http://bitcoinism.blogspot.com/2013/12/voting-pools-how-to-stop-plague-of.html

[though you will rarely be contacted about your reports]

Advertisement: If you see garbage posts (off-topic, trolling, spam, no point, etc.), use the "report to moderator" links. All reports are investigated, though you will rarely be contacted about your reports.

Not receiving feedback on why one's accuracy rating drops is a huge disincentive for using the "report to moderator" feature.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1r6inu/proposal_for_local_bitcoin_meetups/

[Countermeasures]

http://bitcoinism.blogspot.com/2013/11/is-it-time-to-boycott-all-us-bitcoin.html

As of today, the efforts of Bitcoin Foundation and others who have told us that Bitcoin should be altered to make it more acceptable to the regulatory apparatus has finely bore fruit. A group of investors announced Coin Validation, a service designed to remove all possibility of financial privacy for Bitcoin users.

This service will work by asking Bitcoin businesses to voluntarily (at first) violate their customer's privacy by providing them with a list of every bitcoin address known to be associated with that customer. The list will be used to create a database of "clean" addresses, where clean means tied to AML/KYC information, with the ostensible goal of allowing these businesses avoid "tainted" Bitcoins.

The first thing to note about this plan is that it will in no way remain voluntary. Regulators in the US and possibly other countries are waiting for such a database to exist so that they can require all companies in their jurisdiction to only accept payments from customers whose identities can be fully tracked. So far they have not been able to require this because the technology does not exist, but Matt Mellon, Alex Waters, and Yifu Guo are apparently willing to build it for them. Now you who to thank for selling out your financial privacy.

Countermeasures

Use and create non-US alternatives:

It's virtually certain that every US-based Bitcoin company, as well as any company backed by venture capital firms, as well as any currency exchange which deals with USD is going to sign on to this plan. Bitcoin users who which to retain their privacy should avoid dealing with all of these companies, as well as create alternatives that are based outside the United States and not susceptible to political pressure.

Mobilize the international Bitcoin community:

Non-US Bitcoin users should demand that Bitcoin companies in their countries respect their privacy and refuse to participate in this or any other surveillance scheme.

Use privacy-enhancing technology:

Protocols like CoinJoin, if properly implemented and used,  can render the information in this database useless. Anyone who cares about financial privacy should ask the developers of their wallet software to implement this ASAP.

Practice good Bitcoin hygiene by never using the same address twice.

Abandon traditional businesses:

There's no point in lobbying traditional businesses based in the US and other repressive regimes to resist this kind of pressure. They are too vulnerable to pressure and are going to do whatever the regulators tell them to do.

They are, however, in no way essential to the future of Bitcoin.

The economy of the future is System D. Traditional businesses with their physical offices, corporate charters, bank accounts and licenses are holdovers of a dying paradigm. We should focus instead on creating tools to empower individuals to create censorship-resistant business models.

We will not build a bridge to the future by conforming to the past. While it's unfortunate that traditional Bitcoin businesses are trapped in a position where they must cripple the features of the currency in order to be allowed to operate, we as a community must continue to move forward even if it means leaving them behind.

It would be nice to have a section of the forum dedicated to Bitcoin-related entertainment media content instead of them being relegated to "Offtopic"

Bitcoin songs and music videos, "Hiter responds to inputs.io" videos, etc.

1 Neliso = $0.77
1 Covert = $8.02
1 Calore = $13.27
1 Worstall = $17.26
1 Korda = $34.00
1 Denninger = $89.69
1 Moore = $115.09
1 Sirer = $214.13
1 Weisenthal = $264.61


Bitcoin is currently trading at 999 Neilsos, 96 Coverts, 58 Calores, 45 Worstalls, 23 Kordas, 8.6 Denningers, 6.7 Moores, 3.6 Sirers, and 2.9 Weisenthals.

The only reliable solution is to source your coins in small values, so you don't need to split value. Yet this is not possible if the payer is splitting and paying you numerous times, e.g. an employer.

http://bitcoinism.blogspot.com/2013/07/reclaiming-financial-privacy-with-hd.html

Nails it.

http://themisescircle.org/blog/2013/08/22/the-problem-with-altcoins/

re: http://bitcoinism.blogspot.com/2013/07/reclaiming-financial-privacy-with-hd.html



Depth=1 nodes are called accounts. The GUI is focused around displaying accounts. The textual representation of an account's extended public key is called an "account number"

Account 0 is reserved for internal use, to create change addresses and individual use addresses. Requesting a single address from the client should be considered deprecated and require multiple clicks to reach in the GUI.

When a user wants to receive bitcoins, they are encouraged to make a unique account number for each entity that will send them money. They should also be told not to share the account number with anyone other than the intended sender.

