This is what I mean by universal:

Math is universal (independent of time and space and independent of person using this particular concept). Examples:
If someone says ''2+2=-5'' is wrong, then this statement is true:
- independent of time; this statement was true 1000 years ago, is true now and will be true in a million years from now
- independent of space; this statement is true in North America, in Portugal and even on Mars
- independent of person; this statement is true when you say it, when I say it and even when the pope says it

Imagine someone claiming ''2+2=-5 is false unless it serves a public good; then 2+2=-5 is true''. Idiocy, right? Or something like this ''Upward buoyant force that is exerted on a body immersed in a fluid, whether fully or partially submerged, is equal to the weight of the fluid that the body displaces, except for Chuck Norris who cannot be immersed, because he has lawful authority to walk on the water''.


Morality is also universal (independent of time and space and independent of person using this particular concept). Examples:
If someone says ''it is wrong to initiate violence, e.g. to rape), then this statement is true:
- independent of time; this statement was true 1000 years ago, is true now and will be true in a million years from now
- independent of space; this statement is true in North America, in Portugal and even on Mars
- independent of person; this statement is true when you say it, when I say it and even when the pope says it

Now imagine someone claiming ''gang-raping Birdy's child is wrong, but if it serves a public good then it's okay'' - would you agree to such an exception from the rule?


Ethics (and abstractions like state laws and regulations and religious laws and regulations derived from ethics) are not universal (they are always creating exceptions from the rule). Examples:
- stealing is wrong unless ... (exception follows: majority agrees to it, etc.) - real life example: ''A person commits theft, if without lawful authority, such person knowingly: 1 controls property of another with intent to deprive him of such property ...'' Arizona Revised Statuses, § 13-1802
- raping is wrong unless (exception follows: a person wearing FBI jacket is permitted to do so) - real life example: ''A person commits molestation of a child, if without lawful authority, by intentionally or knowingly engaging in or causing a person to engage in sexual contact with a child under fifteen years of age'' Arizona Revised Statuses, § 13-1410

This is your ethics at work! I do not want such a world for myself and for my children.

Rationality is based on one's morals? Where did you get it from?

Would you care to explain?

It is morally wrong to initiate violence against humans or threaten them to use violence. Initiating violence or threatening to use one contradicts the property law (you own yourself). Noone should initiate violence against you. Neither should you do it against others.

It is also morally wrong to steal properties from other humans.

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Coming back to your fantastically misleading question:  have you ever been in a situation requiring such a decision from you? No, you were not! And you will never be. It is always morally wrong to kill innocent person. How would you feel if someone killed you (just because you happened to be innocent)?

It is the other way round.

Ethics is what is perceived good and noble by people living in a certain geographical area in a given specific time.

Morality is universal (independent of time and space), just like universal is law of gravity or Archimedes law. Morality is provable rationally (using logic) and empirically (using observations and experiments).

Yeah, I know it is a bit confusing; analogy:
- communists and other freaks acquired term ''anarchy''; during tens of years media convinced people that anarchy is (violent) chaos.
- politicians acquired scientific term ''law'' (laws exactly describe the world around us; laws are rationally and empirically provable) and convinced us that their coercive regulations are laws too, just by labeling their regulations as laws!
- religious freaks acquired term ''morality'' (we all heard BS phrases like ''religious morality'', etc in our lives) and deformed its universal meaning.

Morality is objective (like math, physics, etc.). Term morality have unfortunately been acquired by weirdos, preachers and idiots.

It cannot differ from one person to person (killing, stealing raping were morally wrong for your and my grandparents 1000 years ago and are morally wrong now for you and me). Ethics (from which the statist and religious laws and regulations are derived) changes over time (raping was ethical and legal a few thousand years ago).



We are probably having disagreements over definitions. Can you define ''morally'' and ''legal''?



Can you prove owning gold (chemical element) is morally wrong? What harm do you do to others by owning it? This sounds like an arbitrary opinion to me.



No, I am stating a fact (objective, provable rationally and / or empirically).

Not every activity labeled ''illegal'' is morally bad. There were times when owning gold in North America was illegal. While you certainly could call owning gold illegal, you wouldn't call it morally wrong, would you?

Another example: it is morally wrong for you to kill in cases other then self-defense, but it is legal for you to kill if you a dressed in green costume with a sign ''US military'' or a blue costume with a sign ''police''.

Yet another example: it is morally wrong for you to steal someone's bitcoins, but it is legal for you to steal them if you wear a cap with FBI letters on it.

