So he is Ron Paul's son.
I'm not from the USA.
But accepting BTC for the Presidential Campaign it seemes a big thing to me.

1. Rand Paul is More Compromising and Pragmatic
Ron Paul often won acclaim for never voting for a tax increase or for any bill not specifically authorized by the Constitution. Rand Paul has indicated an interest in compromising on matters from immigration reform to health care. He has also made efforts to compromise within his own party by working with AIPAC and allowing some foreign aid to countries considered pro-American.

For our country’s sake, certainly for our soldiers’ sake, America’s mission should always be to keep the peace not police the world #VFW


2. Statewide Elections – Rand Paul Has More Appeal Across an Entire State
In his first race, Rand Paul won the primary and general elections by 23 and 12 points, respectively, and has already won more statewide elections than his father. The only time Ron Paul ever won a popular vote was the US Virgin Islands caucus in 2012.

3. Party Politics
Rand Paul endorsed Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012 in a sign of party loyalty and pragmatism. Ron Paul has not publicly endorsed a major party candidate candidate since Ronald Reagan. In 2008, the elder Paul, a GOP officeholder, endorsed Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin for president.

4. Sanctions
The real isolationists are those who choose to use force overseas to promote democracy, rather than seek change through diplomacy, engagement, and by setting a positive example. – Ron Paul
 
Ron Paul has called sanctions “an act of war” and a “precursor to war.” While Rand Paul has voted for sanctions on Iran, he has fought to ensure that nothing in the language of the sanctions “shall be construed as a declaration of war or an authorization of use of force.”

5. Iran
During his campaign for Senate, Rand Paul said it was “reckless” to take “nuclear weapons off the table in certain circumstances” regarding Iran.

"I think it equally unwise to say we will never contain a nuclear Iran."
Rand Paul
He has also couched his subsequent support for sanctions by saying “a nuclear Iran would be a threat on a global scale.”
Ron Paul has said there was no evidence Iran was building a weapon with its nuclear program. The elder Paul also rhetorically asked, “Why wouldn’t Iran want a nuclear weapon” when so many of its neighbors have them. It was an indication that, although Ron Paul opposes nuclear weapons, he does not consider a nuclear Iran a threat to the US.

6. Rand Paul is More Likely to Talk About Religion

While Ron Paul has always identified himself as a Christian, he has doesn’t talk about his faith very often. He has also said activities like the Prayer Breakfast seem more about publicity than faith.

Rand Paul has spoken to numerous faith-based groups, often as a way of spreading his views about Just War. The younger Paul also expressed his antipathy to a strike on Syria by making a deliberate point about how it would affect Middle-Eastern Christians.

7. War on Drugs
Ron Paul has said the war on drugs has been a “failure” comparable to the prohibition of alcohol. He has also supported a general de-criminalization of narcotics on a federal level.

During his 2010 campaign, Rand Paul favored states rights regarding drug prohibition while also telling an evangelical Christian group in Iowa earlier this year that he “does not support the legalization of drugs like marijuana.”

More recently, the younger Paul came out against mandatory minimum sentencing for drug possession. He also called for the restoration of voting rights for felons, an important issue in the drug war.

8. Income Tax
Since at least his 2008 run for president, Ron Paul famously said that the national income tax should be “repealed and replaced with nothing.” Rand Paul as recently as this summer advocated for the “Fair Tax” with a rate of 17 percent for individuals and supports eliminating “most” of the Internal Revenue Service.

Subpoena is a court order, so yes he has to respond (either consent or fight it in court) or he can be jailed.

And yes you should always use PGP or something else for sensitive communications.

I hope they enjoy reading my pm's to Inaba warning him to stop trolling and derailing threads, and him whining about someone else starting it.

When I joined on my first Board meeting, Jim Harper and myself immediately put forward a vote to have the board meeting recorded. We followed Robert’s rules of orders, and everyone else basically shut us down and failed to follow procedures. There were “more urgent” things to discuss (as you will see later, the urgent pattern was an excuse to just continue on their course and shut us up). It was critical for us to vote on a plan that would save the Foundation. When I mentioned that such a critical vote is all the more reason to make sure the whole meeting gets recorded, I was ignored. The Bitcoin Foundation hates transparency. If they would have been transparent then everyone would know there is no money left. Something I think the members have a right to know, wouldn’t you think? Members have a right to know that the current board failed to tell them the truth, and that their way of running the organization resulted in it going bankrupt. But instead of taking responsibility, they want to find the next executive director, that will come up with another magic plan. Ironically, being transparent from the start might have prevented this whole thing to begin with.


