That's like 19 bucks an hour. Not bad.

This is pretty interesting method. The problem is someone would post it online for free or with advertisements at some point.

I look at voter apathy (in the absence of things like 'one candidate per ballot' or 'vote

• or be dissapeared') as a measure of how good things are.

If you can't be bothered to get off your ass to vote, you don't really have any big societal issues to address.

It's pretty much like that everywhere. There were 8 comments on the "Bitcoin, Gold or both" article and all 8 of them were, "GOLD IS SHIT, BITCOIN RULES!" and of course half of those commenters had the bitcoin logo as their avatar lol....

How is this anything but bad news for Bitcoin? Or do you seriously believe the majority of normal law abiding citizens would be willing to risk 12 years in jail under money laundering charges just so they could use Bitcoin?

How are they trying to control digital currencies? Poor choice of words.
They are creating legal frameworks for digital currency businesses.

The reporter, Jake Bernstein, has obtained 47½ hours of tape recordings, made secretly by a Federal Reserve employee, of conversations within the Fed, and between the Fed and Goldman Sachs. The Ray Rice video for the financial sector has arrived.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-09-26/the-secret-goldman-sachs-tapes

With all these merchants jumping on the bitcoin bandwagon don't expect the price to be going up any time soon.
Massive downward pressure will come from this.

Did anybody even read the actual criminal complaint?

He was a public figure who should have expected some extra scrutiny thus having a huge incentive to do everything by the book. Instead, Shrem knowingly broke the law by trading with a silk road vendor, going against the good judgement of his own CEO.

The guy is a greedy dumb-ass and Bitcoin would be much better off without the likes of him involved. I would stay well away from anything he does in the future.

"A pen register is an electronic device that records all numbers called from a particular telephone line. The term has come to include any device or program that performs similar functions to an original pen register, including programs monitoring Internet communications."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_register

Basically they monitored all the internet usage of Ulbricht for a few days, this was "judicially authorized".

"The Pen Registers did not collect the contents of any communications. They collected only routing information, such as the IP addresses being contacted using the account, router, and devices, the ports being accessed, and the MAC addresses of the devices involved.
We used the Pen Registers to track when Ulbricht was connected to the Internet and what IP addresses and ports he was connecting to. By monitoring when Ulbricht appeared to be online, and comparing it to the times when “DPR” appeared to be logged in to Silk Road (as reflected by his activity on the Silk Road discussion forum), additional evidence was collected corroborating that Ulbricht was in fact “DPR.”

More at 18 - 21 in the declaration

Well, when you start making money off of it as a financial investment alone, you stop being an average Joe. The main question is whether the coins are consolidating in fewer hands, and I think the trend is in the opposite direction. The goal is not to eliminate the rich, but to decrease the barriers of entry for everyone. We need enough players with diverse interests to remove the risk of monopolistic behavior, but that's about it.

I think this is good news but it may be better to provide the 100 dollars to each student in a staggered format. Instead of 100 lump sum maybe 2 payments of $50, 1 at the beginning of the semester and 1 at the middle or at the start of next semester. Or 4 payments of $25. This would also protect students from getting hit hard by a large drop in price by dollar cost averaging it for them.

"The 21st century is when everything changes." - Captain Jack Harkness

Does breadwallet have an address book?

The price is completely irrelevant at this level. I think you are on the wrong page. This year (as mpkomara said) so much has been done in "...user adoption, wallet safety, education, public awareness, network security and Bitcoin companies have received more investment from venture capital than any other year. I call that a good year."

While I appreciate the work Hearn has contributed so far, he is a proponent of blacklisting. He got such a huge backlash last year when he came out for it, though, I believe he'd never get such a thing implemented. Fixing malleability, as I understand it, has more to do with how businesses implement the Bitcoin protocol, not a problem with the protocol itself. It's a "best practice" kind of solution.

This is what you can do if you have a central bank.

This article seems more interesting for me http://www.coinfinance.com/news/charlie-shrem-pleads-guilty

"They had no choice. When federal agents were investigating silk road they discovered Shrem was helping launder money. They can't just ignore crimes that are taking place right in front of them. Most banks execs are smart enough not to detail their illegal activites in email. - neededtobesaid"

Yes and No.
As prosecutors, yes, they have a public obligation to fulfill their role as, well, prosecutors. However, the law affords them considerable latitude in how they do that—and for good reason.

The best exercise of justice lies in the ability to weigh the many factors involved, and effect a reasonable degree of pressure and/or punishment. What I see here, is not that. I see the typical "throw the book" at him, hope the charges stick, resulting in an easy plea deal—which they got.

I've never known a prosecutor to give a second thought as to whether (and to what extent) they should have charged. Nor whether they just ruined someone's life in the process.

For crying out loud, we have grandmas in federal penitentiary for growing and consuming cannabis for their arthritis. In one case I was reading about, an elderly lady invited an officer in her home for tea, only to be imprisoned, when he saw her plants in her kitchen.
Shrem's amateur-ness, clearly evident, is more of a sign of his lack of criminal intention. Most pros in this business, who know very well what they're doing from the start, take the necessary steps from square-one to maintain security and plausible deniability.

Lastly, money-laundering is fundamentally a questionable "crime" to begin with. If I think of routing certain funds in a certain way with a certain intention: it's legal. But if I think about it in a different way, even if I'm essentially doing the same thing, and am willing to disclose my thought process and paper trail, then it can be illegal. This is one of the reasons banks place a premium on confidentially of their internal records. No matter what their intentions, if records are made public, they may be used to construct a case against them, regardless of their intent.

This is also a reason that some folks (perhaps more on the extreme side) call money-laundering a "thought-crime." It's already illegal to do whatever the action was, that the "laundering" is suspected of aiding. Why not simply prosecute that original action? And if the core action wasn't illegal, is it even laundering then?

In the case of Shrem, so what if he sold bitcoin to someone—even if they told him they were going to spend it at the Silk Road? Several items for sale at the Silk Road are perfectly legal. Furthermore, even if someone told Shrem they wanted bitcoin for the explicit reason of purchasing drugs, who's to say those drugs aren't legal in that person's jurisdiction? The Silk Road sells internationally.

Yes but payment and merchant are just our tools to get on mainstream. The real uses of cryptocurrency have yet to be discovered

What phone does this guy have that he can record sound to a cassette, read sound from a cassette or CD, scan VHF/shortwave, write to VHS, or emit and detect radar? And I doubt any smartphone on the market sounds as good as those speakers with 15" subwoofers did 23 years ago.