Money Laundering is when you try to hide the origins of funds though:
Placement - the initial entry of the "dirty" cash or proceeds of crime into the financial system.
Layering - attempt to separate illicit funds from its source.
Integration - the money is returned to the launderer from what seem to be legitimate sources.
This is why I think the money laundering count is fairly weak. I think it is there to coerce a plea to the less serious, but better established failure to file an Suspicious Activity Report count. It is pretty clear Shrem had a legal obligation to make such a report. He didn't. That's pretty open and shut, I think. People need to stop using the "TV definition" of money laundering. I have seen "black money into white money" and other similar nonsensical statements several times in this thread. The statute is the statute and it is right here: (3) Whoever, with the intent—
(A) to promote the carrying on of specified unlawful activity;
(B) to conceal or disguise the nature, location, source, ownership, or control of property believed to be the proceeds of specified unlawful activity; or
(C) to avoid a transaction reporting requirement under State or Federal law,
conducts or attempts to conduct a financial transaction involving property represented to be the proceeds of specified unlawful activity, or property used to conduct or facilitate specified unlawful activity, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than 20 years, or both. For purposes of this paragraph and paragraph (2), the term “represented” means any representation made by a law enforcement officer or by another person at the direction of, or with the approval of, a Federal official authorized to investigate or prosecute violations of this section. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1956Bolded for emphasis by me. Money laundering is a very very broad statute. It has many different elements. The prosecutor isn't charging Shrem with Money Laundering but rather being part of a conspiracy to commit money laundering. That means he doesn't even need to have commited all the elements of the crime himself, rather that his actions combined with the actions of his co-conspirator meet this definition "with the intent to avoid a transaction reporting requirement under State or Federal law ... conducted financial transactions involving property used to conduct or facilitate a specific unlawful activity". Is he guilty? Well that is up for a jury but can we drop the quaint TV land money laundering = "making dirty money into clean money only" definitions. They serve no purpose. If the law says Money laundering is eating a cheeseburger on Tuesday then that is what it is. To try and proactively avoid the flames, this isn't a statement on the merit, or morality of the statute, merely the statute as it exists. |
|
|
|
Agreed. Hopefully pools and major solo operators can see that their long term profitability is based MORE on the growth of Bitcoin than the short term orphan cost. Hopefully large pools are aware they don't need universal support. If 70% of hashpower agrees to produce larger blocks (say 500KB avg) for the good of the network. It cuts the orphan cost by 70%. Still I think the orphan cost does highlight the reality that miners are going to be increasingly reluctant to devote more space to free tx. This is something users will have to come to grips with. Including a fee and waiting hours or days is unacceptable (although it is often for non-fee reasons) however no fee tx should be considered charity by users and if someone does you an act of charity in an hour, or day, or week well you got what you paid for. The default behavior of most clients should probably be changed to include the "min fee" on ALL txs not just low priority ones. If users want to they could change this but they should be warned "Including no tx fee may result in delayed confirmation times". Enforcement for relaying at node level should still only be on low priority.
It is somewhat ironic that this is more of an issue due to the higher exchange rate. The min fee on low priority tx was lowered due to rising exchange rate. Today 3.3 mBTC is ~$1.50. Ouch. However if Bitcoins were worth less it would be less of a cost. Since Bitcoin is often used as a proxy for USD a 5 mBTC fee (which more than covers orphan costs) is more viable at a lower exchange rate.
I love this thread. Only 1 year ago the likes of Mister Bigg were going nuts saying miners would create humungous blocks full of 1-satoshi paying transactions, because there was no reason not to. Therefore block size shouldn't be lifted. Now people are moaning block size isn't increasing fast enough. There's no better evidence that a block size limit is no longer necessary - no-one apart from the odd Eligius block is even approaching 1MB. Miners are forgoing the fees. Just scrap the cap. No-one is forcing miners to build on some 4MB block full of spam transactions; they can always ignore it and teach the spammer a lesson. Free markets will sort it out. And with 1 BTC worth $800 or more, screwing around is no longer cheap. I think a cap is still useful. The cost to massively bloat the blockchain remains a viable threat, and at a tiny fraction of what it would cost to 51% the network. Bitcoin has a somewhat unique cost vs benefit scenario. There is actually little direct cost to put a tx in a block however the true cost is the total storage, bandwidth, and memory requirements of all the full nodes combined and most nodes are not miners. While miners who are economically motivated are unlikely to do something stupid (like create a 1 GB block full of millions of txs with a 1 satoshi fee), an attack may not be economically motivated and at this point dumping hundreds of thousands of GB of additional blockchain size could slow adoption. That being said I am much more in favor of raising the cap possibly to 10 MB (or even 5MB) to buy us the community the time to fully analyze all the possible implications of future block sizes (no cap, floating cap, high fixed cap, etc). |
|
|
|
I don't buy into a falling market. I also don't trust the exchanges. This seems to leave me no other choice than to wire fiat out of exchanges and then find a way back in once my confidence in the market has been restored.
