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I want to link my Bitcointalk name with BTCJam's. Verification code: e1bc86f5-3234-4aea-acdf-c2cb5b21038d
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Sounds more to me like "700 EUR lost when gambler doesn't follow instructions."
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Today was the delivery deadline for a bet on betsofbitco.in: http://betsofbitco.in/item?id=676.. the question was whether or not "A Butterfly Labs SC product will be successfully delivered to at least 1 end customer by November 7th, 2012", using the end of the day EST as the deadline. We're about two hours short of that, and should be well past the drop-off time for any commercial package service. Have any end users here received an SC product? (I get the impression the answer is "no", but thought it'd be nice to have a clear consensus to resolve the betting.) |
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He walked up and capped a kid in a old folks community here in Florida and walked on the charges saying he felt threatened.
He did not "walk on the charges", he has been charged with second-degree murder and is awaiting trial. |
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Look, I understand that you probably feel like a retard for being completely wrong after acting as arrogent as you guys did.
I'm not even going to address your assertion that I have made zero arguments in support of BitCoin being property, as you're clearly just grasping at any argument you can right now. Go read through the thread, and think next time before you get behind a loudmouth like Sunnankar.
Also, don't patronize me about my education. I'm right, you're wrong. Deal with it.
When the law against you, emphasize the facts. When the facts are against you, emphasize the law. When the law and the facts are against you, speak angrily and pound the table a lot. You seem to be a living example of the third maxim. Perhaps you should rename yourself LegalSparrow - as an "eagle", you're still in the phase of development where the adult birds drop pre-chewed food in your mouth. You're the one who's going to be apologizing for your arrogance in a few years. |
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Isn't it necessary to fill out some complicated, intrusive forms and submit copies of your ID to someone you barely know in some other country before waiting a few weeks to receive a refund? I'm pretty sure that's how it works.
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This guy clearly deserves a "colorful offshore libertarian" tag.
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There are no cases involving bitcoin, so you couldn't use them in a brief.
Then how do you suppose the law is applied to new things/ideas? Do you think that when the first cases were argued regarding telephones, that the attorneys and judges involved said "well, we've got no appellate caselaw about telephones, so there's no need for briefs, we'll just make some shit up"? HINT: This is a question that can be answered with research. ANOTHER HINT: The answer starts with "no, that's not what they did." All you could do is make the plethora of arguments that I've made throughout this thread, and wait for the judge to agree with one of them.
You have not made arguments, you have reported on comments made by unidentified professors and lawyers and you have said that the correct outcome is "obvious". While taking a survey of people with training or experience may be a good way to predict future outcome(s), it is not a substitute for actual reasoning. Perhaps that's all that you can do right now, but you should not imagine that your limitations are universal. I suspect that as your education continues, you will reach a point where you are capable of coming up with arguments about how and why existing legal doctrines can and should be extended (or not) to fit new situations or technologies. |
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The way I saw it, someone would download an album from iTunes which is signed over to the customer who then OWNS that item and it has value (I dont think people consider there mp3 collection as valuable at the moment, napster/p2p has changed that - not that digital music ever had value - but now we have the blockchain....
I think smart property could be made to do wonderful wonderful things for society (or not in the wrong hands), in a lot of areas!
Well, that's the happy version. Unfortunately, that's pretty much the opposite of what we've seen of copy protection/DRM over the past 30 years - the "smart property" will likely be used to make sure that if I buy a new computer or a new car stereo, I have to re-license all of my music again, or pay an extra fee so I can enjoy my content on a new device . . . or that if I sell my device, all of my content will disappear, and the new owner will need to re-license it. And if the device gets confused about the facts and circumstances, it may deny me what I've paid for, and since I'm "arguing" about my "rights" with a computer who thinks it knows all of the important facts already . . . I am not saying that DRM is inherently evil - but that it has traditionally been designed not to protect the rights of people we'd think of as owners/consumers, but of the rights of publishers/lenders/sellers. That probably sounds good if you identify with those classes of people - but I spend most of my time using software written by other people, and machines designed by other people, and I spend more time than I'd like trying to work around practical problems with copy protection/DRM that prevent me from doing the things that I've (approximately) already paid for. (e.g., I have paid for probably 8 licenses for Adobe Acrobat, and I have five people in my office who need to use it from time to time - but I am reluctant to re-image some computers, because I am not confident that I will be able to reinstall Acrobat, even though I've paid for it.) |
