In the goddamn criminal complaints!

http://www.scribd.com/doc/205808113/Def-Espinoza
http://www.scribd.com/doc/205808118/Def-Reid

Did you even bother reading them?  Jesus Christ.

Your BITCOINS have ALWAYS been safe.  What has not been safe, necessarily, is balances in exchanges, which are not actually Bitcoins, any more than your money in a bank is actually dollars.

Well, you might recall that the progenitor of American environmentalism, and arguably modern environmentalism (in its rational state) was Teddy Roosevelt.  The common term for the philosophy then was "conservation."  It's difficult to imagine anything more conservative than conservation itself. 

It's quite easy to see the flaws with going after family (and individual) use of things like fireplaces and stoves, which are a very traditional means of generating heat and are usually used in relatively remote areas where they pose little threat except theoretically in the aggregate. 

Suppose you get equal results from shutting down, say, an old coal-fired electric plant, one that couldn't possibly ever even get near compliance with even loose regulations, and in fact belches gigantic clouds of smoke and particles that are actually making people sick.  There are, in fact, many of these kinds of plants.  Most of them have been grandfathered. 

On the other hand, suppose you have a similar amount of smoke generated over 100,000 square miles in some remote area, by tens of thousands of mostly poor people.  On paper, the environmental impact looks the same, but if you visited this remote area, the air would be clean and you would see no health issues whatsoever.  It would be the equivalent of someone smoking a cigarette a mile away from you once a year.

So you can take on the coal plant that's actually causing problems.  Okay, they hire a bunch of lobbyists and obstruct everything for years or decades.  You have a fight on your hands.

Or you can, relying on bullshit numbers, go after poor people who can't fight back.  If you're a politician, this choice is easy.

But if you actually care about the environment, you've just created an entire generation of people who hate your guts, and think you're a bunch of fascists, and actually, they're right.

Extremists serve no purpose but their own.  Beware whoever claims to love humanity.  Because they don't like YOU.

I consider myself an environmentalist, but environmentalism and the EPA are two different things.  One is a general philosophy and the other is an utterly corrupt government agency.

Incidentally, this is not about carbon, but about particulate pollution.  Doesn't really matter, though.  It's an absolutely stupid way to make enemies out of a lot of people simultaneously, and at the same time, a retrograde tax on poor people who can little afford it.  At the very least, any currently existing fireplace/wood heater/water heater should be grandfathered in out of basic decency.  At best, though, this whole stupid policy should be reconsidered.

I can't think of a more ridiculous thing to go after.

I guess it's easier to do this than go after 70 year old coal-fired power plants dirtier than 100,000 homes.  After all, poor people don't have the money to fight back in court.

That's being charitable.  They're written at the reading comprehension level of a pig, since that's who wrote them.

Buying stolen credit card numbers is not a victimless crime.

Why would they?  Is Bitstamp blaming everyone but itself, while making terrorist threats to hold customer funds forever unless other people meet their demands?

No, they're doing what Gox SHOULD have done.  Implementing a fix immediately without whining and crying and pointing fingers everywhere but themselves.

You're misinterpreting Art. I § 10, which is referring to the (currently 50) states.  Only Congress may "impair[] the obligation of contracts."  A legislative action doing such a thing is, for example, bankruptcy.  Even with respect to the states, the prohibition has never been absolute, and certainly is not now.

This section of the Constitution was drafted to prevent practices in which the states would either pass "private bills" relieving (usually) some wealthy person of his contractual obligations, or basically pass laws giving the property of foreigners to colonists, causing a fear by the Framers that this would scare away foreign capital.

Check Federalist No. 10 by Madison for a fuller explanation.

ETA:  Incidentally, not arguing your actual point, at least not here, just your citation.

Not when they had been personally told otherwise.

Where's the part of that where he says "then, after returning the txid, depend on it as a permanent identification proving a deposit into an exchange?"  I'm not seeing that.  There's really nothing more fundamental to Bitcoin than the blockchain, and that if something is on it, you can trust it forevermore after whatever number of confirms makes you comfortable.  If it isn't, you can't, even if it might have some temporary use in the interim.

In 2010.  If I recall correctly 2010 is before 2011.

There are plenty of known issues with Bitcoin, some of them more or less serious.  This, frankly, is one of the less serious issues, since it only arises when people design custom software very, very badly.  Gox and its principals were well aware of this particular issue, having been told about it personally, but chose to design defective software.  This wasn't even accidental.

The problem is, if I'm understanding it reduced to its simplest level, relying on transaction information that is NOT YET ON THE BLOCKCHAIN.  It kind of boggles my mind anyone could base any reliance for verifying deposits to a system on anything whatsoever not on the blockchain, even for tracking purposes.

It's clearly non-optimal to use this information at all, but the downside of it could have been very easily avoided.  I hope no other exchanges operate this way, but I honestly don't know.

"But I saw you throw a baseball through it after you were told not to, that it could break if you did that!"
"It is glass that is designed defectively!  I refuse to stop throwing baseballs until you fix glass!"

Their problem isn't that people didn't understand them.  Their problem is that people did.

There are still two free things available to new players.  The big one is the DonkDown freeroll on Wednesdays at 10:30 PM EST.  Another is there are these 66 player sit-and-go-freerolls that go off from time to time and can be found under the SNG tab.  There's also a "free" subtab under the SNG tab that will have it, usually by itself, if it's around.

The 66-er generally only goes off at times of low traffic, so you have to snipe for it a bit.

About time.  I have often been annoyed to see the alleged Gox price absurdly at variance with every other reputable or semi-reputable exchange, but yet have it cited repeatedly in the media and elsewhere as if it is an actual price.  A real price is something you can get for the commodity.  An exchange that doesn't let you cash out for weeks does not have any business issuing a price, and nobody should take such a price as anything other than fiction.

These clowns should be drummed out of the community.

Seems to me the problem here is that Gox, amazingly enough, is once again unable to meet its obligations and casts the blame on something, anything else, crashing the price of Bitcoin and generating bad press.  This is called pissing in the well.

Exactly.  A plea deal would say they were just going after shutting down bad actors.  Not offering a plea and going out of their way to prosecute would indicate they actually want to establish a precedent that simply selling Bitcoin is operating an unlicensed money transmitting business, so as to be able to pull in a wider dragnet at some later date.

I have to say that if the claims in the complaint are factually true (always a big if), these two clowns have done Bitcoin a grave disservice themselves.  If someone comes up to you and says they want you to sell them Bitcoin so they can commit open crimes with it, and you facilitate it, YOU are a criminal yourself, you are not doing Bitcoin any favors, and THE GUY IS PROBABLY A COP.

Frankly, a vig like that sounds to me very indicative that defendant knew something was shady and was therefore charging extra.  Who would agree to a fee that large who wasn't up to something (or in this case a cop).

Except they didn't do just that.  They approached them claiming to want to buy Bitcoin to commit outright crimes.  But yes, New York is the most likely state to simply go right after Bitcoin sellers for no other reason than just selling Bitcoin.  These Florida LEAs felt it necessary to do a sting.  Otherwise, they'd have just arrested them the first time they showed up and sold a small about of Bitcoin.

How smart could these dudes have been?  "Hey, mon, I'm not a narc, really!  I just want to buy this coin to go commit a bunch of crimes!  You okay with that, brah?"  And these clowns agreed to do it.