Of course.  I'm not naive enough to think that someone people don't break the law.  In fact my father was a terrible menace and it's just good luck that he never killed anyone.  Thankfully they took his licence or he probably would have.  (Oddly he still had a pilot's license though.)

I am also fully aware that if the laws didn't exist at all, or if society accepted such behavior, the risks to myself and my family would be much higher.  That's a non-starter to me...and for the umpteenth time, to most other clear thinking and semi-responsible people in our society as well.

In the same general vein, I am a gun owner also even though the law says that nobody should be breaking and entering my place or stealing my property.

It's tempting to argue this from the 'limited government red tape' perspective, but...

I'm sure if I killed someone for any reason I'd feel terrible about it.  The details of many, if not most, fatal accidents are probably pretty clear and it would ordinarily be just fine to clean up the mess without undue hardship, but...

I will bet that there are more than a few cases where the participant(s) are known to the authorities and are let off the hook due to their social rank or for good-old-boy reasons.  I would not be adverse to enforcing a formalized no-exception process for clearing anyone of manslaughter no matter what the circumstances.

Not necessarily.  Some accidents are simply not avoidable.  And some people are just naturally not as skilled as others.  That is a risk I take into account every time I get on the road.  (The road built with my tax dollars, by they way.)

That in no way makes it acceptable for some people to put other peoples lives at risk against their will simply because they feel like being irresponsible.  People who do so should be punished for being irresponsible idiots and unnecessarily endangering others against their will for that indiscretion alone.  If they roll the dice and end up killing someone, they should be punished for both opting to roll the dice and for the death (or injury) resulting from their decision.  My society agrees with me.

It is so unbelievable simple that I cannot tell if you are joking around or what?  Just in case:

If you are driving drunk on a public road, you are endangering other and spreading risk to them which they have not given authorization to do.

If you are endangering only yourself nobody has a right to stop that (in my general opinion.)  In fact, being a fan or Chas Darwin and a bit of an asshole, I highly encourage people do do stupid things simply for the purposes of cleaning up the gene pool a bit.  Again, of course, only if they keep the risk contained to themselves.

Of course.  But they don't have the right to drive on them until they sober up.

Back to the original point of the original thread, my own thoughts about drunk driving are the consensus opinion.  Strong consensus in fact.  There are a variety of opinions on every subject.  A (thankfully) small number of people argue fervently that molesting kids is perfectly fine, and they can even point to societies where it is the norm.

The point is that it makes practical sense to choose spokesmen who are not going to alienate a high percentage of the population.  Promoting higher and more convenient use of Bitcoin is the goal of some in the Bitcoin community and that is one of the main charters of the Bitcoin Foundation.  As I said initially, Libertarians are fringe, and considered dangerous wackos by a lot of people.  And not without some good reason as evidenced by this conversation.

I have no beef with anyone doing anything they want to themselves on their own property.  If you want to get shit-faced and drive around, that is fine.  Just do it on your own property and if you don't have your own property then defer your dangerous behavior until you can get some.

I have to use public property for transportation in order to live.  Just like almost everyone else.  If you create extra risk for me an my family that is creating a very real problem for me.  If I have to balance the reality that there are a lot of shit-faced drivers who so far have managed to avoid killing someone on public property, that is detracting significant from the value of this resource among everyone who could otherwise enjoy it.  You are distributing the cost of your pleasure to every other member of society and it is wrong in most people's minds.

Now if you think that there should be no such thing as 'public property' and that in and of itself creates the problem you are having with drunk driving laws then that is another thing (and equally stupid.)  Wait until someone who has their shit together enough to buy all the public roads does so, and see how they put up with irresponsible boozers using what is now their private resource.

It may come as a surprise to you, but drunk drivers kill thousands of completely innocent people every year and maim many times that number.