A "Receive Bitcoins" function should enquire whether to receive to a new account or an existing account, and should ultimately return an account number (not an address). If the user creates a new account, she should be asked for the name of the sender who will be depositing bitcoins to that account (for address book purposes).

Accounts can be disabled, which means the client no longer scans them for incoming transactions, but can always be enabled in the future.

Services which send bitcoins to users should start asking for account numbers instead of addresses. Services which accept bitcoins from users should create a different Bitcoin account for each registered user and provide them with the account number.

Clients should save account numbers with their associated address book entry, keep track of the most recently used address in that account, and automatically use the next address in the sequence when a user requests to send a payment.

Privacy conscious users should be able to tell their client to use multiple transactions when necessary to avoid associating inputs from different addresses as described in the link above.

Any two entities which want to exchange bitcoins between themselves should only need to exchange account numbers once. From that point on, each one has the information needed to generate every destination address that they will ever require.

As a user, I install a new Bitcoin client and create a wallet. I create account numbers for Mt Gox, Coinbase, LocalBitcoins, my mining pool, etc. I then log in to the website for all those services and update my profiles with their respective account numbers. I also save the account number each one of those services gives me in my client so that I can just "Send 1 BTC to Mt Gox" from the client and the funds will automatically arrive at the correct address.

Calling extended public keys "account numbers" will map well to what users are already familiar with in terms of banking. Recipients can easily track payments from specific customers without requiring address reuse and its associated harm to financial privacy.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/smbcforum/viewforum.php?f=40

http://bitcoinmagazine.com/trust-no-us-companies-with-the-future-of-bitcoin/

I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States. –Ladar Levison

Secure email providers Lavabit and Silent Circle have taken the heroic steps of shutting down their businesses in order to preserve their integrity. Unfortunately the definition of heroism necessarily implies that their actions are heroic because they are unusual. Their actions surprised us because most companies, when faced between choosing between continued operation and honoring the trust their users have given them, toss integrity aside.

Even though Levinson was speaking in the context of communication providers, his words apply equally well to Bitcoin. A police state is no less interested in controlling the flows of money between its subjects than it is in monitoring and controlling the flows of communication.

2013 was a great and terrible year for US Bitcoin companies. Several high profile companies received significant venture backing, which is good insofar as a recognition of their success and growth potential. However this also puts them in a hostage situation.

The investors backing these companies naturally want to not only receive a return on their investment, but to have the principle itself returned. This natural desire to get their money back serves as an effective means of control over them by bureaucrats who are capable of using their legal power to make the value of those investments evaporate on a whim. Because of this risk and others, venture capitalists normally insist on gaining significant control over the companies they invest in. This means that you should expect that when the US government says, “jump”, every venture-funded Bitcoin company will reply, “how high?” Hoping they will all have the courage of Lavabit is unrealistic.

From its inception, Bitcoin was destined to come into conflict with laws and regulators in the same way P2P file sharing did, and from its inception some people respond to Bitcoin’s potential by suggesting that it be changed to make it more compatible with the systems of legal control it was designed to evade.

Some of the proposals which have been suggested in the past include: adding the capability to reverse transactions, confiscation of balances, creating a central authority that can whitelist and/or blacklist addresses, and requiring all users to register their wallets with a government agency. So far none of these have been implemented into the protocol but the pressure to do so is will only continue to increase, especially by venture-funded companies, especially in the USA.

Ultimately it will be up to the international Bitcoin community to resist these pressures. The US government has a long reach, but non-US Bitcoin users have the ability to operate beyond it if they choose to develop that capability. It would be an enormously positive sign for Bitcoin if communities in Europe, Russia, China, and Latin America started their own development initiatives.

Bits of Proof and btcd are positive steps towards making the Bitcoin protocol resistant to arbitrary change by a small group. The best possible outcome for the network is to be composed of heterogeneous nodes, consisting of independent implementations which only implement protocol changes via a standardization process which involves near-universal consensus.

The single best step the global Bitcoin community could take to ensure this outcome is to create and fund projects that implement alternate Bitcoin implementations in a manner independent of any US person, company, or organization.

Bitcoin promises to be a neutral and international monetary standard, which provides a level playing field for participants all over the world. In order to realize this potential, it must be protected from the controlling influences of any single government, even if this causes some short term difficulty for Bitcoin users and companies under the control of one of those governments. It’s time for users around the world to step up and make sure not all their Bitcoin eggs are trapped in the US basket.

Quickstart guide for encrypting Facebook chats with OTR:

http://bitcoinism.blogspot.com/2013/08/facebook-chats-can-be-private.html

I'm sitting here at a local Bitcoin meetup, listening to someone who knows absolutely nothing about Bitcoin talking about a MLM that's getting ready to start up.

