Bitcoin Foundation receives cease and desist order from California

[cryptoanarchist]

liberty dollar was a physical coin that was put into circulation as a counterfeit of a US dollar coin. it held the $ symbol etc which is trade marks of government.

Wrong. The $ sign is not a trademark of government..LMAO.....take a few moments to think about that before you make yourself sound galactically stupid again.

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[DeathAndTaxes]

liberty dollar was a physical coin that was put into circulation as a counterfeit of a US dollar coin. it held the $ symbol etc which is trade marks of government.

Wrong. The $ sign is not a trademark of government..LMAO.....take a few moments to think about that before you make yourself sound galactically stupid again.

That is correct franky1 often gets the details incorrect.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rounds/rounds34.1.html (copy of jury form lists many of the details of the case).

The coins however did use the words "USA", "In God we Trust", have US state names, and symbology commonly associated with US coins.  Statements of the company about launching all 50 coins to coincide with date of US mint launching US state coins was introduced as evidence.  As was documentation that the organization encouraged passing the coins as US coinage (not overtly lying but allowing the counterparty to make a mistake that the coins were US legal tender), encouraged participating merchants to give unsuspecting customers Liberty Coins as change without informing them it wasn't legal tender (i.e. customer buys $60 worth of goods, pays with $100 FRN and gets back Liberty Reserve coins for some or all of change.  Most people would assume that if they paid in legal tender, the change back was legal tender).




Then you have aspects like the $10 Silver coin having about $6 worth of Silver at the time of minting.  Everyone at every level got very large cuts of the profits.  Ultimately it was unsuspecting consumers who got $6 in Silver instead of $10 in FRN.

[BurtW]

As a former Liberty Dollar RCO, I can tell you that TECSHARE is 100% correct. Not only did Bernard and LD not violate any similitude laws, counterfeiting requires the INTENT to defraud the public. Bernard had hired a very well known attorney to make sure he WASN'T violating any similitude laws. So how can anyone say he intended to violate a law when he paid someone a ton of money to make sure he wasn't??

It took a completely bullshit stacked jury to twist around that simple logic. It remains as a great proof that there is absolutely NO justice whatsoever in federal courtrooms.

cryptoanarchist:  How do you resolve what you said in this quote with the pictures in the previous post?

Are you saying the pictures are fake?  From those pictures and D&T's post it is OBVIOUS that there was an intent to defraud.

If you bother to look at the rounds Liberty Dollar issued, you would NEVER confuse them for federal reserve notes or coinage issued by the treasury.

TECSHARE:  how can you say that with a straight face?  I just looked at the rounds and they look a lot like US money to me.

[Severian]

liberty dollar was a physical coin that was put into circulation as a counterfeit of a US dollar coin.

It's ok to be ignorant but it's not ok to lie.

If you're ignorant, educate yourself. If you're lying, stop it.

[Severian]

The coins however did use the words "USA", "In God we Trust", have US state names,

D&T, I'm surprised. You're usually more on top of it than this.

It says, "Trust in God" and there's no country name. libertydollar.org is prominent on the coin. Only a fool would be taken in by this coin.

And you'd have to totally out to lunch to ever think that Ron Paul would be put on a US coin:

Ultimately it was unsuspecting consumers who got $6 in Silver instead of $10 in FRN.

No one using this coin was an unsuspecting consumer.

[cryptoanarchist]

As a former Liberty Dollar RCO, I can tell you that TECSHARE is 100% correct. Not only did Bernard and LD not violate any similitude laws, counterfeiting requires the INTENT to defraud the public. Bernard had hired a very well known attorney to make sure he WASN'T violating any similitude laws. So how can anyone say he intended to violate a law when he paid someone a ton of money to make sure he wasn't??

It took a completely bullshit stacked jury to twist around that simple logic. It remains as a great proof that there is absolutely NO justice whatsoever in federal courtrooms.

cryptoanarchist:  How do you resolve what you said in this quote with the pictures in the previous post?

Are you saying the pictures are fake?  From those pictures and D&T's post it is OBVIOUS that there was an intent to defraud.

Obvious? That is clearly just your opinion, because its not obvious to me. I don't think they look at all like US coinage, as evidenced by the website and 800 number on that. Are you saying that you've seen US coinage with a website URL on them?

If you were going to convict someone based on opinions, then I guess you could go after Chuck E Cheese for their "dollars" as long as someone had the opinion they looked like US coinage. That's why there are similitude laws - to make the laws OBJECTIVE and NOT SUBJECTIVE.

I'll restate what I said before: you can't claim that there was intent to counterfeit when you hired a lawyer to make sure you aren't violating similitude laws. Now, if someone else used them to pay a merchant that is expecting fiat, there may be an argument there, albeit a weak one as most store transactions lack a written contract and the person offering a LD could argue they were proposing new terms.

