Other jurisdictions besides the US could profit mightily from running future bitcoin exchanges. Hong Kong, Singapore, London, Zurich, Moscow, Rarotonga, Cayman Is., who knows where a server can be set up?
LOL, I like the Labuan and Vanuatu jurisdictions. But any place not on this list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FATF_Blacklist will ultimately be drawn into the "Down with Bitcoin" club, militarily if necessary. |
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Well the US government is no longer a government but a plutocracy. So i really dont care what they do or think anymore. I will be trading outside of the govenment's criminal organizations.
Bravo, someotherguy. This is one of the silliest threads that I have seen on bitcoin forum. It would be like convening the regulators and feed-at-the-trough lawyers to come up with a way to make downloading new release movies via BitTorrent a legal and mass-market activity. Bitcoin was created specifically to bypass or "route around" the regulators and it doesn't need to be mass market to achieve that. The only attornies that bitcoin community will need are defense attornies experienced in defending against attacks from the AML crowd. It would be great to create that Dream Team. |
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grondilu, "la Défense" on May 25th lunch sounds great....please post here when you have final cafe address since i won't have anyone's mobile number. cheers,
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If talking to them makes y'all trust me less... then good! I'd like to see more careful code review, and, as others have pointed out, if bitcoin can be destroyed by one person, or requires the leadership of one person, then it has failed to be the strong, decentralized system that I think it is.
I don't trust you less. We should all practice safe code as a matter of routine! IMHO, the wider intelligence community may end up being "closet" bitcoin proponents. If you think about, it makes a lot of sense. Iran-Contra connection under the Reagan administration would have been far more difficult to discover under a bitcoin monetary system. Bitcoin doesn't replace PayPal, bitcoin replaces hawala. |
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two thoughts that haven't gotten too much attention on this thread.
1) Why do we think Gavin's talk will be available to the public? It's the CIA, not TED.
2) If Bitcoin is decentralized, why do we look to Gavin as a leader? Shouldn't the whole project exist more like a headless mob?
This was the Wikileaks dilemma. Julian Assange claims to have spoken up publicly because the non-participants were about to speak up just to fill the void. Let's just hope there's no Swedish blondes involved. Clearcoin appears to be operating within the law. But an unlicensed US-based bitcoin money exchanger would not be. |
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Why is it such a disappointment for some that Gavin gets invited to speak?
Why should he not go, Grondilu and others?
Mainly because there is no upside and it is unnecessary. Personally, as a humble blogger, I feel that it is an inappropriate audience (less so than the FBI however)! It will tend to harm his reputation in the BTC community significantly more than it will help (but it is Gavin's personal decision to make). On a non-Gavin collective level, it would be like Pablo Escobar presenting to the DEA or Marc Rich presenting to the IRS or Phil Zimmermann presenting to the NSA. |
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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.
Excellent comment. I agree most with the source code statement because that is what happened to PGP under NAI in 2001. Published bitcoin code will require more rigorous review but that is always the case with open-source crypto code. Even if Gavin reconsiders, someone else from the bitcoin community would step up and I think Gavin realized that. This is merely a show for the CIA to order in some Chinese carry-out and fill time to justify salaries. Trust me, the people that matter are already well aware of the Bitcoin Block Explorer and the vulnerabilities of the IRC network. They even have a separate division/fund that invests in startups. http://www.iqt.org/Even while intelligence community may facilitate transfers with bitcoin, the true threats to the rest of mankind will come from the coordinated multi-government crackdown on the global exchanger network. There are over 2,000 digital currency exchangers today in various legal jurisdictions around the world and it is fairly trivial for those exchangers to add bitcoin as an offered product. So, an invitation to present at the FBI/Treasury AML crowd will be the canary in the coalmine. |
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As I was thinking about a place where to do this, I thought a symbolic place for finance would be nice.
So, what about having lunch at "la Défense"?
It's quite a nice place with lots of cafés and restaurants, and it's also a large pedestrian place so after lunch we can spend some time there and talk about the project if we want.
Any other idea?
Café des Phares 7, Place de la Bastille 75004, Paris Metro Bastille Café Le Bastille 8, Place de la Bastille 75012, Paris Metro Bastille These two cafés share not only the prominent location of the Place de la Bastille and all the historical reverence attached to this Parisian cornerstone site, they were also linked to a sort of renaissance movement in Paris cafes known as the Philocafés. These are spots where people would meet as a club, and whose purpose was to philosophize, almost in ways reminiscent of the art and intellectual movement of the early 20th Century. If not in actual potency, they definitely hit a chord with nostalgia. The two bustling cafés have seen it all and probably roll right along with an amused grin. http://www.myparistrips.com/pariscafes.html |
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I'll be in Paris with my family next month, and would like to arrange a meeting or two with other bitcoin-people. Who is in/near Paris, and what would be a good time/place to meet?