I'm not about to stand by while some weirdo runs around playing Russian roulette with other people's skulls just because they get their jollies out of it and it's a 'victimless crime' 5 our of 6 times.  Nor are most sane people which is why some societies have rule of law and some have vigilante justice, but all functional societies have at least something.   Always have and always will, so you would be well advised to deal with it as best you are able.

You called me a 'statist' or some such.  I tell you that I am not glued to the idea that the problem is solved via a functional state body as long as it is solved somehow.  You are perfect correct that I have no problem with 'violence' of one sort or another if that is what it takes to solve the problem most efficiently and most fairly.

You do seem a little mixed up (like a lot of Libertarians) about how one person's natural rights stop where another person's start.  I've got no problem with people doing whatever they want as long as it impacts only them.  When you start distributing risk to others without their consent is where we start to run into issues.

I just assumed that Ripple was open-source and didn't even notice that it was not in the bit of research I did on it.  Glad I didn't waste a lot of time on it.

Trimming your case out of the response text makes it a lot easier to 'rest' the case I suppose.  Handy because in context it makes zero sense to do so.

Driving drunk is not a 'pre-crime'.  It's a 'right then and there crime' for reasons that make sense to a vast majority of people.  From an engineering perspective it would be just as well that a responsible community beat the shit out of and regularly killed fringe wackos who endanger the rest vs. having the state do it.  Either one would work for me.

People like you (if you are not simply trolling which seems likely) are fringe among most populations, and will likely be fringe within the population of Bitcoin users as well.  I advise you to learn to like it.  I'm pretty fringe for other reasons (specifically in that I don't get my information from mainstream sources making my view of reality non-normal) and it does not bother me.

I probably watched it a long time ago, but just did again thanks to your link.  In retrospect, this interview is probably why I place the most confidence in Garzik (at least until I did until I was more aware of Peter Todd.)  Everything indicates to me both that he is thinking several chess moves ahead of most of the other participants in the ecosystem and that his view of the best practical future for the solution is something I could live with.

The view of the end-point of the Bitcoin solution expressed by Hearn (who also seems to think many chess moves ahead) is not at all to my liking as I see the solution he proposes as one where the operational aspects of the solution are almost completely monopolized by a small number of super-entities.  On the other hand, he seems to be very much the driving force behind keeping things going at all via the LevelDB work.  I value and appreciate this significantly even while I distrust the motives a bit.

Gavin and ~sipa I have yet to get a good read on.

Thanks for bringing this conversation back on-topic and demonstrating conclusively why it is good policy to keep Loonytarians out of the spotlight as much as possible.

So it is A-OK to drive drunk as long as you don't happen to get in a crash and kill someone?

There are very good reasons why explosives are required, by law, to be treated with a high degree of care.  This is especially true of high explosives if that is what Ver was screwing around with.  (I do have first hand experience with high explosives having been an engineer in the US Army at one time, by the way.)

I have every right to rent and apartment for my family with the expectation that some nit-wit is not storing a box full of high explosives below my kid's bed, and I have every right to expect that the renters in the houses I own are storing such compound in my basement.  This is part of the reason why I don't complain to bitterly about paying my taxes.

It would be much different in my mind if Ver had owned his home and it was rural.  Then he could cook meth or blow his hands off or whatever he wanted to do and it would not effect others.  (Though I call myself a Socialist, I'm probably more of a pure Libertarian than most people who apply that label to themselves.)

If/when the paramilitaries set up do deal with irresponsible actors like Ver (appears to have been) and re-oriented to act as that back-bone of our police state, I will be complaining more bitterly about my taxes.  Until then I have to accept the good with the bad and work to prolong the probably inevitable shift.  In the Ver case it seems like the justice system was doing largely what I pay and ask them to do.  Gotta call it like I see it.

I've thought his presentations have been good to excelent, yes.  And I believe that his efforts with the retail outlet are doing Bitcoin a good service...at least in regard to guiding the solution in a way which makes me rich(*).

*: I believe that developing Bitcoin with an 'exchange currency' focus, that is, used for buying trinkets, will ultimately kill it, but it will take years and make me rich in the process though.

