What do you think they should do, all move to an Ecuadorian embassy?  Stop expecting people to be martyrs and start putting together an alternative team of devs who are either already in the sanctioned countries or who are willing to face prosecution for sanction-busting - or are you too "lazy" to do that.   

It's also not going to succeed in the long term if development of the official client and big economic players are shut down for sanction-busting.

It seems to me that there's a section of the community which is looking for martyrs.  If you believe that Bitcoin needs martyrs, then be that martyr yourself instead of demanding others put their asses on the line. 

No-one is forced to use the official client.  No-one is prevented from developing other clients.  Nobody's stopping you from putting together a team of devs to build a sanction-busting client.  The problem is people behaving as though the devs and major Bitcoin businesses are genies whose purpose is to grant your wishes.  There are many different agendas within the Bitcoin eco-system and the only one responsible for ensuring your own is advanced is you.

I don't think they're "unwanted" effects in dank's case or in the case of most people who take dissociatives and psychedelics.

Possibly, possibly not but the problem isn't so much Iranians knowing about Bitcoin as it is services/organisations actively assisting the bypassing of embargoes against Iran.  Discussing it here isn't quite the same thing as making a request on official channels to do something which facilitates Bitcoin being used to bypass sanctions, though.  

If someone were to ask Charlie how BitInstant could be used to bypass sanctions against Iran, it would be really silly for Charlie to even engage in the discussion.  Services and organisations can't really afford to say anything other than "we won't help people bypass the sanctions" without painting a huge target on their backs.  They can't be seen to be promoting or allowing the use of their service/organisation for bypassing the embargo.  

Everyone has the right to determine what risks they take themselves.  No-one has the right to tell others what risks they should find acceptable.

There is nothing stopping those who feel strongly enough about the issue from releasing a non-official versions of the client and taking the risks associated with facilitating Bitcoin's use in embargoed countries themselves.

Cat drugs.

It's not just the US which is enforcing sanctions against Iran - the UK and the EU are as well and it's likely that other nations/economic co-operation organisations will follow.  The possibility of Iran becoming the new Cuba is not remote and "major players" are vulnerable, both as businesses and as individuals, if that happens and they fail to enforce the sanctions.

He's probably just doing copypasta from a cliche generator at this point.

FATF member countries have started applying stronger economic sanctions against the Iranian government and Iranian financial institutions.  The US, the UK and the EU have all recently issued new directives regarding financial activity with Iran.  I suspect that Jeff is concerned about Bitcoin being promoted as a way to bypass those sanctions, which could lead to it being directly targeted by AML/CTF laws in those jurisdictions.

http://www.knowyourcountry.com/iran1111.html

You should probably team up with the owner of HustleCiti.  She's on the East Coast and she's even into Bitcoins.  She has contacts in LA as well.

21 days left dank and you haven't even got a venue yet.  Finding artists is the least of your worries.

How is using a volatile currency going to encourage a stable economy?

And exactly how is converting the value of the watch to BTC going to help you make the trip to California more quickly than selling it for fiat - which you could almost certainly do today if you took it to a dealer?

Also, can you elaborate on


kthx

The recovery of funds was reported here by the lawyer who facilitated it.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=97272.msg1098303#msg1098303

Now I'm going to have to defend usagi on something, damn you.  I don't care what gender usagi chooses to identify with and I'm certainly not going to demand that he "pick one and stick with it".  He does need to realise, however, that how he chooses to handle the issue of gender identity within a business context is going to be yet another thing which affects people's perception of his stability and therefore his reliability and credibility.

It's really his attempts to gaslight people and maintain that "we have always been at war with eastasia" which should be the central issue.  It doesn't matter whether he's being revisionist about what he did and said in the past because he's delusional as fuck or for convenience - the very fact that he's trying to write a revisionist narrative regarding his Bitcoin "companies" makes him untrustworthy when it comes to doing business.

I've requested that on several occasions with no result.

Maybe he needs an entire album released in his honour and not just a single song.  

I agree, but closing this thread and making him use the normal lending forum to request loans would be a reasonable alternative as would not allowing him to use a "business" thread as a soapbox for attention-whoring and evangelising.

I love it when people on a crusade to "defend their reputation" end up totally destroying it by flinging shit at others and stamping their feet like two year olds.

Let it go, gineta, before you become a laughing-stock like usagi.

Ummm, he didn't need anyone's permission to speak to a lawyer.  It's the manner in which he acted on the advice he claims to have received which is at issue, not his right to seek that advice in the first place (which was absolute).

I don't totally love that option because I do think there's value in having service operators be able to make announcement threads which are locked so they don't get derailed.  Because you can't filter a thread by poster here, there's no easy way to find information posted by service operators in amongst the multiple trainwrecks which get spawned around the one basic topic.  Perhaps we could still allow them the option to have a locked announcement/update thread in IA only if they participate in the discussion threads relevant to those announcements.

I do believe that only service operators, the devs, and the mods/admins should be able to open threads in the "Important Announcements" forum.  There is no reason why VIP membership alone should grant someone the right to open threads in that forum.  The mods already copy the OP of important threads into IA with a link if it's started in another forum.  There's no good reason for letting VIPs use IA as their personal soapbox.

I'm strongly in favour of taking away the delete button though (maybe set a five minute window in which a post/thread can be deleted).