The guy must have a graduate degree in doxicology.

I'd been expecting it 'any day now' for about 16 months.  It drove me to take the BTC position I wanted to be holding with some haste which ended up costing me a bit.  In fairness though, when USD/BTC got down to the $2-ish mark I was not so concerned about being harassed from the finance perspective...rather, it just seemed like a good deal at that time and I took a bigger position than planned.  Anyway, at this point I see widespread harassment as one of the better things which could happen for Bitcoin and I'm sitting fat and happy.  So, the world is good!

Financial harassment is nothing new of course.  As best I can tell it was a major factor in Tradehill shutting down.

Lastly, although I am not real keen on the authorities harassing people generally, I'm not going to exactly shed a lot of tears if the likes of pirateat40, Bruce, 'Tom Williams', the Intersango clowns, and the BFL guys (if they turn out to be perps) getting thrown in the pokey for their transgressions.  All of them have put a black mark on Bitcoin and thus both set back my hopes for the solution and  also cost me money.  Just like when so many people gloat about finding 'free power' to run their miners, law enforcement whacking these types is kind of like finding 'free muscle'...though it's a gift horse I would peer into the mouth of...

So, a company doing custom hardware on first-run ASIC is saving a hundred bucks by taking over the name of a different company?  Hmmm...

I mean I'm famous (in my circles) for being tight with money when it comes to infrastructure, but I cannot imagine stooping this low for that kind of savings.  Do yourself a favor and come up with a more plausible hypothesis for this one.

For those who might have other skeletons in the closet, here's another suggestion that may or may not be worth considering:  Run like a bastard!

They both netted a pretty good haul.  That's the way I see it anyway at the time of this writing.

Put another way: 'subscribing'.

I've no doubt that brain structure plays a big role in one's propensity to view things as 'black/white' or 'infinite shades.'  I've observed it first hand in my own family even, and it is deeper than simple native intelligence.

But 'black/white' is a much more simple strategy and handy if one wishes to (or needs to by necessity of lower cognitive ability) avoid considering the nearly infinite tangential factors which shape most aspects of our world.  Thus, it is a well represented mode of thought at such 'training' institutions as your average seminary, madrassa, Misses Institute, etc.

Me: Watching the evolution of a class of developments which have the potential to be highly empowering to 'peers'.  If it can be arranged that 'peers' are not a handful of people sitting atop a handful of pyramids, such a construct as a peer-to-peer crypto-currency could be hard on governments gone rotten and exploitative individuals of any stripe.

Oh ya...I'm also up into the 5-figure range profit wise.  On paper at least.  The rubber hits the road if/when I try to cash out.

I suspect that in a lot of cases it's because the forum population is rich in 'marks'.

PayPal wanted my photo-ID after many years of making e-bay purchase through them and keeping a cash balance.  They certainly made it sound like it was due to new government regulations.  This made me decide to finally quit them.  When I tried, their UI would't let me so I had to call.  The lady asked me my SSN and DOB which I spoke into the phone and then said that we are all golden now.  So PayPal at least is clearly asking for much more than they actually need (unless they consider a voice-print to be sufficient.)  I consider photo imagery and voice data to be bio-metric and jealously guard it from those who wish to put it into a database for any reason.

A big difference between PayPal and Mt. Gox is that PayPal would happily return all of my money if I did not comply.  They simply would not let me add more to my account.  Mt. Gox, OTOH, will freeze funds until they get the bio-metric info.  I consider this to be extortion and theft.  But it has not happened to me since I've never tried to get money out of them so I am only going by what I read on these forums (and of course most of it is from jaded customers.)

Ah.  I'd quoted in an unusual way something I thought was funny; the part about 'cocaine stealing his boyish looks' and before/after 'scared straight' stuff.  I guess BFL_sonny did not catch that.

Assuming whoever uses that handle is reading this, here is my response to the pm:  It's a mistake.  The pics were dead links unfortunately since I would have liked to see how well they went with the copy.  Just follow Phin's link to the offshorwatch conversation (I think it was.)  Second post from the top is where the text I quoted came from.

---

BTW, Phin, Your question is both phrased in an amusing manner which made me laugh, and a good question besides.

