Slashdot Mirror
Secret Service Raids Gold-Age
Wired has a story about the Secret Service raiding one of the several firms that promise to exchange your old-fashioned greenbacks for even more old-fashioned gold - the idea being that E-gold is a better medium of exchange than those boring currencies backed by national governments. Unfortunately it seems that the primary use of e-gold seems to be turning stolen credit cards into cold, hard, ca.... errr, gold. (Update: 03/30 5:19 PM by michael : The headline has been changed to make it clear that the raided company is a company distinct from E-gold. The business relationship between the two companies is not entirely clear.)
Does that mean my e-pyrite is worthless too?
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"Defenestration" is to throw out of a window; what's a word for throwing 'Windows' out of something?
The secret service should have to reimburse E-gold based on the average days' worth of business for each day that they had the equipment that kept the business from running.
Is it economically dangerous because they offer gold or were they stealing credit cards?
Does this give new meaning to the typical "Gold Card"? And when do Platinum card holders get their share?
-brain
It seems that this theory has been tried out before. From what I know this did not work. The company was Crypto punks. This company was a pioneer in crypto in the early 90's. Anyway they told people that people could do transactions with them using crypto credits. I don't now what happened to this company. It was mentioned in the book Crypto . Does anyone know what happened??
Diplomacy is the art of letting people have your way
I'm failing to see why money laundering is slashdot worthy.
I thought the e- in a company name was no longer the only criteria for that sort of notice?
Mind you, online money laundering is a dot com startup that probably did pretty well for itself. Wish I'd thought of it back in the boom days.
The same government that is slavering over the lucrative uses of e-currency doesn't like it when an old technology such as credit cards comes into contact with electronic currency creates crime.
Well, fuck them. Go develop a more secure credit card system.
Or get rid of credit cards all together.
As I think about it, yes, please, do! The cred card has been one of the most abusable, fraud-prone forms of transaction since its inception. it creates lots of ways of creating debt that wouldn't otherwiose be there by encouraging people to spend money they don't have at exorbitant interest rates.
I do not have a single credit card. Contrary to popular opinion it has never stopped me from renting a car or getting a hotel room. I do have a credit history, too, if I need REAL credit like the kind for buying a house or other major investments.
Goat sex free since 2001
I thought the job of the Secret Service was merely to protect the president. Is this wrong? If so, what exactly is their responsibility? If not, on whose authority did the raid take place, and why was it not the FBI? I'm a little confused here.
--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
Before people ask, "why are the US President's bodyguards involved here?"
The Secret Service are a branch of the US Department of the Treasury.
A Secret Service FAQ: The Secret Service has primary jurisdiction to investigate threats against Secret Service protectees; counterfeiting of U.S. currency or other U.S. Government obligations; forgery or theft of U.S. Treasury checks, bonds or other securities; credit card fraud; telecommunications fraud; computer fraud; identify fraud; and certain other crimes affecting federally insured financial institutions.
[
The company in question is GoldAge, not e-Gold...if you take a look at the site, it does beg the question of legitimacy... http://www.gold-age.net/ga-post-index.html
And now for something completely different...a man with three buttocks.
It is entirely possible that some illegitimate clients are laundering thier money through the e-gold service. Especially if it's tax free - a very plausible way to dodge the IRS. The buisness is being investigated under the guise of credit card fraud - so they can look into clientelle that maybe using the service as a mony laundering scheme. Hmmm... sounds like a Tom Clancy novel.
Move 'zig'!
Yeah, okay.
Got Rhinos?
I recently took a trip to Lawrenceburg Indiana to go on a gambling riverboat. To my suprise, all the ATMs in the place took credit cards without needing a PIN. The machine must have acted as a point of sale rather than a cash machine. So when it comes down to it, anyone with a stolen card could withdrawl money off the card with no PIN needed. The machine charged a percentage fee for each withdrawl.. unlike the regular $2.00 ATM fees. Off the top of my head I believe the charge was $2.00 + 2.9%. Anyways.. I found these ATMs shocking.. anyone have any experience using one?
-gerbik
You know, that was an idea doomed for failure. Sure, anybody can just come up with e-currency, but backed by gold? Did I miss something here? Doesn't Cryptonomicon say gold is the death of value? After all, none of the big world goverments find in necessary to back their currency with real goods (be it metals, produce, etc). It's a real problem to do so. When you base your currency off of a real item, you can't just print more and more with impunity whenever you need some. And man, that really holds you back with e-cash, 'cause bits are reproducable for free!
Do you like Japanese imports?
Are the islands U.S. property? How do the agents know that e-gold has NOT reported over $5,000? If the details are not there, then they should bust ALL on-line banking firms, whether or not they are FDIC insured or credit union types who do not have a policy of reporting.
I'm sorry, without more information, this piece of news is just flamebait in and of itself.
Please post an addendum as soon as you get it.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
The problem with credit cards is that stupid people use them stupidly. I'm the kind of customer the credit card companies hate -- I never carry a balance and always make sure I have enough cash in my bank accounts to pay the bill in full. Actually, I used to use a debit card for everything instead of a credit card for this reason, but since I got one of those cards with cash-back bonuses, I use that more ofen.
Its no surprise the Secret Service has Gone too far, but what I see happening is, they may be concerned with persons, embezzling money than using companies such as e-gold, as a means of hiding their traces.
Regardless of what the company actuall does, for those who don't keep up on privacy issues I suggest you read up on James Bell and how his "Assassination Politics" paper landed him in jail for using the same kind of anonymouse untraceable methods in theory...
As for the Secret Service using "credit card" fraud as an excuse, how come they never raid the businesses of adult sites all over the Internet? Or Amazon when someone cards them? Shady tacticts...
360 degrees of Karma
which i also hate, as it levies fees just to put my identity on my money when I spend it, which is not what I want to do anyway.
I never spend money I haven't got, except for on a major investment. The only time I did that was for student loans.
-perdida
Goat sex free since 2001
The world is becoming disturbingly postmodern. In the beginning there was bartering. Then people started using precious metals to represent the value of objects. Then they started using pieces of paper to represent the metals. Then they started using plastic cards to represent pieces of paper. Now they're trading that in for a number in a database.
Makes my head hurt.
Got Rhinos?
I thought it was illegal to own a gold bar in the United States. I know it says bullion, but it also states that the metals are also in bars. If the gold is stored outside of the U.S., are there legal issues?
---> suck it
Good riddance. I'm sick of the comertials. Who every thought that gold would be more stable than curency (even the US$) is just plain stupid. Just because you can put your hands on a piece of gold, doesn't mean that the price is stable.
bah!
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
...Strongly opposes all forms of Alternate currency?
Our Government loves the fact that the american dollar (and all electronic variants of it) is one of the strongest forms of currency in circulation today. They will always find a way around allowing anyone to question its value. If the federal reserve declared gold worthless, would it matter? I think the feds have their heads (guess where?) and their hands (in your pockets?) in the wrong place.
