Frankly, my moral and ethical code is quite different to what is legal.
"State money transmission laws" belong to a set of legal rules that I don't care about as long as nobody gets harmed (physically or w.r.t. his property).
Also, one person being arrested doesn't imply that he has done something bad (unfortunately). These days there are even people that did something bad and wander freely the earth.
Please base you story on immoral or unethical behavior and not on infringement of arbitrary laws. I have no problem with trusting your judgement but I do know that I don't trust your lawmaker.
I'm an avid anarchist, and no fan of the law, but do you not think its immoral for a company to misrepresent itself in order to get preferential treatment under the law? Doesn't that hurt us all by weakening the systems that (attempt to) keep organizations like CLI Holdings from running amok? As US taxpayers (forgive the presumption), don't court room shams like this expend our collective treasure?
While I must confess that I do not fully understand the motives at play, and everyone is innocent until proven guilty, I'm struggling to find a reason for a profitable company to file for bankruptcy which isn't fraudulent.
I just wanted to criticize that many of the arguments in the original article refer to activities like violating the "state money transmission laws" or "money laundering" and "suspicious transactions" (http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/index.html?id=5618295)
They're _a lobbying group_. They don't release educational materials, they don't write code, the main thing that they do is lobby. I too agree that Charlie Shrem is 100% morally innocent (with the exception of other alleged sins like borrowing a huge pile of btc and not paying it back), but the fact is that if you're going to have a lobbying group you should be damn well sure that everyone involved is squeaky clean.
They don't write code? Gavin Andresen is a founding member of the Bitcoin Foundation and the lead developer for the reference Bitcoin client. I'm pretty sure he also owns and operates Bitcoin.org, which has been the unofficial official homepage of Bitcoin for years.
Gavin doesn't operate bitcoin.org; that's another developer. You are right that the foundation does pay his salary, but the fact is that compared to its endowment and its legal expenses the portion of its money that goes out to developers is rather tiny.
> u should be damn well sure that everyone involved is squeaky clean.
i don't think that's how it works, unless you mean clean of negative publicity. i really doubt most lobbying are clean, but you don't hear about them, because they act like the kings concubines.
The problem for all of us could be that people often forget that "An idea is not responsible for the people that believe in it" (some "Don Marquis" said that)
> Frankly, my moral and ethical code is quite different to what is legal.
Just an aside. This may be an incriminating statement to make, especially without anonymity. I don't know what it is like in Europe, but I doubt an American lawyer would feel well knowing that a client has littered the internet with weapons a future prosecutor could find online with a simple Google search for your name.
I'm not sure what the benefit is for revealing this attitude, even if you do feel strongly in this regard.
I'd argue that "having a different code" does not at all entail any illegal action. People often have very different opinions (for example tax laws), yet they comply with the given law.
But then again, taken out of context (the "no harm" part), an eager prosecutor could use it (successfully or not) so I suppose you are right.
Just as a side note: This is not how it should be, and ironically and most unfortunately, your statement reinforces my original point :(
Knowing nothing about them, I automatically distrust them. The beauty of bitcoin is that it does not need this sort of thing. The less of this shit exists -- associated with the term "bitcoin" -- the smaller the attack vector for state interference.
The only reason they exist was to organize and pay developers a salary for working on Bitcoin F/T. Then they had the stupid idea of lobbying the US fed essentially begging to be regulated while everybody else preferred Bitcoin remain a commodity, and unregulated for as long as possible. They operate in secret as well which is strange for an open source project.
Yesterday, at Bitcoin Berlin, the Global Bitcoin Alliance was announced. It is an umbrella organization for national Bitcoin associations. This bottom-up approach sounds much more promising to me than the top-down attempt of the Foundation at creating local chapters.
So what role does the Bitcoin Foundation play in the Bitcoin world? Is this a threat to Bitcoin itself, or is this just some people who thought it'd be a nice name to give themselves some superficial credibility?
Nobody owns Bitcoin. So I guess anybody could create an organization like that. Then it depends on how much influence you can gather.
For example I think in Germany there are organizations who represent IT freelancers (or businesses, not sure). Their opinions are completely opposite to mine (supporting Copyright, Google taxes and what not), but if somebody wants the opinion of "the IT industry", they tend to go to those organizations. Who else would they go to? They presumably have authority by having some amount of members.
Technically speaking, the persons and/or organizations that develop the major Bitcoin softwares own Bitcoin though. It is much like the ownership of World Wide Web: nobody owns WWW in the traditional sense, but the browser vendors and (sometimes) web developers can acts as the owner of WWW in the limited but profound way. That's why the independent implementation and verification is important even when everything is open, and Bitcoin is no exception. (Not that the OP is correct about its claim though.)
