I'd say that it is just a matter of time before we 'do' Iran (up to the mountains, at least.)  Hopefully it won't start WWW-III, but a lot of countries have demographic issues which may be considered something of a silver lining by various leaderships.  Given a choice between ouster by an angry populous which has outgrown the carrying capacity of the environment (be it nutritional or financial), or leadership over a smaller population, I suspect that many leaderships would choose the latter.

Katz is a no-brainer for legal.

I would further suggest:

Ver: = treasury (track record of due diligence wrt putting funds to work.)
BFL_Sonny: = Pubs (editorial experience with LFC.)
Wagner: = director of recreation.

I officially withdraw my suggestion of Gornick in this org.

It would be relatively straightforward to have a handful of sock puppets come forward with comforting stories about how their refunds went.  Probably more meaningful would be to hear from people who either didn't get their refund, or had experiences one way or another in getting a charge-back from PayPal.

Of course BFL's competition could scare up a battalion of sock puppets to damage BFL also but this seems to me less likely, particularly if they are trying to leverage pre-order funding themselves or generally wish for calm weather in mining-gear-vendor-land.

Lastly, IFF this is a long con scam then there is some value in issuing trouble-free refunds at this juncture but it might be difficult to pre-judge how much to 'invest' along these lines in order to maximize the return.  Certainly the first requests have the best chance of being acted upon.

That's because you are one dick eating MF'r.  Just kidding.

I nominate Gornick.

As far as I'm concerned Bitcoin is the thing which is 'threatened' by being tagged with the term 'money', 'currency', or 'coin' (though the name is unfortunate in this regard.)  I favor defining Bitcoin as loosely as possible.  My preference would be to define it simply as a 'decentralized accounting solution', focus on making it useful and robust, and let things fall into place from there.

Beyond that, I think it appropriate to let 'the leaders' define things as they choose.  If Bernanke says gold is not money, that is (and was) totally cool with me.  I couldn't give two shits less.  It changed the characteristics of my PM stash and my desire to sit on it not one iota.  If we don't like the way the leadership does things then the appropriate response is to work toward changing the leadership IMHO.  US Govt personal, Wikipedia, etc...

That was OK, but a little to over the top and obvious, much like Rarity.

IIRC, FAtlas was just straight-up troll and effective in part because a lot of his material tended to have some basis in truth which nobody could really deny.  That is my personal definition of a high quality trawl (since it tends to work the best and also tends to implant interesting and potentially valuable thought patterns within the 'victims'.)  I don't think I was alone in appreciating FAtlas's contributions...seems like he had to put some effort into detaching himself because even some of the forum staff seemed to have some affinity to him.  I think that 'greyhawk' (who is the same guy on both forums I assume) is doing an acceptable job of carrying the banner, and I appreciate his work more than Pinky or Rarity, but FAtlas left some big shoes to fill IMHO.  I guess I've got a man-crush on the guy or something.

But jeez are we a ways off-topic!  Maybe someday I'll try to get some sort of Bitcon<->SA interface going in the off-topic board.  Cannot join SA because they don't (yet) accept BTC...and I'd probably loose my $10(equiv) within seconds for not  communicating 100% orthodox thought patterns.  On top of that, the Bitcoin discussions there are mostly pretty boring at this time.

Ya, on second look your picture thing isn't as SA-like as I  remembered.  I'm not abandoning my hypothesis, but consider it fairly weak.

As for SA, I've got nothing much against them.  I appreciate the work they've done on certain scammers in the past, and it's work that Bitcoiners should have been doing.  The SA population has about the same percentage of imbeciles as we have here which is not surprising.  They have some comedy talent, but much of it has wandered off.

'good_citizen' had about 50% of the SA talent to himself, but he's gone.  I almost had him talked into taking a BTC position once I think.  IIRC, it was at a time when he would now be up 4x or so.  I hope he did and capitalized because 'He so funny; he make me laugh long time!'  The guy's work on logansyriche(sp) and his 'large land mammal' still make me chuckle.

I was under the impression that he was an SA goon for a long time.  I guess on the basis of his initial icon thingy (I never can remember what those are called.)  I go back-n-forth on it.  It would be a pretty high-quality goon-ish achievement to embed as deeply as he and influence people to get conned.  That would be good for some lulz so you've swung me to considering the 'is-SA' hypothesis once again.  It's hard to imagine anyone expending such an effort, but everybody has their callings in life I guess so it seems possible.

I'll have to take the liberty of rolling my own.

  BFL...hmmm... = very skeptical observer.

Even if I didn't feel that sigs are for douche-bags, BFL is nowhere nearly important enough to warrant a spot in one.  My skepticism has built quickly due in part to BFL's actions/in-actions after the Sonny thing popped up to capture my attention.

There is some chance that I'll be interested in ASIC down the road if/when they are developed a bit and I get a better read on the trajectory of Bitcoin itself.  That is why I'm even an interested observer.  But there is no way I'll be investing a dime in something which is closed-source for a bunch of reasons.  The simplest being that open-source tends to garner the mindshare to make a successful product in this space.  With closed source we have to put up with buggy shit from people who don't have much incentive (not to mention skill) to support their product.  And again, in the case of BFL I'll be fairly surprised if they have anything at all in ASIC-land and much more surprised if they get anything out even remotely close to schedule.  I've been surprised before, though, so I certainly don't rule it out.