BitSimple ( https://bitsimple.com) offers same day purchases by bank wire. You wire the funds and receive the coins at an address you designate. Your funds are never held on site, it isn't a wallet service. Obviously it isn't a trust-less system but the trust is limited to a duration of a single exchange. |
|
|
|
|
Yeah would look like a bug to me.
|
|
|
|
In fact it is pretty easy.
- Go to the address in blockchain.info.
- Search for an outgoing transaction and click it
- Show Input/Output Scripts
- In the Input Scripts the value starting with 04.... is the public key.
What is the pubkey of this address? 112xBKNMa2Cj7g9DT8MJYYwUDoKFmYB3EM |
|
|
|
can u post the tx id? I would be interesting in looking into that. As based on what you are saying the tx should round up to 1KB and thus require a fee of no more than 0.1 mBTC.
https://blockchain.info/tx/8ac382eb5b25b1066b046b912fbb6253c53d7c3a331430bc750e6fbc4f787550Also what version of the QT client were you using. IIRC the newest (newer?) version has a slightly different wording so I am wondering if you are running an outdated version.
Bitcoin-Qt v0.8.6-beta on OS X 10.7.5 You may want to report that as a bug. I can't see any reason why the QT client would require more than 0.1 mBTC for that transaction. Can you run this in debug console (Help > Debug > Console) It should look something like this getinfo
{
"version" : 80600,
"protocolversion" : 70001,
"walletversion" : 60000,
"balance" : <redacted>,
"blocks" : 284843,
"timeoffset" : 19,
"connections" : 8,
"proxy" : "",
"difficulty" : 2621404453.06461525,
"testnet" : false,
"keypoololdest" : 1374273042,
"keypoolsize" : 500,
"paytxfee" : 0.00010001,
"unlocked_until" : 0,
"errors" : ""
} Just want to verify what the client thinks the tx fee per KB should be paid. |
|
|
|
Sounds like textbook entrapment... How could that be entrapment. 'textbook entrapment' - been reading a lot of textbooks lately? lol. Most people have no idea what 'entrapment' means legally. When the police 'trap' people, that is not entrapment - that is their job. 'Trapping' people is OK. Unfortunately, most people think that when a cop traps you, it is not fair under the legal principle 'entrapment'. In reality, these have almost nothing to do with each other. If the police put you in a situation where you feel that you must break the law in order to protect your own physical safety, would that be 'entrapment'? Possibly and most statutes have an exemption on non-violent crimes when it comes to the suspect feeling that not engaging would result in bodily injury or death of themselves or another person. Of course these cops weren't dumb. That is why gave the suspects plenty of time to report the first transaction, you know the one where they felt they were in immediate bodily danger. Then setup a SECOND deal and gave the suspects time to report that. Pretty obvious that was a way to kill that defense before it was made. |
|
|
|
Second, you dont know how the undercover agent express his "attempt to use bitcoin for criminal act". He could have made it sound like a joke. I would personal think its a joke if some stranger dude said "yo i'm buying stolen goods with this shit man". If thats not entrapment then i dont know what is Yeah that isn't entrapment. If you honestly believed the person was joking then it is a possible defense. However if you joke with me about illegal activity I am simply not going to do business with you. Is it a joke? Maybe but it might not be and I don't have psychic powers so there really is no reason for me to do business with you. If enough people on localbitcoin followed similar "policy" then people would stop joking (although honestly what % of buyers do you think joke about illegal activity with strangers, for all they know the seller is an undercover cop). Then when someone "jokes" about illegal activity they either are a) a stupid criminal or b) an undercover cop. In the long run it doesn't really matter if you believed someone was joking, it matters if nine people too dim witted to get out of jury duty thought the claim seemed like a joke. If they find is to be credible and they wouldn't have gone through with the sale after that ... well you probably are going to prison. |
|
|
|
I call for government regulations of these private market places.
It is not right that corporations through the use of terms and conditions (and contract law) can circumvent peoples constitutional and human rights.
We need governments acting on behalf of the people to ensure that these so called 'walled gardens' do not become areas where private and undemocratic laws can flourish. Corporations must not be allowed to become more powerful than the people.
We do not need regulation to hinder the growth of these market places, we need regulation to ensure that everyone is treated fairly.
