To wars that we fought with the British to gain our freedoms and rights.

and the lives of horrible child raping, murderous dogs who would otherwise roam our streets if it weren't for the police

And gave us the right to vote and do anything we want to change the system in numbers

and doing everything possible to stand up against going into more debt while keeping our country safe and organizing the systems people like your parents voted to be created and maintained at any cost

Assembly line. Automotive industry. Silicon valley. Airline industry. Microchip industry. Foods industry. Service industry. The largest country of startups in the world.



You know what's worse than sheep? Idiots who don't know their history. When you speak about America, you too easily discount the past 250 years. You're a Ron Paul fan, and yet he is part of the system as well. You can't be against America if you're for saving it, you just have to be against yourself for not saving it-- which you're not...at all...even in the slightest...trying to do. That makes you a retarded, loud mouthed sheep.

EDIT: When are you out of high school so you can run for office? When will you finally not be a worthless drudge on society and actually start doing something with your passions? Are you planning on being a loudmouthed soapboxer your entire life because "the system is corrupt"? Planning on terrorist attacks to "shake things up"? The only thing you'll ever do is keep taking money from your parents, continue to speak about something way beyond your age in noticeable immature, and continue to make yourself stand out in a bad way. You really aren't going to have a productive life nor a very successful one. The only people who listen to the crap you speak are the ones interested in using a pawn to do their extremist dirty work. I look forward to ejecting you without a parachute when you try to blow up my plane because "Bitcoin" and "down with America because they don't accept Bitcoin".

Bingo. That's the correct attitude to have. Next thing you know, Atlas is going to say "I met with a Chinese person the other day on a vacation to China and when they bowed to me, I refused to bow back. I bow for no man!". God what an imbecile. For someone who pretends to live for symbolism, he sure doesn't know the first thing about self-presentation.

The reason people were looking at you is because you did something intending to make a statement, which they received, and in their perception of how generations upon generations of people have given their lives and freedoms so that snot like you could even go to a hockey game, they don't appreciate your sentiments and I wouldn't either. I don't pray at dinner tables where people are praying, but I don't start a thread about it to get attention.

Such an attention whore. Seriously, are you that desperate to be noticed and make a statement? Why don't you run for office then? I'm serious. Why are you the biggest non-active loser in the world who also happens to think he's got it all figured out? Do something with it for christ's sake. Prove it. Why are you wasting your time here on a forum preaching to people who think you're handicapped?


Back to point, requiring pledging allegiance to the flag would be unconstitutional, but so would requiring you to not use your cellphone at a funeral. Once again, you fail to miss the finer details of society as a whole and trade them for a self-fulfilling prophecy of how you need to up against odds with the world in order to be a part of it.

Need much growing up, you do.

I read this and thought "this could have been avoided with Bitcoin" (although it probably would have been "$6 trillian dollars in hacked wallets seized").

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/02/17/bloomberg_articlesLZJARS6JTSE901-LZJMW.DTL

Yep. Standards are a bitch. No matter how pretty you make something, if it's a hair out of line or one pixel off it'll look like dog crap in print so I opted for two professionals to do my job instead. The flatplan was done days ago (as I had mentioned) but the designer is not exclusive to our magazine so there is a slight timing issue when bringing him on board.

To be more specific, I'm no longer layout designer or editor in Chief and starting April 2012 issue, Vitalik Buterin will be Editor in Chief. I will remain Director of Operations and continue to push everyone else down stairs like I usually do, I just think there are better ways to spend my time and talents than moving images around, staring at flatplans and spell checking. Right now that's in making sure the magazine actually succeeds.

If you think the magazine could be a scam, you should ask your police to check into it (unless you're someone like yourself or myself who would probably just check into it ourselves and maybe do a better job than the police).

Not at all. I am thinking with a very clear head, and here's why:

Zhou Tong did the same thing parapipain is doing but to Cryptoxchange in a thread here, literally the same exact thing, and later apologized for it after I showed him the details and did the research myself. The only difference is that I cleaned that mess up and got the people he did it against to forgive him for potentially costing them business. I see this as just bad Karma for Zhou and a good reminder of how the price of Bitcoin affects people's emotions.

Forget what you think my reasoning is for defending this principle, and instead focus on this point: Paripipain is not a 'traitor' to bitcoin. If so, Zhou Tong is also a traitor himself.

Chew on that for a while.

Agreed. I have been hearing about this for the past 12 hours from my group regarding association with Parapain as well. Let me take a moment to make something absolutely clear.

