount of money |
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keep your friends close and your enemies closer Exactly.  Well, at least it was a good idea to publicly announce that he has been invited by them. In case something happens, we'll know who to blame. |
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Speech, body language, etc speak volume of information to CIA agents. The channel of speech is a hell lot faster than the channel of text.
Yeah, right. Especially when the speaker has to schedule a date for the presentation, take a plane to get there and so on... When is this presentation supposed to occur already? June? We are not even in May. And how long does it take to read doc and watch a video? |
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I am sorry Gavin is accepting Tax payer's money in order to do something like that.
If he accepts 3,000$ to give a presentation about bitcoin, what would he do for 300,000$ or 3,000,000$? Would he accept a full time job as trying to find a way to destroy bitcoin?
Why do CIA need to have someone explain bitcoin in flesh and bone? Can't they read Satoshi's white paper, source code and other information available on this forum?
I must say I am a bit disappointed by Gavin. I hope he reconsiders.
From now on, I'll be even more suspicious about any source code Gavin will publish.
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Of course you can short bitcoins: 1. Borrow some bitcoins. 2. Sell them on the market. 3. Wait until the price of bitcoin has lowered enough 4. Buy some bitcoins back. 5. Pay back your debt. 6. Profit and go back to step 1. |
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Oh I've just realised that this topic is mine so I can stop this 9/11 debate if I want. And I do want to stop it. Sorry guys.  |
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Please don't start a 9-11 debate.
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