Garzik encourages regulation

[Crazy]

You won't have a new paradigm without us, who you call the unworthy.  Reality necessitates compromise.

Reality is, whether you'd like to believe it or not, and whether it's a morally sound argument or not...  Bitcoin will flourish with or without law-abiding and/or "willingly regulated" users. Pandora's box and all that. Once the right individuals get involved, the underworld will maintain the value of the currency among themselves alone. Anyone else that wants to get involved in Bitcoin sans the illegal activity... it'll be there for them, too. If you doubt the illicit materials market can't sustain their own economy once the infrastructure is put in place, I'm not sure I can convince you of anything. Anyone, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

[gusti]

Okay.  Let's try a different approach - if Bitcoin is declared illegal goes completely underground, how will I use it without great risk to my personal safety?  If Bitcoin users could actually pull that off, then we have a real fight on our hands, instead of a series of brutal raids on our homes.

Remember there is a world outside there. If I were you, I would consider moving abroad.
I would be very scared of living in such a police state you are describing.

Anyway, Bitcoin should live on it's premises, or die with them.

[Goldenmaw]

You won't have a new paradigm without us, who you call the unworthy.  Reality necessitates compromise.

Reality is, whether you'd like to believe it or not, and whether it's a morally sound argument or not...  Bitcoin will flourish with or without law-abiding and/or "willingly regulated" users. Pandora's box and all that. Once the right individuals get involved, the underworld will maintain the value of the currency among themselves alone. Anyone else that wants to get involved in Bitcoin sans the illegal activity... it'll be there for them, too. If you doubt the illicit materials market can't sustain their own economy once the infrastructure is put in place, I'm not sure I can convince you of anything. Anyone, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

I do doubt it.  A currency is only as strong as its exchangeability.  Don't pretty much all underworld exchanges use either established currencies with obvious backing, or a barter system?  No one uses "black dollars" that I know of.  Perhaps bitcoin will be different, but only time will tell that.

Remember there is a world outside there. If I were you, I would consider moving abroad.
I would be very scared of living in such a police state you are describing.

Anyway, Bitcoin should live on it's premises, or die with them.

I don't agree with that, but I certainly respect it.  And yeah, the raid thing is a real worry for me, should Bitcoins be declared illegal.

[em3rgentOrdr]

Okay.  Let's try a different approach - if Bitcoin is declared illegal goes completely underground, how will I use it without great risk to my personal safety?  If Bitcoin users could actually pull that off, then we have a real fight on our hands, instead of a series of brutal raids on our homes.

Remember there is a world outside there. If I were you, I would consider moving abroad.
I would be very scared of living in such a police state you are describing.

Anyway, Bitcoin should live on it's premises, or die with them.

There is actually a whole body of thought on what is known as "Agorism" on how to provide law and security without government:

from http://agorism.info/

In a market anarchist society, law and security would be provided by market actors instead of political institutions. Agorists recognize that situation can not develop through political reform. Instead, it will arise as a result of market processes.
As the state is banditry, revolution culminates in the suppression of the criminal state by market providers of security and law. Market demand for such service providers is what will lead to their emergence. Development of that demand will come from economic growth in the sector of the economy that explicitly shuns state involvement (and thus can not turn to the state in its role as monopoly provider of security and law). That sector of the economy is the counter-economy – black and grey markets.

[Goldenmaw]

Banditry, indeed!

[Crazy]

I do doubt it.  A currency is only as strong as its exchangeability.  Don't pretty much all underworld exchanges use either established currencies with obvious backing, or a barter system?  No one uses "black dollars" that I know of.  Perhaps bitcoin will be different, but only time will tell that.

You doubt it? What is maintaining the "exchangeability" of Bitcoins right now? The fact that you can do business with a few obscure businesses to get some some shirts, servers, VPNs, gift cards? The fact that there's a bunch of speculative trading? You think these two economies, if isolated, foster a stronger value among currency exchange than illicit drugs? I'm not sure why you would question the market more than the infrastructure. If trust and value are instilled within the system, the medium of exchange, then the materials in the exchange are insignificant (at least IMO). There are a ton of people that think Gold is useless, a fictional currency and useless commodity. While gold does have its pragmatic applications, it's the collective agreement that gold is valuable that makes it valuable.

