Earlier quoted context omitted.
Feel free to list your choice of countries without any government and we will see what their quality of life ranking is vs. standard countries with functional government. Here is a handy chart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inequality...
Which of those countries doesn't have a government? And which of those countries has a society like what I'm advocating? Note that I'm not simply advocating that we have anything so long as it's not government. I'm advocating a specific alternative to government.
Silk Road 2 Hacked, All Bitcoins Stolen
441–450 of 555 posts
Re: Silk Road 2 Hacked, All Bitcoins Stolen
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could easily go to a bank and withdraw 90k in cash. There'd be paperwork involved, but even small bank vaults hold far more money than that. This chart is old (1992) but gives an indication of the amount of money in a bank vault: http://i.imgur.com/hVZWFR5.png
Quite a lot of banks will simply say "no, not with any amount of paperwork". It's over the AML threshold. Unless you're a business with a need for that quantity of cash.
Quite a lot of banks will simply say "no,
not with any amount of paperwork"
You're going to need to provide a source for this statement. HSBC was just pilloried in the press for denying large withdrawals to the point that they reversed their policy."Suspicious Transaction Reports" or "Currency Transaction Reports" only take a few minutes at most and can be completed online. The AML threshold applies whether you're using cash or a check, so you're basically saying that banks won't deal with transactions over $10,000 which is absurd.
Nearly every bank and credit union has a 'Large Cash Withdrawal' policy that merely requires ~7 days' notice prior to the withdrawal so that they can order the cash. It also of course waives their liability if you lose that cash or get robbed, but that's to be expected.
Re: Silk Road 2 Hacked, All Bitcoins Stolen
#443This is seriously the most hilarious thing I have read in a long time. Here we have a group of objectivist libertarians who believe that there should be effectively no laws other than the law of economics and self-interest who run an illegal website devoted to the pure greed of cashing in on contraband, and this is what they write: "I’ve included transaction logs at the bottom of this message. Review the vendor’s dis…
I don't oppose governments. I oppose some of their laws.
Most ordinary people oppose laws--half the country opposes the ACA, the other half opposes the Patriot act. Perhaps libertarians oppose more laws than the average person, but opposing laws and advocating full-on anarchy are two very different things. There is no hypocrisy inherent in calling for the repeal of some laws and calling for the enforcement of others, because this is what Democrats, Republicans, Greens, Libertarians, and all the rest of them do 7 days a week.
You reference Ayn Rand in jest but it is worth pointing out what she and other libertarian thinkers have actually said about the role of government:
> Such, in essence, is the proper purpose of a government: to make social existence possible to men, by protecting the benefits and combating the evils which men can cause to one another. - Ayn Rand
> The free society has an indispensable role for government. The law, in a society of free people, protects the life, liberty, and property of all persons alike, ensuring peaceful conditions within the community. Government performs as an impartial umpire, by interpreting and enforcing the previously agreed upon rules. - Ludwig von Mises
> A government which maintained law and order, defined property rights, served as a means whereby we could modify property rights and other rules of the economic game, adjudicated disputes about the interpretation of the rules, enforced contracts, promoted competition, provided a monetary framework, engaged in activities to counter technical monopolies and to overcome neighborhood effects widely regarded as sufficiently important to justify government intervention, and which supplemented private charity and the private family in protecting the irresponsible, whether madman or child -- such a government would clearly have important functions to perform. The consistent liberal is not an anarchist. - Milton Friedman
In fairness to you, there are some libertarian thinkers who have been more on the anarchist side (Murray Rothbard comes to mind). But there is nothing inherent in libertarianism that would require libertarians to adopt an anarchist position, and in fact most libertarian thinkers have taken a very positive view of government when it enforces those laws that libertarians think are important.
What I'm trying to say is, libertarianism isn't the same as anarchy, and most libertarians aren't working to destroy the government. They're working to change it, to make it better, the same goal that conservatives or liberals or anybody else has. And there's nothing inherently hypocritical about repealing drug laws but keep prosecuting thieves.
