An Extortionist Has Been Making Life Hell for Bitcoin’s Earliest Adopters
wired.com
wired.com
Um, the "operator(s) of Silk Road Market" allegedly attempted to hire a contract killer. I'm pretty sure that's the opposite of peaceful, if true.
The “police have been devoting a huge amount of resources to track down
peaceful people engaged in voluntary trade like Charlie Shrem and the
operators of the Silk Road Market,” Ver says
You can gain additional insight into the statement when you look at how Robert McMillian introduces Ver, a few paragraphs back.
Ver put a 37 bitcoin bounty on [the hackers] head.
[Ver] was himself sentenced to 10 months in federal prison... peaceful people engaged in voluntary trade like
[...] the operators of the Silk Road Market
So long as that quote is being faithfully reproduced, I don't see how talking about his prison sentence has much to do with what I'm talking about.
I just wanted to point out the opinion of the silk road presented in the article was not an opinion belonging to wired but instead it belongs to this Ver guy, who is in fact a criminal.
My only point was that the Silk Road case isn't just about the big bad government rushing after innocent people that just want to do their drugs in peace while keeping to themselves, but are caught up in the War on Drugs.
That said, if the law enforcement were forced to presume that you were innocent until convicted, they would not be able to investigate you because they would no longer be presuming that you were innocent.
The statement that I commented on makes the assumption that the admin(s) of Silk Road were doing nothing but providing a marketplace for consensual (though illegal) transactions. If the admin(s) of Silk Road were engaged in a murder-for-hire plot, then I would assume you are ok with the FBI investigating such things (though maybe I shouldn't make such assumptions). Murder-for-hire goes well beyond people just minding their own business.
So it makes sense to blame the police for starting a commotion that set in motion a situation that would not have arisen otherwise.
Just playing devil's advocate, but the only difference I see here is that the government has a monopoly on law and they hire the police, and the killer that person allegedly hired is not working for the law the government made, but for the law that person made.
So there's no need to pontificate here. This is just the difference between an organization having a monopoly on violence and then acting surprised when others want to make contracts with rules based on violence as well.
Not to mention our current president has ordered the murder of US citizens before but no one is arresting him.
The “police have been devoting a huge amount of resources to track down peaceful people engaged in voluntary trade
like Charlie Shrem and the operators of the Silk Road Market,” Ver says, “while evil hackers were busy terrorizing
quadriplegic Hal Finney and his family.”
This is meant to suggest that the police were harassing innocent people while completely ignoring the actual crimes described, of course playing up the typical Bitcoin narrative of the violent, thuggish and incompetent police state.
Left completely unmentioned, is the fact that Bitcoin is designed, and intended, to make it infeasible to track users and enforce laws against transactors. It's an explicitly anarcho-capitalist system. Extortion rackets around Bitcoin are not a bug, they're a feature.
Cash is difficult but not impossible to track, Bitcoin is ridiculously easy to track by comparison.
[1] http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/72/how-is-it-poss...
PS: For comparison you can fedex ~170,000$ worth of gold in a vary inconspicious 15 LB box. Shipping ~60,000 lb of gold (1Billion$) is much easier to track and more risky.
"voluntary trade" makes it sound like said trade wasn't actually illegal (in
other words, like something the police are actually supposed to stop, peaceful
or otherwise.)
Left completely unmentioned, is the fact that Bitcoin is designed, and intended,
to make it infeasible to track users and enforce laws against transactors.
Just because something is illegal doesn't mean it's wrong.
But the police don't arrest people for breaking ethical principles, they arrest people for breaking laws.
So also, in context, not entirely relevant.
...Unless the police officer has ethical principles, in which case they will refuse to obey unfair laws. I remember watching an interview with a Danish cop that refused to arrest someone for smoking marijuana inside their own house. I think it's fair to say the government police system encourages unethical people to become cops.
They absolutely do. For example, police in Seattle explicitly made marijuana enforcement the lowest possible priority years before Washington legalized it. It was a common sight to see policemen standing right next to people openly smoking pot on the street and completely ignoring them.
The police actually have a huge amount of leeway, and it can be a big problem. They often decide who to prosecute and who to ignore, and their decisions are often driven by race, revenue concerns, or other issues that have little to do with justice.
[1] http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Two-years-later-littl...
If you disagree with the morality of a law, fine - but your assertion that enforcing drug laws is as immoral as enforcing slavery laws is debatable
If you want a legal precedent, the Nuremberg trials somewhat settled that question.