[Goldenmaw]

You doubt it? What is maintaining the "exchangeability" of Bitcoins right now?

It is my personal belief that the anticipation of widespread liquidity and exchangeability, coupled with obviously rising values due to that same speculation, are what is responsible for the current value of Bitcoins.  It is also my belief that were it to be announced that all of those Bitcoins were soon to be illegal, everyone who lived in the USA and who wished to remain on the safe side of her laws would sell off as quickly as possible, which would tremendously damage their value.

[Crazy]

It is my personal belief that the anticipation of widespread liquidity and exchangeability, coupled with obviously rising values due to that same speculation, are what is responsible for the current value of Bitcoins.  It is also my belief that were it to be announced that all of those Bitcoins were soon to be illegal, everyone who lived in the USA and who wished to remain on the safe side of her laws would sell off as quickly as possible, which would tremendously damage their value.

I will note that prior to the media exposure, Bitcoin was maintaining it's value very well. The spike was from media exposure and ensuing speculative trading. What will be interesting to watch is the trade volume of the market while Silk Road is closed for maintenance/upgrading/security evaluation. I know they said it was also to help shift the focus to the positive aspects of Bitcoin, but they very well may have the opposite effect: pegging the market to illegal activity. I hope that isn't the case, but I think it's a plausible scenario.

[gusti]

You doubt it? What is maintaining the "exchangeability" of Bitcoins right now?

It is my personal belief that the anticipation of widespread liquidity and exchangeability, coupled with obviously rising values due to that same speculation, are what is responsible for the current value of Bitcoins.  It is also my belief that were it to be announced that all of those Bitcoins were soon to be illegal, everyone who lived in the USA and who wished to remain on the safe side of her laws would sell off as quickly as possible, which would tremendously damage their value.

Don't worry, cryptocurrencies will survive despite being illegal or not, if people find a real benefit for using them.
Like illegal drugs market flourish everywhere (please don't ask me what are the benefits of illegal drugs)
Maybe we may have  "medical bitcoins" dispensaries, too.  

[lonestranger]

Okay.  Let's try a different approach - if Bitcoin is declared illegal goes completely underground, how will I use it without great risk to my personal safety?

Has anyone ever pointed out to you how spineless you are?

[Scientician!]

Okay.  Let's try a different approach - if Bitcoin is declared illegal goes completely underground, how will I use it without great risk to my personal safety?  If Bitcoin users could actually pull that off, then we have a real fight on our hands, instead of a series of brutal raids on our homes.

The real danger occurs at the exchange level.

If all you ever do is mine bitcoins, and then either hoard them or trade them directly for goods/services, you *should* be fine.

Once you start turning BTC into fiat, USD particularly.... Expect high levels of scrutiny, sooner rather than later.

King Whitehat is coming.

[Goldenmaw]

Okay.  Let's try a different approach - if Bitcoin is declared illegal goes completely underground, how will I use it without great risk to my personal safety?

Has anyone ever pointed out to you how spineless you are?

No.  They have disagreed in colorful ways with my appraisal of the situation, but you are the first to make this mistake in exactly this manner.  Since you're my number one customer on this front, I'll clarify my stance a bit:

A man holed up in his apartment against a police siege with a 9mm to protect his hard drives is not a revolution.  It is an obituary entry.  None of us have anything to gain by picking fights we can't possibly win.  The Give Me Bitcoins or Give Me Death is going to result in the death option until our little niche has the general public behind it.

The real danger occurs at the exchange level.

If all you ever do is mine bitcoins, and then either hoard them or trade them directly for goods/services, you *should* be fine.

Once you start turning BTC into fiat, USD particularly.... Expect high levels of scrutiny, sooner rather than later.

King Whitehat is coming.

I dunno'.  Miners send out some pretty damned predictable traffic.  I don't doubt it could be looked for specifically - and I sincerely doubt mining through multiple proxies is feasible for most people at this point, do to latency issues.  You'd need some damned good proxies.

[Scientician!]