You have no constitutional right to set the terms of Apple's walled garden anymore than you have a "freedom of speech" to stand naked in my living room and scream obscenities in my face at two in the morning. So how about .... if you don't like the rules in Apple's private property you don't use it. Problem solved and without the implicit threat of violence by the state against its citizens. If enough people do the same thing, it will hurt Apple's bottom line and Apple's shareholders will get pissed at Apple's management and demand changes. Possibly leading to a more open Apple or at a minimum a smaller weaker Apple. See all that without the need for you to use (indirect) violence to force others to do what you want them to. |
|
|
|
The hacker won't return the coins. Consider it a $300 education. Had the site been popular it might have been a $300,000 loss. Saying you are really careful and yet failed to do server side validation is an oxymoron. I would recommend learning some unit testing. My guess is you are developing the "core" program and consdering error checking as an add on. For larger and more complex projects this always fails. Grab a couple books on Test driven Development ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development ). The $300 loss could be worth thousands if it makes you a better developer. |
|
|
|
Perhaps you can whitelist all addresses for only the port that the wallet connects to. That will not whitelist any websites (I assume the wallet doesn't connect via port 80).
That's a good idea too - I might try that first, as it could be easier to implement and maintain. Agreed. If the software you are using supports creating whitelisting rules by port and also supports wildcard for all addresses (i.e. *.*.*.* ) then that will work much better and it will be maintenance free. You want a rule which allows connections on port 8333 to all computers on the internet. If you can do that you are done. |
|
|
|
|
Each coin will have a new coin subsidy schedule.
For Bitcoin it began at 50 BTC for the first 210,000 blocks and then it halves (technically a binary right shift) every 210,000 blocks. With the blockcount and a a little math you can compute the total # of coins in circulation *. Keep in mind the block count begins at #0 (genesis block) so when looking at sites which report the block height or block # adjusted by one.
At block #209,999 it would be 210,000 * 50 = 10,500,000 BTC.
At block #210,000 it would be 210,000 * 50 + 1 * 25 = 10,500,025 BTC.
At block #284,681 it would be 210,000 * 50 + 64,682 * 25 = 12,117,050 BTC.
* For Bitcoin (and I assume all copycat clones) this only provides you an estimate because technically a miner can choose to receive a smaller subsidy (but not larger). So right now your mining pool "could" decide to put a subsidy of zero in instead of 25 BTC. Of course there is no reason to do so but due to bugs in mining code there are a dozen or so blocks where the subsidy is less than the max allowed. A pool generating a block with 24.9 (or zero) new coins would be valid, as would 25.0 new coins but 25.1 would not. Also due to a bug in early client version the 50 BTC in the genesis block (#0) is unspendable although it is generally included in the total coin count.
|
|
|
|
|
can u post the tx id? I would be interesting in looking into that. As based on what you are saying the tx should round up to 1KB and thus require a fee of no more than 0.1 mBTC.
Also what version of the QT client were you using. IIRC the newest (newer?) version has a slightly different wording so I am wondering if you are running an outdated version.
|
|
|
|
|
His wallet doesn't connect to other "sites" (as in websites) it connect to a completely random set of other wallets (well other wallets running as full nodes). There is no way to white list that as the nodes in the network are continually changing.
One option however would be to install a wallet (technically you just the need "node" so the wallet can be empty) on another machine. If you can do this then you could restrict his access to just your wallet.
Something like:
(p2p cloud of nodes - unknown set of entities) <--------> (your node - a static known entity) <-----> (your sons node)
You white list your node and it acts as a bridge.
|
|
|
|
|
I would chargeback now not later. In a scam it is good idea for the scammer to string the victim for as long as possible. They almost certainly are a scam. Stop being emotional holding out for the 1% chance they are legit and risk pushing this past the chargeback window and then when you "know" it is a scam it is too late to do anything.
|
|
|
|
I looked at a number of the failed transactions on skanner before the api facility was stopped and it seems a lot of withdrawal transactions had several inputs, but one of which had zero balance, an initial double-spend. For example. If customers A and B both try to withdraw BTC within a few seconds of each other their payments would share one input address in common with a balance to satisfy only one customer. Whichever gets propagated through the network first has a successful withdrawal, the other is silently ignored, languishing. That would be better than the reality. My stuck tx is a double spend, and the original was included in a block 10 days ago. That is right MtGox tried to pay me with "coins" they already paid to a completely different customer over a week ago. |
|
|
|
|
Sweet 21% of consumers would consider using Bitcoin.
Also never is a long time. I think in the 1970s at least as high of % would have claimed they would never use the internet and in the 1980s a similar percentage would have said they would never use online banking and in the 1990s a similar percentage would have said the same thing about digital downloads, smartphones, gps navigation, etc.
|
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