I just got a personal message from Sonny.  My personal ethics are to not divulge pm's, but it had something to do with photos and some data which I personally don't have.

I've been relatively mute on the BFL accusations (though my personal suspicions and disgust at the LFC goings-on shine through sometimes), I'm not a perp-hunter, and I've never mentioned anything about any photos.

I've not responded to the pm in part because I am not completely confident that I understand the nuances of the forum software.  Probably Sonny has just got me confused with someone else (Phin?) although I would expect Sonny to be fairly bright, paying close attention, and not at all unfamiliar with the concept of threads of conversation.  I wonder if anyone else has received such a pm?

You sound like someone who got screwed on an auction run through this forum, then tried to get sympathy via a new post, then had almost all of the community who bothered to post mock and humiliate you.

I guess I'd be bitter to if that had happened to me...but I don't think I'd be as inclined to lump all of the participants of the forum into such a tight group.

Hi rating on your post for funny, BTW.

Then he should have been more clear because that is nothing like what it typically meant by the term.  Bitcoin is just as counter-party free as gold...one's holdings in either are not a liability to someone else.  Period.

For the record, and I've stated it before, Bitcoin appeals to me more than gold because it suffers from this theoretical weakness and it is much more tenable for an 'attack' to take this form compared to gold.  Put another way, if the 'haves' of Bitcoin take advantage of their position to much, it is possible that the peeps could simply walk away and choose a different (but effectively the same) solution.  It would be much easier than with gold I feel...just a software update.  So the 'have nots' would have somewhat more leverage in a peer-to-peer crypto-currency economy.  In my theory at least.

The problem is that Keiser shows little sign that I can detect of being Austrian school or Libertarian.  This sorely limits his appeal in certain circles.  Fortunately for him (and me), his material and presentation seem to be enough to overcome his other liabilities.

"full of shit"?!  Some of the stuff was comedy gold.  The second post sucked me in for a while before my attention wandered:

"""
... Took 5 servers to run? And it still failed, often.
Got something you want the whole world to know? Use Mailvault!

...

Then there is Wolf DeVoon, a wannabe lawyer and his site, ...
The soulful pictures of a luser who has left a trail of unpaid debts and broken promises are just too much!

Oh wait! I have some similarly soulful photos of Houston, before the cocaine stole his boyish looks.
There he sits, staring off into a future just filled with other peoples money. Brings a tear to your eye.
Anyone want to see them?
When compared to the after pics...excuse ME.. er.. wedding pictures taken last year. Well, the
antidrug program missed a sure thing when they passed these up. Talk about scared straight!
"""

Distributed peer reviewed arbitration with evidence material made public and arbitrators anonymity jealously guarded.  All participants in the community are potential arbitrators in the same manner as jurors (in the US) and a ratings system similar to e-bay's allows perspective counter-parties the ability to assess the counter's history, ratings, judgments, etc to choose whether to undertake a transaction or not.

Although I believe it to be completely my own I claim no rights to the idea.  But it's near the top of my list for ideas to develop if/when I feel in the mood.

Fair enough.  All of these arguments do aptly illustrate that, similar to a fractal, pretty much all potential monetary instruments (and pretty much everything else besides) has many layers which could be explored.  And could safely be ignored if one wishes to focus on the simple engineering challenges of employing said instrument reliably.

I (for one) hold that both gold and Bitcoin are more simple and [thus] more robust than the various counter-party based instruments that are presented through 'MOPE' as the only realistic options.  (Alas, I must associated GoldMoney with the counter-party stuff as Cypherdoc argues/frets about, though I admit to not knowing much about it.)

IIRC, the Mechanical Turk (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk) was demo'd for decades.  Ditto countless 'free energy' type devices though they tended to have a shorter life expectancy for various reasons.  The conference seems to have been attended by a fair number of legitimately skilled persons.  (Any hardware guys?)   It'll be interesting to know their observations if they have any to share.

If one thinks about it, the quantum electrodynamics which are responsible for the physical properties of a the gold in a Krugerrand and lend it some of it's strength as a monetary instrument are every bit as conceptually challenging as the mathematics and cryptographic algorithms which do the same for Bitcoin.  Vastly more-so I would suggest.