Jesus wept.  You started this thread with the express intention of funding your hookah lounge through debt.  If you're no longer planning on doing that, then close the fucking thread  - otherwise it's just another one of your egocentric blogging threads.

There are no "low-risk assets".  Every single Bitcoin service which takes user funds for investment or exchange is at risk of being shut down or having their cash flow interrupted due to regulatory issues or the domino effect of other services collapsing.  People need to stop pretending they don't know that.  

Every single time you leave your BTC or your local currency on a BTC service you are doing so knowing that recovering your funds will be difficult and/or costly in the event that the service fails due to incompetence or external factors.  What Bitcoin business so far has failed due to factors which could not have been foreseen?

Hope you're good at multi-tasking if you're planning to be a famous musician by the end of the year and raise sufficient funds to open the hookah as well.

This true of most 34 FATF member countries.  While no-one has yet adopted all of the FATF 40+ 9 AML/CTF recommendations in their entirety, there's a significant standardisation of adoption in Western countries in particular.  There are also memorandums of understanding between nations and provisions in trade agreements which effectively mean that other nations adopt similar financial compliance models to those of the US.

Honestly, it's about time that wannabe entrepreneurs started to realise that you can't just do whatever you want within the business environment and claim some kind of magical immunity because...Bitcoins.  I hope the events of the last couple of months do have some kind of chilling effect on start-ups so that we see a much more professional approach to the launching of Bitcoin services in the future. 

Very, very few existing Bitcoin services have the kind of financial reserves necessary to weather regulatory or other legal challenges and that needs to change.  One of the first questions we should be asking those launching services in the future is what their contingency plans are for predictable challenges such as bank accounts being frozen, their service being hacked, regulatory requirements being imposed, etc.

PayPal spent years trying to avoid being regulated and it ended up losing the fight despite having the enormous financial reserves of e-Bay at its disposal.  Facebook abandoned FB credits - which were projected to be a huge source of revenue - in order to avoid potentially expensive legal complications.  I doubt that even the most successful Bitcoin services can afford protracted legal challenges lasting years and costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Services need to be far more upfront about what their plans are for dealing with legal and regulatory issues which will almost certainly arise more often as time goes on.  For many services, the honest answer is that they will simply have to close if they come under regulatory or other legal scrutiny - it's about time users were explicitly made aware of that likelihood.

This is a Bruno parody, right?

The US doesn't usually acknowledge international precedents, especially from Commonwealth countries.  I'm not really seeing how the liquidation of Bitcoinica LP would bring extra to the table regarding the SEC.  The SEC may well decide that all Bitcoin services which have offered securities, derivatives or exchange services to US customers have acted in violation of US law, but the liquidation itself wouldn't be central to any such finding.

Kind of like how he maintains that money is unimportant but he's always asking other people for it.

I called it earlier in the thread.  You're back to blaming lack of capital.  I guess you're going to blame people not "having faith" in you or "not understanding" you for your inability to raise the funds needed for the hookah lounge venture.  You'd have a lot more credibility if you openly stated that executing your idea for a hookah lounge was a whole lot more complicated than you anticipated.

You see abandoning one project after another in rapid succession as replacing ideas with better ones.  What potential investors see is someone who is utterly unable to commit to their own projects and unwilling to put any meaningful effort into executing them.  The more projects you "replace with better ones", the more difficult you're going to find convincing people to invest in your ventures if you ever do seriously commit to a project.

This is pretty much true.  People wrongly perceive the barriers to entry into the Bitcoin financial services market as being low - they pretty much believe that all they need to be successful is an idea and a website.  Those who enter the market believing that are likely to fail quite spectacularly.

People will still rate based on personality and they'll rate posts they agree with "high" and those they disagree with "low", regardless of the merits of the post.  Reddit's a good example of this.  I suspect that pirate's rating would have been through the roof when he was still the darling of the Lending forum -  his supporters would have rated every post of his high, giving him a credibility which was unwarranted.

No need to keep this thread open then, is there?

Can't wait to hear about the next project you're going to abandon in less than a month.

It's bad enough that this forum is a scammer haven.  Adding options which pretty much amount to popularity contests will remove whatever illusion remains that it's a place where serious Bitcoin enterprises hang out and relegate it once and for all to the "fan site" category.  We don't need to do things which make it even more like an AOL chat-room for petulant teenagers than it already is.

MtGox was only able to do that because they bought bitomat.pl.  They have no legal authority to takeover the payout process for Bitcoinica and nor can that authority be granted to them by the LP if Bitcoinica is insolvent - not that anyone in their right mind other than a liquidator would touch the payout process at this point.  Anyone who turns records or funds over to anyone other than a liquidator at this point is leaving themselves wide open liability-wise - which is why Gox won't unfreeze Bitcoinica's MtGox account until legal authority to access the funds is established.

Patrick being a smart-ass, I assume.

Tihan's posted another update, by the way.  First hearing before the High Court of NZ on 1 November.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=109316.msg1243849#msg1243849

I presume that if the SEC regulates securities, it also regulates stock and currency exchanges.  It's probably the agency which could have the biggest impact on Bitcoin at this time.  If the process of converting USD/BTC is forced to become largely OTC, it's likely that a lot of users will abandon Bitcoin in the short term, that many speculators will leave the game and that newbies will decide that it's just too cumbersome at this time.

Facebook abandoned FB credits primarily because of anticipated legal and regulatory hurdles, despite projections for a massive amount of income coming from FB credits - and FB was much better placed to fight those battles than Bitcoin.  PayPal tried to fight regulation for years and ultimately lost despite having the resources of e-Bay at its disposal.  Dwolla quickly capitulated to regulatory requirements.

Without involving the CIA, the FBI, the NHS, the NSA, etc, Bitcoin can be forced into a niche just by "standard" regulation.

A non-trivial amount of people would wear such tags like a badge of honour.

I think that local rules can be useful in keeping a topic on track.  I also think that the mods should look at how they're being used in a thread.  When threads about major things don't stay on track we see multiple spin-off threads spawned by people who think their particular point has been lost amongst the noise.  This leads to useful information being spread across multiple threads in multiple forums and makes it harder for people to keep up to date with what's going on.

I don't think local thread rules should be able to be used to exclude specific posters from a discussion, though.  The mods will already remove off-topic posts, and I'd hate to see moderation based on who a poster is rather than the content of a specific post.  theymos has given people time out for trolling before and will no doubt do so again.  OPs can lock their own threads if the discussion gets derailed and re-open it only when the thread has been cleaned up or split (I do think the mods should use the thread split and thread merge options more often). 

They don't really have to address "the nature of Bitcoin" in order to deem it to have value.  In order to regulate and tax it, they need to deem it to have value.  If people want to recover what they're owed by the various Bitcoin entities which have imploded, they need Bitcoin to be deemed to have value, but they don't need its specific nature defined.  People could have been lending pirate beanie babies or pogs and the underlying principal would still be the same.