Another one.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5085826.0

Horseshit.  If the rule about low quality posts was being fully enforced, most of the topics on the front page would be deleted because they're just worthless merit bait and every low quality thread seems to spawn ten more saying exactly the same thing on the same issue, making the forum virtually useless for actual discussion.

Give some examples of high quality "negative" posts which have been deleted if you want to prove that this is happening and get people to join you in opposing it.

Another one, with a different username.  If nothing else, it breaks the plagiarism rule.  It's C&Ped right down to the spelling error.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5085758.0

Did you really need to start a new thread for this?  You could have just reported the posts in question if you believed they broke the rules and/or put the poster concerned on ignore.

Also, you should have linked to the posts in question.  A more descriptive thread title would have helped, too.

While "lurk more" sounds archaic in 2018, it's obvious that you're not aware of the forum's culture of free speech or you wouldn't be appealing to authority because someone hurt your feelings.

Whether it's your intention to farm merits by posting in Meta or not, Meta does seem to be full of unnecessary, low quality threads at the moment.  "Why is this thread even here" is not an unreasonable question to ask of most of them.  Many are repetitious and add nothing of value.  They just clutter Meta and it does appear to observers that they've been started in the hope of the OP being "noticed".

Your particular thread opened with an OP which made a declaration about the "problem" of members selling accounts without providing any evidence whatsoever that it *is* a problem, then you got into slapfights with a couple of posters who expressed the opinion that your thread had no value and just contributed to the problem of low quality content.

We don't "have to" teach you at all.  Whether people feel it's worth putting energy into newbies or not is an entirely personal decision.

There doesn't "have to" be equality in the forum.  It might be what you'd prefer.  It might be what most people would prefer, but this isn't a democracy and neither your preferences nor mine forge the rules.

Moderators do not "have to" ban anyone.  Your insistence that they do, when added to your other "have to"s, just comes across as an overdeveloped sense of entitlement.

The one suggestion I've seen which might improve things is banning junior accounts from participating in earning campaigns.

Given the appalling quality of many of the posts in Discussion, bringing back newbie jail but with a merit requirement to get out of it mighn't be a bad idea, either.

What you're proposing is an insanely restrictive policy which is aimed at protecting the ability of people to earn money from the forum.  You're essentially prioritising what should be a nice side benefit of the forum over its primary function.

If anything, I think it creates another problem.  It will discourage people who just want to use the forum from using the forum, and that's not the intention behind the merit system.  You don't want to introduce even more rules or metrics which discourage people from using and contributing to the forum as a community.  That will just mean that even more of the remaining members will be here purely to earn money from the forum and wherever you set the bar they will make the bare minimum effort necessary to reach it.

You're assuming that everyone has static IPs, for a start.  Many people don't and therefore have no control over what their current and future IPs will be. 

You're also assuming that people log into the internet from only a few places, when the reality is that a lot of people are connecting from multiple different places on any given day, all of which have different IPs.  It's not unusual for someone to connect to the net from home, work, their phone, various sources of free wifi, and the homes of friends or family all in one day, and even more different locations if their work takes them to different places or they're travelling.

I don't think that was the entirety of the scam.  I suspect that at least part of the scam - and perhaps the most important part - was to get Bitcoin from others on the pretext of backing Denariuz.  We've seen how easily "investors" can be convinced to part with their Bitcoin in the past.  Saying you received $54 million in credits from the ATO lends an air of legitimacy, as does saying you're going to launch with a pool of 100,000 BTC but it's all self-referential stuff with the smell of smoke and mirrors.

This isn't going to be a fast investigation, but it will be interesting to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

I'd take any claims by Wright, including the claim that he contributed $23 million in Bitcoin to Hotwire, with a grain of salt until such time as his financial dealings have been verified by forensic accountants.

It looks like there was tax fraud prior to that as well.  

Hotwire was only incorporated in June 2013 and the ATO withheld a $3 million GST refund for the September 2013 quarter, which is what precipitated the insolvency of Hotwire.  So in their first quarter of operation they submitted GST claims which the ATO did not find legitimate.  The ATO also with-held R&D credits of $9.6 million for Hotwire.  

De Morgan is another Wright company and the one which is under investigation for the $54 million R&D rebate claim.  Apart from any tax fraud issues arising from this investigation, there are also potential securities fraud issues.  It's a public company and that creates its own legal issues.

It's probably worth pointing out that the AFP is our federal police.  They both investigate in their own right and provide support to government departments in investigating high value or novel crimes which break federal laws.  They also assist the state police forces where appropriate.  

It's beyond ridiculous to believe that ordinary people can understand Bitcoin but federal agencies whose job it is to investigate financial crimes cannot.  While the use of Bitcoin in this particular situation is novel, it's not like it hasn't featured in other investigations in the past - especially those related to Silk Road.  The potential for it to be used for money laundering/terrorism financing has been acknowledged by federal agencies for a long time.  They get how it works and they have both the resources and the authority to access data which no-one else can.  These guys investigate complex financial crimes all the time.