If he doesn't budge another inch until there is a reason to (ZhouTong does or does not provide said documents), then I think this issue needs to die. We all know (or most of us) that there is nothing legally he could complain about in his country that wouldn't just incriminate himself only, but it's important the personal attacks stop so that the silence before the revelation will be deafening.

When Zhou Tong posts the information (which he will, and I know for a fact what he's going to post) Parapain needs to apologize for the way he went about this. Other than that, there is absolutely nothing wrong with inquiring to the police to look into something you personally feel could be a scam, and all the misinformation Parapain is believing should be excuse enough for his actions.

Whether he ever translates a single word for the magazine should never be a topic of discussion, nor should his character. What should be a topic of discussion is "correct ways to inquire into the legality of something" followed by "correct ways to teach forum members a lesson". Since no actual harm has (nor probably will) come from this, the only thing we have is a thread about bitcoinica full of spite and vile, agging on a person who thinks they are doing the right thing.

One thing is for absofuckinglutely sure-- if I were parapain, I'd be fueled even further by it, so why not let this thread dust up a bit until 3 weeks from now?

That's my advice as an ex-constant-self-embarrasser-on-the-forums. Hell, I can even tell you guys a story of when Zhou Tong himself did something exactly like this and then later apologized. Education is key guys. Education.

Thanks for clarifying Maged, I was -extremely- new at the time and didn't even know admins were alive.

I still think it was less than half my fault though, only given the ridiculous, unprofessional, libelous, and contract breaking manner in which he acted.

It's good to see that you guys don't give it out so easily anymore, but so long as it's done in secret and only the mods know about it, I'll never appreciate/trust it as much as I could.

Ugh. Well I wish I could say OP didn't deserve it, but it's going to be an interest month while we wait for this meme to die down.

Agreed. He's way too nice to people here, but he does things for the community of it.

 

Seriously though, filing a complaint/inquiry with the police is not the same thing as filing a police report of some criminal action. It's like knocking on the window of a police car and asking if "that man over there walking around in his house without any clothes on is breaking the law or not".

Sounds like you have another police report to file then-- for MtGox! ^_^

Parapain opened up a channel to the police in regards to a bitcoin business. If anything, he has an opportunity to learn directly from working officials on bitcoin laws in Spain. When everyone's done being angry and realizes that there is nothing the Spanish inquisition can do about a business in Singapore, why not ask Parapain to relay some questions to the police (since they're already looking into it)?

Use opportunities people. The door's already open, let's just walk through it.

My comment about this in another thread:





Laws were originally created to help keep order and minimize difficulties living in a society. International laws are very complex and require months if not years of litigation to come to decisions on. The law that Bitcoinica operates under is not an international one and according to my own research, anyone other a Singaporean citizen themselves can use Bitcoinica legally regardless of it's registration. Bottom line, regardless of how absurd it may seem in relation to your own country's laws and practices, what is illegal in your country isn't necessarily illegal in another. Parapain didn't know this and he hasn't caused any trouble at all.

Here's how it's going to play out:

1) Police will push the inquiry to the detectives unit
2) They will find out where Bitcoinica operates out of
3) They will find out that the bank accounts are in Singapore
4) They will close the inquiry.

Nothing lost, only a few members getting an education. If one single member of the forum filing a police report locally could stop bitcoinica, then that wouldn't be a company worth anything now would it? I hope you guys don't seriously think it'd be that easy...

Spain != Singapore



It's just lack of information. To parapain, this was a potential scammer. He couldn't have known without knowing, and if he knew he wouldn't have needed to know. You dig? Now he knows.

Everytime I go to sleep.... Christ.

Since this magazine is something from the community and for the community, naturally we want to include the community as much as possible. That seldom ends up in including people who are all exactly the same in every way. I didn't know Paraipan had an issue with Bitcoinica because paraipan is not in the DCAO (where we usually discuss issues openly and find solutions before taking action) but now that I do, I've explained some things that everyone here will find out soon as well and will clear up everything.

There is nothing wrong with paraipan doing what he did though given the information that he had. He doesn't know Zhoutong like I do, nor did he bother to research Singaporean law and get to the bottom of all the legalities of Bitcoinica. Absolutely nothing will come of the police report paraipan filed, and within a month the information paraipan wanted will be made available to the entire community anyway so please don't be so butthurt about it.

Also, paraipan speaks Spanish and English. He wants to be a part of the magazine translating. Whenever I can use him, I will. Just...let's start asking questions first people. There are literally thinktanks just sitting around waiting for inquiries and everyone seems to just get bored and run off on tangents.

Point taken.

