I thought I'd get an account with 'localbitcoins.com' even though transactions of the size I'm interested in don't seem that common.  Upon trying to set up an account, I get the following error:

  ---
  Forbidden (403)
  CSRF verification failed. Request aborted.
  More information is available with DEBUG=True.
  ---

In a search of bitcointalk.org, I only see one reference in the newbies section from someone else noticing the phenomenon, and no response.

Before I research the potential issues (if I even bother), I just wondered if others might have noticed the same behavior.

I am running on one of my more secure machines.  FreeBSD with Chromium built from source: Version 25.0.1364.97 (183676)  I am also on a satellite connection.  I am not interested in setting security ignore overrides unless and until I understand fairly completely why such behavior occurs, and this is particularly true of security certificate related issues in Bitcoin-land.

I was dog sick for weeks one time (in the military) and saw several doctors who prescribed some IVs to re-hydrate.  Eventually no doctor was around, but an LPN (or some such) was seeing patients.  They guy touched the back of my head and said "Mono.  Test him."  It took him less than 5 seconds to correctly diagnose the condition.  By that time I was just about over it so on my month of sick leave I was fine and had a great time.  I also lost 20 lbs and was able to max out the next PT test on the 2-mile run for that reason.

All else equal, I'd prefer an MD to someone without the formal education, and would prefer an engineer with a PhD to one without for software development, but experience is highly important which would weigh heavily.  Almost everyone I've ever worked with and undergrad from MIT or IIT have been outstanding engineers.  I would favor people from top rated institutions over probably any other factor for work that the institution specialized in.

Some of the best engineers I've worked with have had no degree at all or one in Anthropology or some such.  These people are often more creative and effective, but also often lack commitment and have short attention spans.  I think that possibly the biggest positive in having a degree is that it demonstrates that an individual has commitment and can be a reliable work-horse for the long haul.

I did half of my former transaction through Bitcoin-Brokers and half the Mt. Gox.  Bitcoin-Brokers worked fine and I'll use them again if I get no bites here and if they are still taking sellers.  Mt. Gox USD cash-outs seem to be simply not possible in any form at this time so I want to fill my cash-flow needs.  I've got a $5k wire in process, but I don't expect to get it for a long time.  If ever.  This offer is for between $5,000 and $10,000 if prices remain in the $150/BTC range.

New pricing:  The mean between spot at Mt. Gox, Bitstamp, and BTCChina at the time of the transaction.

New escrow idea:

 - Each party escrows 10 BTC.
 - Buyer (of BTC) proves to escrow agent that he/she has met their commitment by taking a series of pictures of {n} USD bills near the seller's hand.
 - Seller (of BTC) proves that they have transferred BTC by sending the total and signing a message from the sending account.
 - Escrow agent (I prefer John K if he'll do it for a reasonable fee) decides how to resolve any dispute.  Escrow fee split 50/50.

I'll probably be in the Portland Metro area (or at least a few hours from it) in the next week timeframe.

If I don't get any bites within a few days I'll close this thread again.

The rest of the details are outlined below and are still more or less valid.


=== OLD ===

Mt Gox rejected my AML because my documentation includes a P.O. Box in addition to a physical address.  Mail theft and vandalism is common in my rural area so many of us use the community post office for snail mail.  That is hard for organizations to conceptualize.

Anyway, this is how I want things to go down:

  1)  I and a buying party decide on a location in the Pacific Northwest where there is either a US Bank or Wells Fargo.  The closer to SW Oregon, the better for me, but $10k is enough to warrant some time and travel and doing a person-to-person transaction saves the transaction and wire fees.

  2)  We meet in the bank lobby and the transaction occurs there.  I prefer Wells Fargo where I have a PMA account and am thus treated as a VIP to some extent.

  3)  The transaction may occur in parts.  That is, we make a partial trade and I deposit funds, then rinse and repeat.  I will not subject myself to significant losses should the buyer take off mid-way through the process.  Nor will I be exiting the bank with a lot of money.

Price would be spot at Mt. Gox at the time of the transfer(s).  If a buyer wants to sweeten the deal for me that would be fine.