I also think you're over-estimating the value of the "Bitcoin community" in investigations such as this one.  The Bitcoin community has been largely unaware of this guy and he certainly wasn't on their "is this guy Satoshi" radar before any more than Ross Ulbricht was on their radar prior to the Silk Road busts.  The community at large would not be aware if he's managed to acquire $30 million in Bitcoin in ways which aren't recorded in the blockchain.  The individuals who would have knowledge of such transactions would have their own compelling motives for remaining silent.

I suspect it was the investigation into him which led to the media's interest, either directly or indirectly.

It's obviously possible that the raid was brought forward if the authorities believe that the media attention gave Wright a bigger motive to have someone destroy evidence at his home than the tax investigation alone warranted.  Tax evasion/tax fraud and money laundering often go hand in hand, after all.   

The images of the raid don't suggest a whole lot of urgency, though, and neither the ATO nor the administrator stopped Wright from leaving Australia so I guess we'll just have to wait to learn exactly what the authorities knew about Wright and when, whether or not he turns out to have been associated with Bitcoin's early development.

He's asking for information from the article's author.  As a relative might do if they thought that evidence of their son having been involved in the development Bitcoin might give them access to large amounts of money. 

The raid was related to an ongoing tax matter.  I have no idea why you're characterising it as "the feds" wanting him because he's the Bitcoin creator.

The FBI has nothing to do with this.  This involved the ATO, the AFP, and will probably also entail an AUSTRAC investigation.

Plenty of people get invited to conferences on the basis of self-promotion.  Do you really think conference organisers are going to check out whether he holds the degrees he claims to have been awarded, let alone whether he works with one of the biggest privately owned super-computers (even if he does, his role may be insignificant)?

That doesn't mean he's not Satoshi.  People can start out wanting to remain anonymous and later want credit and adulation (see Silk Road), but almost everything in the Wired article is self-referential so Wright could have claimed pretty much anything he wanted to conference organisers.  Seriously, look at the scams which have been perpetrated in the Bitcoin sphere in the past on the basis of nothing more than self-promotion.  People want to believe.

So?  Paul Hogan has lived in the US forever but there was still a high profile court action against him by the ATO which lasted for years.

The UK isn't a barrier to either administrative or criminal action against Wright, and he clearly still has assets in Australia.  The UK will extradite, and if Wright is on an Australian passport he's kind of screwed because it can be easily frozen in the event of insolvency and/or criminal charges.

The ATO has considerable coercive powers, as does AUSTRAC.

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/revealed-the-ato-hit-suspected-bitcoin-creator-craig-steven-wrights-company-with-a-1-7-million-penalty-2015-12

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/the-australian-who-may-have-invented-bitcoin-claimed-to-have-landed-54m-in-taxpayer-funded-rebates-2015-12

Tax fraud on the scale alleged is going to court.  There are no two ways about that.

Through those proceedings, a lot more information about Wright will eventually become public.  Typically, though, such proceedings take years.

Whether or not Wright is Satoshi is irrelevant to the tax case but the tax case may ultimately reveal the answer to whether or nor Wright was involved in the early development of Bitcoin.

It will be interesting to see where the seized evidence leads.  Wright is interesting not for the possibility that he may be Satoshi, but because this could be the first Australian case of substantial tax evasion, money laundering, and fraud in which Bitcoin is central rather than incidental.

 

I'm inclined to the same view.  Why should the forum change anything in order to protect the parties to what's a pretty scummy activity anyway?  The only change I'd support is tagging of accounts which have been sold so that new users are aware the person posting isn't the original account holder (old users probably know anyway, by the change in posting style).

If people want to report Australian-based stuff, ACORN is the appropriate agency.

http://www.acorn.gov.au/

If you'd interacted with the original Maria, you'd understand that logic is irrelevant.  I honestly wouldn't put it past them to still be trying to peddle their software years later.  Probably still involved in getting funds out of South America illegally, too.

The thermos thing was a joke for a very long time.  Talk about a blast from the past.

LOL if you don't think people would attack Satoshi for being "out of touch" with Bitcoin as it exists now if his "shove in the right direction" didn't align with their personal agenda for Bitcoin.  For large amount of users (and miners, and Bitcoin services), ideology is irrelevant and their primary concern is whether any changes increase or decrease the chances of them making a significant profit in the short-term future.  Whether Bitcoin is going to be around in 20 years, much less 50 or 80, is utterly irrelevant to them and always has been.

You really want to repeat this drama countless times between now and when the last BTC is mined?  Because there's nothing Bitcoiners love more than hysteria and every single time an increase is suggested the whole "sky is falling" thing is going to happen again.  In fact, it's probably going to be worse in the future because there will be more people involved in Bitcoin so the number of people hand-wringing over each change will increase over time.

If Bitcoin can't survive things like this then it's not going to be around long term anyway.