Why does anyone ship explosives across state lines (or anywhere) unless they run a demolition company? Just wondering (I'm in the UK).
http://www.businessinsider.com/silk-road-boss-ordered-6-assa...
I also support 90% of the drug laws out there. The argument that heroin and meth should be legal is asinine. I'm not the police state. I'm common sense. I don't care if the meth dealer is a hip and gentle guy. He's empowering others to destroy their lives, which very often leads to more crime as addicts will steal or even kill for their next fix.
disagree downvotes dont change the truth: Ulbricht ordered kills casually. Physically addictive drugs cause social harm. All the libertarian claptrap in the world doesnt change reality, sorry Rand Paul supporters!
I don't think it's asinine. There's clearly reasonable arguments for it: mostly that the consequences to society of harsh crackdowns on drug abuse are worse than those of legalisation - in particular that addicts feel that they have no option but to kill or steal in order to obtain their next fix.
Do I think people ought to do hard drugs? Absolutely not, it's clearly a terrible idea. I just think addiction should be treated as a medical condition, not some righteous moral crusade. Legalisation might be a step too far, but criminalisation isn't clearly a better option.
Many people see drugs as a single problem with a single solution (eliminate all the drugs). But it's much more reasonable to see it as two problems: trafficking and use. Trafficking would be decimated with legalization and money fighting it could be spent on programs to help users.
Yes, as Portugal has shown us.
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Maybe you're not a churchgoer, but the additional meaning of "tithe" discussed in your link confirms even further that a tenth is what "decimate" is about, because those who tithe, typically tithe a tenth of their incomes.
[EDIT:] Language changes, and attempts to avert such changes, are both part of what "language" means. Don't even get me started on "penultimate". b^) I wouldn't have commented, except that parent (since deleted) was a fairly aggressive, specific, and substantially incorrect ("nuh-uh! decimation can also refer to tithing!") criticism of josh2600's comment.
What about alcohol? Cigarettes? Poker? Penny stocks?
All of these things have contributed to people blowing their savings, futures, and ruining their own lives and their families' lives.
By criminalizing drugs, people who want to fix their behavior are unable to because they're afraid to go to jail.
What we need is support centers, like we have for alcoholics, gambling addicts, sex addicts, internet addicts, and addicts of any other kind. Prohibition didn't work for alcohol in the 20s, and it hasn't worked for drugs.
Prohibition does absolutely nothing to control drug demand. It makes the supply swell until it overruns law enforcement's efforts to stem it. It makes hard drugs with stronger effects for a small dose more profitable for smugglers, because they're easier to ship. And as American alcohol Prohibitionism showed in the 20s, it makes drugs more popular among the underaged.
Common sense is a great place to start from! Then you do science. You predict what will happen under various policies; you try some options and observe what happens; you revise your understanding of the problem; and repeat.
From the few places where people are thinking that way, it seems like the best approach is neither criminal law nor pure legalization, but regulation, treatment and harm reduction. There are some examples in this report from the Global Commission on Drug Policy:
http://www.undrugcontrol.info/images/stories/documents/Globa...
But we still have a huge amount to learn, because for the most part we're not even trying -- just sticking with the "common sense" approach of looking for a larger hammer, when hitting the problem with a smaller hammer failed to work.
Why exactly?
> often leads to more crime as addicts will steal or even kill for their next fix.
You realize the drug laws you support create this behavior, right?
What do you think about state organized lotteries then?
So does Farmville.
You do know that Paul Erdös, the most prolific mathematician of the 20th century (if not ever) was a meth addict, right?
I'm not saying "meth is good"; but that blanket generalizations are bad.
Do you have a reputable source for this? Wikipedia and a quick "Paul Erdos meth" Google were both fruitless for me.
Still, uh, using amphetamines or amphetamine analogs in controlled dosages from pharmaceutical sources is a pretty normal thing to do, a pretty normal thing that doesn't seem to cause a whole lot of problems for most people. We give it to children to make them sit still, and many adults take it, too.
There are some analogs, like Methylphenidate, which are said to be less addictive, but many people prefer, and use Adderall, which isn't, and both are deemed to be safe enough to give to children in small doses. We even give straight up Dextroamphetamine to some people (though it's rather less common)
I mean, dosage is super important, of course, and so is purity, but yeah, lots of people take small amounts of amphetamines without problems.
Edit: As someone else pointed out, methamphetamines are similar in effect to, but generally more dangerous than amphetamines, and the latter, I believe, is what Erdos, and most everyday users under medical supervision use.
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Or are you suggesting the NSA is behind this to make people want to avoid Bitcoin because it's too secure?