Everyone has the right to know the truth:

- The Foundation has almost no money left, and just fired 90% of its people. Some will stay on as volunteers.
- Core dev can no longer be funded by it, and Patrick Murck is trying to re-create a new Foundation just for core dev, because the current name is tarnished. Do not fall for this.
- The current Executive Director (Patrick Murck), will be gone in 2 weeks, and they are trying to find the next person to blame everything on.
- Jim Harper was threatened for doing a press release which was (barely) critical of the Foundation after he got elected. The Foundation tries to make sure we hide the truth by subtly threatening us on a regular basis.
- If I get asked to leave the Foundation for telling the truth, so be it. The truth is being told.

It's a little unusual. Not hugely unusual in the black-market cases I've looked at. It's routine for stuff to be sealed indefinitely and when they're unsealed, often they're boring procedural stuff with only the barest summary of the facts. For example, there was a recent OD in North Dakota linked to an Evolution buyer which resulted in the sellers also being arrested, which make up 3 or 4 different cases in PACER, and while many of the filings are sealed, there are enough unsealed complaints or plea agreements that in conjunction with news articles you can figure out most of what went on; on the other hand, there are sealed documents which turn out to be mind-blowing, like in the Ulbricht trial where we noted some interesting-sounding sealed documents filed in advance of the trial and which turned out to be about the DEA corruption/embezzlement scandal; and more usually in cases where there's informants or undercover agents, nothing gets released or the case itself is sealed/hidden - eg for the former, the digitalink case began ~Jan 2012 and he cooperated somehow and despite everyone starting to serve their sentences all the key filings are *still* sealed, while for the latter, we know from mentions elsewhere that there exist cases regarding 'dripsofacid', 'moveitnice', 'alllove', 5 NZ arrests, 'TrustusJones', 'Aspire28', Scout/'cirrus', 3 UK arrests for SR1, 6 for SR2, 'Dark_Mart' etc etc, but we know nothing about them and probably never will.

In this case, the consistency of the sealing suggests that something interesting could be in them and the prosecutors are taking pains to make sure no hints leak. Or not.

Agreed. So you also agree that a lock is way too excessive?


See point above... And still no need for a 5 day ban...

All in all still seems to me BCT did BFL a huge favour by locking the original thread and banning their "biggest opponent"...  

EDIT: especially considering the timing; where BFL is scrambling for sales by renewed aggressive marketing at this very moment...

Please share a link to a video meanwhile.

Sure you could expensively embed messages in Bitcoin txs (I even developed a method of encoding the data into sigs) but it would be a ridiculously expensive way to send messages when you could just use stego and put them in images for no cost at all (with pretty much the same level of obscurity).

So it is no more vulnerable that any other P2P network (as you can just spread your virus information via torrents if you want to hidden in images or other files using steganography).

IMO it would actually make much more sense (and cost nothing) to use torrents over Bitcoin so the fact that the article focuses on Bitcoin and not other (free to use) data storage P2P networks is rather odd.

This is 100 % correct. I have a friend who lives in Tanzania and another in the DRC. They laugh at the idea of Bitcoin getting any sort of foothold in Africa for the next 10 to 15 years.

I think they still do.... M-pesa rely on centralized telecommunication services and a central point of failure. Bitcoin is a much better alternative and more transparent for corruption and bribes, that are common in areas in Africa.

Would they leapfrog the traditional banking system..? Well at first I thought so....but I reckon, they still need to convert to fiat for most things, with limited merchants accepting Bitcoin now... So for a while... they would have to rely on some banking functions, until more merchants accept Bitcoin.

They most probably will. m-Pesa is a classic example of something which developed in Africa.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa#History

In 2002, researchers at Gamos and the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation, funded by Department for International Development UK (DFID), documented that in Uganda, Botswana and Ghana, people were spontaneously using airtime as a proxy for money transfer. Africans were transferring airtime to their relatives or friends who were then using it or reselling it. Gamos researchers approached MCel in Mozambique, and in 2004 MCel introduced the first authorised airtime credit swapping – a precursor step towards M-Pesa