I hope you are getting differences between morality and legality.

Why?



Coins are coins, except some of them are tainted (by the will of the person who was robbed). I wouldn't willingly accept a payment with tainted coins. I would pay more for non-tainted coins (to have a clean conscious).



It would take satoshidice's developers a few hours to build in their service an option for punters not to accept tainted coins. Some would accept tainted coins, some would not.

The judgement system is not needed. In your client you would specify that if your name appears on Google with words like ''arrest, confiscation, etc.'' your coins get automatically tainted (unless you revoke it or something) or if you do not log into your client for more than 2 weeks then your co8ins get tainted or .... a mixture of user-specified conditions.



There are a lot of brainiacs in this forum. They can figure out the problems and find ways to mitigate them

This sounds like an oxymoron: stealing from a thief  


I have an idea for a new type of crypto-asset:

The protocol of this new asset should envisage in cases when coins get stolen / extorted by people doing business as ''governments'':

a) a mechanism for tainting the stolen coins (if you are a moral human being you wouldn't deal with such tainted coins, you wouldn't buy them, their market price would be lower), or even
b) a mechanism for making the stolen coins unspendable (thus screwing the thieves - a crime should not pay!), or even
c) a mechanism for making the stolen coins retrievable by the victim of the theft / extortion (in case the human that was attacked gets freed in some point in future).

This would be fun 

Drugs (which in fact are exogenic neurotransmitters) do not create what you imply they do.

80 now

Yes, I know.


Consider these two charting & trading front-ends:

http://www.multicharts.com/   YT video of how it works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu_AjBpbjNI (short one) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJmwPEFoVlg (long one)

http://www.ninjatrader.com/   YT video of how it works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXfD9Ep0WoI (short one) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLBa73Q6v3s (long one)

These front-ends are used by thousands of individual traders, by money managers and hedge funds. Just send e-mails to developers of these softwares and see if they are interested. By integrating with one of these you will get access to many traders.

Metatrader is free for end users but very expensive for an exchange / broker (a few hundreds thousand dollars in integration works and license). Surely Kraken can afford it, but at the beginning of their business they might want to try cheaper and better alternatives.


I am too surprised the level of sophistication in crypto realm is so stone age when it comes to exchanges.

1. All of us already have an account in an exchange. Many of us have accounts at more than one exchange.

2. Opening another account is a masochism unless benefits of having a third account offset the pain of doing the paperwork again (like scanning the recent utility bill, etc).

3. Having your data feed and trading gateway integrated with a decent charting & trading front-end would (in my case) help me doing something... I hope I am not alone in this.

They have just started! Give them time to first start crawling, then walking and then running!


But it is a nice platform! No other exchange gives you ability to have so many order types. Kraken to some extend fuses both the role of an exchange and the role of a broker (with these order types). This is the best platform on the market right now (if it can perform as promised).


1. I too consider the US jurisdiction a negative. People doing business as USA are dangerous lunatics at large.

2. For the same purpose I consider EU jurisdiction (Bitstamp) almost equally unsafe. I live in the so called EU and I will rather open account at BTC-e, Russia than in Bitstamp, the so called EU.

3. Why one exchange thrives under unfavourable (EU) conditions and the other under similarly unfavourable (USA) conditions does not? Just a few ideas:
- Kraken is still in its infancy - it needs time,
- Kraken is busy doing time and cost consuming legal equilibria (reading and understanding phone book-sized legal gibberish is distracting from creative tasks) and can't devote resources to deal with core business,
- the general market is already saturated with exchanges and no other similar ones are needed (Kraken's launch was too late or /and its offer is no much different from what competitors have already been offering),
- Kraken failed to differentiate themselves from other exchanges (having better order types and lower fees might just not be enough to differentiate) or failed to communicate the differentiation.
- the target clients were badly defined (Kraken needs to find a yet unexplored niche within the market and develop from this niche into a general market).

1. Your goal at bitcoinstarter is BTC 25. You won't be able to finance your undertaking with this amount I think.

2. Who will cover the remaining amount?

1. Will you be servicing then these businesses as a payment processor?

2. If yes, are those BTC 5 a remuneration for bringing you the clients?

I might be right about money managers. A low to mid quality money manager has USD 2 - 10 million worth of assets under management. None of whom I know decided to start trading bitcoin simply because of the lack of even basic tools.

I didn't know Bit4X until you posted its name. I am a newbie to Bitcoin