Any day now...

I've made my BTC holdings as secure as my PM holdings, but at the expense of making my BTC almost as difficult to use as my gold.

Obviously I see a lot of the advantages of Bitcoin in terms of mobility and it's a big part of the reason that I'm dinking with it.  I'm just saying that securing one's private key is not a trivial problem.  Those who think it is or treat it like it is may have the mis-fortune of no longer having the problem.  And again, this is borne out by a huge amount of evidence (which does not appear to me to be slowing down much yet.)

Hell NO!

I figure at this point that if I am ever to see my money, it'll probably be from the pool that the Feds appropriated.  Even that's a long-shot (but it doesn't help that I've not gotten around to filing some sort of claim.)

Nagski, do you have any actual useful pointers about filing a claim.  I'm planning to claim the value of 50 BTC at Coinbase rates, and this is well out of the range of small-claims.  The chances of getting my money even in the best of circumstances are so low that I don't think it's worth hiring legal help.

Ya...it can be transmitted at that speed of light right into some thief's control and it has happened with a truly impressive percentage of the currency base.

Everything has it's pros and cons.

More rarely, bitcoins can be transmitted at the speed of light right into the void of time-space by using a public key which is off by one character or fucking up on a script.  In this way it does have an analogy to gold which can go down with some sailing ship or be forgotten about in some treasure chest.  But gold lost in this way is vastly easier to recover than it's Bitcoin analog and recovery happens with some regularity.

Does Mt. Gox have an identity theft kit from you?  I so, it's entirely possible that a bunch of ex-employees do as well.

Chances are that Mt. Gox wasn't especially generous with their severance packages, but I imagine that some of the more enterprising ex-employees could find a way to take the matter into their own hands.

Nicely stated.  +1

It's worth note that the U.S. has a somewhat expansive view of 'in the US' when it comes to financial matters, and it does not map to the classic notions of geography which we all learned in grade school.

ScrapOfCat rocks!

 - edit:  Shout out to Otoh also who has an unusually high percentage of ones which I like.  But 'The Gods Must Be Crazy' on remains my all-time favorite.
 

Sounds like you are a bit butt-hurt about not getting in a bit earlier and making some money.  Deal wit it, Bitch

Yours,

  Che G.

Firstly, when the bills are inscribed with 'in tvbcof we trust' I'll take a little more personal responsibility for the scam.

Secondly, you are talking to a guy who has been dicking around with PM's for over a decade and BTC for what is now a relatively long time.  This for a reason.  I am not satisfied with certain aspects of our mainstream monetary systems myself and have been more active than most in exploring alternatives.

Thirdly, I've only taken out one bank loan in my life (to buy an FZR400), and I bought CD's to automatically pay it off.  I paid for school by working in the summers.  I thus don't contribute to the money supply at all.  I do hold some money in the bank which allows them to inflate the money supply by giving loans to other suckers to buy overpriced housing and such, but I try to avoid even that and a bulk of my wealth is not situated where it can be sucked into the shadow banking system.

The victim is very likely out $1M.

Some God damn fucking tweaker scum stole an old riding tractor from me a while ago.  He probably got $1 for it at the scrap yard.  It was worth 100x that to me because it had sentimental value and I had plans for it.

As soon as you start doing stupid and criminal things you are responsible for the losses that result as far as I am concerned.  Don't like it?  Don't steal from people.

One of the very first bitcoin transactions I did was over PayPal.  The Vietnamese kid (?) got all screwed up with PayPal.  After I had the BTC, sent him some extra $US so he could un-fuck himself and break free of PayPal.  He kindly sent me the money back when this was accomplished.  (This probably gave us both a somewhat false sense of the community...oh well.  It was a calculated risk, and $20 to me was probably a lot more to most people in Vietnam.)

Anyway, it would never give me pleasure to steal anyone's Bitcoin, identity, $US, bucky-balls, or anything else.  I think the last thing 'stole' was a balsa-wood airplane to which I affixed the wrong price tag when I was about 10.  It still bothers me 35 years later.  Someone who did find these things fun is someone who well might be inclined to do it again.  Frankly I'm happy to have them identified at least (so I can avoid them), and I'm sure not going to shed to many tears for them if they need to pay for their indiscretions.  At least if the punishment fits the crime.

Shrem engaged in known criminal activity with the intent of enriching himself, but he was providing a service which was in demand and not engaging in straight theft of fraud against individuals from what I read.  Someone who flat out steal from people is much worse in my book.  Even if it is for 'less than $1000 worth of play money' and even if it was several years ago.

