Well, I guess just like nobody ever protested anything before Facebook existed, we'll have to go back to those days of no protesting, because it certainly isn't possible to organize any way other than through some corporate behemoth.

They don't need a conviction, which in a criminal case needs to be beyond a reasonable doubt.  They could lose the criminal case and still win the civil forfeiture case, which is a separate legal action and they only need to win by a preponderance of the evidence in that action.

Unless he's an idiot and didn't get a binding deal of some sort.

Liar.  I tried to go there and find them, and all I found was a couple dead guys.

I wouldn't take that too seriously.  There are a number of possible confounding factors.

1)  People in the U.S. interested in Bitcoin prefer to obscure their actual origin and don't register as being in the U.S.
2)  There are more unrecognized spiders in other countries (maybe).

Number two is just wild speculation, but number one is pretty likely to be true.

Suppose other than creating Bitcoin, he's a complete jerk.  Maybe things would actually be worse if he came forward.

In any event, it's entirely up to whoever (singular or plural) is Satoshi to come forward or not.

The pirateat40 Ponzi couldn't have been more blatant without actually calling itself a Ponzi scam.  The claimed rate of return alone said that it was a scam to anyone with an ounce of sense.

What could possibly go wrong with an unregulated, illegal stock market that trades stocks in Ponzi scams, among other things?

Apparently, everything that did.

I'm curious what kind of crack someone had to smoke to think this was remotely legal.

I'm not the one claiming investing in Bitcoin is like investing in a Ponzi.  That would be you.

Many if not most investors invest in at least some of the assets they own, directly or indirectly, with less than perfect knowledge of the asset.  Is everyone with stock in an automobile company an expert in automotive engineering who could invent a car top to bottom?  Is everyone who invests in Google or Apple an expert in search engines or computers? 

Anyone who invests in a mutual fund is invested in dozens if not hundreds of different assets, and often as not, don't know much more than the general composition of the fund, much less are experts in every aspect of the business of every single stock they own.  To claim that they have to be is ludicrous on its face.

Yes.  All an investor generally has to know when arranging a portfolio is how assets have performed in the past and how they can be expected to perform in the future, especially in relation to other assets.  Especially when a portfolio is diverse, a certain number of mistakes is tolerable, especially when someone has a small position in something volatile or as a hedge, because say, gold performs well when stocks perform poorly. 

I think that an investor who simply decided BTC is likely to increase in value in the long term while experiencing a lot of short-term volatility, who knew nothing else about it, and invested some portion of a portfolio in it based solely on that assumption, would probably do just fine.

By comparison, someone who wanted to invest more substantially, or to do things like day trading BTC, would be foolish not to know more than that.

Actually, if one considers the Bitcoin community itself and the Bitcoin network as participants, the possibility of failure of the network or the technology is a form of counterparty risk itself.  People who know nothing about the underlying technology are used to the risks of trusting some fund manager, though, or someone whose reputation would require them to make good on their representations.  They're not so equipped to judge whether the underlying math is sound, to secure their own Bitcoin wallet, or to judge whether or not the whole thing will just dry up and blow away.

Almost anything in an ETF, whether a foreign currency or package of foreign currencies, raises the same question as to why the people investing in the fund just don't invest in the underlying asset.  Because it's messy, to them, and they don't want to deal with it directly, but they do want to participate in and profit from the appreciation in value of the asset.

Really the question almost comes down to the question "why have ETFs at all for anything?"  Apparently, people have decided they want these instruments and the market will make them available for purchase.

I would question that their regulatory position is one of unalloyed altruism.

So far as I can tell, they want to protect the bad guys who pay for their campaigns from the rest of us, while protecting the markets of the bad guys who pay for their campaigns by making it as difficult as possible to access the U.S.-facing markets.  They protect them from foreign corporations whether or not those foreigners are bad guys or not.

Nonsense.  Floating a prospectus that is nothing more than empty paper would be a crime and people would go to prison.  There are third party audits of this kind of fund, ensuring that this actually exists.

The Winklevoss twins have a reputation within the financial community and pulling off an outright scam would utterly destroy this reputation, rendering any other assets whose value depends on their name worthless as well.  This would cost them a lot more than their relatively small investment in Bitcoin.

It is a reasonably good guess that the seed assets are the coins they bought months ago, and I don't know if anyone did any blockchain research to find out which coins, in particular, they acquired at first.  I'd guess they acquired them somewhat stealthily to avoid driving up the price while they were acquiring it, but don't know for sure.

There is very little cause to doubt they actually acquired the coins.  There would be absolutely no purpose to doing so.  I wouldn't mind seeing the transactions on the blockchain, but it's more of a matter of curiosity than of tinfoil hat paranoia.

This may be the case with Liberty Reserve.  I have not followed the case, so the fact that I haven't seen any particularly compelling evidence the government claims about it are true doesn't mean much.

However, the Megaupload case strikes me as a classic case of government overreach, the raid on Kim Dotcom was pure jackboot lunacy (and later thrown out by a New Zealand court as illegal), and so far, the U.S. has woefully failed to make any solid case against Megaupload itself (as compared to its customers).  It appears to me that either what Megaupload was doing is legal, or else what a lot of other more well-established corporations (including Google/YouTube) are doing is just as much a crime.

It appears to me they went after Kim Dotcom more because of his larger than life persona (see what I did there) and appearance of being a buffoonish egomaniac than because he actually broke the law.  If he is a lawbreaker, then apparently lawbreaker is just another name for a successful entrepreneur without a big corporate backer.

They're likely to end up having more than they have now.  That might be the number one target in the world for an electronic heist, especially considering the potential for actually getting away with it.

Usually, having a "good" sponsor is important because most ETF sponsors are experienced in the field.  This new sponsor entity has never done this kind of work, so to the extent that's a plus for an EFT, this entity lacks it.  However, even entities experienced in this kind of instrument have never done a Bitcoin EFT, so the whole project is terra incognita, even to the "Big Boys." 

I think it can and should be treated (at least by the stodgy fund guys) as what it is, a high-risk, high-yield investment opportunity, and given the proper place in a portfolio based on that.  The fund is higher risk than BTC itself, IMO, because of the not insubstantial risk of the Winklevoss twins or their people themselves somehow screwing up, losing the keys, or getting hacked, because their trove of coin is going to be a fat, juicy target.

One of the primary purposes of a corporation is to have a separate legal personality, so a corporation, even one you control, has a separate legal existence.  Do the paperwork right and it can even take the fall for you in times of legal or financial trouble.

As usual the DonkDown didn't start.  Do you guys even bother checking?  Because it fucks up EVERY week.

While the term has negative connotations, all a "bubble" denotes is simply a period of expansion followed by a rapid contraction.  One can determine that somewhat objectively by simply looking at a graph.

If this doesn't look like a rapid contraction to anyone, they need their eyes or their head examined:



I certainly wouldn't mind putting "bubble" in quotes, because the price of BTC generally settles far above where it was when the "bubble" started, but still well below the peak price, and generally slowly increases in price after that before another cycle.

So the price has never, ever gone down.  It's just been a straight line upward at all times.  Okay.  Got that.

Nice name.