It’s worst. Browser incompatibilities don’t break the web, and sometimes only affect the people that want pixel perfect rendering. With Bitcoin, all the nodes have not only to implement the “abstract” protocol, but be bug compatible with the “official” node (where official is whichever has the “51%” hashing power). Any incompatibility will cause a fork eventually.
> The Bitcoin core development team has worked to limit transaction malleability. There is broad agreement in the community that this needs to be eliminated. Finding the best and most responsible solution will take time. In the meantime, users of the reference implementation do not need to be concerned. Transactions are always tracked properly by the Bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind software.
Sure atm they have the most influence. But there are a lot of wallet implementations for Bitcoin already. Not sure about the nodes - anyway, if the developers were to do something extreme, I think forks would emerge quickly.
They help set national policy for regulation of virtual currency, which is pretty important. They've testified before Congress twice and have had a number of closed-door meetings with federal agencies.
Shrem is out the door. But if you're saying the foundation should have fired him the moment he got arrested, absolutely no. He's still innocent before proven guilty, and knee jerk reactions like that are counterproductive more often than not.
I'm not saying there should be knee jerk reactions but they should make sure their members / managers / advisor are squeaky clean. It's bad for the community when these people turn out greasy.
Easier said than done. I had dismissed cshrem as a playboy half a year ago when he completely failed at getting Bitcoin Wireless off the ground and let BitInstant just die, but I had absolutely no idea he was doing anything illegal.
For people that have been watching the Bitcoin Foundation for a while the possibly shady nature of some of it's members isn't news. There have been complaints about it since its formation when some of it's members supported a company coinvalidation that wants the government to essentially require the registration of all BTC addresses so potentially illegal acquired coins can be blacklisted.
I think what we will see in the Bitcoin Foundation is the same thing we see happening in Bitcoin as it grows; a shake out of the less ethical players. So far Shrem is out if things don't go well at MtGox their CEO is next and hopefully this Vessenes guy as well if it turns out he really is up to this nonsense.
The question is not "Do you trust bitcoin", it's "Do you trust the Bitcoin Foundation". The latter is an organization set up recently and is not involved with the original bitcoin creator.
Why would you trust a foundation anyway ? and trust it on what or to do what exactly ?
I don't think users or investors have anything to do with the foundation, the foundation is just an entity that is there to communicate on some stuff about bitcoin.
The foundation is free to promote anything it wants, and people are free to criticize or to believe it to their own risk.
The question has not a lot to-do with Bitcoin itself, it's mainly aimed at us believers who have a lot invested in these crypto currencies.
I'm personally wary of the foundation because some of the central members promote coin blocking and tracking, and I see this as opposite to Bitcoin's intended purpose.
Except, govt is the one enforcing use of its currency, while Bitcoin Foundation is a just a club of enthusiasts like you or me. They have no special power over Bitcoin. (Except, Gavin has private key to alerts in BitcoinQT, but this does not affect me and my transactions in the slightest.)
Interesting. From my point of view Bitcoin - is an agreement on protocol. We trust the idea and protocol to be secure.
What if someone changes this protocol and you won't be happy with these changes (and you can't control these changes now) - does it mean you were enforced to use it?
Someone can "change" the protocol only for himself. Like you can code up a web browser with a different version of HTML, lets say HTML++. If you find a couple of guys who will serve you webpages in HTML++, good for you, but this does not affect me, or the next guy who still use good old HTML.
Bitcoin Foundation or some well-known economist or developer may be put out some reasons for some change and convince people to upgrade to new rules. But the ultimate decision is in hands of every individual user: miner, merchant or a regular consumer.
No. If all miners start mining their own fork (e.g. creating 250 BTC in a block instead of 25 BTC), users' wallets will reject such blocks. Some other miners will pop up to continue mining the blockchain under previously agreed upon rules.
Miners can't just go and change the protocol. They risk that non-miners won't accept new blocks, so if they are going to enforce different rules, they need to make sure that everyone (not only other miners) will be okay with that.
Of course, some people can upgrade blindly. But if in the middle of transition it turns out that some people are worse off, everyone will rush back to avoid wasting resources on blocks that are not 100% accepted.
Well, you don't regularly see contentious protocol changes. I agree that miners are mostly following the technical leadership, I'm not sure it is 100 years true.
I don't think I had heard of them before the quite aggressive attacks against MtGox just recently. Which were day later shown to be quite hasty, given that Bitstamp suffered from the very same problem.
Criminal charges don't matter that much to me. An entity that's a potential danger for the global banking world would certainly get into legal trouble even they weren't doing anything wrong.
"State money transmission laws" belong to a set of legal rules that I don't care about as long as nobody gets harmed (physically or w.r.t. his property).
Also, one person being arrested doesn't imply that he has done something bad (unfortunately). These days there are even people that did something bad and wander freely the earth.
Please base you story on immoral or unethical behavior and not on infringement of arbitrary laws. I have no problem with trusting your judgement but I do know that I don't trust your lawmaker.