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Are you guys really suggesting that there would be no way to recover stolen bitcoins in civil court?  What about fraud, that doesn't involve an illegal use of a computer? Do you really think a judge would allow you to defraud someone of $10k in bitcoins and say, "oh sorry, it's not fraud because you didn't take anything of value"?? I'm not saying that, but I am saying that the plaintiff's attorney or the prosecutor will need to be prepared to give the judge a brief with something better than "obviously . . ." and "a bunch of professors and attorneys think . . . ", and I think it would be pretty interesting to imagine what, exactly, that brief will say. I am not saying that BTC is the same as points in sports - but, let's say that in the upcoming World Series, an umpire makes a call that effectively hands one team a win and the other a loss. Can the losing team successfuly go to court and ask the judge to order MLB to award them an extra point, or a do-over on a particular pitch? No - if they tried, the judge would tell them to go away, even though there's a lot at stake, the court is not going to get involved with the internal governance of a game or a sport. I'm not so sure the result wouldn't be the same if there were a dispute about WoW gold or other game accomplisments/awards - I am not nearly as confident that you are that there are any contractual rights in WoW gold, and that if there are, that a court is going to impose its judgment over that of the owner/publisher/operator of the game. There are some people who want to say that BTC is essentially a giant game like WoW - personally, I think that argument will not be successful, but all of us (pro- and con-) are going to have to come up with something better than "obviously, my position is correct" if we want to prevail in court. I also see a tremendous difference between a Player v. Blizzard dispute about WoW gold, and a User v. User dispute about BTC - in the first case, there's a contract/TOS, and the court can order Blizzard to simply credit the player's account with extra gold. Regarding BTC, it can't simply be created out of thin air (other than mining), so for one guy to get more, someone else has to have less. I gather that I ultimately agree with you about the correct answer for many of these questions - but I have yet to find a judge who will go along with something merely because a brief recites that the desired result is "obvious" or "clear"; in fact, my experience has been that the more often terms like that appear in a letter/brief/conversation, the less clear or obvious the proposition is that is being advocated. |
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There are property rights in WoW gold (subject to your contract with Blizzard), why should this be any different?
Do you have a cite handy for that? I can't seem to find any article - scholarly or otherwise - that reaches that conclusion. I've talked to a lot of professors and practicing attorneys in the last week or so, and they all agree that the attachment of property rights to bitcoin is so obvious that it is barely even a legitimate question . . . . If you guys still don't agree, that's fine, you can just wait for the first court case involving bitcoin.
Well, that's the tricky part, right? Many people agree that taking someone else's BTC is wrong, and is (or should be) illegal. The question is, how do we get there from here? If A transfers B's BTC's to C, without B's permission, is that a crime? If so, what crime? Is it a civil wrong, is that a tort, or based on some sort of contract, or a statutory wrong, or ..? If A defrauds B out of some BTC (assuming all of the other elements of fraud are present), has anything really happened? In the course of trying to track down your reference to property rights in WoW gold, I ran across these articles, which don't appear to answer the question, but may be of interest to others: http://www.bu.edu/law/central/jd/organizations/journals/bulr/volume85n4/Fairfield.pdfhttp://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=962905http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1469299http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1092284http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=981755http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1100302 |
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to turning the blockchain into something recognizable to legal system(s).
... because bending technology to suit the legal system(s) inflexibility is such a good idea .... or, perhaps it's looking at the law as the distillation of centuries' worth of human experience with transactions, property, and disputes, and piggybacking on the lessons learned by others, rather than insisting on novelty for its own sake, and re-learning some difficult lessons the hard way. |
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While this doesn't address the wallet/keypair issue, one way to more clearly define the role/meaning of the blockchain would be for it to include actual statements of fact or performative utterances.
I don't know what the actual data structure of the blockchain looks like - but whatever it looks like today, it could be modified to include something like:
"I, the holder of private key <blah>, with respect to the 5.5 BTC I received in prior block <blahblah>, assert that I am the legal owner thereof, and I further assign all right, title, and interest in those funds as follows: 2.5 BTC to the holder of private key <blah 2> and 3.0 BTC to the holder of private key <blah 3>."
.. the main advantage I see to that would be that it could potentially turn misuse of someone's BTC's into fraud, given the explicit assertion of ownership, which if false, might constitute fraud. (Fraud has a complicated legal definition which is different from state to state, so I'm using that term loosely here.)
On the other hand, I recognize that not everyone wants to reach that result; but this strikes me as one approach to turning the blockchain into something recognizable to legal system(s).
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A very sincere thanks to all of the investors and savings holders! Your investment is fully insured - we will put an equal amount of your principal into a cold storage.
Insured by pirate debt
Now I'm off to plunder some loot from uniquely generate timely intellectual capital!
