|
Many people are operating under the flawed assumption that law enforcement is about rules. It's actually about power.
If the people with power to enforce their will don't like what you are doing they will use their power to stop you. Law is one of the tools they can use, and they go to great lengths to maintain the pretense that law is objective and consistent, but don't fool yourself that you can depend on a superior understanding of it to protect yourself.
Many, many people have lost liberty or property because they mistakenly believed they could use superior legal arguments to fend off the government. It's a form of magical thinking.
Don't rely on magical incantations to protect yourself - use technology to make yourself a hard target.
|
|
|
|
|
The only sane course is to assume that all Bitcoin-based businesses are illegal whether they appear to be so or not.
Even if you think it's completely lawful protect yourself by running it in a way that you'd be safe even if it was illegal.
|
|
|
|
|
It sounds like the OP's question is related to a concept someone mention in one of the colored bitcoins threads.
|
|
|
|
Specifically, I need: - A businessman, who will keep track of orders, outsourcing production, making bulletpoins, etc.
- An electrical engineer, who can design a PCB with the needed components.
- A programmer, who can help me in making the PC UI, the µc firmware, auditing etc.
Why do they need you? |
|
|
|
I see that as a mute issue, The word you're looking for is "moot". |
|
|
|
Future Bitcoin services need to be run as if they are illegal enterprises, like Silk Road, even if what they are doing is apparently legal. Why: - Laws change.
- Regulations are vague and open-ended, and it's probably impossible to operate a business without accidentally violating one.
- Even if you do manage to operate without violating any rule law enforcement agencies do not always limit themselves to the letter of the law when deciding to begin an enforcement action.
- Governments are not the only threats to a successful business. Non-governmental organized crime is almost equally capable of extortion.
The solution is to run all services in the darknet, not tied to any physical location or legal jurisdiction, and without any explicit connection to a real-life identity. In order to reduce the risk of the operator running away with all the coins customers should start using Bitcoin like it was intended and only get involved with zero-trust business models instead of giving their money to companies that blindly emulate old paradigms. |
|
|
|
In theory, yes; however, it should be noted that at the time of their respective shut downs, this was true of both the Liberty Dollar and e-gold.
One could buy virtually anything online with e-gold, pay bills online, send payments to and receive payments from non-users of e-gold, etc. Being largely offline the LD worked a little differently, but there were entire communities where it had a strong and sometimes almost universal acceptance. Both rolled up and vanished practically overnight, as if they never happened. The Liberty Dollar was referred to on record as a "unique form of domestic terrorism," and not one person outside of the LD userbase batted an eyelash or wondered how on earth minting and using silver coins could be a form of terrorism. e-gold was shut down and its founders and officers barely escaped prison time, on the basis that a vast amount of criminal activity was occurring within the system; four years later, if even a single criminal has been brought to justice as a result of the multi-year, multi-million dollar investigation, the state is suprisingly quiet about it. I don't think either one had the international reach Bitcoin has. If the United States bans Bitcoin they can't stop me from using it to pay for VPN service from a provider in Europe. If they also convince EU countries to ban Bitcoin the service can move to any part of the world that's not banning it yet. Once the critical mass of commerce is reached there won't be any practical way of shutting it down besides turning off the Internet entirely. |
|
|
|
|
The "Zeitgeist movement" is nothing more than resurrected communist propaganda from the early 20th century except with computers.
It comes almost word-for-word from the propaganda that was floating around from the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. The proponents of central planning always promise a scientifically-managed utopian society where money isn't necessary.
It never works for reasons Mises described as the economic calculation problem. The addition of computers to the toolset of the central planners does not solve the problem, and the Zeitgeist people always handwave around the problem of what happens when the masses don't want to listen to the self-appointed elite that will be telling everybody how many resources they are allowed to utilize. There's only way to impose central planning on those who don't agree and we already know how that works out.
|
|
|
|
|
Considering the effect of John Gabriel's G.I.F.T. perhaps it would be more useful to have a "not an asshole" badge.
|
|
|
|
|
If "economy" is defined as "the ability of banks to extract a percentage of every income stream on the planet via interest payments on revolving credit" then yes, deflation kills the "economy".
|
|
|
|
Why is it when shit hits the fan ppl still race to the dollar? Because the fiscal disasters in other large economies are even worse. |
|
|
|
The observer effect is very clear, that a subjective consciousness alters the results of the experiment. That interpretation was shown not to be true by experiments specifically designed to test this hypothesis. The "observer" is any part of the environment which interacts with the system in a thermodynamically-irreverable way. http://www.danko-nikolic.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Yu-and-Nikolic-Qm-and-consciousness-Annalen-Physik.pdfTaken together, the existing experiments suggest clear conclusions regarding the predictionswe derived. All predictions have been falsified. The existence of interference patterns depends solely on whether the “which-path” information is in principle obtainable [11,20,33–35].Whether such information is registered in consciousness of a human observer, one can conclude, is irrelevant. Consequently, this conclusion leaves no other option but to reject the collapse-by-consciousness hypothesis. |
|
|
|
|
Does anyone take BTC for donuts?
|
|
|
|
According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. When do we find out which algorithms are broken? |
|
|
|
|
I never realized those icons were hyperlinks.
I think there's a Fitts's law violation somewhere in here.
|
|
|
|
Why don't you just use the "new" button?
Didn't know it exited until you mentioned it and I started clicking on random things. On my screen that little unlabeled icon is far to the right where it's hard to keep track of which thread corresponds to which icon. |
|
|
|
|
I always use the "all" link to open threads long-running threads with new posts because I can't memorize the last page number of every thread I've read to know exactly which page I should start at. Then I have to scroll until I find the last post I remember reading and go from there.
Since the database already knows what the last post I saw was, why can't it automatically load the correct page when I click on the topic link, and as a bonus, scroll to the newest comment via an anchor?
|
|
|
|
|
It is kind of funny how someone can start a foundation that relies entirely on voluntary contributions and donations and we will go over its proposal with a fine-toothed comb but someone could start offering a bank that offers 90% interest per day and they would be overwhelmed with people begging to hand over their life savings with no questions asked.
|
|
|
|
I have a few questions about the Foundation that I haven't seen answered anywhere else.
1. How will potential conflicts of interest be identified and addressed? Especially with regards to the relationship between the foundation and businesses associated with the board members.
2. Is there an explicit list of activities which donations might be used for, or perhaps even a list of activities which donations will never be used for?
Hey AbelsFire, these are good questions, ones I'd like to discuss. I think that the fundamental concept we are working with is that individuals (who have invested some money and time) and corporations (who have often invested MAJOR money and time) and the core development team should work together, share the load and financial burden better while aiming at protecting and promoting and standardizing Bitcoin. The bylaws, to be published soon on Github, talk a little bit about how we're aiming to do this. I have anticipated that member classes who are unhappy with their representation would advocate for different representation. I was hoping for some more specific answers but I'll withhold judgement until the bylaws are published. At this point I can't say whether or not I'd be willing to contribute money to the foundation. If one of the functions is to hire one or more full time developers that certainly something I'd contribute for but the rest is pretty murky. I don't know if I support "share the load and financial burden better while aiming at protecting and promoting and standardizing Bitcoin" because I don't know what that actually means. |
|
|
|
|
I have a few questions about the Foundation that I haven't seen answered anywhere else.
1. How will potential conflicts of interest be identified and addressed? Especially with regards to the relationship between the foundation and businesses associated with the board members.
2. Is there an explicit list of activities which donations might be used for, or perhaps even a list of activities which donations will never be used for?
|
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
