No, it isn't. It's freedom of association. Freedom of speech does not apply to private associations. If a private association has rules which say you're not allowed to say certain things, they are free to prevent you saying those things within that association, and they are also free to prevent you from associating with them if you violate their rules. By the same token, you are free to form your own association with its own rules, if you want to. But as long you're a member of this association, you have to follow this association's rules. Okay?

Right. Better stop using money, then. And food, while you're at it. Otherwise you're indirectly responsible for poverty and famine, respectively.

Sure it is. I can give dollars/bitcoins to gun/drug/porn dealers, and they'll give me guns/drugs/porn. What's the difference?

This is true, but hardly relevant. True anarchists believe that law and order can come entirely from voluntary cooperation in a society without a ruling class (regardless of what your dictionary says and how the word is used in general speech, the word literally (and as used in political science) means "without rulers", from the Greek ἀν an (no) + ἀρχ arkh (ruler)), and do not advocate immoral or unethical activities, and do not condone illegal activity except where the law itself is unethical.

Well, sorry for talking you into doing the right thing, but doesn't it feel better to help others rather than steal from them? Wait, don't answer that.

Really? From your post, I thought this was your intention. Most supercomputers will get their CPU caches handed to them by a good cyborg player. Good luck with your project.

I assume you're talking about Instawallet? Unfortunately, there is absolutely no way to recover bitcoins from just a Bitcoin address. Since all addresses used in Bitcoin transactions are public, if this were possible than anyone could just take anyone else's bitcoins, and that wouldn't work at all. Instawallet is not going to be able to assist either, since they have no way of knowing whether you really are the owner of the account or just someone trying to steal the account owner's money. All Bitcoin transactions are irreversible and if you ever lose access to your account, the money is gone forever. Sorry.

Your friend's only hope is if the wallet identifier is in his browser history; if not, the money's gone and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

My feelings of luck were unfounded:

http://satoshidice.com/full.php?tx=2528f68494b7260c2406ba0d2bb8d5ac7826924fc7d8fbbf190b7999fa0108cd

Deal. I'll put it all on lessthan 1. I'm feeling lucky.

Bitcoin, like dollars, is used for a wide variety of purposes, both legal and illegal. It's just a tool; what you do with it is up to you. And I don't think the word "anarchy" means what you think it means. Anarchy means "without rulers", not "without law". There is law under anarchy, even if the law is something along the lines of "don't steal from me or my friends or I'll kill you".

Just because some people use Bitcoin for illegal purposes, does not justify you or anyone else stealing from others. Nor does it mean that anyone using it honestly is somehow "contributing" to illegal activity.

1Ksbv9gXmmHQCwZAF3baxnqMPXentBPBzm

Unfortunately, I have not reached Junior Member status. I have always been at least a Full Member since I first registered, completely bypassing the Newbie and Junior Member ranks. You see, I have a special arrangement with Satoshi Nakamoto. I gave him my immortal soul in exchange for the Full Member rank, so I could get out of the Newbie jail early. I have since realised that there are easier ways of doing this, and I plan to use this bitcent to buy my soul back, if Satoshi agrees.

(Okay, I lied. I did actually reach Junior Member status before becoming a Full Member. Satoshi Nakamoto does not own my immortal soul. I'm not going to use my bitcent to buy my or anyone else's soul, instead I'm going to save it until I have enough bitcents to build that space station I always wanted.)

Don't take it personally; my insult was directed at you morons in general, not you specifically. I'm sorry if I offended you more than the other morons. Anyone who thinks the law or even basic ethics somehow don't apply to Bitcoin is either stupid or severely delusional. If you want to break the law, that's your business, but at least don't act all surprised when people get angry about it.

What the Hell are you smoking? Bitcoin is not illegal. Liberty Dollars were busted for counterfeiting (they were trying to pass off their coins as real U.S. dollars), and e-gold is still operating, despite the operators being busted for running an unlicensed money transmitting business. The U.S. government specifically allowed e-gold to continue functioning since it recognises that e-gold's users still have a legal right to the money in their accounts, regardless of what laws the company broke. Bitcoin is not a money transmitting business and is not being passed off as real U.S. dollars, so neither of these cases apply to it. There is also no law giving the U.S. government a monopoly on currency; while the law requires U.S. currency to be accepted as payment for debts, any other currency may be used for any other kind of private transaction if both parties agree. It's perfectly legal to pay Canadian dollars, Euros, or bitcoins to anyone who's willing to accept them as payment. Bitcoin is not unpoliceable either. I'm not sure why you would think it is.