There is no spork.
I have only had to rent a car twice and both times they took the debit card.
Hotels, some places they take cash with photo ID, some places debit card. I think it is a lot easier out of the country as they really like getting american currency anyway
-- perdida (not wanting to be modded down as over-rated, hence unchecked the +1)
Goat sex free since 2001
Not only do they protect the president, they have to fight anything that undermine's United States currency.. counterfeiting, credit card fraud, large money laundering, etc.
The Secret Service's electrionic evidence guidelines are located here. and include the following information that seems pertinent in this case:
1. * * Networked or business computers
* Consult a Computer Specialist for further assistance
* Pulling the plug could:
* Severely damage the system
* Disrupt legitimate business
* Create officer and department liability
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
"Defenestration" is deforestation??? Huh? in French, the word for window is fenetre (sorry I can't do the accent). Me thinks your brain is a bit woody friend.
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
Look, I know this is Slashdot and not f--kedcompany.com, but I think this proves my infamous August, 1992 hypothesis.
Let me recap: I was a new graduate student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I was sitting in a coffee shop -- Amer's Cafe on State Street for you fellow Ann Arbor-ites -- and had just ordered an 'Amer's Cap' and settled down to a nice, grungy table with a copy of Wheelock's Latin (for the requisite foreign language requirement), a copy of Hannah Arendt's 'Eichmann in Jerusalem', and a copy of Raymond Carver's collected stories (I was in the MFA program there and dutifully reading through all the Carver, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolf, Bobbie Ann Mason, Joy Williams I could find) and suddenly got a pain in my stomach.
It was an odd pain. And -- sorta like the Woody Allen character in one of his 1980's flicks (Hannah? Misdemeanors?) -- was convinced (beyond a shadow of a doubt) that the pain was, in fact, a tumor and that the death-watch clock had started.
I tried to drink my Amer's cappucino (sp?) without much success. I kept wondering about this weird pain in my gut. I gave up on Wheelock, tried Carver, and decided the pain -- whatever it was -- was driving me batty. It wasn't a bad pain, just a little one. The sort of mild pain that always -- I was certain -- into the sort of pain that caused doctors to say, "Look, it's nothing. Don't worry. Just relax. Come back in six weeks if it's still there." Of course after six weeks you'd be dead.
So I left Amer's, walked down State street, poked my head into Borders, bought a New York Times, and then headed straight for the doctor.
The doctor was an old fat guy who immediately slapped on a rubber glove and told me to pull down my pants and roll on my side.
After he'd done what had to be done he said, "Look, don't worry. You need to relax. Come back in six weeks if the pain is still there."
I walked to the grad library, found an empty desk on the fourth floor, and started to read the Times. I was in a bad mood -- the rubber glove didn't help much -- and I couldn't concentrate. I flipped to the NYTimes business section -- a section I never read -- and there it was in black and white: companies were registering domain names for $70 bucks (it might have been more, I don't remember) and that some of the names were wacky: they were misspellings of common words but the registrants were sure that one day these domain names -- and the web in general -- would be big. Really big. They were like the speculators in the Wild West.
I had a flash that maybe I should register Business.com (no kidding). But then I remembered I was a graduate student and seventy bucks was my walking around money for the *entire month*. So I let that idea slide. (That was my mistake.)
But then I had a second flash -- sitting there in the Harlan Hatcher library and staring out at the campus from my tiny window -- and I said to myself: you know, I bet every business is gonna try to put 'e' before their name. We'll have eLiquor.com. eBeer.com. eCoffee.com. (Since everyone was talking about e-commerce and the promises it heralded.)
And then I had my third -- and last -- flash -- the flash that would become my 1992 hypothesis: that any business with the 'e' in the title will surely be fucked. Maybe not in 1992. Maybe not in 1996. But one day, all these fucking eBusinesses are gonna be fucked. Fucked, fucked, fucked.
eThis, Chief.
And here, today, sitting at my desk, I remembered all this. Remembered my three flashes that morning on the fourth floor of the Harlan Hatcher Graduate library on the campus of the University of Michigan. Remembered my theory about the 'e' before the name. Remembered that it took me six weeks to get rid of that fucking pain in my gut -- three doctors, lots of aspirin and cranberry juice -- until one doctor -- the only one who didn't slap on a rubber glove and turn me on my side -- said, idly, "Have you tried taking some Pepcid?"
Read your history. During the period of the Articles of Confederation there was chaos.
potential alternate currency systems.
----------
Technoli
1:30pm: LMAO (Laughing My Ass Off) RAOTFL (Rolling Around on the Floor Laughing) All right, 50 more ccs. The rest of the world is stupid, they actually WORK for what they get. LOL.
--
"May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house"
--
"May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house"
-George Carlin
The guy starts in on this philosophical pitch about the portability of currencies, and how the internet is going to pose serious challenges to consumers wishing to make transactions on a global stage, and how gold, of all things, is the world's best bet to unify the online shopping experience. As such, he entered into the E-Gold pitch, and I started hoping that the work on my Prelude would hurry itself up.
My initial verbal reaction to the E-Gold plan was "oh, yeah, that is an interesting idea", but in the back of my head, I was thinking "Yaaar MatEy, wE be KeeLhAuLin yEr GoLd" and I conjured up images of eyepatches and pirate ships. I wasn't even sure he was making any sense whatsoever, but then again, selling dog shit online would get you VC money back in '99...
I'm not going to trust my money to an online company that doesn't have the professionalism to present a decent image. A con artist can have a professional web page too, so image isn't the only thing to look for. If the bank's web site code is sloppy, what makes you think their accounting software is any better? A sloppy website is the online equivilent of a back-alley business, or wearing torn jeans & a tee-shirt to meet a prospective client.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Hey, Slashdot, perhaps you will remember some of the articles youve had in the past about headlines that make wild claims and then give the special circumstances in the fine print? Well, what the fuck are you doing now? The main point of the article about e-gold was NOT the credit card fraud, the owner even states that he stopped accpeting credit cards because of the fraud problem, the point was "why did the secret service raid e-gold?".
so...stop tossing around crap
# Tom von S.
# -------------
# "Nuclear weapons can destroy all life on earth,
There are several books about people who have attempted to set up private monetarty systems. Pioneers of American Freedom and Men Against the State are two title I remember off hand. In all cases the US has managed to crush such setups using FUD, harrasment, and basically making up charges against the owners. Neal Stephenson has a short story about this, also.
Annoying, I have to get out the door before Atlanta rush hour, so I can't look up these URLs. But all you people who think this is about credit card fraud...it's not. In fact, it's a great thing if credit card thieves buy virtual cash. The credit card used to buy the gold was stolen? Return the cash to the credit card company, and take back the gold. It might be useful to impliment a 48 hour waiting period or something here, and that would be what the feds did if this was about credit card fraud. Of course, I have to wonder what it is people are buying with this, and why we just can't just track what the people have bought with the stolen gold? I mean, the turnaround time, no matter what, has to be faster with using the stolen card directly vs. using it to buy gold and using the gold to buy things. Why not treat it exactly like normal CC theft and arrest whoever pick it up where it's delievered?