Gavin, I will be traveling to Paris to meet there and my current dates are May 24-27th. Can you please reconfirm that May 25th is the agreed date. Cheers. |
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Tyler, I am confused and shocked by your analysis, especially given your NME {New Monetary Economics} http://www.amazon.com/Explorations-Monetary-Economics-Tyler-Cowen/dp/1557860718 days with RK {Randall Kroszner}. You should know better. It’s not that I really care about your analysis except for the fact that economist voices on the topic of bitcoin have a disproportionate impact at this point of its evolution. First of all, you admit to still being confused. I agree with you that you are confused. So, why did you pen an analysis? Once you do some basic research, you will understand that bitcoin is essentially digital gold as far as scarcity is concerned. Gold is merely a byproduct of the big bang (atomic number 79). It has value because mankind has assigned it value through the ages. The bid/ask on bitcoin is no different than the bid/ask on gold. It has value because the market has given it value (probably for its digital properties in enabling a tax-free parallel economy). The central bank may have a monopoly on the issuance of legal tender but it does not have a monopoly on creating a mass illusion. Free individuals can generate a mass illusion just as a central bank creates the mass illusion of paper as value. |
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I just noticed this "It's just a fucking integer" thread... http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=111.msg39861#msg39861Very true. Therefore, the deflation argument that needs to be defended is that even with 8 decimals and the largest nominal attrition occurring in the earliest years, bitcoin supply is not only static but decreasing. This is a slightly different economic defense than the deflation inherent in a static gold-based economy, because in the case of durable precious metals, they are usually found by someone else. Bitcoins can be completely eliminated and never found unless you luck upon the private key. |
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I am paying for an eloquent article that defend Satoshi's decision to limit the bitcoin supply to 21 million. Plus, Mises articles are not public domain. I want public domain.
BTW, Mises Institute articles do fall under the creative commons license for republication. I am not seeking the btc bounty ;-) , but I wanted to point out that eloquent defenses of deflation already exist. It matters not that the monetary unit is btc or gold or silver. The 21 million decision was an arbitrary number. Any economic defense regarding deflation will most likely point to deflation and metals as the "state of nature" starting point. I think a more critical issue related to the static supply of bitcoin is how the distributed system deals with lost or destroyed bitcoin that never return to the system. Not a major impact right now but with a 5% average attrition rate, the ~21 million supply could be significantly eroded because there is no expiration. I would suspect that at least 2% are already gone due to unrecoverable hard drive crashes. |
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You are correct in that the USD is used only as a reference on this exchange, however, this is not unusual and is similar to trading the NYMEX Uranium Futures (UX) Contract (not many of us could take physical delivery of the Uranium we traded).
I provided the initial pool of USD to bootstrap the trading of bitcoins on the exchange.
True, but with a futures exchange, trading the contracts requires only a minimal margin deposit and the contracts that do not deliver instead utilize a cash settlement mechanism (like the S&P 500). It is still not clear to me how the USD balance in your exchange can ever surpass the initial injection balance. But I really like the idea. |
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You need bitcoin dealers who deal with national currencies and can transmit money to other countries. The problem is, we're very dispersed so it's actually hard to setup a network of bitcoin cash dealers so it is hard to set up these kind of things. That way you can set up a peer to peer network of currency exchangers.
The exchanger network is sophisticated and established, although most today deal with WebMoney, Liberty Reserve, c-Gold, Pecunix, gBullion, etc, etc. It is only a matter of market demand before the leading ones add bitcoin. They are already localised for their regional focus into and out of some national currencies. I would estimate that there are over 2,000 digital currency exchangers in the world today. |
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We need a "bitcoin friendly" bank. Basically a conventional bank that would be aware of bitcoins and would offer automatic conversion via exchange market, using nothing but your VISA card (possibly in conjonction with a smartphone).
grondilu, please stay out of the banking system. If exchange is the issue, I think what we need more is a p2p distributed exchange client. Regarding the confused statements of precious metals partnering with bitcoin, you people miss the entire point of bitcoin. I am a gold/silver bug myself and a Dec 2010 long position in BTC would have outperformed gold. In the long run, it should keep pace with gold and silver. |
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This attack probably will be attempted and the g-men tasked with it will most likely post to this forum for stress-testing, feedback, etc.
However, one fact that is overlooked is that "original" bitcoin enables a parallel economy with a tax-less monetary system. It is not just crypto-libertarians that prefer that economic arrangement but 99% of the non-ruling world.
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Once he gets "PayPaled" the way Wikileaks did, he might change his preference.
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Yes, excellent news. Stefan is one of the regular shows that I watch. Maybe he will devote a future show to the topic of Bitcoin and the evolving bitcoin economy.
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