Im sure the NSA has a couple of engis profiling BTC traffic as we speak. Its is certainly conceivable that they could go for the throat and cripple that traffic with trunk router level packet sniffing, but your risk personally if you have never converted fiat to BTC or vice versa is very low, only that you may have a couple of Linux boxes with a shit ton of GPU horsepower and lousy CPUs generating quite a bit of heat and noise curnching lots of numbers for no very good reason

I reiterate, anyone currently cashing out should be doing it as quickly as possible from a non-extradition treaty country. EAs with multiple hundreds of thousands of BTC, I'm looking squarely in your direction..

[gusti]

A man holed up in his apartment against a police siege with a 9mm to protect his hard drives is not a revolution.  It is an obituary entry. 

Please enlighten me which hard drives do I need to defend with a gun. Are the ones with a 2048-bit encryption ? Or are the ones sitting on an offshore cloud-style facility ?

Anyway, I must tell you that your scene is very good for next Jason Bourne's movie.  

[Goldenmaw]

A man holed up in his apartment against a police siege with a 9mm to protect his hard drives is not a revolution.  It is an obituary entry. 

Please enlighten me which hard drives do I need to defend with a gun. Are the ones with a 2048-bit encryption ? Or are the ones sitting on an offshore cloud-style facility ?

Anyway, I must tell you that your scene is very good for next Jason Bourne's movie.  

You witty son of a gun.

[Scientician!]

Also, a little anecdotal story, for anyone doubting the Black Box's very real power:

In the mid 90s, during the fiber optic buildout boom, a close friend of mine worked on architecting an AT&T inter-continental fiber switching terminal in the Bay Area (west coast of the US for non Amercians ). Towards the end of the project, NSA came in and restricted access to the main switching room. He is almost certain that they mirrored the connection and pointed it directly at a huge datamining operation that was housed nearby in what amounted to a very large bunker.

Essentially the government is very likely archiving every packet of traffic sent by anyone at a few key junction points.  They have likely been doing this for 15+ years. They are likely getting close to having the computational power and algorithmic wherewithal to parse these many exabytes (zettabyte?) of data.

I know this may sound perilously close to tinfoil hat club territory to some of you, but again, if you think that the CIA/NSA/SS is going to simply allow BTC to threaten the primacy of the USD in this country completely unchallenged, I think you'll find you are sorely mistaken.

[Goldenmaw]

Oh, geez.  Where's J.C. Denton when we need him?

[NO_SLAVE]

This is classic first mover advantage unfolding. Becoming safe through sanction, and then as competitors show up,  800 pound gorilla status secured....off to buy more BTC.....

[Scientician!]

Oh, geez.  Where's J.C. Denton when we need him?

Great game

But seriously, this is not far fetched. My friend doesn't know exactly what was done in that terminal, just that it was very very secretive, and verifiably NSA. He's much smarter than me and I'm inclined very much to trust his assesment of that situation..

Anyway.. none of this shit is particularly germane to this discussion, I apologize for the semi derail.

Personally, I'm going to continue happily mining, and hoarding, and exchanging BTC directly for goods/services.

 Currency exchangers are well cautioned to be extremely careful.

[gusti]

Also, a little anecdotal story, for anyone doubting the Black Box's very real power:

In the mid 90s, during the fiber optic buildout boom, a close friend of mine worked on architecting an AT&T inter-continental fiber switching terminal in the Bay Area (west coast of the US for non Amercians ). Towards the end of the project, NSA came in and restricted access to the main switching room. He is almost certain that they mirrored the connection and pointed it directly at a huge datamining operation that was housed nearby in what amounted to a very large bunker.

Essentially the government is very likely archiving every packet of traffic sent by anyone at a few key junction points.  They have likely been doing this for 15+ years. They are likely getting close to having the computational power and algorithmic wherewithal to parse these many exabytes (zettabyte?) of data.

I know this may sound perilously close to tinfoil hat club territory to some of you, but again, if you think that the CIA/NSA/SS is going to simply allow BTC to threaten the primacy of the USD in this country completely unchallenged, I think you'll find you are sorely mistaken.

I know big brother is already between us, and with our own consent. But, on the other side, copyright piracy hurts US economy by the billions. So, why don't they enforce them all ?