--vikingat40
You're doing it wrong. Having Insurance just means saying you'll never default  Nonononono. If you want the insurance, you have to send an amount equal to 20% of your weekly balance to me, every Sunday night. If V@40 defaults, then I will pay you some BTC, less my administrative fees, etc. I am also offering insurance on the insurance. Just send me 20% of 20% of your weekly balance to me every Saturday night. If I default on the insurance payout if V@40 defaults, then the insurance insurance might be available to pay you, less my administrative fees, etc. Feel free to ask about insurance insurance insurance, which covers you in the extremely unlikely case of a triple default. Really, what are the chances of that? Just put the rest of your funds in my Bitcoinica Intersango Mt.Gox account every Friday night, and if V@40 defaults, AND my first level insurance fails, AND my second level insurance fails, then you may meet with me in Belize or Argentina to discuss repayment. I am also accepting bets regarding the likelihood of my default. I will be acting as the escrow agent. If you would like to bet that I am going to default, send me BTC in the amount of your bet. If I default on my other obligations, I will pay you 10x whatever you sent me. This is a good choice for young people who feel like insurance is for old people, or people of any age who enjoy the thrill of gambling. |
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For all those guys their identity is known. It would be easy to file a lawsuit and drag them in front of a court, but nobody seems to have the balls for it even though there's lots of big talk on the forum. Instead, everybody just accepts the losses and moves on, waiting for the next scam.
Well, it's "easy" in the same way that it's "easy" to climb Mt. Everest - the process is documented in any number of books and movies. So why doesn't everyone do it? Even though we know how, actually going through the steps is expensive and difficult. The problem with suing scammers is that by the time you actually win and try to collect, the money is probably gone - so the successful plaintiff will have spent money creating an effectively unenforceable judgment. Judgments are interesting if you can get one against a person or an entity with a lot of non-liquid assets like real estate - they are not very interesting versus a person with no income, who provably knows how to get paid (if they did have income) in a difficult-to-detect/track fashion, and who has no assets. My hunch is that none of the three people you mention have any assets to speak of - and certainly no assets that would remain following litigation, which gives them a motive/opportunity to spend their $ defending themselves, and/or transfer value from assets that are easy to collect against into assets that are tough to collect against. This is why, in the real world, we often depend on things like bonds and insurance to protect ourselves against bad behavior - while lawsuits are possible, they're a very inefficient/unsatisfying way to solve problems, especially versus people with no assets and no income (known in the legal profession as "judgment-proof"). Also, most people aren't willing to act as quickly or as aggressively as they'd need to in order to protect themselves - e.g., seeking an order to freeze funds and appoint a receiver at the first sign of trouble, rather than waiting until the money's clearly been gone for several months, and then reluctantly filing a lawsuit with the cheapest attorney they can find as close to the expiration of the statute of limitations as they can get. |
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Thanks for posting this. I don't necessarily agree with every part of it, but it seems like an honest effort to explore the issues, which is better than I've seen before.
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Maybe. IANAL, but if you are in the U.S. and advertise to other people in the U.S. then its SEC jurisdiction. Even if the website is across the globe.
If you are not in the U.S. and advertise to people in the U.S., then it will come down to the local country willingness to cooperate with the SEC. I think the FSA is more than willing to play ball in an investigation for instance. (U.K.).
If you are not in the U.S. and you advertise only to people not in the U.S., the the SEC has absolutely no jurisdiction to do anything to you. Some other authority might though.
At least this is my understanding.
A lot of this boils down not so much to law, but to political and practical questions - examples might be Julian Assange, Kim Dotcom, or Sonny Vleisides (the guy at BFL whose arrest/conviction created a lot of excitement here). In each of those cases, the US decided that what those people did, while they were outside the US' territorial boundaries, was offensive enough to the US that they were willing to devote considerable effort and resources to catching them and punishing them. I do not mention this to argue about the legitimacy or the validity of the US' actions, but to simply point out that they occurred. Someone else who achieves a high enough profile, though offshore, may find themselves in similar circumstances. The US has always had a relatively expansive view of the reach of its regulatory jurisdiction, and has always had a very limited view of the reach of the US Constitution's protections of individual rights. (E.g., if you are in another country, the US can punish you for what you do there, but you cannot expect the protections of the US Constitution regarding search & seizure, interrogation, counsel, etc.) Both of these things have become even more exaggerated since 9/11/01 - to be honest, I haven't bothered tracking the precise contours of exactly what the US thinks it can do these days, since successive presidential administrations have been eager to exceed those contours, and the courts have been willing to go along with the project. |
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Second, 'Bitcoin', and resulting 'bitcoins', are really just a math equation and results of that equation. Obviously, neither the equation '2+2=4' nor '4' are not copyrightable. However, if you use a particular font, color, etc. and fix it in a medium then you may be able to have a copyright attach to that particular work. Copyright is a very abstract area of law in that sense. Consequently, copyrighting the math equation that is Bitcoin is, almost without a doubt, going to fail just like you would fail with trying to copyright the general formula '2+2=4'.
