Yeah, this is currently a problem in the USA. Anyone can call themselves a "software engineer". Even to legally cut hair one has to obtain a proper "cosmetologist license" and show proficiency in disinfecting and delousing his tools of trade.

You should have taken at least basic accounting class before trying to sling the accounting software. Any self respecting professional will ask you questions about how you tested it. I'm thinking that you will have answers of the type: "positive energy", "only love" & "chain reorganizations will never happen, right guys?" This is very sad but common situation in the bitcoin millieu: a programmer wants to design financial software but is proud of not knowing how to do proper accounting.

I think the liability laws in the USA are generally a problem. But in your particular case they will be just what required to teach you how to design and test software for accounting.

Take a few accounting classes before you write the software. It will be cheaper for you overall.

The fraud risk is because bitcoind(.exe) doesn't produce a proper audit trail.

Various gullible or crafty code monkeys peddle modified bitcoin programs that tamper with the basic functionality of the protocol (most often related to the chain reorganization).

I'm actually very thankfull that Gavin Andresen strenously defends the code and doesn't accept the patches that would interfere with the chain reorg logic. It allows any professional to quickly dismiss idiots and crooks: just ask how their software handles chain reorganization and how they tested it.

It does really matter whether the particular bitcoin-related software was designed by an idiot or a crook. The observable end result will be the same: the smart people wont buy it.

This is just wishfull thinking. The clasic counter-example is the failed "web currency" beenz, which was used almost exclusively by huge companies. Stability is one thing. The other is fraud-resistance. The big businesses actually have money and skill to audit the source code.

You can scam a small businessman into believing that the bitcoin doesn't allow chargeback. Big businessman will hire somebody to read the code and will ask pointed questions like: what is this code doing erasing transactions and removing money from my wallet?

Big businessman also knows that a self-deluded enthusiast is completely indistinguishable from a persuasive and skilled scammer.

I'm not sure if you are joking or never maintained auditable accounts for an enterprise.

Slips of paper in the register are for mom&pops and to protect against petty crime. To be considered serious you need to produce an audit trail on the accounting server in conformance with the GAAP. Everything else will be dismissed as too prone to the white-collar crime.

Dude, you are just digging yourself deeper and deeper into your hole.

This is why people like MtGox (and many others) ask for the copy of the utility bill. It allows quick verification of the full ZIP code (5+4+2+1) and find if it is consistent with the bar code and the postal databases.

If this whole Trade-Btc.com wasn't a fiction it would have received at least one piece of mail and its owner would be able to simply type its full postal code with delivery point and checksum.

Everyone in that building needs to supply the suite number to receive mail. Even if they rent whole floor. This is a high turnover building with rapidly changing clientele using short term leases on pre-furnished offices. From my quick look about 1/4 to 1/3 addresses in that building are marked as "Vacant" or "No Delivery". The +4 extension given (0076) was not used to deliver any mail (at least this year) and is currently marked as "Invalid". The ZIP code supplied with the GoDaddy (90025) registration is incorrect too: it is rather poor residential area of West Los Angeles primary occupied by transients with comparatively few long term residents. The corrected ZIP code (90067) is a very upscale address in Century City overlooking Beverly Hills, ideal for an office requiring personal contact and close to a wide pool of temporary workers living nearby.

I'm actually curious if there's anyone here willing to send money to "Vince from IT" who doesn't know the correct postal address for his own office, but he's sure that he works on the 13 floor. Maybe this will be your "Lucky 13"?

Again, please post the suite # and at least the next 4 digits (after first five) of the USPS zip code.

Not really.

10100 santa monica blvd.
Los Angles, California 90025
United States

Please post the suite number and zip+4. We'll check if you are renting more than the mailbox in that skyscraper.

It is a page from the playbook of pump&dump-ers. Do anything to move the inventory.

Bitcoin itself is not a stock, but some synthetic security. But the promotional efforts around it are straight from the "caveat emptor" section of the OTC Markets Group (if you allow me a little bit of USA-centrism).

http://www.otcmarkets.com/otc-101/otc-market-tiers

I just love their icon for the "caveat emptor" section of the "pink sheets":

It would need to work like the current "certificate storage" in the web browsers. You would put the "public key" for the exchange that holds your coins into your client. If they get hacked you could read about it in the news and remove the key manually, without having to wait for the developer to change anything.

The main obstracle is that this would be a rather complex piece of software, with nontrivial effort required to develop it. But I think this will need to be developed sooner or later, probably as an offshot of libbitcoin.

The MtGox commission accounting is sufficiently non-transparent that it is possible that the "side effect" is a "main goal" of "churn". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churning_%28stock_trade%29

Years ago, when day-trading first become popular, the special brokerage firms catering to day traders had employed dedicated people to induce the traders to keep transacting and generate commissions for the house. Maybe the observed "trade bot" behaviour is just a computer implementation of such strategy?

