She doesn't "have to" do anything she doesn't wish to. If she thinks the costs outweigh the benefits, she need not get pregnant or she need not carry the pregnancy to term. However, women have the option of conceiving if they think the benefits outweigh the costs, a choice men don't have.

The idea that this is somehow a disadvantage to women is only sensible if you see women as slaves to their biology who are powerless to make sensible choices. I utterly reject that premise.

I apologize for the late reply to this post, and I realize some of these issues are out of date at this point. I just noticed it, and I think it's worth replying to because the relationship GLBSE has with asset owners is not like anything ordinary stock exchanges have, and this difference seems to keep getting forgotten:

That's because they have no continuing agreement with the owner of those assets. GLBSE does.

Again, that can't work with stocks listed on GLBSE because the issuer has no way to tell who owns the stock, no way to pay dividends, and so on. Also, it can't work because there is no alternative to GLBSE and many of these securities simply can't work without an exchange to trade on. Of course, that's not GLBSE's fault or responsibility, but it is something GLBSE is obligated to take into account when it decides to delist an asset -- you can't harm people that reasonably relied on you, and to whom you have a continuing obligation, arbitrarily.

Which he may have done. We don't know. Given that there's no way issuers can redeem the assets through actions we can attribute to Nefario, there is no reason to give him the benefit of the doubt  here. The people who bought stocks through GLBSE relied on GLBSE to protect their ownership of the assets and it is GLBSE's default that has totally cut them off from that interest. Nobody can recover that interest without at least GLBSE's assistance.

Right, but that reasoning is not applicable to GLBSE because asset owners have a continuing relationship with GLBSE to track their ownership interest and facilitate buybacks, handle dividends, and so on. And, so far as we know, this wasn't a delisting for cause. Also, GBLSE could have delisted the asset in a way that protect its customers' ownership interest but chose not to for no reason. Customers had every right to rely on GLBSE to preserve their ownership interest and it appears Nefario didn't even consider this at all. To so totally disregard a contractual obligation is shocking. He had to have known this would seriously harm his customers.

And it harmed GLBSE's customers -- customers who reasonably relied on GLBSE to protect their ownership interest. Due directly to this action, those people have currently 100% lost the value of that ownership interest -- an interest they can only get back if GLBSE acts.

A security.

It doesn't matter.

Nope. A barter exchange is a type of market. You just need something that has a value to be exchanged.

I agree with the first part and the last part but not the middle part. The general consensus seems to be that legally Bitcoin is more like a volatile commodity than money -- something with an established, but unstable, market value.

That's pure craziness. I think you are confusing what you imagine an ideal world might be like and the world we actually live in. You can't pay your taxes in nuclear weapons or sheep. Does that mean the government has no right to restrict a trade of nuclear weapons for sheep?

We are indeed living in strange times.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy

Right, but that wasn't the deal. That was something Nefario unilaterally imposed on you for no reason that he has explained.

Yes, exactly. The point of the scammer tag is not to indicate proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Nor is it intended to be a final resolution. It's very different from a criminal conviction.

Let me try an example: Someone asks to borrow your car to go buy groceries. They never come back with your car. Now, it's not at all clear that they committed a crime. Maybe they had an accident and are in the hospital. Maybe the car got stolen through no fault of theirs. Who knows. But others need to be warned not to trust this person with their car, at least not until we find out what happened to your car.

That's what a scammer tag does. A scammer tag is a warning that indicates failure to make good on an agreement without known justification. It can be removed or restored as changing information warrants. It's not at all analogous to a criminal conviction. It's more like a civil finding that there are very good reasons not to trust the person who bears the tag.

I guess I'm not sure what you mean by "digital asset". For example, a Bitcoin is a digital asset, I would think. But it doesn't represent an interest in something else.

It doesn't represent an interest in something else though, at least not so far as I can tell. In any event, there isn't really such a thing as a "right to use" under US law.

This wasn't about possession, but it was about issuing and creating a market. You don't need any sort of blessing to use anything. Nobody was talking about use.

If it meets the legal definition. Lawyers have told me that if it represents an interest in something else and is easily traded, it would generally be considered a security.


The law is both clear and broad. Courts have interpreted the law to cover pretty much anything that represents ownership of a right that can be traded.


Courts have interpreted this list as showing the intent to cover as broad a scope as possible and absolutely will not limit the definition to just the listed examples.

The law is not what you think it should be.

This is a counterproductive and self-destructive strategy. Look at the Internet -- the technology that has made it almost impossible for even the world's most repressive governments to stop their citizens from reading Western media and blogging about their government's abuses. It wasn't built by people who ignored the regulatory framework. It was built by people who found ways to work within it, worked to hold regulation at bay, and even change it where necessary.

At the very least, every GBLSE customer who relied on him to protect their ownership interest in their assets. At the moment, we have no verifiable information explaining why GLBSE was shut down, but it does appear to have been done on Nefario's orders. GBLSE has the only ownership records for GLBSE-listed assets.