All of my coins came through Tradehill in mid to late 2011.  I can produce an entire wallet file containing 100 BTC if that is desirable, though I think it more likely that I would use bitcoin.info in order to perform a transfer in parts.  Again, I will not be going highly negative without backing.  I have 100 BTC sitting at Mt. Gox, and it is from this pool that my first sale would occur.  These coins were transferred into Mt. Gox rather than having been traded there.

I don't have a history of transactions for the simple reason that I have made very few.  Bitcoin has always been a highly speculative opportunity for me.  I do have a long history on this forum however.

I intend to repeat the process in the coming years as I wish cash flow.  It would be worthwhile to me to form a relationship with a trustworthy buyer.  I doubt that I will myself be a purchaser of Bitcoin in the future as I obtained many more than I ever thought I would during my buying phase.

I would just use Mt. Gox and probably will if/when the verify me.  They were pretty quick to send out a rejection on the basis of my drivers licence containing a P.O. box in addition to a physical address (which they may not have noticed), but I anticipate a protracted period of reconciling the issues.  I'm not in a big hurry on this.

I've found it relatively easy to purchase BTC through exchanges (at least it was several years ago) so I assume that a counter-party in this transaction would have a reason for wishing to partake in such a transaction.  For this reason I must assume a highly defensive posture.

I am open to using a form of escrow if an agent can be retained.  Here's an idea:  The buyer and I each supply, say, 10BTC to an escrow agent.  If both parties do not supply information of success to the escrow agent, then both parties funds are forfeited to the agent (or a charity or some such.)  In this case, the transaction would proceed in parts of 10 BTC.

All details of the anticipated transaction would be documented and signed so there are no misunderstandings.  No non-business correspondence is desired until after the transaction is complete if at all.

I do not believe that legacy hoard sell-only operations will subject me to MSB issues, but I will want to research this if I find a serious counter-party.  I would entertain the thought of trading for other items I appreciate having (especially precious metals) but my immediate goal is to float my fiat bank accounts at a desired level so I do not wish to incur the spread and other fees associated with such transactions and I have no need to launder funds since nothing I've done is legally questionable and intend to pay capital gains tax.  So, for this transaction a non-USD intermediate will require a good deal on my part and appropriate adjustment in the mechanism by which I protect myself from fraud or theft.

I'd love to have a DU coin, or any chunk of the stuff to add to my collection of interesting items.  I doubt that DU has particularly special mechanical properties aside from being extraordinarily dense and thus good at carrying kinetic energy over space.  I'll bet you'll find tungsten as a component of most of these weapons to exploit it's unusual mechanical properties.  But I don't know either of these conjectures to be true.

U.S. Business interests have had a rich history of developing and exploiting revenue streams and for about a century have had a reputation for being adept at it.  Firstly they obtain vast sums of money extracting fissile material from nuclear waste, then fire the waste from that process at foreigners at probably hundreds of USD per round, and at thousands of round per minute.  You gotta admit that it is brilliant.  Disturbing yes, but also brilliant.

I saw at least part of the documentary recently, probably on youtube.  It almost certainly had something to do with my comments.

I have chatted a bit with Japanese friends about things, and one time in particular while I was in Japan.  Although only one datapoint, I detect some sensitivity to the issue.  Unsurprisingly.  She said mostly that 'it was a terrible weapon' and left it at that.  It would have been rude to continue the conversation with some of my arguments, and I tend to be more rude on bitcointalk.org than in real life unless I know someone extremely well.  Anyway, I bet I would hold a very similar viewpoint even if I were a Japanese, but not very many people are as brutally analytically as I.  I do recall an interview with a high ranking Japanese officer or official prior to his death and he said that of course Japan would have used atomic weapons against the US if it had the ability.  In a general way this is not a justification for anything, and in part because I want to see the US being 'better' than others and feel that we fail when we are not, but my point is that nuking Japan in 1945 was a logical decision that almost anyone would have made at the time.

