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For Sale: 29,656.51306529 Bitcoins

usmarshals.gov

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Re: For Sale: 29,656.51306529 Bitcoins

#261

Post by badfortrains »

adamfeldman wrote: post #259
marme wrote: post #257

What people should be more concerned with is the fact that the government is selling off someone elses property before they have even been convicted of a crime. Dread pirate roberts plead not guilty and has still not had a trial yet. He has not been convicted of any crime so if these are his coins they are selling them before the trial is even finished

How is this possible?

Civil forfeiture. From wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture#United_States "In civil cases, the owner need not be judged guilty of any crime; it is possible for the Government to prevail by proving that someone other than the owner used the property to commit a crime. In contrast, criminal forfeiture is usually carried out in a sentence following a conviction and is a punitive act against the offender."

Or if you're up for a long read: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/08/12/130812fa_fact_...

Re: For Sale: 29,656.51306529 Bitcoins

#262

Post by moe »

chillingeffect wrote: post #220
phusion wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ^^^ I chuckled a little bit when he said hashes people are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for... annd those dollars are printed on paper with old dead guys on it. Ahh the world this guy lives in must be an interesting one.

it's intriguing to me that no one has pointed out the inherent value of BitCoin: You can commit nearly anonymous transactions over long distances with it. It's value over international currencies is in proportion to the size of the black market transacted via BtC. There are many people out there who don't try to get rich, they simply mine a handful to buy small amounts of drugs on the internet. The "convenience" of t…

I don't understand why people keep trying to frame BTC as some sorts of criminals tool.

Fast, nearly anonymous and free long distance transactions are a pretty big deal for non-criminals as well.

Did you ever try transferring a bigger amount of money to a country outside the EU and US? You'd be astonished by the fees and timescales involved.

Services like Western Union and Moneygram are not just used by criminals.

Re: For Sale: 29,656.51306529 Bitcoins

#263

Post by mike_esspe »

kolinko wrote: post #254
mike_esspe wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such centralized system most likely will be shutdown by US government. See E-Gold, E-Bullion, Liberty Reserve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_gold_currency#Manageme...

Well, wasn't e-gold shut down because it didn't comply with aml laws? What if there were two separate entities? One for the currency, and another one for the exchanges? Only exchanges would be considered money transmitters in such a case, right?

Liberty reserve was structured similar to your idea, you could get it only via exchanges, not directly. That didn't help to protect from US government.

Re: For Sale: 29,656.51306529 Bitcoins

#264

Post by Tycho »

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #247
tinco wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is logic. All speculative trading is driven by two motivations, fear and greed. The balance of these two decides the price. Before this announcement the balance was about $650. It means that greedy people think it will go higher than $650, and fearful people think it would go lower. Now comes this announcement. About 30.000 bitcoins wil sometime in July come into the hands of someone who will have paid signific…

Your scenarios smells wrong to me. Why would anyone pay USD for these seized BTC, then turn around immediately and sell them for USD again? The government is the party dumping BTC on the market. The buyer presumably intends to profit. They would profit by holding until the price goes up, and selling into the market at rates that don't dominate the marketplace.

It's a basic arbitrage trade.

Re: For Sale: 29,656.51306529 Bitcoins

#265

Post by fancyketchup »

chillingeffect wrote: post #220
phusion wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ^^^ I chuckled a little bit when he said hashes people are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for... annd those dollars are printed on paper with old dead guys on it. Ahh the world this guy lives in must be an interesting one.

it's intriguing to me that no one has pointed out the inherent value of BitCoin: You can commit nearly anonymous transactions over long distances with it. It's value over international currencies is in proportion to the size of the black market transacted via BtC. There are many people out there who don't try to get rich, they simply mine a handful to buy small amounts of drugs on the internet. The "convenience" of t…

> You can commit nearly anonymous transactions over long distances with it. It's value over international currencies is in proportion to the size of the black market transacted via BtC.

Eh, I think in the long run that will be more of a hindrance than a help, as it will give governments in many places a plausible reason to attempt to ban or limit its use (which would tend to lead to a vicious cycle of only criminals--however you define that--using it).

On a more practical level, I can't remember a time my credit card has been refused for local or international transactions (and any additional fees are largely invisible to me, the consumer). Paying with a credit card also carries certain advantages: If the goods aren't delivered, I spend 2 minutes on the phone and get my money back.

