You're citing a single case involving Romanian immigration law as a "provable track record" relating to US securities law?  bwahahaha.


Absolutely confidence inspiring.

Not to mention how many of usagi's posts were quoted and/or screen-capped.

Those four note songs will bring you undone every time...especially if you can already play The Star Spangled Banner.

I assume that HKT is Hong Kong Time, so that response from Nefario was sent to you at 19:51 Wednesday UTC.

You mean like karma made your motorcycle happen?  And your hookah lounge?  It takes action to turn ideas into reality.

I guess we'll see just how good your karma is, won't we?  It's not like you can fake a music festival attended by a million people.  It will make headlines all over the world.  Let's see exactly what you and your karma manage to come up with in the next 85 days.

Could you clarify which day "that day" was.  The IRC log refers to him having a lawyer's appointment on Wednesday (UK time) last week.  It's what he found out at that appointment which seems to have led him to hit the eject button.  The major thing he'd expressed concern about was the AML implications of GLBSE's activities.  None of us know whether he consulted a lawyer who specialises in financial services law or a generalist lawyer, but there certainly seems to be a relationship between that consultation with a lawyer on Wednesday and the closure of GLBSE.

"Real shit"?  How about providing a single shred of evidence that you have the capability to organise an event for a million people, this year or any other year.  You post a near constant stream of consciousness but whenever you're asked for any evidence that you've researched what's involved in actually doing something, you hide behind "it will just happen" or "I don't plan things" bullshit.  Your "evidence" is always "karma will make it happen".

And don't complain about the adults treating you like a child when you can't answer adult questions with anything other than wishful thinking.  A goal without a timeline and a concrete plan is just an idea and we all have thousands of ideas and yours are in no way unique.  Children don't have to consider practical realities like finances, logistics, and laws but adults who want to make things happen do.  If you want to be a fireman or an astronaut when you're 7, no-one expects you to know how you're going to do that.  If you want to organise a music festival when you're an adult, then the only way you're going to convince people that you're not just day-dreaming and dribbling bullshit is to tell them how you're going to make it happen and then do those things.

Says the guy who was worried about the possibility of losing his licence last year because it would would set back his sure-fire magic wealth creating scheme of the moment by a couple of years.   

Why aren't you and your co-organisers off finding out what you need and making it happen?  Oh wait.  You don't have any co-organisers and you don't have any funds with which you purchase what you need.  Might as well carry on dribbling bullshit then.

You're not going to attract the number of "like-minded people" you need to stage an event this large here.  At least start a fucking Facebook page or something to attract both donations and volunteers if you insist on pretending that this event is ever going to happen.

If you accept donations for this event and this event doesn't happen when you said it would, you absolutely deserve the scammer tag.  No weasel-like, "people are investing in me, not my projects" bullshit.  And no "other people let me down" bullshit.  Put up or shut up.

They do, however, information share with other, equivalent agencies, both domestically and overseas.  If they discover something which may be of relevance to another agency, they typically turn that information over to that agency for further investigation.  Most Western nations have formal information sharing agreements with each other regarding financial crimes.

He's definitely acting in his own best interests.  I also suspect that he knows this forum well enough to realise that if refunds don't start flowing soon people will start filing complaints with the FSA, the SEC and other regulators making his worst nightmare come true.  His best interests in this case are served by returning funds as soon as possible.


This is location dependent.  In some places, regulators already have the statutory authority to demand information without having to obtain a court order and there are penalties for refusing to provide that information on demand.

If it's AML he's concerned about - as stated - he won't get any advanced warning.  It's illegal in most FATF countries to tip off someone to the existence of an AML investigation.

At this point, Nefario should be taking advice only from a lawyer who specialises in financial services and securities law.  If he follows the advice of internet strangers, he won't have a leg to stand on if the shit hits the fan and regulators do go after GLBSE.

Do you really believe that you're not required to have insurance for a music festival, even if you're not charging people for admission?  The list of laws and regulations you'll have to comply with will make your head spin.

You could hold it in Somalia, I guess.  They're infrastructure has fallen apart so you wouldn't have to worry too much about legal issues.  And I'm sure that their citizens would welcome some free entertainment.

And what, exactly, are you going to contribute?  What is your share?

You sound like one of those teenagers who has "a great idea for a game" and then wants everyone else to execute that idea for nothing.

Based on past experience, you're going to leave any actual work involved in organising this event up to others because you don't care for planning things.

