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Silk Road 2 Hacked, All Bitcoins Stolen

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Re: Silk Road 2 Hacked, All Bitcoins Stolen

#461

Post by grrowl »

mbillie1 wrote: post #91
MarkPNeyer wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the law has very little to do with supporting freedom and peace these days.

That is very true, but there's still an enormous chasm for your average person between being mostly-law-abiding (I'm not counting things like jaywalking or going 5mph over the limit) and participating in drug sales, which could land you life in prison. Hell, I think drug laws are incredibly unjust in the US, and that the government is overstepping its bounds left and right. By no means should you infer from this that…

Overzealous drug laws make normally-regular people be defined as criminals. As such, they are forced into contact with other criminals. Some of these criminals break moral laws as well as legal ones.

Re: Silk Road 2 Hacked, All Bitcoins Stolen

#463

Post by DennisP »

mpyne wrote: post #337
DennisP wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Libertarians have a strong sense of morality based on property rights. You might be thinking of anarchism.

Anarchism has a strong sense of morality based on communal rights. It's not strictly amoral (and in fact is very far from it).

I wasn't clear, I didn't mean to imply that anarchism has no morality, just that it isn't based on individuals' property rights. (At least, that's my understanding of it.)

Re: Silk Road 2 Hacked, All Bitcoins Stolen

#464

Post by kaonashi »

xenophanes wrote: post #424
kaonashi wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess just what libertarianism was from Belsham into the 20th century, before the influence of Rand and Rothbard. The comment was in response to a statement saying that Rand spoke against libertarianism, which was true.

Can you explain more? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Belsham > [Belshan] used the term libertarian in a discussion of free will and in opposition to "necessitarian" (or determinist) views The use of the word "libertarian" in free will debates is separate from political libertarianism. But it's worse than that: http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers... > This essay is cited as the first to…

He was the first guy to ever use the term libertarian; so from that point until the late 60's, libertarianism was something Rand was ostensibly against. Most libertarians today embrace the Randian critique of the libertarianism of her day.

In other words, the libertarianism of today is by and large anarcho-capitalism rebranded.

Re: Silk Road 2 Hacked, All Bitcoins Stolen

#465

Post by EGreg »

gwern wrote: post #453
EGreg wrote: post #273

Ummm seriously why do these marketplaces hold your bitcoins??? Don't they know bitcoins support m-of-n transactions? There should be a marketplace without the ability to have bitcoins stolen! It's rather straighforward people.

> There should be a marketplace without the ability to have bitcoins stolen! There is at least one, and it's pretty well-known. You underestimate how much ordinary people don't want to deal with things like m-of-n transactions/multi-sig.

So why can't it be made more user friendly?

Marketplace initiates the transaction, and all you have to do is sign it with your bitcoin client.

Re: Silk Road 2 Hacked, All Bitcoins Stolen

#466

Post by xenophanes »

kaonashi wrote: post #464
xenophanes wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain more? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Belsham > [Belshan] used the term libertarian in a discussion of free will and in opposition to "necessitarian" (or determinist) views The use of the word "libertarian" in free will debates is separate from political libertarianism. But it's worse than that: http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers... > This essay is cited as the first to…

He was the first guy to ever use the term libertarian; so from that point until the late 60's, libertarianism was something Rand was ostensibly against. Most libertarians today embrace the Randian critique of the libertarianism of her day. In other words, the libertarianism of today is by and large anarcho-capitalism rebranded.

> He was the first guy to ever use the term libertarian

The word has multiple meanings. He used a different one. How is that relevant? It's like you cited the first use of the word "mouse" (animal) when we were talking about computer mice.

And your comments don't make sense. Rand strongly criticized anarcho-capitalism, you say libertarians today are largely anarcho-capitalists, and yet you seem to be disagreeing with the Objectivism/libertarianism divide (though it's hard to tell what your position is).