Sure you are.  The only real question is why, and why with such gusto?  I guess we'll find out eventually.  Or not...it's not terribly important one way or another.  Just one more thing in a countless list of observations of the world around us.

I share the OP's disappointment at the makeup of the community.  But when I sit back and think about things I find that it is completely anticipated given the nature of the solution and space in which the solution exists.  They say that what does not kill you will make you stronger and that will hopefully be the case for Bitcoin.

I am unimpressed by the various intellectual luminaries here who assert as fact the nature and goals of the Bitcoin solution.  Unless they have had deep philosophical conversations with the creator(s) of the solution, their assertions are no more valid than my own.  The evolution of the solution may take some twists and turns which is utterly surprising to them and not at all in line with the orthodoxy of their philosophical schools of thought.  If it does, that may be as much by design as by accident.

edit: 2-char fix

I would love it if Bitcoin stole even the tinyest barely noticeable amount of 'market share' from PM's.  Among the reasons, it would make me insanely wealthy personally.  That is a part of the reason I speculate in it.

Another reason I prefer Bitcoin is that gold is very difficult to shake out of the hands of those who hold it, and most of these are hands that I would love to see working in the poor house.  With Bitcoin, OTOH, if a significant fraction of the user-base were at a significant enough disadvantage complements of the owners of the currency base, they could simply upgrade their software and switch to a more promising solution.  So there is pressure on the holders of the currency to ensure that it is relatively useable and useful to the general population.

What percentage of gold has been stolen?  Bitcoin in it's short life?  Seems to me that a fair amount of BTC has been 'teleported' across distance right into some thief's pocket.  And that this scenario is as 'reliable' as clockwork.  'Cheap' for the thief also since it is unusual for them to be caught and fairly unheard of for them to be punished.  So you see, everything has it's advantages and dis-advantages.

Most of the thinkers (or most who impress me much at any rate) seem to recognize that Bitcoin and PM's have some significant potential to complement one another.

Sounds like you 'accepted' and 'put up with' what Mt. Gox coerced you into and it doesn't matter what you do now; they got your goods.  Unless you managed to pass them fake info I guess.

The interesting thing is that Mt. Gox has shown no interest in defending or explaining their practice especially in contrast with PayPal who seem to not need to hold funds hostage.  I guess it makes some sense in that they tower over all other exchanges and are likely to indefinitely. If Mt. Gox is generous with the info they gather, the whole Bitcoin system is potentially perhaps the biggest honey-pot on the net for marking up people with 'interesting' things going on.  Actually, it may be second to tor...but that's just a suspicion of mine...time will tell.

To all the people who have been burnt in this manner, thanks for the heads up.  Really!  Not sure if I would have found the fine print on Mt. Gox's site before attempting to get some fiat out of my BTC speculation through them or not since I have not dug around to date.  Doubt it.

I think that most employers will hire anyone who can make them money.  That's my personal experience at least.  The recidivism rate for felons is such that even a reasonably talented person who could do a good job is a risk to an employer.  'Free market' bitches...suck it up.

Well considered and well communicated points and concerns.  Thanks both for that.

If anything I'd say that the Bitcoin community does to little looking around when it comes to people who are 'movers and shakers' in the Bitcoin world and thus able to do significant damage.  So, thanks Phin.  IIRC, it was actually the SA goons who finally got the goods on Bruce amid howls of rage from the Bitcoin community replete with all manner of wild assertions about the makeup and motives of SA.  Nobody spends a lot of time DOX'ing people who are pretty up-front about their business, and in this case if BFL delivers the goods nobody (accurately DOX'd or not) is going to have any problems.  If they do not, it won't be long before the poor guy in CO is cleared should he have been incorrectly fingered.

Currently we have some theoretical modicum of help with rip-offs and the artists who perform them from law enforcement (complements of my tax dollars...you're welcome...) but nobody including me is real comfortable with that solution.  An alternative is community self-policing which a handful of people are pioneering.  It's actually a bit surprising to me that there is such widespread outrage.  I would say to people who are whining about it, 'if you cannot stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.'  I personally don't expect to maintain any anonymity if/when I do anything Bitcoin related that effects other people and even if I did I gave up anonymity a long time ago figuring that I would need more reliable ways to solve any problems which may crop up anyway.

IIRC you've got something like 45 days from the purchase date.  But that (or something like it) is for me and I have only payed from an account which I keep charged with fiat (not using a credit card.)

I've harped on this before, but I hope people realize what a dis-advantage Bitcoin is at by not having the ability to do charge-backs.  A second-best solution would be to be able to nullify transaction, or at least part of them (such that the value goes into the ether.)  Perhaps on some sort of a pro-rated schedule.  In this way, someone who scams someone else would at least not be able to profit (which would drastically reduce the incentive to scam, of course.)  There would be relatively little reason for an otherwise happy customer to nullify a transaction for shits-n-giggles I feel.  But if that were a problem, a very simple rating registry would help a lot.

I read the chat log incorrectly.  My bad.

He seems to have been threatened by the target (which demonstrates a mix of fear, desperation, lack of any real capabilities/intent in this regard, and extreme stupidity given that it is public forum.)  Or did I read the IRC chat that you were so proud of incorrectly?