Since part of the fraud revolves around intentionally delaying the delivery of hardware, his role at BFL would put him smack in the middle of things despite the fact that he doesn't own the company.

I think it would boil down to:

1.) Were there really delays in manufacturing the Monarch?
2.) When he made the public statements about delivery times, was he intentionally misleading customers?

The inability to deliver useful hardware in the stated time-frame would rest at the feet of the person in charge of such things, which would be Josh methinks.  That would put Josh's role in the center of the fraud.

Still just an employee. As much as I'd like for Josh to put on his big boy orange jumpsuit, he appears to have no ownership in the company and thus his liability is minimal. Fancy title means little. He had no authority to do anything.

SO, IT IS TRUE!!!

http://www.butterflylabs.com/management-view/josh-zerlan-3/

"VP Product Development" sounds like a bit more than "just an employee".  In fact, isn't a severe failure of Product Development precisely the reason the company is now in this mess?

Not crossed 450$. I'm calling it- bulltrap and short squeeze.

This is not paypal integration per se but something much much less. Comparable with that braintree news?

But people will buy on the news after pump as usual so we will not see below 400$ for a while.  

As happy as i am that BFL is fucked it isn't good for Bitcoin. Just imagine the news and how people react to it. Another "bitcoin company" who screwed everyone over. More ammo for the haters how Bitcoin is evil.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=788886.60
http://coinfire.cf/2014/09/23/official-ftc-complaint-butterfly-labs-obtained/

Relevant links. BFL and AMT have VERY similar circumstances and it appears that the FTC and federal government is starting to take action to address these  shady vendors. Law enforcement in various jurisdictions are also apparently showing an interest in this matter. It is important that we continue to press on as and contact law enforcement both local and federal until we get results. Joshua Zipkin pulled the same trick as BFL with delaying the launch of hardware.

From all appearances it seemed he had the China miners up for quite a while at least a month mining before even shipping them (I have pulled logs from a machine that has logs to show the machines operation time which is something that cannot be forged or falsified). While cgminer has no logs, the linux system does and gives quite a bit of insight into how long the machine was running, uptime and all that. This will vary with individual miners, but I imagine the variation will be minimal but consistent. Anyone who got the original image with their miner or created a backup will notice this if you have the Linux skills to look at it.

At any rate AMT is also in a much more damned position as there is far more evidence here including things said by the CEO to use to prove their fraudulently criminal behavior. I do hope that there is jailtime for Joshua Zipkin and his co-conspirators as well in all this. BFL has gone down and they were the big fish in all this. AMT is a relatively small fry but a notable one. These scammers are falling like dominos.

Yeah, hmm.  To clarify, I was assuming the high and dry part would mean that it would be a multi-departmental initiative on the level of the Moon landing.  If Canada or USA Financial department wants to release it as a pet project, it will surely fail.  If it is an executive order or legislative act, then that would be an entirely different thing.  My question was to that:  Why?

LOL why would "the government" do this?

Consistent value is a derived property which follows from portability. Anything which is liquid and which can be easily teleported anywhere, without technical or regulatory complications, will have the same value everywhere (though it might be hard to see, as the other things which you would buy with it can have different values).

Real estate is an extreme case which has 0 portability. So much so that I'd say it becomes an issue of fungibility. 2.5 dunams of land in Tel Aviv is a fundamentally different thing than 2.5 dunams of land in Jaffa. There is no interchangeable unit "dunam of land", in the same way that an apple is an apple wherever it is.

"Convenient" isn't a fundamental property, it's something that follows from the other required properties, such as portability, divisibility and fungibility.

What do you mean by that?

No, money does not need to have value beyond the value it gains by virtue of being a commonly used currency. If a thing satisfies all the requirements for good money, and is therefore used extensively as money, it will automatically gain value.

This is true based on prior experience. However past performance does not guarantee future results. Also eventually the "law of large numbers" will need to kick in to slow the rate at which bitcoin can continue to increase in value

http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/epr/09v15n1/0907silb.pdf documents an amazing thing back in 1933.  People listen to President Roosevelt and actually went to make deposits after the bank holiday.  Those days are gone, right?  Nothing like that could happen again.

Can funding government operations via debasing the national currency as opposed to taxes, etc., actually be a sustainable approach?  Is inflation *always* the consequence eventually?

I agree.  I am buying when I can and holding on to them long term.

My goal is at least 20 and preferably 100...

(by the way, what does HODL mean?  I have seen it used on this forum.  HOLD I assume?)

Cryptocrypt.org, but you need an invite.

It's stacked with some influential people.