I'll be surprised if Charles spends any time real time in jail.  His position and history within the ecosystem has probably resulted in a pretty strong hand.  I sure would not want to be one of his 'friends' right about now though.

---

@Bugpower:  Oh!  Magical Tux would totally make my day.  I used to have a lot of sympathy and respect for Mark, but since he fucked me for $5k that has mostly vanished.  If he rolls back the transactions and returns my 50 BTC like I asked, I'll put the voodoo doll back in it's box

Probably best to wait and see who he rats out.  Maybe some other house-cleaning will be in order and it could be taken care of in a batch.

HSBC negotiated from a position of strength that they'd cultivated.  In their case, a credible threat to burn down the house.

Bitcoin should take a lesson from HSBC about what can be achieved from what position, IMO.

Nothing in any of the Bitcoin Foundations roadmap seems to indicate that they have any intention of taking either the high road morally or hardening the solution against the types of attacks that can pose a threat.  They seem to wish only to lay prostrate as quickly as possible and hope that they are allowed a quite corner in the room to exist.  I'll bet (and literally am) that this strategy will result in a lethal bitch-slap.

Strudle wrote the orig.  Not Nagle.  Big diff.  You might want to correct the citation.

I've just set up an auto-sell schedule for shits-n-giggles.  Hopefully it will lessen my compulsion to check the charts every few of my waking hours (and maybe sleeping ones to, for that matter, since when I wake up in the middle of the night I often have a peek.)

If nothing else it should l help Coinbase front-run me, though I did make the sale value small enough so that it should not be worth the bother.

That actually would not surprise me (though the justification would.)  Byrne is despised by Wall Street, their whores in the financial media, and regulators (largely also revolving-door whores) for not letting Overstock go tits-up like he was supposed to when they got naked-shorted to the max.

Why?

A fair fraction of the people 'higher up' got in early.  There are a number of reasons why someone might have taken an early interest, and many of them would be associated with having a genuine need for a solution such as Bitcoin...or such as Bitcoin was 'marketed' at least.  Many of these are associated with something considered 'bad' by large segments of society.

I actually consider a well off early adopter who is 'squeaky clean' to be something of a novelty though I'm sure that many do exist.  Bitcoin is a interesting technical and social phenomenon in it's own right.  But then so are many other developments which could compete for the attention of persons with a natural interest in such things.

 edit - sp

It is actually quite unlikely that there does not exist evicence of wrongdoing at many levels given the scale of HSBC's malfeascence (though I'll agree that it may not have reached their chief complience officer mainly because he/she is likely a careful and clued in person else they would not have gotten the job.)

It is also quite likely that the US DoJ does not have large piles of it, but that is probably mostly because they don't want it.  An artifact of the lobbying money spent at various levels of our government.

The trouble with secret evidence and 'parallel construction' is that it makes decisions and actions of the authorities non-believable to the clued in segment of the public.  When the likes of Shrem get busted and his counterparts at HSBC simply get an even bigger bonus at the end of the year, all of the otherwise valuable work in trying legitimately fight crime is severely depreciated.

The issue boils down to a few factors and 'transparancy' is one of the most important of these.


Maybe, and maybe not.  It could be that Bitcoin has actually been surprisingly unmolested so far in part because there are so many mice who seem to have almost a compulsion to stick their heads into the mousetrap.  As they rapidly exit the ecosystem, that utility might vanish.

If he has had any communications with Mark I hope they took extreme care to ensure that they were private or very well thought out.  Even then both parties need to hope the other doesn't squeal when the chips are down.

Depending on how future enforcement actions progress, ya, there could be some clawbacks in his future.  When one's wealth is a result of others being defrauded it is hard (but not impossible) to achieve perfect innocence.  Working directly with the primary party in the fraud wouldn't help.

If the Feds can triangulate between SR and BitInstant...  Ouch!

Probably the garden variety junkies, tweakers, etc have nothing to worry about, but I'll wager that a lot folks higher up on the food chain utilized Shrem's services since in the earlier days (at least) he was one of the only games in town.

I personally think that the whole 'war on drugs' is a sham and a scam, but it is the case that the larger operators were not doing their thing out of the goodness of their hearts.  They were in it for the money, and the money was there because of the stupid drug laws.  If they end up paying the price, that is how the dice landed...and they voluntarily picked up the dice to have a role in the first place.  I'm not shedding a lot of tears for them personally.