Same way you safely buy a unicorn or any other imaginary entity safely on eBay.  You don't.

I stand corrected.  The OP did state it was a link in btc-e chat, and I misremembered.

TOR latency is rarely more than a second or two.  Especially if you were one of the few miners in operation, the odds of a block coming in at the same time would be negligible.  The odds would be slightly increased by the low difficulty, but it may have never happened even once in the early days.

They could have been a bit quicker deleting an obviously bogus and malicious link from their own chat.

So far, not a single scammer, even people who have ripped off thousands of people and then laughed in their faces, has suffered any repercussions whatsoever for their crimes.  It appears to be as zero-risk as crime gets.  No wonder there are so many scammers, when BTC users are pussies who let people rip them off left and right with no response other than whining and crying.

If you mean gambling online yourself, it is generally not illegal to gamble with your own money, though conceivably you risk losing money if a site shuts down.  I would note that most BTC gambling businesses that do any substantial volume, like SatoshiDice, have moved operations out of the country.

A site that operates overseas and takes BTC deposits directly and cashes out only to BTC is not subject to the main tool federal prosecutors have at their disposal, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which directly targets financial institutions.  That's a big mallet, but with no banks to go after, this law is inapplicable to BTC.

However, I wouldn't place much faith in the argument that BTC is immune to state laws criminalizing gambling, which generally define gambling for the purposes of enforcement as wagering for "anything of value."  If you can sell it for real money, buy goods or services with it, and it actually has a measurable market value, that's going to count as gambling.  It might not count as "illegal gambling," especially if the house is getting no cut, but the moment you start raking and making money, it's probably covered.

So I'd say running a BTC gambling site in the physical United States is a pretty dicey proposition, though whether anything actually comes of it is dependent on whether some ambitious LEA actually feels like doing something about it.  I'm not sure what monetary threshold would be big enough that anyone bothers, or whether they are even interested in BTC at the moment.  The feds have shown little understanding of the concept so far.

I think it is highly probable that before any widespread enforcement effort, the FBI or whatever other LEA wants to do something will start making public statements indicating their intent to do, and that people will have some time to exit the market, perhaps safely, but it could be that they start with a bang by busting one of the major operators.

If you're planning on doing anything substantial, you should consider getting real legal advice, not just ask people on the Internet.  Depending where you live, your local authorities may have a practice of doing little or nothing in this area, or they might be very aggressive.

Calling Bitcoin itself a Ponzi because one exchange has made wildly irresponsible statements is idiotic.

This is definitely evidence, though, that supports staying the hell away from Gox.  This entity is clearly speculating with Bitcoin while purporting to be an exchange, an entity that should be neutral.  I suspect their service will continue to go down whenever it is convenient for them to do so, or when they can profit by exacerbating a panic.

People should seek alternatives to this bullshit site.

Conceivably, an exploit like this could lie in wait until you use two-factor and then hijack your existing session to do whatever.  While the OP did, IMO, screw up, Gox has some responsibility to monitor their own computers.

Actually, you should start a thread in the Scam Accusation subforum and then bump that, because that is the only way you get a scammer tag.

Hate to keep harping on this (I have posted this three times now), but the thread isn't going to post itself, and since I was never a member of this pool, I would have no standing to start it.  Someone who actually got ripped off needs to go over to that subforum, post it there, and then post a link to it here.

Maybe, since I "live" on the Gambling subforum, where scammers are more common, I just happen to be more proactive on this.  Mining pools, while some have scammed, are generally a lot more trustworthy.  But that's exactly why a scamming mining pool is a serious threat to the Bitcoin public and needs to be scammer tagged even more aggressively.

Please, someone who got ripped off, go to the Scam Accusation subforum and post evidence of this shit.  Then post a link here to that thread and encourage others to post their own evidence.  This is the kind of stuff that does get a scammer tag applied, but you have to take it to the right place.

Additionally, as it was patently unconstitutional, the first court to try a case involving this law threw it out, albeit over a technicality.  While it was reissued, it effectively went away with the passage of the Gold Reserve Act.

This executive order was a clear blunder, but caused little to no actual effect in reality, except to the one guy actually prosecuted under it, who won his case.  Unfortunately for him, he actually lost his gold, but at least now, it is entirely legal to possess gold, gold certificates, or any similar objects.

While in theory, the government could do this again, in practice, I don't think it would be tolerated.

Indeed.  If anyone is now wealthy for having invented Bitcoin, there is a reason for that.

They deserve to be wealthy.  I fail to get how there is anything whatsoever wrong about someone being rewarded for doing something successful that has improved the world.  People who improve the world should be rewarded, as this creates an incentive for future innovation.

Do you realize that, as I pointed out earlier, this was a sarcastic reference to their bullshit claims of having invented Facebook?

Bitcoin is unconstitutional?  WTF?

First, this is more America-centric bullshit.  The U.S. Constitution has nothing to do with what the rest of the world can do.

The U.S. Constitution is about the U.S. government, and nothing more.  It says what the U.S. government can and can't do.  

By its very definition, nothing that private individuals do can violate the Constitution.  The Constitution limits only the government.

So you say.  But in the world we call "reality," where things actually happen, he could have made a bad decision and excluded the guy because of his race.  In that event, the guy could sue him, win an enormous judgment, and then guys with guns would show up and seize the property.

In this thing we call "reality," there are laws that say he can refuse service to this guy, even for no reason at all, with impunity.  However, if he refuses service for the wrong reason, he loses a lawsuit, loses everything he owns, perhaps even goes to prison.

People care a lot more about what happens to them in reality than in fantasies.

Frankly, I don't mind terribly if the kind of idiots who take Alex Jones seriously stay away from Bitcoin. 

A complete lack of legal merit has never stopped the Winkledouche twins from suing in the past.

Also, I note that my post was a joke.

"Satoshi" is pretty obviously a group of people.  I doubt anyone seriously thinks it is a mysterious Japanese coder who somehow speaks excellent colloquial English but has yet to demonstrate any grasp of Japanese, who created this shit and then just suddenly disappeared.

So if someone or a group of someones out there somehow did mine a bunch of the early blocks and is waiting to cash out, all I can say is well played, sir!

In the "real world," we call this fractional reserve banking, and it isn't a scam because the gummint says so.

Depends.  Why is the Jewish owner refusing to serve the guy?

Civil rights laws only protects certain classes, like race, religion or national origin.  If he's refusing to serve the guy because he is a Gentile, then that is prohibited.

However, politics is not a protected class.  He can refuse to serve a neo-Nazi, a guy whose haircut he doesn't like, a Democrat, a Republican, a lawyer, because he doesn't like lawyers, or any other non-protected class.

So the short answer is no, a Jewish owner of an eatery can't be forced to serve anyone he doesn't want to serve, unless the reason is that the person falls into a very narrow set of categories of "protected classes."  Political persuasion does not enter into this.

Just as a landlord could refuse to rent to a lawyer because he decided that lawyers tend to be a pain in the ass and sue him, he could refuse to rent to a skinhead because he decided that skinheads tend to trash the place.