However, this has nothing to do with fraud, that's just the excuse. This has to do with threating the power base. The government hates the idea we could stick all our money in inflation free bars of gold. It completely screws up how they think the economy should work.
Got to run, someone look up those URLs. I think disinfo.com has something about this, too. Long story short, the government has a very long history of trying to shut down private monies.
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Sure, they know. But do they care? If a bunch of guys with guns show up at your house/place of business and invite themselves inside, does anyone really think that you could stop them from taking your computers?
Of course not. They'll take your computers and your silverware and anything else they feel like taking, because they can. Sure, it's against the law, but unless you can afford to buy yourself a Senator the laws aren't meant to protect you, and the courts know it.
What this country needs is a good, healthy, revolutionary war.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
A bevy of agents from the Secret Service, Postal Service and local police...
- - - If the sun is a star, why can't I see it at night?
Typical ploy, worthy of the SS name.
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
...Why does the Secret Service need the guy's birth certificate? How is that evidence of anything? I would be very wary of surrendering potentially irreplaceable personal documentation to any government agency, otherwise the government could quickly make you a non-person.
And another thing: is it really illegal to own gold bullion in the U.S.? What possible justification is there for that? I'm hoping that's an urban legend...
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Most places will take cash quite happily.
:)
When I first started working in the workplace I ended up doing a lot of travelling. Having just gotten out of college I only had a credit limit of $600 (don't get me started).
Most of the hotels chains I stayed at (Marriott, Doubletree, Sheriton, etc.) were perfectly happy to accept Greenbacks in place of a creditcard. They sometimes fumbled through it a little (since they weren't used to it), but I never had a second glance. Most hotels will, at most, require a deposit. If they take a credit card imprint this covers them on the deposit.
Don't know about Car rentals, since I was under 25 and they wouldn't rent to me
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Does it bother anybody else that the article clearly states that they've raided this guys place and taken all of his stuff, and then follows it up with "We haven't yet filed any charges"?
Whatever happened to "innocent until proven guilty?"
I'll freely admit I don't know the details of the case, but even totally guilty felons have constitutional rights.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
It was illegal in the US to own gold bullion from 1933 til 1974. So it's not completely an urban legend. But you're free to buy gold in the US now. Typing keywords like "legal gold bullion 1933 roosevelt nixon" into Google will find you a lot of references.
I'm not one to start flipping out about bias here on Slashdot, but that description of the raid seemed very biased against e-gold and made me thing that when I read the article it would indicate there was a very solid case against this company. Instead, it seems very ambiguous and more a case of the SS persecuting a business they don't understand because it disrupts their ability to keep tabs on people's money.
Actually it's a Neal Stephenson novel. Cryptonomicon
I don't want to give anything away, but if the idea intrigues you, read the book.
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
Actually, that wasn't a crime in the jurisdiction of the SS. They can only pursue cases where actual US currency has been fraudulently produced/used/etc... since there's no $200, its just a 'dine & dash' essentially for the local constabulary to tend to.
But I loved that bill - whoever made it has to have a great sense of humor and no money!
What you have to remember about money is that it is simply social contract. Instead of giving you a cow in exchange for your sheep, I'm giving you something that you know will allow you to obtain something of equal or lesser value from someone else. Gold, paper, computer digits, it doesn't matter as long as it's secure.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Basically, if your business model allows people convert stolen credit card dollars into Beenz/Flooze and let people buy worthless shit at the Disney store...The Secret Service is gonna leave your company alone. But if your business model allows people convert stolen credit card dollars into bulk precious metals, aka something of real value...You're in for it.
Who every thought that gold would be more stable than curency.
Fact: Gold has about the same approximate buying power today as it did 100 years ago. US currency has approximately 1/100th the buying power today as it did 100 years ago.
Fact: Since ~1950 the Federal Reserve note has not been backed by ANY hard currency; it is worthless fiat paper.
Fact: 'US Dollars' have not been in existence for 40 years now. (The last of them was the Kennedy era red seal, silver certificates)
Fact: The Federal Reserve is about as 'federal' as Fed Ex; it is a private corporation.
Fact: The current monetary system is illegal according to the US constitution
Point: Tell me again that fiat paper gives us a stable economy when Greenspan can swing our entire economic system with the Federal Reserve's arbitrary change of an interest point?
Sir:
I recommend you do a little brushing up on your economics. Gold, silver -- any commodity for that matter -- are not immune to inflation .
The Mercantilist philosophy of the 16h and 17th centuries, which dominated international trade in Europe, proved that any monetary instrument experiences inflation if its supply increases at a rate faster than the rate at which it's demanded.
If we were to attempt to switch to a currency system based on any precious metal, the exact opposite would occur: immense deflation. There simply isn't enough supply for demand.
Peace.
And gold is worth money because??????
It's just lumps of metal, you know.
_____
My Journal
... is "WTF is the secret service doing protecting the President when they're supposed to be dealing with money?!" Seriously, the Secret Service was drafted into the job after some assassination I think...
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
The shiny rock doesn't represent something valuable, it is something valuable. Nobody decided by fiat that gold would be money, it's just everybody's favorite stuff. Many people spend a rather absurd portion of their wealth on gold ornaments.
Similarly, copper, silver, and other coin metals are also much in demand, and small enough to be worth carrying around in your pockets for trade.
There's nothing at all irrational about a market based on the trade value of shiny things.
--
The US government started this modern paradigm when they stole the gold from the people in the 30's via the The Gold Reserve Act.o _Owns_The_Money.html
e.g.
http://www.diac.com/~bkennedy/Thorkelson/X0008_Wh
--
Don't steal. The government doesn't like competition
("Our tax system is based on individual self assessment and VOLUNTARY compliance." - M. Caplin, IRS Commissioner)
("Our tax system is based upon volutary assessment and payment and
not on distraint" -Supreme Court Ruling, Flora v. U.S., 362 u.s. 145)
It's scary what people will pay for pretend things
A Blimpy Burger woulda done the trick.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
It's scary that people will pay money to cheat at a game.
--
--
E_NOSIG
The numbers in the e-gold database are connected to real pieces of gold that they (claim to) have stored in actual vaults.
This kind of gold trading has gone on for longer than most currency systems. 500 years ago if you owned a few kg of gold, storing it at your house would have been crazy. So you'd normally buy the gold from a goldsmith but leave the physical metal in the goldsmith's vault, and he'd give you a piece of paper saying you owned it. At that point if you wanted to sell the gold to someone, it was enough to just sell them the paper, so they could use it to claim the gold from the goldsmith. The e-gold website is pretty informative about this.