Re: Silk Road 2 Hacked, All Bitcoins Stolen

#467

Post by einhverfr »

tolmasky wrote: post #165
zedshaw wrote: post #133

This 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 think you have a deep misunderstanding of libertarianism (which is your right of course). Libertarians don't necessarily not believe in laws, they simply don't believe in a monopoly of laws and law enforcers. This is kind of the whole point. Its clear that in your world view "justice" is somehow inexorably tied to government, but there others that disagree (which leads to your confusion in thinking that because som…

> Libertarians don't necessarily not believe in laws, they simply don't believe in a monopoly of laws and law enforcers.

But based on my understanding this either ends up fully reinventing the public sphere under some (weird) definition of private sector (not-for-profit, incorporated, resident-owned cities) or else it cedes power to rich, powerful corporations. After all the limits of what a contract may cover is a social, and therefore political decision, right?

As a Distributist, I see Libertarians as seeing a real problem and coming up with a weird solution to it. The problem is not to reduce the subject-matter scope of government (I actually think this should be expanded slightly to include running of infrastructure that is physical-monopoly territory provided that services are not provided by the government), but to reduce the geographic and demographic scale of government entities. I.e. rather than move government into the "private sector" (which becomes an empty formalism), bring government back close to the people. Empower local government and shrink central government.

Re: Silk Road 2 Hacked, All Bitcoins Stolen

#468

Post by xenophanes »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #329
xenophanes wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> objectivist libertarians There is no such thing as an objectivist libertarian. Maybe you should learn what you're talking about before hating. Objectivism and libertarianism are separate opposing things. The Objectivist position on libertarians is very negative.

Stalinists don't like Trotskyists either.

And is there such thing as "Stalinist Trotskyists"?

Also that some similar groups dislike each other does not imply that all groups which dislike each other are similar.

Re: Silk Road 2 Hacked, All Bitcoins Stolen

#469

Post by einhverfr »

novalis78 wrote: post #454
mpyne wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even the most staunch of minarchists wouldn't generally repeal the 'base' laws, which are those laws that, if violated, infringe upon the rights of others. Libertarians do not, for example, suggest that murder should be legal -- everyone has the right to life. The set of laws is not really the problem then. Literally everyone agrees that "government should be as small as possible", the problem is that no one ever a…

"literally everyone agrees that 'government should be as small as possible". Coming from Europe, that strikes me as a fascinating American (I presume) statement. From countless conversations I (Libertarian leaning - something which I just discovered in the last few years, did not even know that such a thing existed before that) had in the past in various European countries I found that the size of government was usua…

And yet, having been owner and operator of businesses in both the US and UK, the UK government is far friendlier to small businesses than the US government is. Part of the US problem is that government has scaled up so far demographically and geographically that the government does need to be as small as possible at least on a federal level.

A way to look at this from a European perspective might be the role of the European Union: should the EU government be as powerful as possible? Or should virtually all of the lawmaking power reside with the member states?

Re: Silk Road 2 Hacked, All Bitcoins Stolen

#470

Post by einhverfr »

MartinCron wrote: post #203
Crito wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are currently thousands of different sets of laws and legal systems that you can choose to subscribe/submit to. Potential victims of crimes can shop around for the legal system that they prefer, and those who intend to commit crimes can do the same. Generally this "shopping around" cannot be done retroactively; there are a few exceptions to this however. The way that you pick the one that you wish to be associa…

That doesn't do anything to answer my question about where libertarians stand on the question. I still don't get what a civilization without a "monopoly on laws and law enforcement" would look like.

> That doesn't do anything to answer my question about where libertarians stand on the question. I still don't get what a civilization without a "monopoly on laws and law enforcement" would look like.

Not a libertarian here, but one example regarding this might be medieval Iceland where such shopping around was encouraged and even the basis of the system, as was taking things into one's own hands and perpetrating blood feuds.

Interestingly the difference between "murder" and "manslaughter" in Iceland had nothing to do with intent but rather that if you killed someone that was manslaughter, but if you failed to report it to the family of the victim properly in a timely manner, or you tried to hide the fact, then it was murder (and a far, far more serious crime).

But then I suspect there's a reason why at that time, Iceland didn't have cities.

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