For the vast majority of consumers, the headache of converting local currency to BtC, learning how to use it, and finding a reliable escrow service will greatly outweigh the benefits of being able to buy drugs (especially as states decriminalize drugs). That keeps BtC firmly in the grasp of speculators.

Re: For Sale: 29,656.51306529 Bitcoins

#266

Post by easytiger »

badfortrains wrote: post #261
adamfeldman wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this possible?

Civil forfeiture. From wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture#United_States "In civil cases, the owner need not be judged guilty of any crime; it is possible for the Government to prevail by proving that someone other than the owner used the property to commit a crime. In contrast, criminal forfeiture is usually carried out in a sentence following a conviction and is a punitive act against the offen…

How is that reasonable?

Re: For Sale: 29,656.51306529 Bitcoins

#267

Post by logicallee »

dllthomas wrote: post #211
logicallee wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a basket of currencies (real-world ones backed by governments, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_basket , where the US dollar, pound sterling, etc, etc, all have a weighted percentage.) but what on earth did you have in mind for a mechanism to do a peg without centralization?

I don't have room in this margin (actually, mental-bandwidth constrained right now) but the gist is 1) mechanisms to expand and contract the supply of money in circulation, in response to 2) mechanisms to determine whether money is over- or undervalued. A number of methods for the former should spring to mind. For the latter, my thought is that you add a type of mined block that contains proof of an outstanding bid a…

thanks. This is interesting - you should write it up as a formal algorithm and publish it, so that it could get some eyeballs.

Re: For Sale: 29,656.51306529 Bitcoins

#268

Post by neurobro »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #176
ThomPete wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't downvote you because it's important that people realize why you are wrong. The value of any fiat, piece of gold, diamond etc isn't falsifiable either. You are assuming that other types of currency has inherent value. They don't.

Gold and diamonds have inherent value - they're both used industrially. Bitcoin perhaps doesn't have less inherent value than a non-backed currency though; but even being decades passed gold standard, and such, currencies that have a "reliable" government as support are still pretty reliable.

What was gold's inherent value to industry prior to 1930 or so?

The fact that gold now has industrial uses makes it less suitable as money or a store of wealth than it had been for thousands of years, because saving/hoarding/speculating artificially reduces supply and increases its cost.

I can grant that people might be more trusting of bitcoin if it had some kind of intrinsic value to insure against collapsing 100%, but realistically it wouldn't be more than a tiny fraction of the market value, anyway. And as with gold, those other applications would be more expensive than they ought to be.

Re: For Sale: 29,656.51306529 Bitcoins

#269

Post by Nursie »

Houshalter wrote: post #236
crdoconnor wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deflation will PREVENT economic activity from surpassing speculative activity. This is the problem with deflation - people hoard instead of spending, which is why it is "generally" believed to be detrimental. It is detrimental. Bitcoin's volatility is a direct result of this feature. >Bitcoin is an experiment that will perhaps disprove it. The hilarious thing is that the experiment already proved it. You want a crypt…

If your theory is correct, people would hoard any resource that is increasing in value relative to something else. Currency deflation is just a special case. It's not entirely clear why "hoarding" is an inherently bad thing either. Bitcoin isn't inherently deflationary. It isn't even a fixed supply, it will grow for the foreseeable future. For short periods of time it was deflationary as people speculated that it was…

>> An inflating currency would never catch on. It's a hot potato situation of "I don't actually want to own it because it's decreasing in value. If I do have some, I want to dump it on the next sucker as fast as possible to minimize my losses."

That sounds like a great currency. Not a great asset, or investment, but a great currency, one that is useful as a medium of exchange, not something people can just sit on and expect to get rich from.

Re: For Sale: 29,656.51306529 Bitcoins

#270

Post by sschueller »

marme wrote: post #257

What people should be more concerned with is the fact that the government is selling off someone elses property before they have even been convicted of a crime. Dread pirate roberts plead not guilty and has still not had a trial yet. He has not been convicted of any crime so if these are his coins they are selling them before the trial is even finished

These coins should be removed from the blockchain in a protocol update agreed upon by everyone.

No government should be making money this way.

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