On a personal note, BurtW, why are you so on the US government's nuts? Are you a cop or something?

[cryptoanarchist]

Then you have aspects like the $10 Silver coin having about $6 worth of Silver at the time of minting.  Everyone at every level got very large cuts of the profits.  Ultimately it was unsuspecting consumers who got $6 in Silver instead of $10 in FRN.

That's a completely irrelevant argument. There is no such thing as circulating coinage that has a metal content equal to the face value. If it did, it wouldn't circulate for long as people will take them out of circulation for the melt value.

.25 quarters contain only ~4 cents of metal

.05 nickels contain only ~4 cents of metal

.10 dimes = ~1.5 cents (about a 700% markup!)

Pennies from 1982 and earlier are worth about 2 cents each, and are slowly being taken out of circulation exactly for that reason.

[marcus_of_augustus]

Paul Clayton, senior counsel at the Department of Financial Institutions

Just to put a name and face on the record for the forces at work here. Wonder how much he actually knows about IT? Innovations in value exchange technologies?

[DeathAndTaxes]

Then you have aspects like the $10 Silver coin having about $6 worth of Silver at the time of minting.  Everyone at every level got very large cuts of the profits.  Ultimately it was unsuspecting consumers who got $6 in Silver instead of $10 in FRN.

That's a completely irrelevant argument. There is no such thing as circulating coinage that has a metal content equal to the face value. If it did, it wouldn't circulate for long as people will take them out of circulation for the melt value.

.25 quarters contain only ~4 cents of metal

.05 nickels contain only ~4 cents of metal

.10 dimes = ~1.5 cents (about a 700% markup!)

Pennies from 1982 and earlier are worth about 2 cents each, and are slowly being taken out of circulation exactly for that reason.

Well at one time the dollar had "one dollar" (which is a unit of weight) of gold.  It was either a dollars worth of gold in the coin itself or the paper note could be redeemed for a dollar.  Liberty claimed selling point is that it was backed by silver.  If it merely is a fiat currency sold over face value to the profit of issuers well in many respects it was worse than the federal reserve note.

I think we can just agree to disagree.  I read the states evidence and it is pretty damming.  Ultimately that is why we have juries.  Is it possible they had no intent to counterfeit (which doesn't mean produce an exact replica it means passing currency off as legal tender)?  Certainly however looking at the evidence if I was on the jury I likely would have sided the same way.

This will be my last post to avoid derailing this thread further.  Feel free to have the last word ....

[cryptoanarchist]

Then you have aspects like the $10 Silver coin having about $6 worth of Silver at the time of minting.  Everyone at every level got very large cuts of the profits.  Ultimately it was unsuspecting consumers who got $6 in Silver instead of $10 in FRN.

That's a completely irrelevant argument. There is no such thing as circulating coinage that has a metal content equal to the face value. If it did, it wouldn't circulate for long as people will take them out of circulation for the melt value.

.25 quarters contain only ~4 cents of metal

.05 nickels contain only ~4 cents of metal

.10 dimes = ~1.5 cents (about a 700% markup!)

Pennies from 1982 and earlier are worth about 2 cents each, and are slowly being taken out of circulation exactly for that reason.

Well at one time the dollar had "one dollar" (which is a unit of weight) of gold.  It was either a dollars worth of gold in the coin itself or the paper note could be redeemed for a dollar.  Liberty claimed selling point is that it was backed by silver.  If it merely is a fiat currency sold over face value to the profit of issuers well in many respects it was worse than the federal reserve note.

I think we can just agree to disagree.  I read the states evidence and it is pretty damming.  Ultimately that is why we have juries.  Is it possible they had no intent to counterfeit (which doesn't mean produce an exact replica it means passing currency off as legal tender)?  Certainly however looking at the evidence if I was on the jury I likely would have sided the same way.

This will be my last post to avoid derailing this thread further.  Feel free to have the last word ....

you're still confused. "Dollars" today aren't "dollars" of 100 years ago. A "dollar" used to be defined as 371.25 grains of silver, now it has no meaning whatsoever. Silver dollars didn't even need a "face value" as they were what they were. And LDs were never "fiat", since they were never issued by the government. Please google "fiat - definition" to avoid being ignorant.

Furthermore, my last post was about metal content of coins, and you brought up notes (you should google what a "note " is too) - which are a whole different thing.

LD coins were the subject of the trial, not the warehouse receipts (LD didn't make "notes"). The coins weren't backed by silver - they WERE silver. The warehouse receipts were just what they said they were, and the government didn't even attempt to build a case around them, even though they stole the metals they represented.

[mikegogulski]

I think it's time to found the "church of random", where our religious practive involves random automated prayer. We'll install random prayer nodes sending random prayers to random other believers prayer nodes in order to worship the gods of random.