Risk vs. reward analysis would suggest that "trickle it down" may be the best strategy. It really worked well on the human day traders working out of the dedicated day-trading floors. There's added safety that it is done in distributed fashion over the Internet, so a repeat of the spree-killing from Atlanta is unlikely.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_O._Barton

This quote is worth preserving. There is a number of people on this forum who claim that bitcoin as-it-is-right-now is ready to maintain certifiable accounts for businesses. Who will be right?

You should post this in your FAQ. Many people are wondering whats wrong with your clock. If you happen to live in a country with an adversarial legal system, you will be invited to the court to explain this to the judge and the jury why the timestamps on your blocks are messing up the accounting ledgers of other people.
Very wise statement. Bitcoin is like amber, the bugs inside are to be admired for their beauty as long as possible.

All of them, and probably something else. Its just not yet ripe for prosecution. The prosecution can start building the case and gathering the evidence once there's a first signature under the sacramental "I certify under the penalty of perjury that the foregoing financial statements are true and correct".

Until then the Gavin Anderson's way is still available: close the business before a first audit and return all solicited funds. This is a supreme defense.

By the way: the monopoly money is clearly marked as such in a big type. Some people may think that the tiny-type pale grey on white discalimer will protect them. I'm thinking it wont.

John, lets be realistic. Even in the wildest and wettest dreams nobody related to GLBSE can talk about $80 million USD. The current situation is that even if they deal cash they would have sneaked through under the provisions of Omnibus Paperwork Reduction Act. The sums are so low, so few people involved, the promotion activities so marginal, that they could successfully defend themselves as an entertainment venue dealing with game tokens.

I'm fully with you on the issue that many people here on this forum have an intent to deceive, defraud or otherwise disobey the law. GLBSE is one of the best examples. But the people who raised bitcoins (not legal tender money) in exchange for unregistered securities are not going to get prosecuted for felony. Their best defense will be just to return the bitcoin investments as promised.

So lets keep a clear distinction between the GLBSE stakeholders like Nefario on one side and small time gamblers that use GLBSE sevices on the other side. Mens rea still has an important legal meaning in the USA.

Lolcust, I doesn't matter whether it will be on the visible or on the dark side of the Moon. Just announce that your 14 millions of premined coins are going for the space program development. It will sound more fun than the pedestrian faucet or some such. Maybe then they will let you keep your premine?

Per aspera ad astra!

Support the free trade on Earth by banking on the Moon!

The whole Bielarus will be proud of you.

John is posing important questions. The relevant legislation was ammended so many times that it is hard to understand.

Two quick exceptions off the top of my head:

http://www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/invclub.htm

http://www.sec.gov/answers/accred.htm

There is quite a number of cases that were judged in favor of defendants. But the primary advice was, if I remember correctly, "Don't try to defend yourself pro-se, hire a lawyer".

I'm not Lupus_Youndeboy nor do I agree with him. But to successfully prosecute for money laundering doesn't require any official recognition of the "token". Those prosecutions do take time to build up the case and the evidence.

Years ago the favorite "token" for money laundering were the prepaid long-distance telephone calling cards. When the prosecutions started they had several years of invoices worth high six figure sums and boxes full of VHS surveilance tapes. Some really small-time prepaid calling card dealers were prosecuted while some big-time distributors got off scott-free. For the first ones this was a major source of income, for the later it was just a few percent of the total.

I don't think that authorities in any country would waste time prosecuting joke money laundry web sites or illegal gambling dens with the total turnover in three figures.

Remember that the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition is adversarial, unlike most of the European ones which are inquisitorial.

Personally, I would think that for your coins the best long term plan is to plan setting up your laundries either on the orbit or on the visible side of the moon.

I think it is still risky. The risk would not be in out-of-order blocks but blocks-with-the-same-timestamps and a subsequent zerodivide or blocks-with-almost-the-same-timestamps and total numerical loss of accuracy.

Yeah, I was thinking about too. My copy of MATLAB is on an SGI O2 that is in the storage. I would not be able to deal with this yet. If I find some backups on a non-IRIX disk I'll post.

Let me say what I said using a different terminology. The current regulator approximates a PI using a 2016-tap low-pass FIR filter with a sampe-and-hold (0-th order extrapolator) doing 2016 times subsampling of the output from the FIR.
Those are the famous last words. There were the days when average student of engineering would be splashed with an ink from the paper-tape analog data logger after cranking up the D term during his lab work. Nowadays I don't know how people learn the basics of system stability.

ArtForz had shown on one of the alternate chains both persistent oscillation and lack of assymptotic stability when people implement the diff-operator or some non-linear and/or time-varying approximations to a differentiator.

I know of the only one thing that could be safely done without fixing the problem of acausality or non-monotonicity of the time stamps.
From this I can see that it is possible to synthesize an absolutely stable 5-octave multirate filter bank that would work in front of a 63-times subsampler. There are two problems
for which I don't know the answer:
1) difficulty uses some custom floating point format with very low precision that may cause limit-cycle oscillations in a theorethically stable filter. If the format uses correct rounding then this wouldn't matter.
2) making changes to the difficulty 32 times more often would increase the probability of network splitting into disjoint block-chains, but I don't know how to estimate that.