E-gold by the way was trying to be more of a general web payment system than a way to really stash big quantities of money. Later systems like PayPal operated with normal bank accounts and credit cards and fit better into conventional expectations, so e-gold became sort of silly.
What a misleading article! Even the Wired
article clears this up. The Secret Service
did not raid them for credit card fraud. This
is obvious. The secret service is trying
to interfere with their operations. They are trying to thwart digital cash! The guy who
runs e-gold even said that he stopped accepting
credit cards long before the raid. No, I'm
not a big conspiracy theorist. The issue here is obvious.
Digital cash thwarts taxes, government regulation,
and government monitoring. Whoever approved this
article is doing a disservice to Slashdot readers
by stating that, "oh, it failed because
of credit card fraud." NO. This is a raid designed to stop our RIGHTS.
Gosh... Okay... I've seen the light. You have won. I'm going to leave the Rabbi position and go out in the world and sow my oats. I'm quitting the church and going out to accomplish. Thanks you smarmy little slashdot cretin for changing my life !!!!
Peace be with you
In case you haven't noticed, Mir fell already :)
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Go dude! Revolution now!
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
(Just wondering...I don't know much about Asheron's Call.)
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
Having said that, I'm sure they might take your cash deposit, because they like staying in business. However, the concept of legal tender is only applied to debts incurred, not forcing someone to create a debt. Its a minor point, but I'm sure there are cases where it would be important.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Maybe, being a New Englander, he wasn't Texan enough. *smirk*
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
They really do -- each transaction generates a 2% or so transaction fee. Of course they'd prefer if you would carry a balance month-to-month so they could charge interest, too.
The people they hate the most are no-balance, light users. They're the ones that create administrative overhead without generating profits. Some card issuers have actually started charging a monthly fee in addition to the annual fee for people who have less than $N in charges. I think some even tried to charge if you didn't have a *balance* (ie, weren't paying interest), but I haven't heard since then.
Then again, they hate the people that don't pay the bills, too, but since they managed to change the bankruptcy laws to legalize debtor prison, these people aren't so far up on their hate list.
Gold-Age was arguably acting as an agent for E-Gold, an entity that appears to be providing banking services aimed at the US market whose main differentiator is avoiding the US reporting requirements. It is not a great stretch for a prosecutor to claim that any US company trading with E-Gold is acting as an agent for them and thus conspiring to facilitate illegal financial transactions.
Essentially the Secret Service don't have to prove very much to win a case. There are numerous caes of foreign companies having their US funds confiscated under arbitrary pretexts and finding that they cannot get it back without a ten year lawsuit. These are civil proceedings so despite the obviously punitive nature there is no right to jury trial, presumption of innocence or even due process. Because the alledged target is drug dealers the courts tend to turn a blind eye to the civil liberties implications.
The E-Gold system is widely used for money laundering, read the slashdot thread on the diary of two hackers if you don't believe me. There is no particular advantage to using E-Gold over a more reputable bank (Barclays overseas banking, HKSB Channel Islands, USB, etc.). There is also a sizable disadvantage, you are forced to trust that the E-Gold folk don't run off with your money.
If the Secret Service can demonstrate that E-Gold is being used for money laundering, and the level of proof is very low they can then go off and target anyone acting as an agent for E-Gold.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
It was a service provider that would exchange credit card transactions into/out of the e-gold system. e-gold stores gold, silver, etc. and lets you receive or spend it digitially and in fractional units.
There was apparently a high instance of credit card fraud (so when are they going to raid western union?), but they took the computer, made no arrests, and apparently tried to get the owners of the exchange to implicate e-gold.
Now along comes encryption, fast enough desktop PCs to perform such encryption and a connection to the Internet. Bingo: all of a sudden people can trade with other people anywhere else in the world, using secure channels and valid e-units of currency (including but certainly not limited to e-gold). Lots of advantages: untaxable, untraceable and divisible down to the smallest fraction. The current disadvantage is that State organs like the US Treasury don't like it much and will start cracking down in whatever ways they can.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
Well duh... of course that's what I meant. I just don't have the time for all that typing. Well Bless you my son and may find eternal peace.
Peace be with you
The Euro is 15% backed by gold. Usually it eventually inflates to that point, then they abandon even that peg.
It happened in the '70s when Nixon had to break the peg because the market price was above the $35/oz official price because we were inflating.
Gold can't easily be inflated (given the mine supply and jewelry demand), doesn't rust or otherwise decay, but doesn't pay interest. It is a store of value and medium of exchange.
That is why it works as money and probably will after the fiat currencies blow up. Check the inflation rate in Brazil or Turkey recently?
As long as you are going to set up an e-currency infrastructure, you either need to be the government to declare the bits to have value, or have the bits as a claim on something that does.
That being said, while I have no problem with people selling virtual items or money, I personally think that selling whole characters goes just a little too far. A character is supposed to be something personal, something that you put yourself into, not just a more powerful interface to hacking and slashing. My character for Neocron, whenever it comes on-line, will be something unique and special to me, and I'll never sell him (or her). Though, if I get high level enough that money and items start coming to me easily, I might just sell a few of them. (So far, Reakktor, the company putting the game together, have said they don't plan to forbid such sales unless it becomes a problem in the game.)
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
I need you to contact me immediately. Wired will face an immediate law
suit by e-gold unless the headline of your article is changed
immediately, this does not go out in print and you print a retraction to
this extremely damaging headline.
Barry K. Downey
U.S. Counsel to e-gold Ltd.
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
Of course, then the price of gas would always be 1.00/gal.
Hi Michael, thanks for changing the headline to reflect reality.
i d=002401000001). The News section at http://www.e-gold.com/news.html might also be interesting to some of you. Thanks.
click on "market makers" at http://www.e-gold.com/unsecure/links.htm and you'll see the description "independent exchange providers" -- which hopefully clears things up. I can send anyone who wants it info on becoming one, it's an interesting job, and was even before Parker's SS troubles, which didn't begin with the SS but with trying to accept plastic (see his words at: http://www.themestream.com/articles/310965.html?p
JMR
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
The theme of this book to me was constrasting how the open sourcing of the mechanisms of the abstraction of capital have led to the success of capitalism in the west, and the balkanization of capital abstraction systems in the third world and formerly communist countries has been the foundation of the failure of capitalism there.
This seems to bear directly on how the US government cracks down on alternative capital formation schemes. I think that anything that reduces the fungability of the product of my labor is bad. I also think it may be unconstitutional from a search & seizure perspective.
Capital wants to be free, just like source.
Not A Sig
The first currency based on a backing with e-gold is Plats, found at a MUD called Dark Castle. I have not played, but if 'net-longevity is anything, it's been around for a WHILE and users don't complain about it to me.
JMR
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
E-Shells - trading in the only stuff guaranteed to have long term value: ammunition.