I think it's time to found the "Meta-Church of Random Churches", where our religious practice involves prayers which permute and pervert the random number generators which create and perpetuate the infinitude of random churches, whose prayer nodes send random prayers to random other believers' prayer nodes in order to worship the gods of random.

The collected energies and entropies of believers' prayer nodes' prayers can then be combined with the Meta-Church's RNGs and other entropy sources, thus:

Ei = Ei + f(a, BPNP) + g(b, MCMRNG) + h(c, {SHA256(SHA256()) | scrypt()}(CABN))

where:

Ei = the momentary entropy seed function
a, b, c = "nine numbers of the cosmos" constants (cf. Rees, FRS)
BPNP = summation of momentary believers' prayer nodes' prayers' entropies and energies
MCMRNG = summation of momentary Meta-Church Meta-RNG outputs
CABN = summation of momentary output of California State Bureaucracy Nonsense Generation Function

Self-compiling code, as well as a related LISP dialect, will be published shortly on Github.

[Diamondstarfall]

It's news like these that makes me ponder this about this "world" we live in.

[mikegogulski]

The man who defends himself in court has a fool for a lawyer.

The man who quotes "The man who defends himself in court has a fool for a lawyer" is likely on the Bar Association's payroll.

[QuestionAuthority]

The man who defends himself in court has a fool for a lawyer.

The man who quotes "The man who defends himself in court has a fool for a lawyer" is likely on the Bar Association's payroll.

 

[charleshoskinson]

I think it's time to found the "Meta-Church of Random Churches", where our religious practice involves prayers which permute and pervert the random number generators which create and perpetuate the infinitude of random churches, whose prayer nodes send random prayers to random other believers' prayer nodes in order to worship the gods of random.

The collected energies and entropies of believers' prayer nodes' prayers can then be combined with the Meta-Church's RNGs and other entropy sources, thus:

Ei = Ei + f(a, BPNP) + g(b, MCMRNG) + h(c, {SHA256(SHA256()) | scrypt()}(CABN))

where:

Ei = the momentary entropy seed function
a, b, c = "nine numbers of the cosmos" constants (cf. Rees, FRS)
BPNP = summation of momentary believers' prayer nodes' prayers' entropies and energies
MCMRNG = summation of momentary Meta-Church Meta-RNG outputs
CABN = summation of momentary output of California State Bureaucracy Nonsense Generation Function

Self-compiling code, as well as a related LISP dialect, will be published shortly on Github.

You get two Lolcats for this comment:





Use them wisely

[moni3z]

So:

E-gold operators arrested and jailed for unlicensed money transactions
E-Bullion operators arrested and jailed for unlicensed money transactions
Liberty Dollar owner jailed for variety of bullshit charges
Liberty Reserve operators arrested for unlicensed money transactions
Russian payment gateway operators kidnapped and extradited for enabling online gambling
TBF members ... ???

[QuestionAuthority]

So:

E-gold operators arrested and jailed for unlicensed money transactions
E-Bullion operators arrested and jailed for unlicensed money transactions
Liberty Dollar owner jailed for variety of bullshit charges
Liberty Reserve operators arrested for unlicensed money transactions
Russian payment gateway operators kidnapped and extradited for enabling online gambling
TBF members ...

It doesn't sound very promising when you put it that way.

[Loozik]

So:

E-gold operators arrested and jailed for unlicensed money transactions
E-Bullion operators arrested and jailed for unlicensed money transactions
Liberty Dollar owner jailed for variety of bullshit charges
Liberty Reserve operators arrested for unlicensed money transactions
Russian payment gateway operators kidnapped and extradited for enabling online gambling
TBF members ...

In my opinion it is for the good of Bitcoin system:
- the legal fiction called TBF either dissolves
- or developers leave TBF and remain independent.

It is neither safe nor noble for the devs to be associated with this business organization.

The suit and white collar guys from TBF (businessmen) who wanted to play with fire by hiring lobbyists to get intimate with regulators / legislators to promote their present and future businesses at the expense of Bitcoin system development - well, let them get burned (hopefully not severely). Let them and their lobbyists wage silly legal battles.

[jubalix]

Whats the big effing deal? The notice says "MAY be involved..." Bitcoin foundation is clearly not a money transmitter. The notice requests a response, which I am sure the Bitcoin foundation will no doubt easily provide. Case closed. Nothing to see here.

What if a small business without access to counsel receives such a notice? This is government bullying and is a big deal.

I feel like the BTC Foundation could easily defend this in court without a trial lawyer...

The man who defends himself in court has a fool for a lawyer.

nope not always

[Rassah]

Only a fool would be taken in by this coin.

Then their problem was trying to circulate it in this country specifically.