Well, remember that you also always have those who are going to sell off when something happens that looks like it will depress the price with the intent of taking a round of profits and then buying back in at the bottom.  To make money, the speculators have to be right while others are being fools.

The question basically amounts to asking is it possible a government will do something insanely stupid in the future.  Yes, of course it is.

However, all the indicators seem to be that the move is toward regulation and not prohibition.  I think what is much more likely is that there will, at some point, be some incredibly burdensome and ill considered regulation that harms the market.  Since the feds, remarkably, seem to be behaving more or less rationally, I think this is most likely to come from the states.  For some reason, my crystal ball has some crusading New York State (or possibly California or New Jersey) prosecutor taking some ludicrous position on Bitcoin.  (Of course, the current Florida prosecution could be the thin edge of the wedge.)  Just call it a hunch.

Obviously, because it is now a public relations issue.  So more compelling technical issues are being shunted aside to deal with this comparatively trivial issue because of Gox's actions.

Only because of Gox's fuckup and subsequent FUD has this difficult to fix but comparatively minor flaw suddenly become a priority, basically for PR reasons.

You have my applause.  It is a well drafted document and an intelligent request to make.  Hope the response is as prudent.

Thanks for pointing this out.  It is a good idea.  I hope it has good results.

I don't need to ask them.  I have logic.  As others have pointed out, when alcohol was prohibited, murder related to alcohol smuggling crimes skyrocketed.  Is drinking a beer therefore inherently a heinous crime? 

Obviously not.

Citing the costs prohibition itself creates is not a great argument for prohibition.  In fact, you just cited reasons prohibition is an abject failure and should be abandoned.

Considering that the crime itself is predicated on other crimes, I'd say it really depends on the crime the proceeds of which are laundered.

If, as in this case, the proceeds are presumably either from or going to be used to purchase stolen credit cards, yes, there are inherently victims in the actually completed crime, even if there are no actual victims.

Attorneys charge money for talking with you.  Just this prices the cautious casual dealer out of the market, or forces them to charge exorbitant fees themselves.

Yet another example of the actual real-world costs of "regulatory uncertainty."  Such a vague-sounding phrase, but hits you right in the wallet in reality.

Fuck this smug, fat cocksucker.

I wish he were a tenth as good at doing his job as he is at damage control and deflecting blame.

The devs don't have a "business."  They're maintaining an open source project.  They don't need this terrorism.

Also, they can't simply just roll out a fix.  That idea is bullshit, and is basically Gox propaganda.  First, any problems resulting from this non-optimal implementation are easily avoidable by people who are not morons, but second, fixing it will take literally years.  This isn't because of the inherent technical issues, but because it will require re-writing existing clients as well.  So the devs can't just roll out a fix, the community has to absorb the brunt of the change as well.

The devs may be wizards, but they're not gods, and at this point, Bitcoin is widespread enough a lot of the software people are using is NOT under their control.  Wreaking havoc to fix Gox's problem is not something that makes any sense.

I certainly didn't suggest suing them.  Nobody I can think of would have standing to do it, since they haven't done anything and do not appear to be about to do anything.  I was just pointing out they're the 800 pound gorilla in the room.  May be calmly eating bananas at the moment, but you always worry maybe he'll decide to eat you instead.  So maybe you don't set up a lemonade stand 20 feet from him.

Clearly, in this case, there is no specific victim.  The crime was imaginary and the victims nonexistent.  Similarly, if you tried to hire a hit man to "rub out the guy who ratted on me" and there was no actual rat, there would be no actual victim.  However, murder-for-hire is not a victimless crime.  It inherently intends to have a victim and where one exists, that victim will be harmed.  Similarly, selling stolen credit card numbers is inherently a crime where there are victims, if the crime is completed.

I generally interpret the term "victimless crime" to mean "crimes" where inherently, there are no victims.  So, for instance, purchasing drugs is a victimless crime.  Thinking "bad" thoughts or expressing them is a victimless crime.  Any act which does not impair someone else in the exercise or enjoyment of their rights is victimless, and should never be subject to punishment by the state.