.22 rimfire cartridges, and .45 handgun rounds. You can transfer whole shells or as little as 1/1000 of a shell from one account to another securely and instantly over the internet!
Everybody knows that this "civilization" thing isn't going to last forever, and when it breaks down, you're going to want a big pile of bullets. Not only are they useful, but they'll make great trade items, as they are highly portable and will surely become rare and valuable once the industrial machinery that produces them grinds to a halt.
We guarantee always to have in our ammunition dump a full stock of all , and we will transport them to you. We provide account in the four most popular civilian rounds: 12-guage shotgun shells, 30-06 centerfire rifle cartridges,
At least you can wipe your ass with paper money, but what can you do with gold? Does it keep you warm on a cold night, or shelter you from a snowstorm? Can you eat gold? Well, you could eat a bullet (surely less painful than bludgeoning yourself to death with a gold bar, or giving yourself enough papercuts with a dollar to be fatal), but we're thinking more along the lines of hunting and banditry.
E-Shells: the official e-commerce solution for the new dark ages.
Maybe it will take off when all the survivalist libertarians give up on E-Gold.
--
Compare: someone plays Pacman to an incredibly high score, and another person pays to take over the game, then brags about his great score.
Or (competitive version): a great athlete wins his way to the finals in Olympic Wrestling (an elimination tournament-type sport), you pay him $500000 and he lets you take his place. You are now guaranteed a silver medal.
Also (perhaps the most accurate): a great chess player wins his way to the finals of the world championship. One move away from winning, he sells his place in the game to the highest bidder.
How could this not be cheating?
--
Yes, they can refuse to take cash. They cannot refuse to take cash as payment once debt has been accrued, but they do not have to enter into an agreement that stipulates cash.
"Legal tender for all debts public and private" implies an existing debt. If you just come up to me and say "I want to rent a car and will be paying cash" I can say "I only rent cars to credit-card holders." Since there's no debt, I don't have to accept cash.
If I rented a car to you and you decided to pay cash at the end of the rental, I would have no choice but to accept it. However, it's still possible that they might not accept a cash payment since they have no way to process it and guarantee payment was accepted -- would you give $150 in cash to the $8/hr employee at the airport rental return lot?
E-gold started out nice, but they rewrote their contract so you can't actually get your gold unless you're their gold-dealer.
1) they only trade in big, hideously valuable bars, 2) they reserve the right to only deliver orders of a certain minimum number of bars (which they can change at their discretion)
It's fiat money, folks.
E-gold does not guarantee to ever give you what's yours.
--
Any medium of exchange is prone to some kind of degradation due to someone cheating trying to get more out of it. This includes things with intrinsic value such as gold or tobacco. In POW camps where soldiers got cigarettes in their Red Cross packages, cigarettes became a medium of exchange. But what if you wanted to smoke AND buy that tin of sardines that other POW has? You could pull out a few shreds of tobacco from the cigs you have before you trade them... You get the picture. Even with gold coin, this sort of degrading of the medium of exchange was common. Using gold as a medium of exchange was not practical until someone 3000 years ago discovered that you could rub a lump of gold on a 'touchstone' such that one could tell from the resulting streak that the gold was pure or alloyed with copper or something else. More recent countermeasures were the ribbed 'rolled' edge on coins and the use of scales and standardized weights to discourage the practice of shaving gold from the edge of the coins. These went a long way to keep someone from getting something from nothing.
The current 'money' system that we have, on the other hand, has 'shaving' of the currency built into it. To explain how it works is not complicated, but extemely boring and most of the facts fly in the face of 'conventional wisdom'. In this short space I can best point those who are interested to an excellent book on the subject - "The Creature from Jekyll Island" by G. Edward Griffin (ISBN 0912986212) or more briefly a series of online articles from a week or two ago at WorldNetDaily.
The main motivation of the raid may be some concern of some higher ups that this non-inflatable method of exchange might catch on, and those who derive their wealth and power from creating 'money' out of thin air will again face some competition.
only with magpies.
--
Think of it as Evolution in Action.
If you do stupid things then hopefully it will lessen your chance at breeding and nurturing children that act as stupid as you are.
Reality is just a clever Hack, and the Planck constant is the refresh rate.
This means you agree completely with everyone else, but for completely fascist and vaguely nonsensical reasons. ;)
Let's see how many people fall for it. ;)
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
That I speak my own views, not those of OmniPay as implied in the story.
JMR
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
I'll try really hard not to post anything more about this.
JMR
++++++++++++
sigh
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: re: Secret Service Raids E-Gold
Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2001 19:05:34 -0500
From: Douglas Jackson
To: newsfeedback@wired.com
CC: declan@wired.com
I am the founder and Chairman of e-gold Ltd.
Contrary to the luridly irresponsible and actionable headline on this
article, there has been no raid on e-gold Ltd., or on Gold & Silver
Reserve Inc. [dba OmniPay http://www.omnipay.net ], the company that
originally developed the e-gold system and currently serves as
Operator.
The more edifying reality is that e-gold® is the worlds first
electronic currency designed for borderless eCommerce, enabling the
worldwide use of gold as money. It merges the digital transaction
efficiencies of an electronic payment system with a universally
acceptable basis of value.
The advantages of e-gold include:
Low transaction fees The maximum payment processing fee is 50 cents
(US-equiv.). For a $1000 value payment, this is less than one twentieth
as much as credit cards.
Immediate settlement e-gold payments clear instantaneously, no
matter how large or small the payment, no matter how far apart the
spender and recipient.
Non-repudiation No chargebacks. Get paid, stay paid.
Direct access with bi-directionality Anyone can pay or be paid.
Automation support The e-gold Shopping Cart Interface is easily
implemented and provides immediate authenticated notification of
completed payment.
Zero financial risk e-gold is the worlds first remote payment
system backed 100% by physical gold in allocated storage.
e-gold is in fact succeeding where other electronic payment initiatives
are failing because it is designed specifically for worldwide eCommerce.
All others merely add additional layers of liability to legacy systems.
Since online launch November 1996, the e-gold system has been growing at
an accelerating pace. As of April 2000, 100,000 transactions had been
settled. The one millionth transaction was November 2000 and the second
million mark surpassed in March 2001.
It is regrettable that the first time many people will hear of e-gold(r)
will be this sloppy and damaging Wired headline.
Dr. Douglas Jackson
Founder of e-gold
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
Get some freedom and help expand the possibilities
;)
GoldenAgents is a group of individuals around the world that assist in small non-comercial e-gold exchanges.
You can use e-gold for buying from Amazon without a credit card by using BananaGold or grab Thinkgeek items via MetalProxy
If you want to get paid for your open source programing then set up a donation page just change account numbers and link targets to suit
The other place to check out is Fairtunes to keep music artists well fed in the face of hideous recording company contracts. They take VISA paypal and e-gold
This is my sig, exciting huh!
