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Anyone taking odds the Lee brothers figured out how to get money into China, and bitcoins out?
Not likely to be hard given their situation. Grats to them. I wish them every success if so.
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In what country is it illegal to distribute privately minted precious metals containing writings?
Most of them. In what country it isn't? Link a law? Counterfeiting is illegal, but no one is contemplating doing that. |
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We all know the US and the so called "Bitcoin Foundation" is out of control.
You and some people out there believe that. I and also a lot of people on this board don't think like that. So , why are you talking like you're our representative? I won't even bother to argue with the rest of the "facts" you're mentioning. Additional booster organizations could be very beneficial, but this one seems a non-starter. Why support one that starts by presuming to speak for those who have not lent their voice to them? Why support one that based part of their agenda tearing apart another. The community is still too small and too fragile for such infighting nonsense? Build something. |
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...
It'd be nice if at some point FinCEN moved from a mechanical application of the rules to a more targeted use of their time: it seems very unlikely to me that a Mexican drug cartel is buying up physical Bitcoins, so all they're achieving here is shutting down an American entrepreneur. I know there are people at the Foundation (like Jon and Patrick) who would like to help Mike and are working on it.
The low hanging fruit here might be to try to figure out how NOT lend assistance to frauds and scams (e.g., Inputs.io) by allowing them to use the Bitcoin Foundation as a seal of approval as they rope in suckers. Self regulation? How would that work mechanically? Help pick the fruit. |
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GREAT speech. Antreas is the MAN!  The need to down-step the technology for usability in places with poor infrastructure is one of our incentives for the specie project. He is involved in some good stuff, not just talk, action. The other 6.5 billion... |
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This is interesting also because of the communal public ledger, where everyone just knows who owns which Rai, even the one at the bottom of the river. Money as memory. |
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So now if I make a physical cookie dough coin I am a money transmitter?
if it has a private key that gives access to virtual currency in or on it perhaps using chocolate chips for encoding then yes you are a money transmitter. How do you know? The definitions seem vague and ill defined and without effective rationale. I get that we don't want to be helping criminals, but most people aren't criminals and I'm not a policeman, just normal business in low volume and personal level. Just what level of business needs all taxpayers to pay for monitoring and stored in the central database to prevent the purported threats? please get a sense of humor... Cookies cant be laundering money, they are crumby at it. and besides, I spent all my dough when the chips were down. (see, my humor isn't really better than taking it seriously) |
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Funny you should say that given you're the one mostly looking at BtcChina and claiming all the other exchanges have to adapt to their low price.
There cannot remain such discrepancies in price. Since btcchina cannot follow price on other exchanger. Chinese and their arbers will arb to take the gift of an insta profit. Price will level out, with max 5% difference, to the downside on other exchange and upside on btcchina. So around 8-10% less in the coming days on stamp irrespective of coming price fluctuations. I'm still having a hard time figuring out how arbitrage is happening. The price difference would necessitate people looking for ways to do it, but how? Do you mean Chinese traders dumping on western exchanges? Can they get their fiat? Multinational companies exist. |
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Although it isn't quite wilderness, it is pretty remote. So there are more bunnies than the coyotes can possibly eat, as well as lots of birds including hawks, variety of reptiles, occasional badger or other critter.
We've kept peocock and guinnea hen at the ranch but it is difficult to keep them protected, the alpaca are pretty good at protection and mix well with birds so that may be in the future again.
The alpaca will eat from your hand and are very friendly. Some of them were formerly in petting zoos. They all have their own personality though, each one is different, some are more shy, others not at all.
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I think that is already the consensus - peer to peer transactions between two entities directly do not involve money transmission. As far as I know that's not even being debated. The problems start when there's a third party sitting in the middle who (temporarily) gains control of your money and takes it as a deposit/could run off with it. In a perfectly decentralized world such entities would not exist at all, of course in reality our money starts out in banks so you need to use an exchange to get it out of there. This is an issue because money transmitter laws (in the USA) work on two levels; the federal level via FinCEN, where registration requirements are not that hard (fill out a single online form) and the compliance requirements are basically to keep records, ID your customers and tip off the government when you see suspicious transactions. Even very small companies can manage that. The problems start at the state level, which is actually justified on the grounds of consumer protection rather than fighting crime - the idea is that if you move money around on the behalf of other people, you might be tempted to steal it, gamble with it, lose it through incompetence, whatever. Hence all the paperwork showing you the CEO's have never been convicted of a crime before, taking fingerprints, posting bonds and so on. Whether these rules actually in balance do help consumers is rather debatable - it ignores the cost of all the killed startups that could have innovated, but you can see how politicians arrive at such rules, especially after scandals in which money transmitters collapse (search Greg Gonzales). Fortunately for purely P2P payments in Bitcoin there is no risk of the money going missing, so the only consumer protection issue becomes what if you buy something and it's not properly delivered, which can/will be addressed by dispute mediation/multisig contracts in the protocol. We did a presentation at the FTC on this topic recently. Codifying that consensus would then not be too onerous. Focusing on the justifiable constraints of regulatory activities will be a win. In contemplation of FinCEN's request vs Casascius. It is perhaps a fine line. It is MTB because Caldwell arguably could still have the private key, and there is not a mechanism for him to provably not have it? Thus the requests for trustworthiness? |
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I wish someone would get serious about my suggestion.
Note no need to embed a battery, supply power to the embedded circuit via radio.
Not everyone needs to verify each coin, because the private key is unspendable.