As for DU, uranium itself in it's natural mix of isotopes is not very radioactive although it would stand to reason that it is contaminated with other radioactive materials as a result of the production and refining process.  It's also a heavy metal which, when used in weapons, is highly atomized and does the same to anything it hits as a target.  It would not surprise me in the least if it created environmental issues.  Nor would it surprise me if some of the issues are overblown by the anti-war folks (my side) for propaganda reasons.  One way or another, the fact that we are shooting the stuff at people half way around the world at all is deeply wrong irrespective of the environmental damage.

We use DU because it makes war profiteers rich to be sure, but it would not surprise me if it were a form of genocide planned by our strategists.  Like what Israel does on the West Bank.  A) disable sewage treatment B) arrange lack of protein by controlling imports C) allow fishing only within a near zone where the fish are contaminated and shoot fishermen who stray beyond.  I can see no way that this is not planned and that it constitutes anything other than straight-up ethnic cleansing.  The Palestinians who survive will be ones with particularly strong immune systems which will be interesting to evaluate from a scientific perspective at least.

This is an issue where I take an unusual step (for me) of defending the US.  It was a different time in history, and nuclear weapons were not well understood as evidenced by some of the domestic actions of our nuclear program.  The American/Japanese war in the Pacific was one of histories most brutal and we were understandably war-weary.  Coupled with this, the fact that the Japanese were tenacious and it was difficult to predict their response.  It was also not lost on people that the means that the Japanese employed to control their empire were themselves extra-ordinarily inhumane so there was an understandable attitude of 'they had it coming'.  Lastly, the destruction in both life and property of the atomic bombs were significantly less than the firebombings of Tokyo.

I do wish we had targeted differently.  We had only two weapons to make an impression which was a distinct factor, but I think we could have taken our time and continued to nuke less populated and civilian dominated targets as fissile material became available, and it was a sure thing that we'd be producing such material at as high a rate as possible.

Ultimately I doubt that there was any country who would have deferred on the use of atomic weapons if they were in anything remotely resembling our situation at that time in history.  Least the Japanese themselves.

The main lesson to be learned comes from the Japanese and it is to be ever vigilant against a militant leadership who has aspirations to build and maintain an empire.  They will deliver a bucket of tears to their people eventually.  Always do.  Unfortunately this lesson needs to be re-learned by the masses from time to time, and the US is in the mid-life of such a cycle as I read the tea leaves.

My comments were directed toward presenting a potential explanation to the 'mystery' of how 'public services' provided by corporate entities come to be.

Many of us never really saw the storage aspect of the block chain as much as a problem, and I'm pretty sure we've been through that before.  Access to the data both locally for functional purposes and for WAN transmission catch-up operations are somewhat more salient concerns, but they are surmountable.  The defining issue here is real-time and near real-time economic activity on the network, and how core Bitcoin is going to evolve to support this.  If it does so natively, I argue that it is almost certain to fall victim to abusive surveillance practices and be under constant threat of technical and legal attacks if it challenges other solutions.

That said, it is a perfectly valid point of view that most potential users don't really care about the privacy issues and the service providers are right to make a dime from their efforts anyway, and also that the solution does not necessarily need to present a challenge to other solutions if implemented 'correctly'.  It's not my point of view, but I can accept it as valid.

I have to agree with this.  As a group, we should be ultra-thankful that Bitcoin-Central performed well on formulating a workable reconciliation process and making so many people whole (in BTC terms.)  There was always going to be 'dust' and occasional 'clumps' of value left to sweep up.  Whether by accident or design, the rightful recipients of this value is Bitcoin-Central, and it would be a huge can of worms to modify their reconciliation rules which were quite fair and reasonably well communicated.  IMHO.

What remains to be seen is how much transparency Bitcoin-Central employs in dealing with the 'dust' and the other aspects of this crime.  They have the ability to provide useful information and actions which would benefit the Bitcoin ecosystem at large through the next year or so.  I personally believe that efforts to do so will be a big factor in their failure or success as a for-profit organization.

I would not doubt that gross emotional responses could be detected in humans.  Like 'love of Big Brother' for example.  I'm actually a little surprised that the technology does not exist now or if it does, that it's not used to ferret out the likes of Snowden before he was given root access to the machine.