It also goes without saying that if someone has difficulty getting bitcoins out of an exchange that the individual who sold the service should communicate through e-mail until there can be no resolution, and not go on a smear campaign to get attention and claim people 'scammed them' without any evidence.

It means that we had a friendly and casual understanding. Did you think that a contract was a bad thing? Don't you realize that a friendly agreement to the tune of "I will provide a finished image for you for 2BTC to your liking" could be abused to continuously tell that person that you don't like their designs and have them remake it for all eternity? The one thing both myself and that individual took out of the deal was that we both need to make terms much more clear before doing business and that there is no 'friendly business' on this forum.

Actually, grocery stores are regulated in many ways, including internally with a customer return policy, so you don't really need an additional contract in most cases. You're also attempting to compare graphics design with buying something at a store. Herp derp?

It was a few days late, but the reasoning was that I was due some BTC but it never arrived and I couldn't get my Korean money turned into Bitcoins fast enough to the individual's likings, so instead of even responding to my emails, he jumped the gun and assumed I had scammed him. He was wrong for that. Very wrong, and very unprofessional. The only reason Theymos actually gave me the scammer tag was because I publicly stated "I'm not going to pay you now because you've publicly called me a scammer in 3 different threads without even waiting 24 hours since my last email or replying to it, you posted links to download the source files of the graphic I had commissioned you to make and instructed the entire community to "abuse it freely", and then tried to get theymos to give me a scammer label.". Theymos apparently only read "I'm not going to pay" and didn't see anything else going on, like how the OP voided any verbal agreements we had in the first place and therefor there was nothing to pay for.




That makes some sense, I agree with that, at least on the consumer front-- I don't agree with that much on the life of Bitcoin though. Bitcoin doesn't need numbers, it needs power players, and power players aren't usually superficial, at least not in the nerd world.

Theymos, no matter how many times you spread that FUD, no one will ever agree with you.

I asked someone to make a 2BTC image for which they thought they'd be paid immediately (even though we had no contract).

When I was a little late to respond to their inquiry, they went straight to the forum screaming that I had scammed them.

They did the usual freakshow of telling everyone that I they were sure I was a scammer (I don't know how in the world they came to this conclusion to which they later retracted and apologized publicly for being irrational).

They went further to say that everyone could use the image freely that they had originally made for me and distributed the source files openly to the forum.

At this time, without any inquiries or presence of a moderating force on the forums, I made the adult decision to tell the person to go fuck themselves, to which without any communication from you, you gave me a scammer label.

After some in-fighting and almost everyone eventually agreeing that the entire problem was that there was a 'scam', but that we lacked a clear contract, you made it clear that if I just sent 2BTC to the individual that my label would be removed.

Here's the funny part-- scamming is not up to interpretation.

Scamming means when someone has intent to defraud, which I had not. And even if I did, how does me giving him 2BTC change any initial intent? If anything, that individual scammed me by getting away with his horrible actions, giving away my product to the community for free, and still getting paid for it, and scammed by you for having to follow through on the whole thing and not just do what he deserved--- ignore him.

You really owe me an apology still for having judged that situation poorly, not to continue spreading FUD about it.

Back on topic, TerryTibbs made a decision that even I wouldn't have agreed with. If my customers lost everything due to my own business practices, I would cut my losses as well. The fact that he didn't makes things complicated. Scammer? Probably not.

So then why is there a "scammer" tag though if "poor decisions", "bad business", "lack of clear contracts", and "administrator's whim" can all be considered "scams"?

Seems like we need a little more clarity than just "scammer". Maybe "Defaulted" tag for bad loans, maybe a rating system (I'm aware you had one before that broke/didn't work?) to allow people give evidence backing up their claims that someone is a scammer, etc?

I mean, seriously-- I'm not different than anyone else. I don't care much about someone who has a scammer tag, until the admin wrongfully gives it to me. Then it becomes aware to even me that that sort of power shouldn't be left up to theymos alone.



I hope you're being sarcastic. Theymos doesn't dictate whether I am a scammer or not. All he can do is use his personal judgment and slap a label on people. I am not a scammer nor am I an ex-scammer. I am an ex-theymos-abused person who paid the ransom and got the label removed at the price of having to swallow my pride.


Anyone who would sell off Bitcoin based on anything that happens on these forums much less the actions of a fallible admin should not be considered to having had 'faith' to begin with.

Regulated trade requires regulated currencies.

You can't legally buy stocks, bonds or securities in the USA without USD. You can have a purchasing agent buy them for you (E-trade is a purchasing agent for example) but they pay for them in USD.

+1 Well spoken.