Re: Silk Road 2 Hacked, All Bitcoins Stolen
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
ah, we've gotten to the "i know you are, but what am i" stage already. well, i'm glad you made it to the ted bundy part, but i can only assume you read one out of every 8-10 words, as that last bit was about hypocrisy in general (and why it's pointless to claim someone is a hypocrite in order discredit someone's argument). in no way was a "slippery slope" argument invoked.
Well, in his defense, your Bundy and Armstrong examples are just awful, and the bit about whether X is moral or Y is moral is even worse. You've begged the question of what defines morality entirely and replaced a rational basis for evaluation with the assumption that most people you know would consider one thing "worse" than another. Here's an equally worse argument. If I took a knife away from Ted Bundy, when I enc…
given the recent news regarding pot - i'm pretty sure that assumption was a safe bet.
my first example is ridiculous. that is the point. no sane person would do that. i went less over the top with armstrong. he's obviously a very skilled cyclist, and knows a lot about it. if he offered me cycling advice i would probably listen to it. facts are facts and are independent of who says them.
Re: Silk Road 2 Hacked, All Bitcoins Stolen
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
Law enforcement is ultimately a license to use violence. Having multiple coalitions or companies selling violence as a product seems like a recipe for a truly nightmarish society.
Multiple coalitions competing for customer dollars will lead to more economically efficient distribution of violence, just like if you replace "violence" with anything else like "bread" or "automobiles."
Re: Silk Road 2 Hacked, All Bitcoins Stolen
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
redthrowaway's comment: > You can make the same argument without being an ass about it. Your reply: > It's funny how me pointing out the stupidity and bullshit of a group of criminals makes me an asshole... You completely missed their point, how you can't see that is beyond me.
Careful, now. It looks like you're saying that calling something stupid bullshit is being an asshole. Some of us happen to believe that stupid bullshit is a real thing and that there are circumstances where calling something stupid bullshit may be entirely fair and justified. Try defending against the accusation itself instead of taking the stance that the accusation is always automatically invalid.
I was attempting to show that his response was a strawman.
After further reading I'm guessing his entire online personality is an act though so the topic seems to be worthless discussing.
Re: Silk Road 2 Hacked, All Bitcoins Stolen
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm surprised they had any kind of online wallet. You'd think you would do manual transactions with offline keys if running a blackmarket, or the very least multiple sigs for any hot wallet.
Multi sgi is exactly what The Marketplace has done, as well as not keeping BTC in an online wallet. It hasn't taken off, unfortunately.
Re: Silk Road 2 Hacked, All Bitcoins Stolen
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
How did "stop being a jackass" turn into "I support the guy who stole the money"? Zed, I want to make myself clear, here: I have absolutely nothing to say whatsoever about whatever substantive claims you might be making. I'm just telling you to stop being a asshole about it. But fuck it, I told you pretty much the exact same thing[1] almost 3 years ago, and you haven't changed since then. It's not your message that t…
> Zed, I want to make myself clear, here: I have absolutely nothing to say whatsoever about whatever substantive claims you might be making. I'm just telling you to stop being a asshole about it. For what it's worth, this is Responding to Tone, or DH2[#] #: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
Re: Silk Road 2 Hacked, All Bitcoins Stolen
#449Not having very much knowledge about the financial industry - is this also an issue with marketplaces that deal with fiat monies? i.e. Dwolla, Balanced, Stripe, Venmo, all serve as intermediaries for moving money - do these companies have bank accounts that hold onto massive sums of money? What protections would go into keep those accounts secure?
Well, there's liquor store robberies every day. Same idea, just a smaller scale. :-)
(Likely more to the point: it's probably harder to clean out your own liquor store and claim robbers did it.)
Re: Silk Road 2 Hacked, All Bitcoins Stolen
#450Sounds like Defcon got the excuse he needed to line his pockets with all of the Silk Road 2 money. I don't run a marketplace, but I would assume that an alarm protocol would be implemented and triggered when thousands of bitcoins start to drain out of "hot storage". Exploiting the transaction malleability bug wouldn't net you 4,500 BTC at once. It would take a lot of requests of broken transactions to drain the entir…
Great. Call me when Andreesen funds a black-market for highly illegal drugs.