Did you miss the 'in quantity' part?

Or the part the 'apartment' and 'that he was renting' in the original text?

It could be the case the Ver told his landlord that he would be using his apartment room to store the devices and told all his neighbors.  Also told the local fire department such that if there were a fire the firefighters would know to avoid his apartment room as they were attempting to fight it.  And that they all said, 'Sure.  No problem.'  Somehow I find it doubtful that this is how things went down.

I would not rule out that the guy was a victim of retribution for various of his activities.  Off hand I would find some combination of retribution and punishment for being irresponsible the most probably.  But again I've not looked at the case.  And I believe that at this time information about who engages in 'thoughtcrime' is likely cataloged but the info tends not to filter down into the various arms of our justice department very much...though this is likely to change drastically and quickly at some point.  Given the timeframe I'd tend to guess that Ver's case was likely driven largely by his own lack of common sense and it sounds (admittedly through docs that the government has written) as though there is a fair degree of legitimacy to his treatment.

I've not studied the case as it is unimportant to me, but...

If that is true, it is what I would consider probably criminally negligent behavior in most circumstances.  Storing any sort if incendiary or explosive devices in quantity is serious business and putting the lives and property of others in danger is very wrong.  Unfortunately is is completely appropriate that some of my tax dollars get burnt up in an effort to protect society against people who lack common sense and will subject others to undesired risk without their knowledge.

I see no conceivable reason to liquidate completely whether the value approaches near zero or near infinity.  If I walk among the living in 7 years and there remains a functional legal system under which private ownership of property is feasible, I would probably wish to have a city block.  Maybe we'll chat again then.

I'm looking for about 1BTC/kilo of physical gold.  PM me when you wish to go for it.  I'll know how to tell gold from tungsten by the way.

The hard-core Libertarians in the ecosystem have served their purpose in getting things bootstraped.  Now it's time to move forward and start making this thing pay off, and these guys scare people and limit the solution in mainsteam-land where the real money is to be found.

I'm all for putting the most wholesome and friendly a face on Bitcoin as possible and that seems to be what the Bitcoin Foundation is all about.  They are doing admirably at this, and moving the whack-jobs out the back door is illustrative.  Hurrah for them.

My feeling is that Bitcoin proper has one foot in the grave already in terms of achieving any worthwhile political or social goals, and there is very little chance that the next foot won't follow.  At this point I mostly want to see a run-up in valuations so I can cash out at with the highest take possible.

Dead right on all accounts.

My Android phone got completely hacked the other day for no reason that I can see.  It is unknown exactly what capabilities the hacker had, but good security practices make me assume they had full access.  So, nix that solution.  Unless one is a 'fucking dumbass' that is.

God only knows what kind of spyware permeates most windows machines these to.  So using Windows in any capacity also makes one a 'fucking dumbass'.

Like I mentioned earlier, anyone who lets anyone hold any coins in any account as a function of using a service is also a 'fucking dumbass' by the logic of the OP here.

I won't go into detail, but when I did my own cold storage work I paid particular attention to the hardware storage device I used used (and whether it was a cryptographic filesystem or not) as well as the 'wipe' command (or 'shred') in conjunction with any temp files.  I also never used any binaries I didn't compile myself.  I also chose my secondary crypto system carefully and of course took pains with the physical security of data resulting from my cold storage operations.  I cannot honestly say that I took any care against TEMPEST, but I did think about even that.

I won't call anyone a 'fucking dumbass' for failing to employ the rigor I used, but I will say that it is not completely trivial to use Bitcoin with a high degree of safety in spite of the much balyhoo'd assertions to the contrary.  I was very rigorous because I expected Bitcoin to be potentially very valuable (though likely a total loss) and it was not worth playing unless on is willing to do it right.  I don't fault others for having a different philosophical outlook though, nor for lacking certain technical skill I developed over many years due to my chosen line of work.