You'd best be opening a bank account, too.  You're not going to get 1 million people wanting to pay in Bitcoins and your suppliers/service providers are going to want to be paid upfront in dirty fiat money.

Anyone want to work out what the insurance premiums alone would be for an event with an anticipated attendance of 1 million people?  One of the questions you're required to answer when applying for special event insurance here is your past experience running similar events.  You also need to provide the details of the insurance - including the coverage amount - carried by security, contractors, vendors, performers as well as submit your risk management plan with your application.  That's just for public liability.  Adverse weather, cancellation, fidelity and material damage insurance costs extra and requires additional information.

Hawala is actually regarded as both an alternative remittance system and an informal value transfer system by AUSTRAC.  I suspect that other countries also have financial services laws which accommodate services like hawala and that - like ours - the definitions aren't restricted to the remittance/transfer of money or currency.  AML/KYC requirements have been expanded to cover an increasing number of transfer systems, formal or otherwise.

Thank you for your compelling legal argument.  The first entity which gets dragged into court over Bitcoin should hire you to represent them.

Not just Pty Ltds (who have to give ASIC details related to share-holdings).  Ltd companies have to maintain a share registry which can be inspected by the public and organisations which have members (such as unions and non-profits) have to maintain records of membership.

At law, regardless of how many Bitcoin enterprises have styled themselves in an effort to make themselves sound legitimate, most of them are either sole traders or simple partnerships - meaning that the business has no separate legal existence from its owners and that they have full personal liability in respect of its activities.

It's even possible that by using language which has a specific legal meaning to inaccurately describe their operations, some Bitcoin enterprises have intentionally misled their users in a manner which is an offence in and of itself.

So you're pulling numbers out of your ass just like you did with the hookah lounge instead of actually finding out everything you'll need to organise/procure and getting quotes for it.  A lot of this stuff will need to be booked months in advance, so you need to find out about it now.  You can't even begin getting permits until you've picked a venue and a date.  Then you have to organise everything being available at that location on that date.  Organising this event should be taking up at least 8 hours of your time each day and you need to find co-organisers within a week.  You don't have any money yet, so you can't pay other people to handle the logistics, booking, permits, etc for you.

I think someone should design a running total graphic so that we can track how close to his goal of $5 million dank is as the donations come rolling in.  If he's aiming to raise $5 million by the end of the year, his daily target is $58,823.


LOL

There's no reason at this point to believe that users won't get their funds returned.  There might be open conflict between the shareholders, but no-one's suggested that GLBSE has insufficient funds at this point to pay its users.  While any involvement by regulators would slow down the repayment process (it took a very long time for people who had funds caught up in the online poker bust to have their funds returned), there is no credible evidence of any regulatory agency being involved at this point - this decision seems to be an attempt to pre-empt such a possibility.

Don't get me wrong, I believe this has been handled appallingly and that the attempt at revisionism by those associated with GLBSE is nauseating, but assumptions that users won't be repaid are somewhat premature.  If Nefario is already melting down over the possibility of GLBSE coming under legal scrutiny, it seems incredibly unlikely that he'd intentionally do something like not paying users which would actively invite legal scrutiny.

Of course one thing which we've seen happen with Bitcoin businesses is them starting out handling small amounts of other people's funds and eventually handling large amounts.  There'll likely always be a threshold above which operators will be required to do the full box and dice registration, and operators who don't plan for that from the beginning should probably be avoided or you are just going to see lots of businesses closing down when they reach that threshold because they either can't be bothered with or can't afford the registration process.  The is all the kind of stuff which should be allowed for in the business plan of any viable enterprise anyway.


What you believe the law should be doesn't affect how it operates in the real world.  That Bitcoin is intended to be a currency is explicitly stated in the "official" documentation regarding the protocol.  Satoshi himself descibes it as "electronic cash", so you're not going to get far arguing that it's merely a payment processing method.  Even if it was just a payment processing protocol, payment processing is subject to regulation.  So are commodities.  So is stored value. 

Not until there's something very specific that the lawyer can handle.  Lawyers charge for every phone call they take and every email they answer.  Unless you've got unlimited funds with which to pay your lawyer, you're not going to pay him to take 500 phone calls telling people the same thing you've already told them.  Bear in mind that attorney-client privilege severely limits the information that your lawyer is able to disclose to others, too - even if your lawyer knows exactly what is going on, that doesn't mean he can legally disclose that information to your creditors.