2013-08-09 LFB: Is Bitcoin Real or Not?

[aigeezer]

http://lfb.org/today/is-bitcoin-real-or-not/

A nice pro-BTC article as you'd expect from the author, Jeffrey Tucker.

Tucker's stance would be more convincing if his company Laissez Faire Books accepted BTC as a payment medium. One gets the sense that the suits in the biz division are oblivious to the bow-tie in the editorial division, and vice versa.

Stephen Gornick brought this up here about a month ago and I wrote LFB about it at the time. No meaningful response from them yet.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=253176.msg2694263#msg2694263

[GenTarkin]

Pretty awesome article that puts things into perspective in an efficient & truthful manner.

[monkeybars]

Tucker's just an employee of Lassiez Faire. He doesn't run the business side. Wouldn't be surprised if he ran it by them at some point tho.

[aigeezer]

"Then the police made a deal. They could go to jail and have their kids put in foster care or fork over all the cash they were carrying with them. Yes, it’s legal and ever more common under civil asset forfeiture law. In fact, this law has become a huge revenue source for government (the Justice Department collected $4.2 billion in 2012 through such seizures)."

Monstrous.

Edit : found more : http://www.forbes.com/sites/stephendunn/2013/02/18/asset-forfeiture-is-anything-but-civil/

The example was indeed monstrous, but since we're all Bitcoiners I'll quote Tucker's silver lining too:

"Now consider a different scenario. The couple was stopped and had no cash at all. Instead, they were carrying a different kind of currency that lives inside a smartphone. When they made it to their destination, they cashed out this currency and bought their used car.

It does raise the question: Is Bitcoin a possible defense against civil asset forfeiture?"

[marcus_of_augustus]

cue the meme pic ... ?

Civil asset forfeiture? Bitcoin user not affected!

NB: on a side note, I hear border agents (and sometimes cop/investigators) are regularly taking away cellphones, laptop and other mobile devices for full download/clones and hovering up the whole hard-drive, no probable cause necessary ... basically just because they can. User should be aware of the broad powers of State officials in regards to confiscation of digital material when transporting bitcoin keys around on mobile devices ...

[giantdragon]

As I know it is impossible to prove that concrete user owns Bitcoins (of course if he have made all precautions (i.e. used each address one time and kept private keys encrypted)).

[bitfromit]

cue the meme pic ... ?

Civil asset forfeiture? Bitcoin user not affected!

NB: on a side note, I hear border agents (and sometimes cop/investigators) are regularly taking away cellphones, laptop and other mobile devices for full download/clones and hovering up the whole hard-drive, no probable cause necessary ... basically just because they can. User should be aware of the broad powers of State officials in regards to confiscation of digital material when transporting bitcoin keys around on mobile devices ...

Good strong brain wallet required....