I'm sure I could beat a summary judgement motion that Bitcoins are just math during discovery. And I'm not even a lawyer. Think MP3 compression or RSA public key encryption. Both are tools that allow for expression. I think it would be helpful to distinguish between discussing code that achieves a particular result (the source code or executables for, say, bitcoind) and the output or results of using that code. There should be no argument that Excel, the spreadsheet, is subject to copyright. And there should also be no argument that, if I use Excel (or some other computerized tool) to calculate the result of an equation or expression, that the result is not subject to copyright by virtue of the fact that I used copyrighted code to create it, versus working it out by hand with pencil & paper. I do not see a meaningful difference between a simple equation and a complicated one - I suspect that all of us would easily agree that "2 * 2 = 4" is not subject to copyright; I find the idea that "342972134893249 * 212312389547523 = 72817233507401087375017372227" is not copyrightable a tiny bit more uncomfortable, since obviously there's more work required to reach the result, and that's not exactly an equation that a lot of us wander around with at the tip of our tongues. But I can't come up with a principled legal reason to distinguish between them, that's meaningful in a copyright sense, since it's well established that copyright is intended to protect creative expression, not sweat-of-the-brow hard work (see, e.g., Feist v. Rural Telephone). (People unfamiliar with copyright may want to be aware that while a particular number or fact is not subject to copyright, a collection of numbers or facts that has been deliberately arranged/edited/curated can be, but only to the extent of that human creative intervention. Similarly, a creator can take something which is not subject to copyright and add something to it, and the resulting combination is copyrightable. So I can't hold a copyright to Plato's Republic; but if I came up with a new translation of it to English, I could copyright that; or I could take a public domain translation and intersperse commentary and artwork that I created, and get a copyright in the resulting work, but only to the extent of my additions/changes.) So I am curious to hear more about the argument that BTC could be protected by copyright - either the private keys ("wallet"), or the abstract idea of value which is represented on the blockchain and is controlled by the keys. The private keypair, as far as I know (and this is bumping up against the limit of my understanding of the technical side of BTC/Bitcoin) is simply a group of numbers that happen to have a particular characteristic; they were identified through an iterative process by which potential candidates were created randomly and tested for having that characteristic, and the first which were found to have that characteristic were selected. So I don't really see any of the traditional creative/editorial input from a human being which has historically been an essential part of the creation of a copyrightable work. Of course, it would be possible to argue that the creative/editorial input was added at the time the program was written, in the description of the criteria for identifying viable private keys - but that suggests that all of our BTC's are the property of the development team, since they're the ones who provided that input. (Of course, this would be different in the case of vanity addresses, since the holder of the address made a deliberate choice about the text they wanted included in the address. Most of the addresses which are short enough to be found this century are also probably short enough to be uncopyrightable, but at least it's the beginning of an argument.) I am not wild about calling the blockchain a contract from a legal point of view because it's not at all clear to me who the parties are, or what their agreement is, or what the terms of the contract are. We could say that all of the activity for a day or a week or a year or all time on, say, the NYSE is one big multiparty contract - but I'm not sure it really makes any sense, or that it helps us much, or has any real meaning. In many ways, Bitcoin is reinventing the Torrens title system, except that the underlying good is an intangible shared expectation of value, not real estate; and there isn't one central registry, but a decentralized peer-to-peer registry. |
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Is that a joke?
Bitcoin is basic maths. Making laws to change how Bitcoins work is like making laws to change how gravity work.
Guns and bullets run on basic chemistry and physics. Do you suppose that a legislature might make laws (which might be commonly, if imperfectly) enforced regarding the possession and use of guns and bullets? Do you suppose that a person who manufactured and sold guns or ammunition might at some point find it helpful to be aware of those laws? Note to the feebleminded: I have a lot of guns and bullets. Molon labe. I believe the Second Amendment protects an individual RKBA. I am not arguing that guns should be more regulated. This post is not about gun control. This post is pointing out that governments attempt to, and with varying degrees of success, regulate items and processes which operate on basic physical or mathematical laws or processes which are themselves beyond the legislature's reach. If that observation is insufficient, you might consider whether or not governments have attempted to regulate the growing and processing of certain plants, or of relatively simple chemical reactions/transformations that can be applied to ordinary chemical compounds. Those attempts have obviously been less than wholly successful; but they have certainly had a significant impact on people interested in those plants and those chemicals, to the extent that many people who would like to use those things do not, and others incur significant costs adapting their operations to the the risk of (imperfect) intervention. |
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I have had only glancing exposure to investment clubs, and that's from a tax perspective, but they're typically structured as unincorporated associations or as partnerships. All gains & losses pass through to the members.
They typically only invest in registered, publicly traded securities - if someone is claiming that an "investment club" somehow escapes the rules about the registration of securities and securities dealers, a citation to the applicable regs/statute would be a good start.
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