If this is an indication of that particular industry getting involved it could make Pirateat40 look like a small time pickpocket.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMhEIzAmYGk

http://dailyanarchist.com/2013/07/17/bitcoin-a-bet-against-the-stupid-horse/

If you aren't already using email encryption, or if you need help convincing friends and family to use it, watch and share this video tutorial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zZ5udMzWsc

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=239905.0

Regardless of whether it is actually illlegal or not, he should operate it in a way that he's safe from being shut down under the assumption that it is illegal.

same thread:

No, I said that with no monetary controls YOU are probably funding terrorists.

I know with 100% certainty that I am funding terrorists by paying income tax but I pay anyway because if I don't those terrorists will come after me.

http://bitcoinism.blogspot.com/2013/06/i-love-smell-of-crony-capitalism-in.html

I have a lot of sympathy for the difficulties mainstream Bitcoin businesses face with regards to dealing with the legal environment surrounding their activities.  It's difficult enough to meet the needs and expectations of customers while trying to rapidly expand to meet demand, but on top of that they must contend with the reality that their investments, personal assets, and even non-incarcerated status could be threatened at any time by the arbitrary dictates of distant bureaucrats. For that reason I can not condemn those companies who seek to comply as a means of gaining the forbearance of the Sword of Damocles which stands ready to behead them.

This sympathy does not extend, however, to those people who actively seek to expand and extend this regulator power for their own enrichment. The ones who want to recreate in Bitcoin the legacy financial system's revolving doors of regulatory capture where winners and losers are chosen in smoke-filled rooms and gains are extracted from the market via fiat that could not be achieved by offering superior products and services.

In a recent interview Joseph David has, I believe, revealed himself as the latter.

If CAVirtEx wants to get a license for themselves, because unfortunately that's the only way to get the banks to deal with them in certain ways that's their choice to make, however that's not enough for Mr. David. He wants his choice to be imposed by law on his competitors too, and the justifications he gives for this position are entirely specious.

Honest and capable businesses do not need to fear unscrupulous fly-by-night competition. In fact, competition like that is one of the very best gifts you can offer such a company. Integrity and reliability are a brand differentiator. Companies that have this and are surrounded by competition that aren't, automatically distinguish themselves and rise to the top. We've already seen this in the Bitcoin community, as a core group of successful companies stand among the smoking wreckage of numerous other failed ventures. Those companies are doing just fine without regulatory barriers to entry because they have the talent and reputation to differentiate themselves in the market.

The obvious answer to the question of why Joseph David would feel the need for an aggressive regulatory environment to knock off smaller competition could be that he's not confident with his company's ability to compete on a truly level paying field, but there's also a much simpler answer - he doesn't actually want to run an exchange business. As he reveals in the interview, his ultimate goal is not to be an entrepreneur, but rather a career bureaucrat on a regulatory panel that tells entrepreneurs what they can and can't do. Determining the advisability of doing business with a company whose CEO doesn't actually want to be in the business is left as an exercise for the reader.

On the other hand the activities of regulators are ultimately good for Bitcoin, just not in the way they think. Increasingly draconian regulations and pressures to compromise Bitcoin neutrality will act as a catalyst to develop decentralized, censorship-resistant business models. Most Bitcoin ventures are organized along the standard model, with a headquarters and a bank account, and a corporate charter of some kind. The downside to this model is that such a company can be intimidated, regulated, harassed, bought out, taxed, and controlled. Loosely-coordinated swarms of individuals acting in a P2P fashion can accomplish the same tasks and are almost infinitely more robust.

Within Bitcoin we are beginning to see the same perfect storm forming that formed around filesharing technology in the early 2000s. Young, tech-savvy and passionate people are getting excited by the possibilities offered by a disruptive technology and at the same time frustrated because the beneficiaries of the status quo insist that their rules do not permit the use of this technology to its full potential. If past results are any indication attempts to force Bitcoin to conform to the old rules will cause an innovation backlash. Rendering regulations ineffective and impossible to enforce will simply be added to the list of challenges to overcome when it comes to starting a new venture.

The copyright cartel tried to stigmatize file sharing by calling it piracy, but all they got for their efforts was an entire generation of young people who embrace the title of "pirate" as a badge of honor and a technological arms race which they lost. When the legacy banking system, financial regulators, and their myopic collaborators in the Bitcoin business world try to make Bitcoin color within the lines they will create the incentive to gamify money laundering.

When that happens, all I'll have to say is: let the games begin.

I have a screen capture video which shows a person setting up and using email encryption.

I have an audio file that consists of another person narrating a script that describes what is going on.

The two do not perfectly match up. In order to produce a completed video with sound, it will be necessary to insert pauses in the audio stream, and to insert and remove still frames in the video stream.

The final video will be somewhere between 13-15 minutes long when complete.

If you can help with this contact me with your quote via PM.

I'm looking to hire a CPA who can practise in Texas for an upcoming project. Anyone who is interested is invited to contact me via PM.