With CCs, there's no other way to pay you bills than to give the receiving party complete control over all your money (up to the charging limit, which usually is no less than $5000) and then trust them to only take as much as they're supposed to.
Now don't tell me you don't see the stupidity here...
Every highschool student could come up with a more secure, yet still simple method, but I guess CCs is what you get when you hire banking idiots instead of students.
--------------------------------------
Are you really an attorney? Serving Wired this notice on Slashdot?
You gotta be fucking kiddin' me.......
Dave
But it's utterly certain that there was no evidence to support claim. In fact, the evidence argues against it, because E-gold the company wasn't raided. ONE service company ("Gold-Age"), a single solitary company that resells e-gold, was raided, for alleged fraud. Hyping this up into a federal attack on anonymity is sensationalism at its worst.
-- flossie
http telnet
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
It's a gold-metal mutual fund. That's all it is. You pay dollars (or something else) to buy shares of the fund. The fund uses those dollars (or other) to buy gold. You redeem your shares. The fund sells some gold.
This happens every day. Calling the shares grams doesn't change this. But there is nothing earth-shaking about it. The mutual-fund industry has existed for decades (and gets along quite nicely with the Feds, and even other governments).
E-gold will allow you to buy or redeem small amounts of shares, electronically. That's nice. It's even useful. More power to them. It's a service that other mutual fund companies would do well to adopt.
But this doesn't change the world, or even matter dramatically for privacy
No, I'm not the attorney, I just posted his letter, at his request (I vowed I wouldn't post again, and look!). Anyway, it was incredibly-bad headline writing or article-reading, one, but perhaps in response to the lawyer's mail, the headline was actually changed from sensational to factual.
JMR
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
BTW, Check Cards, Debit Cards by any other name, are very dangerous: the money is debited from your checking account immediately. Why does this matter? Because theft happens, and, just as bad, mistakes happen.
For example, I've seen "settlement" programs (programs that submit payment transactions to the credit card processors) get stuck in loops and repeat the same charge hundreds of times. Not fun (unless your transaction happens to be a refund...). Credit card users may have been temporarily inconvenienced by maxed out cards (pretty bad, I know), but Debit Card holders actually have the money transferred out of their accounts - and if checks bounce because of it, oh well!
Don't use Debit Cards. Learn restraint and use Credit Card or Charge Cards (Amex, DC) responsibly.
For more information see: Clark Howard's Consummer Action website. Search for Debit cards.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
But the value we assign to the shiny rock is no more absolute than the value we assign to, say, an Internet stock. Back a few months, tech stocks were everybody's favorite stuff, so people paid more for them than their intrinsic worth.
The intrinsic value of gold is actually probably fairly low, and it's not "backed" by anything. Personally, I don't see the attraction of gold - it appeals to people with unrehabilited caveman sensibilities - ooh, shiny thing, me want! If gold went out of fashion, then it would lose value as surely as Amazon did when tech stocks went out of fashion.
There's nothing at all irrational about a market based on the trade value of shiny things.
Why couldn't you say the same thing about, say, tulips? (cf Dutch Tulip Mania) The difference is a perceptual one. As you said, "it's just everybody's favorite stuff". And it's only valuable as long as it stays that way. You're betting on fashion, like buying Armani suit futures.
Ever try to send money to a relative overseas? Cashing a certified check from a US bank costs $20 to $50 dollars in many European countries, and takes 2-3 weeks for snail mail and waiting for the check to clear. Paypal, e-gold, and other payment systems can be good; maybe not perfect yet but these things are a good idea getting better.
Barry K. Downey
U.S. Counsel to e-gold Ltd.
Looks like you left out your full title there "Vice President of huffing and Puffing".
So you are running a site out of an obscure caribean island offering financial services whose principal attaction appears to be being beyond the reach of US regulatory powers.
If I were in such a situation my first plan of action would not be to initiate libel lawsuits in the US which not only makes libel lawsuits almost impossible for plaintifs, but also empowers litigants with sweeping powers of discovery.
Everyone knows that if you want to piss Declan off you simply go to Pittsberg and buy officers Haven and Hammond-Schrock a drink.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Gold has /never/ gone out of fashion. At no point in time has any society said "my, that gold is ugly stuff, let's get rid of it ASAP"; whenever it's been considered inappropriate for individual adornment, it's merely been appropriated to glorify state or religion. Even if all societies did stop valuing it for decoration, it has many valuable industrial uses. Its rock bottom price (barring, say, asteroid mining, which will finally destroy gold's worth as a portable store of value by making absurd supplies available) due to industrial value alone is not less than a quarter the current price (and I'm being conservative). Compare rhodium, palladium, etc. OTOH, there is no bottom limit on the value of paper money, it goes right down to nothing with depressing regularity.
It's true, gold will not be good for that much longer. Asteroid mining, or core tapping, has to come sooner or later, and then a day's skilled labor will buy a ton of gold or more. Personally, I think we're going to drop money in favor of automated commodity trading, since our computers can keep track of current trading value quite easily. For simplicity of human consideration, composite value indices will replace fiat money; you'll still think in dollars (now defined as complex calculations of a variety of indispensible products), but you'll transfer grams of gasoline, helium, type 137 wheat, antimatter, etc.
Stocks have exactly the same intrinsic value as scrap paper, as does paper money. That's what intrinsic value is: the use you (or others) could make of the thing you're holding, not what it entitles you to by law. Abstractions such as shares in a company do not have intrinsic value.
Another way of putting it is that intrinsic value is all the value they can't take away from you without taking away the actual object. I dunno about you, but I'd still want a few ounces of gold, even if I couldn't sell it or trade it.
--
Which it is, these days gold is no longer the standard for high end jewelry, go into Tiffanys and you will see much more platinum than gold in the wedding rings section.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Federal Reserve + IRS = The Protection Racket Coup of 1913
by Jim Bowery
Jim Bowery, January 13, 2001 -- The author grants the right to copy, without modification.
INTRODUCTION
Federal Reserve money buys protection from punishment. You are punished if you don't pay taxes. This has become the Federal Reserve's primary monetary authority. The moral hazard of basing monetary authority on punishment has now been realized in the systemic and out-of-control gang rapes of prisoners in the US. All other unlawful acts by US governments are now overshadowed by the murderous, sexually sadistic character of governmental authority that has developed in US penal systems. Federal Reserve money is now protection racket money, or, if you prefer "punishment protection money". Calling it "fiat money", "debt money" or even "legal tender" obscures its true character. The transition to this form of money began in 1913, when the 16th Amendment dramatically expanded the potential need for legal tender in the form of taxes while, in that same year, the Federal Reserve Act started the process of removing from legal tender any backing value other than the protection it affords against punishment. That the redefinition of "legal tender" was unconstitutional(1) has become only a minor dimension of the massive decay in legitimacy and moral leadership during the 20th century triggered by these acts of 1913. These acts were largely in the interest of continental European banking concerns doing business under the name of J. P. Morgan. As vital interests of the United States were sacrificed on their behalf, those foreign interests are reasonably called "enemies of the United States", the acts of U.S. citizens on their behalf "treasons", and all such citizens "traitors".