We've been "serious about your suggestion" long before you posted it.  The engineering and social challenges are not insignificant. There are finite bitcoin. To accomplish this you either need perfect durability (unfeasible) or the ability to duplicate while maintaining uniqueness (so that a worn/destroyed piece can be recreated). Otherwise there is loss resulting in unnecessary deflation. There are also social consequences to accomplishing that with various solutions in consideration. Some ideas floated among the bitcoin specie team: Unspendable private keys could expire (and need to be recreated prior to expiry), for a functional perfect durability. Un-recreated private keys could be added to extend block rewards (in an alt-coin). The mechanism for this could be a block chain registry of physical-bitcoin unspendable private keys (think namecoin). |
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There is no thread yet and you're right that Sen Carper has submitted questions to the Foundation as followup to the Senate hearings. AFAIK the answers haven't been written yet, the deadline is end of Jan, iirc.
At some point when the followup answers are submitted, I hope they will be public (can't think of a reason why not).
Thank you for this response. Carper seems reasonable on the matter and likened it to internet early days in an interview aired this morning (when fear mongers were chanting child porn over and over). He pointed out that while they certainly worked against such things, the internet has brought much more benefit than harm due to a reasoned policy debate. If the pencils have been sharpened even further since the response to the California nonsense was drafted, it promises to be very good reading. Curiosity is peaked. The internet was a tax-free zone in the US for quite a while. That model worked strongly to US advantage and this point may resonate with Carper. If I were to offer anything further to that it would be to as strongly suggest as possible that since every transaction (not within an off-chain service provider) is public and unencrypted, there should be no need for money-transmitter registration so long as all transactions by a potential registrant are done on the public block chain. |
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Yes, just because its JPM, and they are filing patents to prevent others from doing what they think they can do, does this mean that what they were crafting was bad technology.
Or just in hands that aren't ours.
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Mike really should be ashamed of himself
Why? For raising a question for discussion? As a Bitcoin Foundation outsider, I have little insight into the machinations there, but I suspect that there are BF folks watching this thread. As part of the charter of reaching out to the broader community, I'd be curious as to whether and what form the follow up to the Senate hearings are taking. Senator Tom Carper is still looking for input from his staffers. What has been drafted by the BF for their consumption. We have the US Senate looking for input on whether and how to regulate, what are we giving them? Is there a thread on this that I've missed? |
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Latest poll just shows we like prime numbers.
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LOL'd at foreign hackers. We all know that there aren't any in China, and that everyone there is happy with their government's decisions. My heart goes out to the good people born there. Today is not their easiest day, and there are likely more days like this to come. |
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Don't have much to add here, other than that he did everything that he said he would do with respect to myself.
He did send me a PM shortly before disappearing asking if I wanted to order something, but I was still contemplating doing something with that when all of this happened. I feel badly for all those that relied on reputation he built for his early good performance.
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If tomorrow it is declared illegal, then you stop. Up until that point you were doing nothing illegal.
Really? FBI quote. Article I, section 8, clause 5 of the United States Constitution delegates to Congress the power to coin money and to regulate the value thereof. This power was delegated to Congress in order to establish and preserve a uniform standard of value and to insure a singular monetary system for all purchases and debts in the United States, public and private. Along with the power to coin money, Congress has the concurrent power to restrain the circulation of money which is not issued under its own authority in order to protect and preserve the constitutional currency for the benefit of all citizens of the nation. It is a violation of federal law for individuals, such as von NotHaus, or organizations, such as NORFED, to create private coin or currency systems to compete with the official coinage and currency of the United States. “Attempts to undermine the legitimate currency of this country are simply a unique form of domestic terrorism,” U.S. Attorney Tompkins said in announcing the verdict. “While these forms of anti-government activities do not involve violence, they are every bit as insidious and represent a clear and present danger to the economic stability of this country,” she added. “We are determined to meet these threats through infiltration, disruption, and dismantling of organizations which seek to challenge the legitimacy of our democratic form of government.”
You can't even compare that to bitcoin was found guilty by a jury in Statesville, North Carolina, of making coins resembling and similar to United States coins; of issuing, passing, selling, and possessing Liberty Dollar coins; of issuing and passing Liberty Dollar coins intended for use as current money;
He was minting his own money, yes, but he was making coins that resembled us currency. You are an idiot to try and compare the two. Please tell me how bitcoin resembles any us currency available today? They didn't resemble US currency in any meaningful way. The jury was simply wrong and the resulting injustice will ultimately be rectified. That case is not settled law anyway, it has yet to be concluded, and hasn't gone to appeal yet either. The FBI didn't prove their case, there was never any intent to counterfeit (intent is a necessary element of the crime). If you ever listened to von Nothaus, just about every statement he ever made about them was to distinguish them from US currency and say how they were different (and as he'd aver, better). |
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Wow, you actually believe the US has the gold?
no, he said they will have to purchase the physical But he seems to focus on transportation and also seems to think this will happen fast. "Fast"? Well, before 7 years is up, if you call that fast. It is in the bullion bank's interest to drive the price down as quickly as they can to get it done, but the faster they go the more expensive it will be. Logistically, it could be done in a week if they had the gold at hand.The point is I dont know when. You don't know, and we shouldn't expect to be told ahead of delivery. Someone will know, but that isn't us. I expect them to take much more than 7 years (if they ever return it at all). They will just extend the paid arrangement with Germany, who know what time it is as well. I suspect that the crisis of confidence such action would create would be more expensive than the gold itself (and also make the gold more expensive). |
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It is all just luck, remember. Nobody can predict the future.  Too modest. Nicely played. |
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