Depending on how they interpret the specific intent requirement in Florida, that might actually be a defense, as silly as it sounds.  Of course, the fact-finder would have to believe or at least have reasonable doubt as to that intent.  For example, suppose the defendant testified that due to his personal knowledge of the buyer, he knew that the buyer was a milquetoast who really wanted to buy embarrassing, but entirely legal porn and made up this story to seem like a badass.

(Incidentally, while this may be a defense against the full monty money laundering charge, there are quite possibly lesser included offenses of money laundering that apply without specific intent.)

At that point, no crime there, unless you buy the state's rather contrived theory about unlicensed money transmitting businesses.  Incidentally, the latter is the far more worrisome potential consequence of this case, especially if adopted at the federal level, and there is some statutory basis for it.

The New Zealand courts basically threw out most of the evidence against him as being illegally obtained.  I wish them luck.  Actually, I don't.  I wish they'd find a fire, then jump in it and die in it.

They now have a tough case, though.  I'm sure they'd rather extradite him to the United Snakes where he can be waterboarded and held forever without any charges.

Well, I'd say simply having to register to be able to sell BTC would be an issue.  FinCEN, as much as it has a lot of bad things at its disposal that it has not, in fact, done to date, has a fairly lengthy history of creating regulatory uncertainty and then suddenly prosecuting some practice that has been, to date, tolerated.  While I am not a full-bore anti-government loon by any stretch of the imagination, and in fact, FinCEN's public official statements to date have been actually pretty welcome and reasonable, there is still an environment of regulatory uncertainty.

In some senses, this is good.  Sometimes, you really don't want the government all that interested in what you're doing at the moment.  However, it makes it rather difficult for large-scale money and venture capital to make long term decisions when they are considering rolling out physical infrastructure and other things that can't be rolled back and turned back into money should the situation change.  A lot of the kind of tech necessary for large-scale investments in Bitcoin is going to be stuff that is useful for nothing other than Bitcoin.  Therefore, a big investment in this kind of stuff would be rendered worthless by sudden prohibitive actions by the government.  This scares away that kind of big money.

Personally, I don't think FinCEN has yet abused its position, with regard to Bitcoin anyway.  But the possibility of it doing so is always going to be a variable.

I think the probability that Congress would do something insanely stupid if it did anything with regard to Bitcoin is a reason to prefer the current situation.  But that doesn't eliminate the downside of regulatory uncertainty.

The longer before late registration, the better.  "Never" would be my preferred time frame.

It's a bug, not a feature.

It's a pretty arrogant and unwarranted claim, par for the course for Kim Dotcom.  I like that fat cocksucker anyway.

So you presume that if it takes a man a minute to dig a post-hole, that 60 men can dig a post-hole in one second?

Only if you assume there's some constant that correlates number of people getting degrees with pages of regulations.  That isn't actually the case, nor is it even the case that rules and regulations themselves directly correlate to evil, assuming evil is some measurable value.

A lot of what is called "deregulation" isn't.  A lot of times, some measure is proposed as "deregulation" and after it's done, if you count up the pages of "regulations," they're much larger.  What was called "deregulation" was simply a list of exceptions for the purchasers of the "deregulation."  When corporate sponsors purchase "deregulation," what they generally mean is deregulating THEM.  Not you or me.

Also, extremists themselves may be rare, but they're often influential or at least used as tools by the more powerful. 

The Sue-and-Settle Racket, an article by Forbes (yes I know) on the practice of setting policy you can't get through the legislature by having a "friendly" group sue you, then settling out of court on pre-arranged terms allowing you to do what you can't get passed into law.

I actually sometimes agree with policies that get enacted with this kind of shit, but it is obviously pernicious to have policy set in what amounts to a corrupt bypass of democracy.

I do believe it's a widespread problem, but not systemic.  It isn't inherent to the protocol.  It's just a best practices thing where less-than-best has become very common.  Some (Bitstamp) are responding sensibly to it, while others (the Magic the Gathering folks) are spreading FUD and trying to cover their ass.

I think we can see which response has better results already.