When you go shopping, do you just grab all the goods you want and then walk out without paying? At least wait until they threaten you before giving them the money. It's their own damn fault if they don't notice you leaving without paying, right? Right? You're going to end up either dead or in jail if you try to apply those principles to the real world.

There are always people willing to enforce the law. The question is whether those people are police, who generally won't mess you up too much if you go along quietly, or mobsters who'll beat the shit out of you if you don't pay back what you owe. Which of these societies do you live in?

My post was a warning, not a threat. What the OP did is illegal pretty much everywhere, and he could probably tracked down very easily with only a few subpoenas to his ISP and bitcoin exchange. Will the site operator actually go to the trouble? Probably not, but it's possible. Will the OP get a knock on the door from either the cops or a collection agency if they do go to the trouble? Almost certainly. Remember, this is real money we're talking about. It's only a matter of time before someone decides to take it seriously.

As I've pointed out, this exact situation has happened with real banks. Do the authorities just say "Well, if the bank can't manage their customers' accounts properly, that's their problem, not ours"? Spoiler alert: they do not. When you take money that doesn't rightly belong to you, even if it was as a result of the bank's negligence, you are either forced to give it back or arrested and charged with fraud. Anyone who thinks this is never going to happen with Bitcoin is deluding themselves.

What is it with these morons? We live in a society of law. OP, you took property that didn't belong to you, sold it, and kept the proceeds. That's illegal. You could be sued or even arrested if the site operator actually decides it's worth taking legal action over. And with bitcoins becoming more valuable by the minute, someone will eventually decide that they are worth it. And no, just because there are bitcoins in your account, that doesn't mean they belong to you. This exact situation has happened many times with real banks, and guess how many times it's ended well for the poor fool who decided to withdraw their "free" money and spend it? That's right: none.

Anyone who's casually stealing bitcoins just because they think nobody's going to do bother anything about it is going to get a really nasty surprise when the day comes that people do start to take these matters seriously.

It means no transaction fee was paid. Transaction fees are collected by miners as payment for confirming transactions. A transaction which does not include a transaction fee provides miners with no financial incentive to confirm it, so there is no guarantee that such a transaction will be confirmed quickly, or even ever (though they usually do get confirmed eventually).

0-confirm transactions can only be spent if they came from yourself (change or send-to-self), since bitcoind doesn't "trust" transactions from other sources until they have at least 1 confirmation. This rule came about after one version of Bitcoin had a bug that caused it to sometimes send transactions with insufficient fees, which would therefore never be confirmed. Normally this would be no big deal, except that other clients simply accepted these transactions and spent them, creating even more transactions which would never confirm, which would be spent again, and so on ad infinitum, until finally everyone's transactions were getting stuck because everyone's wallets were filled with coins that were never going to confirm. It was a real mess.

So now Bitcoin will only trust other people's transactions if they have at least one confirmation, which is the way it should be. The old way of just trusting all transactions, confirmed or not, never really made sense, since the whole point of distinguishing between confirmed and unconfirmed transactions in the first place is that unconfirmed transactions can't be trusted (eg, they may yet be double-spent, while confirmed transactions cannot (at least, not without a lot of further discussion)).

Fail. They don't know (or care) where your bitcoins go, what they do know (with the help of Customs and the Post Office) is where your packages go and what's in them. And that's all they need to know to make the arrest.

Really? Don't dust outputs require a certain minimum fee regardless of priority?

Right.

No, you got something completely wrong. A double-spend is two transactions sending the same coins to two different addresses. Only one of the two transactions can possibly be accepted as valid, and as soon as one of them is confirmed, the other one becomes invalid. And if the now invalid transaction was payment for goods or services that you already delivered without waiting for confirmation of the transaction, you just got ripped off. There is no way to know, short of waiting for confirmations, whether a double-spend has taken place or is about to take place.

You're obviously not staring hard enough. My mother says she no longer recognises me since I started using Bitcoin.

This patent is for executable QR codes, ie, actual byte-code instructions encoded in a QR code. This doesn't affect Bitcoin or anything else using QR codes for URIs or IDs or any other kind of non-executable data.