You sound kind of mad.  Plus, I was kind of agreeing with you, so I'm not sure why you felt compelled to insult me.

Also, look at what the subject of this thread has been changed to. 

We won!

So let's be happy together.

Chill.

Deal.

We might even get to see you in a video!  *nudge nudge wink wink*

Yes, and this should occur naturally, because such people naturally obtain good feedback of their own.  This gets weighted into how their own feedback is rated by a trust system.

Without saying anything derogatory about anyone in charge of DefaultTrust, it is absolutely impossible for any person to make decisions other people should trust about things like this, when they clearly have their own conflicting interests, but DefaultTrust is basically rammed down everyone's throat.  Many people don't even realize it should be turned off.

The history of people who have been on that DefaultTrust list who shouldn't have been is so long and familiar to anyone here who has paid any attention that I need not recount it.  Its history speaks for itself.

It benefits nobody except the people on it.

And then you'll still be screwed by people who rely on DefaultTrust, who will see you listed as untrusted and not deal with you.

They're not really trying to do that.  They're trying to keep their for-profit prisons full and control the population.  Also, they use the drug trade themselves to hide at least part of the black budgets for intelligence agencies like the CIA.  Whether it's to fund the Contras during Reagan or, now, the CIA's cozy relationship with the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico, the government has always played both sides of the tracks in the "drug war" game.

Only an idiot or someone who doesn't know you can turn it off would use DefaultTrust, which is a sick joke.  How many scammers and lunatics has that list had?

That would mean basically abandoning the drug war entirely.  They're not going to do that.

And if it got out that the feds were basically ignoring darknets, and throw in the fact that online ordering is vastly superior to dealing with often murderous street scum for one's buzz, the bulk of the market would move online overnight.

The federal heat is going to increase, not decrease. 

The good thing about this, for those who do not care in the least about the drug trade, is that it will inevitably lead to an arms race as surveillance and anti-surveillance technology duke it out, resulting in improved technology for the rest of us.

That's entirely not true.  Ignorance not being a defense is such a bedrock legal principle it even has one of those fancy Latin maxims:  Ignorantia legis neminem excusat. 

You are talking about a specific intent crime.  In this case, the specific intent is to take the jeans without paying and, additionally, that the intent was to deprive the owner of them permanently, i.e. the codification of the old common law offense of petty larceny.  "I didn't know shoplifting was illegal" isn't a defense.  Just as "I didn't know dealing drugs was illegal" wouldn't be.


That's an entirely different issue from whether it is a defense in the first place.  Guilt is one thing, sentence another.

In this case, though, it is completely implausible considering his public statements that Defcon was not entirely aware that there is this "drug war" thing going on and that it is highly illegal to deal in large quantities of drugs.  Considering he was denouncing the very legal scheme he was violating, he was not only aware it was illegal, it was actually his intent to violate it and to thwart the drug war entirely.

Whether or not one agrees with him in principle on that issue, that's going to be very bad at sentencing.

He may be a terrible person, but if anything, use in a hostile operating environment by a group like ISIS would show its resilience.  And you don't get many more hostile operating environments than the one ISIS would be using it in.

I agree it shouldn't be encouraged, though.  It'll either happen or it won't.  Scum are going to flock to anything they see as untraceable and secure for their villainy, just like paper money.

Ignorance of the law isn't a defense, even if it was plausible.

It is already trivial for them to seize domains.  It requires little more than them simply ordering the registrar to hand it over.  Clearly, this is legally wrong and unconstitutional, since domains are a form of intangible property, but in actual practice, they're doing it on an almost daily basis.

(Seizing .onion pseudo-domains requires actually compromising the system, though.)

This has literally next to nothing to do with net neutrality, though.

Like many sociopaths, he thinks he is the smartest person in the room and everyone else is a moron.  So of course he thinks that.  People like this can be pimp-slapped by reality again and again without ever learning a thing.

Make their own crypto with what?  How many terahashes do you think a camel can do?

Why would he have previously made good on money stolen in a hack if that's the case?  All the "character evidence" so far I've seen on Defcon is that he seems to have been ideologically motivated as well as by money, and wanted to run an honest (if illegal) business.  He doesn't even have the taint of DPR's scheme of having antagonists whacked.

So I really doubt he was running off with anything.  I wouldn't be surprised, though, if the nark urged along acquiring new vendors in the hope of acquiring new investigation targets.

That's my point.  If BTC exists long enough, every unit of currency will eventually have some taint to it.  It will have been swindled from someone, used to buy drugs or other contraband, spent by terrorists, etc.  So a scheme of simply taking such money out of circulation is foolishness.

Obama attaching his name to net neutrality was guaranteed to have this result.  First, I seriously doubt his commitment to the issue, or even understanding of it, and second, it just brings the nutjobs out of the woodwork.

Net neutrality is at its fundamental level simply about treating similar traffic similarly.  The idea of metered access with fees for various types of services and degradation of quality of services based on type of traffic is the problem.  Sort of like if you got charged more for electricity based on some arbitrary criterion, or if you only were ALLOWED to have rationed electricity, unless you were a business partner with the electric company.

Now, you might say there's no real problem with metered access and charging differently and making deals, but remember, if you look at this on the protocol level, to have this kind of differentiation, you need to be able to identify both the source of data and its destination, as well as what kind of data it is, in order to differentiate between types of traffic.

By definition, any kind of anonymous traffic is going to obscure this data, and any non-neutral scheme of access is going to assign that kind of traffic the lowest possible priority.

In other words, either kiss your anonymity goodbye or get used to it being slow as fuck, because ISPs if allowed to do so will either simply drop such traffic on the floor or shunt it off the highway onto an ungraded dirt road.  Only packets that can "show their papers" will get enough bandwidth to be functional, and you can expect service to be deliberately degraded even when the infrastructure is entirely sufficient to carry it, simply to extort more fees out of you.

Needless to say, the protocol-level changes that would make it easy to meter traffic like this would also substantially help the government spy on us even more than it is already doing.

I almost wish Obama had denounced net neutrality as a right-wing scheme of some sort, then the same gibbering wackos currently attacking it would love it.

And if they do it, all the Bitcoin they have instantly becomes worthless.  It would effectively be outlawing Bitcoin, because fungibility is necessary for functionality.  It would be like scanning all cash money at the bank for drug residue, and immediately removing such money from circulation, without compensating its owner.

Odd as it may be, the use of BTC in an underground economy actually proved its resilience.

I think we can live without use by terrorists, though.  That will come soon enough anyway.

What the hell makes you think medieval lunatics are going to be willing to use Bitcoin, much less able to?  They take being anti-science to a whole new level, are destroying textbooks containing "haram" concepts like that the earth is round, evolution, etc.

And then there's the whole murdering people thing. 

If you think Obama somehow invented the concept, you're literally too fucking retarded to talk to.  If you think he gives a shit about it, you're even more retarded.