THE MORAL HAZARD OF GOVERNMENT AND MONEY
Legitimate governments provide assurance that we are secure in our lives and properties by protecting our legal rights in exchange for taxes and other duties. The most legitimate governments will even back up their commitment by providing some sort of compensation if our legal rights are breached, much the same as insurance companies do when they pay out on an insurance policy. But there is a fine line between protection rackets and insurance companies. Indeed, gangsters frequently call their protection rackets "insurance" and the payments they extort from their victims "insurance premiums". That fine line between protector and protection racket is crossed when "moral hazard" tempts the "protector" beyond the limits of his character.
In conventional insurance terminology, "moral hazard" is the temptation to artificially increase hazards. A classic case of moral hazard is an otherwise unprofitable business buying lots of fire insurance and then hiring an arsonist to burn down the place of business.
Insurers, too, can profit by increasing hazards if it is the uninsured who suffer the exposure to risk. A classic example of an insurer's moral hazard is the temptation to parasitize a productive business by threatening it with destruction unless the owners pay regular "insurance premiums".
And that brings us to the morality of governance.
The most profound moral hazard for governance is the penal system combined with taxation.
The framers of the US Constitution included prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th Amendment. They also made it difficult to parasitize productive States. This they did by requiring that taxation on a State's citizenry be proportional to the State's population under Article. 1. Section. 2. Clause 3. and Article. 1. Section. 9. Clause 4. Making taxes proportional to State population helps control the moral hazard of governance at the Federal level by making it difficult for the Federal government to transfer wealth to States that are politically active from States that are economically productive. Also, States are more capable of defending themselves from the Federal government than are individuals. Unfortunately, the requirement for taxation proportional to State population ("with apportionment" and "with regard to the census") was removed by the 16th Amendment, thereby promoting political porkbarrel at the Federal level and punishing productivity. In the same year the Federal Reserve Act gave license to gradually reduce legal tender's reliance on gold and silver as backing value, leaving the protection legal tender afforded against government punishment it's primary backing value. (Shortly thereafter, the 17th Amendment also removed from the States the power to elect Senators, further eroding the States' ability to protect their citizens from the federal government.)
These acts of treason have produced profound moral hazard at the Federal level, and set the stage for the relentless and radical decay of moral leadership during the 20th century.
WARRIOR INSURANCE
The proper role of government is protection against force and fraud. Therefore, to keep it honest, government's source of revenue should be insurance premiums against loss due to force and fraud. Said premiums could be payable in notes issued by the insurer/protector, but the insurer/protector should merely cancel the insurance policy and cease protecting those who do not pay. An insurer/protector should not generate the market for their own notes by threatening to punish those who do not pay -- as that is a protection racket, even if the insurer/protector honorably indemnifies those who do pay in the event of a covered loss. Such insurance premiums and corresponding insurance coverage would, necessarily, stipulate other conditions under which the insurance/protection continued to be provided at the agreed upon rates. This amounts to taxation on asset value, adjusted for various conditions that may affect risk -- with the added guarantee of indemnification in the event that asset value is lost due to force or fraud.
Such a system actually eliminates governance, as we know it. I call it "warrior insurance".
Under warrior insurance, reinsurance networks take the place of existing international treaties and alliances. Intelligent warrior reinsurance networks will check loss of asset value resulting from gang, or "protection racket" formation well in advance of any need for warfare. Warrior insurance premiums eliminate taxation. Competition between warrior insurance companies creates checks and balances supporting liberty. Formation of mass armies on ideological/political grounds is suppressed by exposing the underlying quid-pro-quo of reciprocal altruism that actually exists between people and their sovereignties -- over-extended kin identification, the basis of political and religious warfare as well as one-world ideology, is rendered less viable. Warrior insurance companies are much like the original sovereignties that defended newly formed civilizations -- they are, in fact, quite traditional. Empires subsumed the original sovereignties because trade, communication and literacy were so centralized. In the information age, this is decreasingly the case. What is increasingly necessary is a strong, distributed militia living lives bonded to their communities and lands from generation to generation, who value honor above their own lives. Unlike systems of taxation, warrior insurers will compensate those who are bonded for conscription in time of war, or deputized in times of civil emergency. Those so bonded would naturally demand a vote, or representation, in declarations of war or civil emergency.
Under warrior insurance, the citizens' militias traditionally enjoy tax relief, since they are in effect, protecting themselves. In Scotland, rather than forming a Yeoman class from the "kindly tenants", "feu fees" were imposed to pay for foreign war debts during the Protestant Reformation, thereby dispossessing ancient families of their lands to make way for revenue generating land use such as wool-producing sheep. Kindly tenants were kindred or clan members who had traditionally been given relief from economic rent/taxation in exchange for sworn allegiance to their clans' militias under the command of their chiefs. But the clan chiefs were corrupted by the royalty which had become more interested foreign adventures than they were in allowing the clans to support and protect themselves and their families on their own lands. The royal war debts began consuming the livelihoods of the folk. Many were forced to flee for their lives. This was the primary origin of the Scotch-Irish pioneers who attempted to create a society in "the New World", free from such betrayals of clan loyalty. The earliest pioneers suffered a 25% mortality rate in the first year of migration in their desperation to create that "New World". This was not merely the moral equivalent of war -- it was death on a massive scale in a struggle with nature herself (war with natives was not the primary cause of these deaths), on the one hand, and tyranny on the other. As usual mostly men went to the frontier to risk everything for their new lands, but many women and children also suffered similar fates. As a consequence, the founders of the United States, folk memory still fresh, thought the avoidance of foreign wars to be common sense. This gave rise to the Monroe Doctrine and the avoidance of foreign wars.
Compare and contrast such a system to the internationally adventurous protection racket posing as a government we have today.
THE MURDEROUS, SEXUALLY SADISTIC BASIS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE
The US Federal Government, by basing its monetary authority on punishment protection with the treasons of 1913, has degenerated into an irredeemably murderous and sexually sadistic regime operating without lawful authority.
When Pennsylvania Quakers established the original penitentiaries, they were places where a man was to spend time alone in a room with a bible to contemplate the error of his ways. Now they are the source of most acts of rape in our society as well as a primary dissemination point of the deadly Human Immunodeficiency Virus that causes AIDS(2).
This is so much the case that a standard book on preparing for prison life "You Are Going to Prison" by Jim Hogshire, answers the question "Will I get butt-fucked?" quite simply and in the affirmative. Government itself routinely uses the EXPLICIT threat of gang rape in 'crime prevention' programs aimed at youth, such as that depicted in the public television broadcast of "Scared Straight"(3) where youth offenders are warned about their fate as sex slaves if they go to prison. Awareness is so widespread that Hollywood movies routinely make light of the pervasive nature of prisoner rape. Until recently, federal officials have avoided, like the AIDS epidemic they help spread, any indication that they are conscious of the fact that their authority relies, in large measure, upon cruel and unusual punishment. But even that taboo may be crumbling(4).