(It's entirely possible this was no scam and Nefario's actions were compelled by others. And it's possible he will make good to the extent possible and is really under duress. But it's also possible this was a huge scam all along and many of the assets were fake, owned by Nefario secretly, and Nefario orchestrated the whole thing to walk away with thousands of bitcoins. We don't know, and we shouldn't speculate. But we can't wait forever to act either.)

For the record, Nefario getting a scammer tag was *never* the result I wanted. That really doesn't help anybody. It's the sad result of Nefario's inability, chosen or compelled, to remain silent while others are relying on him to hold up his end of various bargains.

The regulation comes from issuing and trading securities. It has nothing to do with what the securities are exchanged *for*.

To be rewarded for your willingness to wait.

Because in exchange you are rewarded if you need the money later than someone else.

How do you figure?

But that won't reward you for withdrawing later, which is the whole point of this scheme.

Why would you owe the exchange anything?

Huh? In what sense does an exchange have to "cover" trades?

Try it and see how it does in the market. I think non-speculators wouldn't like to trade on such an exchange nearly as much, and speculators don't want to do business with just each other. But maybe I'm wrong.

That is absolutely not true. Otherwise, an unlicensed contractor could make a contract to do some work for you, take your money, and then say, "Sorry, I'm unlicensed. I can't legally do the work."

Of course, but it's always legal to pay damages. You're certainly right that you couldn't force the contractor in my example to do the work. But you can certainly get your money back alone with any other damages, including punitive damages.

That's pure speculation at this point, at least so far as I know. If the contractor in my example says, "Sorry, the contracting board says I'm not licensed to do the work. Bye.", do you just take his word for it and let him off the hook for any damages you suffered? Asset owners have suffered damages because they relied on GLBSE.

It's just that the community is immature. It's the same reason the "wild west" was once wild.

Sure, imposing a central authority would be one way to tackle the fraud. But it's far from clear that it's the only way.

Although I wouldn't say I'm convinced beyond a reasonable doubt, it certainly appears (at least to me) more likely than not that Nefario delisted all of Goat's assets just to get back at Goat for an unrelated issue and defrauded GLBSE customers that owned those assets by completely disregarding his obligation to protect the value of their ownership interests in those assets. There is no way he could not have known that the delisting would reduce the value of those assets.

Atlas hates the dev team because they're not getting enough done and they're not responsive enough to the community's priorities. That's why he opposes their effort to get more development resources and initiate a better process to assess the community's priorities.

His only alternative is to disclaim debt that he might be able to pay back. However, I definitely agree that more communication would be better. It's entirely possible he's actually trying to assume a larger share of the burden for the bad loans than is fair. But if he wants to convince people of that, he needs to make a clear and complete case. (Because it's also very easy to say "80% of my loans went bad, and I'll split that cost with my investors" when only 15% of the loans went bad to basically steal from your investors.) Transparency helps credibility, but if you're lying, you take the risk you'll get caught in the lie.

However, if he's going to ask his investors take the all or most of the burden for a bad loan, I believe they have the right to know who defaulted. And if those who defaulted want to claim that he's lying, they should be given that opportunity so the investors can assess whether they're actually being treated fairly.

It doesn't seem that unusual that the same physiological conditions would cause the same hallucinations. However, one very common factor in the descriptions of near death experiences is that the people who have them say they are unable to describe them. So this makes the commonality of the rest of the description suspect. They're often of the form, "I can't really describe it but it was kind of like ..." and then you get a textbook description. They also seem very similar to descriptions from people who took LSD.

When the dev team starts rejecting patches that improve this problem, I'll join your complaint. When you have an all-volunteer project, it's pretty hard to set priorities.

It can be very hard to tell the difference. It depends how much of the payback deficit is caused by genuine investment and operating losses. His investors had substantially the same information he did, so it's not unreasonable for them to bear the losses. That is, after all, the purpose of investors. (And I think we all understand that the line between a loan and an investment is thoroughly blurred at interest rates this high. It was clear he was loaning the funds out and clear that there's always a risk of bad loans.)

The problem is that even if you accept this reasoning, you still have Nefario screwing over all those who hold Goat's assets. In fact, there's no evidence Nefario considered any of the obvious harm the sudden delisting would do to GLBSE's customers. And as of yet, we have no explanation for why such a drastic action was even advisable, much less necessary.

Even with the best of imaginable outcomes, you'd have to expect the assets to lose a significant fraction of their value and every asset holder to be inconvenienced by having to track the asset in some system other than the one they were already using. And frankly, it looks like Nefario either didn't think about it or just didn't care. He just wanted to get Goat.

Yes, other people did some things they possibly shouldn't have done. But nothing I can see compares to GLBSE's wholesale abandonment of their customers without explanation.