Beyond that, I would not rule out the possibility that thoughts which are formulated through semi-vocal means within the mind might be tapped with some amount of precision.  At some point anyway.

That hypothesis should remain open in most cases, and especially in anything related to Bitcoin.  Even the Bitcoin solution itself.

The best marker I can think of the lend confidence to a system is whether the principles have been put under significant personal attack.  Phil Zimmerman (Silent Circle) and Kim Dotcom are two people who have received a fair amount of grief over their histories of involvement with the Internet.  It's always possible that the purported attacks and punishments were elaborate hoax's and/or that the individuals have been flipped, but it is still a highly useful data-point.

Technically speaking, I think it was the king of England's tax men who were the target of irritated citizens ire.

But ascribing ownership where it does not fit is a common rhetorical trick which is fairly effective.  Like why is Snowden 'giving away our secrets' for instance.  I commonly hear that from people who I know with complete certainty are not the connected insiders who held the secret that there existed a truly extraordinary amount of domestic surveillance.

Well of course they do.  The last person I would trust would be someone who claims they are going to take a bullet for me.  They are either hopelessly neive or bald-faced liars.

It's an aggravating corundrum that one gets the best info on who is trustworthy only after they've been shut down.  Parenthetically, I gained a lot more confidence in Mt. Gox after they were given a fair amount of grief by the US authorities.


Accepting Bitcoin is one of the things that gives mega.co.nz some credibility in my mind.

After Snowden's leaks shedding light on how closely the 'five eyes' are cooperating I do not like that they are based in New Zealand...but it's preferable to the US at least.  I do hope that they employ infrastructure commissioned in disparate jurisdictions, and that they and engineered the nerve center to be able to migrate seamlessly if the need arises.


The only solution I will truly trust is one where it is technically impossible for the provider to do one thing or another, and who provides a lot of transparency and system level design whereby I can validate certain things.  Here again, Mega.co.nz seems to have a pretty solid framework for making that theoretically possible.

Lavabit (or perhaps Zimmerman) mentioned the difficulty of securing mail (presumably meta-data) under the current (and dated) protocols such as POP and IMAP.  I assume that they are talking about routing.  It may be possible to devise a system based on one-time use addresses which are similar in some ways to Bitcoin addresses, and combined with a series of proxies operated on a P2P basis, it could become pretty challenging to perform meaningful analytics even with a huge advantage in terms of network taps which the NSA and it's minions have.

One way or another, I think it is finally safe to assume that it makes no logical sense to trust 'the powers that be' to have any restraint at all in terms of their means and methods of imposing control on the masses.  Nor is it wise believe anything they might say since it is abundantly clear that they will flat-out lie about any operations or plans.  Thus if the masses desire or need a solution, it is only logical to work on one which is theoretically sound against any and all attacks.  This stands for both a currency solution and a communications solution.

Humptulips Washington on the other hand...not so sure about those guys.

Typically through monetizing the intelligence information coming off user access and generally enticing traffic for other properties which do so, though in the case of archive.org I think they may be primarily a philanthropic organization.  One way or another, if they are US based it is a fair assumption that any network interaction will be analyzed by various state and private organizations.  Indeed, unless one is exceedingly careful that assumption should be made about any Internet activity anywhere.

Bringing things back to Bitcoin, I see this sort of utility as a threat to the solution.  Any crypto-currency will be a rich source of intelligence information in proportion to it's success.  There is probably a role for a solution which welcomes such analysis for users who don't care and a role for a different implementation which focuses on hardening against such analysis (and the potential for sister monitoring and legal infrastructure to attack the solution), but each implementation will have one opportunity to decide what camp they wish to be in.  Being the first, Bitcoin get's the 'first round draft choice' here, though it looks to me like the principle movers of Bitcoin have already made the decision.  For my part, I'm falling back into the mode of deciding to live with whatever decision is made...as if I have a choice...

Probably any nation with the organizational ability to develop nuclear weapons would have show 'restraint' if they were in our position.  We never had the ability to take over and police other populations and no great need for resources that could only be had through genocidal acts.  WW-II opened up other ways of achieving a larger share of the pie for us so it would have been stupid to opt for nuclear war (though various people argued for this from time to time.)

I feel that the US was a different nation 80 years ago.  The main reason I feel this way is that so many top scientist immigrated here and helped up develop nuclear weapons, and largely because they seemed to have confidence in our nation as a force of good.  In fairness it needs to be pointed out that the likes of Germany and the USSR were not much competition in this regard.  Anyway, it is hard to imagine anyone immigrating here now for that reason though plenty of people still come here for the money.  As we descend into a totalitarian surveillance state it will be interesting to see how that impacts the quality of our immigrant population.

I've been following it and am not at all surprised.  It's what I've been harping on for some time...if the US doesn't like something on the Internet, the pressure which can be brought to bare against it is greater than most people imagine.  Especially young  males.  It is why I feel that Bitcoin should be actively forming a hardened shell.  The strategy of getting the the US government to 'like' Bitcoin as a means of protection is probably a losing strategy in the end.

Bitcoin cannot be killed, but it can be forced into a role where it is used only by highly technical individuals...and very brave ones at that.

Some people are capable and some are not.  We employ armies of mercenaries from all over the world and they have no qualms about murder for sport.  And we have a lot of people with experience in Iraq and Afghanistan who's brains are scrambled (literally and figuratively) to form a pool.

Ultimately no nation has ever had trouble finding manpower to commit atrocities domestically and the US would be no exception.  Even with appropriate indoctrination only a minority of citizen (and foreign-born mercenaries) would be capable so there needs to be a force multiplication factor but modern hardware and systems make that more possible now than probably at any time in the past.

Even though an armed citizenry is not an insurmountable problem for the imposition of martial law and what-not, it is still a nuisance and a complication.  Of the multitude of things I fool around with (cars, tractors, ladders, falling trees, etc) firearms are one of the least dangerous.  Simply put, they are simply not as big a problem as they are pumped up to be, and it is not unreasonable to hypothesize that one of the reasons for the anti-2nd amendment campaign is in anticipation of finding it desirable to control the population through more authoritarian means at some point on the horizon.

In a scenario where there was hot citizen/government combat, most of the citizens would fall victim to some video game player operating a drone from half way across the country.  The poor guy with the peashooter would be just poof.  gone.  No idea or warning about what hit them.

The main strength that the 2nd provides in terms of a policy at this point is the alienation it would cause to attempt to take it away.  It would be very messy.  A lot of people are really attached to their guns.  I am, though not nearly so much as a lot of my friends and neighbors.  I see the high rates of gun ownership in my area as a key element in keeping confrontational crime to a surprisingly low level in a part of the country where we have 2 or 3 law enforcement personnel covering 1500 square miles and much poverty.

We have a relatively strong contingent of tweakers and various 'white trash' who occasionally use firearms in their tussles among themselves, but absent guns (which a lot of them cannot legally own anyway) they would just use some other utensil.  Usually they do anyway.  The vast majority of citizens are 'normals' and taking firearms from them would create very legitimate psychological and quality of life issues since they would feel much more vulnerable to threats, and not without good reason.

Probably the only way to get firearms out of the hands of the citizenry of the US at this point would be to implement a forced urbanization campaign as was attempted in Vietnam.  At that point a computer program could do the drone strikes with simple logic, and it would be safer doe to 'friend or foe' decisions which humans often fuck up.  I mean 'authorized' personnel would be in the non-urban zones from time to time working on resource exploitation, infrastructure maintenance, etc.

Unsurprising.  The 'marketing' is not what I would consider to be particularly up-front.  Many of the claims about privacy, peer2peer, scalability, centralization, etc were at best temporarily true.  Many of the legitimate advocates of the solution honestly believed the 'hype',  and very few of those who understood the technical aspects of the solution sufficiently to see the looming issues did much toward disabusing the crowd about some of some of the misconceptions.  We all have at least a financial stake in growing the userbase after all, and it would probably be disingenuous to neglect that as a factor in how the solution has been presented.

[y]es.