Any reasonable man must ask and demand an answer to this question:
"How has the Quaker conception of the penitentiary been so perverted that the threat of HIV-infected gang rape of prisoners is now a primary component of the government's authority?"
The answer is simple yet profound. It lies in the distinction between the two bases of money:
Reward VS Punishment protection
Everyone is familiar with the concept of reward money -- money issued with a promise from the issuer to reward the bearer usually with some commodity, such as gold or silver, upon presentation to the issuer.
The concept of money backed by punishment protection sounds unfamiliar to all but a very few scattered individuals. It is unfamiliar even to Nobel Prize winning economists, let alone the vast pool of PhDs from whence they are chosen.
Yet punishment protection money is as simple and obvious as it is pervasive:
Money issued with a promise from the issuer to protect the bearer from punishment upon presentation to the issuer.
> Forget the Clothes --The Emperor is a Murdering Rapist Run Amok
Many critics of President Clinton accused him of being a murdering rapist. But President Clinton was simply the by-product of an epic perversion that has overtaken the lawful government of the United States. It would be understatement to call this perversion a criminal gang. Criminal gangs only occasionally commit rape and murder against their own community. They don't pretend to be a lawful authorities in public. They don't issue their own currency as protection racket money and then demand it as "legal tender". They may rationalize their criminal conduct, but they don't convince themselves that what they are doing is lawful. They admit to themselves that they are gangsters. At least they are that honest. But, perhaps this is simply because gangsters are afraid to compete with the most massive criminal organization in history, whose roots extend back at least to 1913 when the Income Tax and Federal Reserve were created.
The Federal Reserve was created in the same year as the Income Tax for one simple reason:
The US Federal Government was shifting from Reward to Punishment Protection as the basis for its monetary authority.
Federal Reserve Notes are promises to reduce the bearer's risk of punishment for tax code violation, upon presentation to its collection agency, the IRS, in the form of Income Tax.
Note here that it is impossible to reduce the risk of punishment for violation of the income tax code to a level commensurate to the threat of prisoner gang-rape(5). This has become the foundation of the IRS/Fed's all-pervasive aura of fear(6) upon which their punishment protection money is based. The Income tax code is so complex that not even the IRS with all its private contractors from law and accounting firms, can reliably and reproducibly interpret it. This makes it possible only to _reduce_ the risk of punishment -- no matter how much wealth you turn over to the IRS.
In this manner the federal government creates demand for the Federal Reserve's otherwise worthless paper(7). Under the evil monetary basis of punishment protection, the government's monetary authority is limited only by the degree to which it can create pervasive terror of its prison system in the hearts of nonviolent potential tax code "offenders" -- and that means you.
With punishment protection as the basis of its monetary authority, and therefore its ability to buy votes, it was only a matter of time before the US Federal Government, as though an animal trained by operant conditioning, would find ways of increasing the severity and cruelty of its punishments.
But like rat in a maze, the US Federal Government had a problem to solve:
How to impose cruel and unusual punishment without arousing the wrath of a people whose ancestors had risked a 1 in 4 chance of dying in the first year of migration to the New World in order to escape just such evils?
The solution, reached without conscious intent (conspiracy) of individuals was a form of punishment so cruel and unusual -- SO TABOO -- that no decent human being would even want to think about it, let alone use freedom of speech and the press to talk about it:
Gradually cultivate prisoner rape as the basis of government authority.
By replacing pillory, open corporeal punishments and work restitution, so common before the 20th century, with an environment in which Mafiosi and other gangster types are protected from prisoner rape while the American pioneer cultures, less prone to prison gang formation, are systemically gang-raped, an ethnic bias was created against the very peoples who founded the country to escape government predation. The actual bias is apparent as at least 3 out of 4 prisoner rapes involve blacks victimizing men of Protestant heritage while Mediterranean Mafiosi are somehow immune.
The ruthlessly pragmatic and sadistically sociopathic genius of this is that its very intensity, both as physical trauma and moral outrage, rendered it invisible.
Such is the mentality of the child molester who relies on the traumatic nature of his crime to cover his tracks -- seemingly unable to control his subconscious urges. Such was the mentality of those men who, in 1913, gave us the Federal Reserve and the Income Tax.
CONCLUSION
As with a molested child whose shame and guilt compound his trauma, so the American people have come to accept as, as fated, a life lived with this filthy family secret(8). The US Federal Government, now basing its authority on cruel and unusual punishment, cannot be considered legitimate by any reasonable man . The fundamental role that the application of force against citizens plays in defining legitimacy demands such a radical conclusion.
Warrior insurance will be a crucial tool in the triumph of honor over the political will that has so corrupted the rule of law. But honorable warriors need something to protect. Pioneers risk their lives creating new lands. Women then risk their lives giving birth to new folk. Finally, warriors risk their lives protecting their lands and their folk.
The burden of leadership falls, as it did after the feu fees that so motivated the Scotch-Irish, on pioneers.
The dilemma, facing those of us who value the heritage of those early Americans who risked so much to escape sadistic authority in the old world, is not whether we are willing to risk our lives for freedom from such tyranny, but whether we can pioneer a 'New World' where our love of freedom can bear fruit in the face of death.
References
(1) This is a consequence of the unlawful declaration that Federal Reserve Notes are "legal tender". "Legal tender" is called such because courts are required to accept it as money for legal purposes (by far, the largest legal purpose of money is payment of taxes). The US Constitution, under Article 1, Section 10 requires the States to use only gold and silver as payment for legally recognized debts. Article 1, section 8 does not give Congress power to make legal tender. Therefore, the declaration that Federal Reserve Notes are "legal tender for all debts public and private" is unlawful. The best counter arguments to this generally ignore the fact that the paper currency issued by the original central banks were presumed to not be backed by legal tender's value as protection against punishment, let alone cruel and unusual punishment.
(2) See http://www.spr.org/docs/stats.html
t m
(3) The "Scared Straight" program from the 1970s is still going strong as evidenced by this April 5, 1997 article from the Lubbock Avalance- Journal: http://www.lubbockonline.com/news/040697/prison.h
An excerpt:
"DALLAS (AP) - A grand jury has refused to indict prison inmates in connection
with a ''scared straight'' prison visit during which several boys claimed to have been molested."
(4) Assistant U.S. attorney Gordon Zubrod from Harrisburg, PA made the following public statement to 3 suspects who fled to Canada (this statement was captured for the public record during a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interview):
"You're going to be the boyfriend of a very bad man if you wait out your extradition."
(5) Look at the classic paper on the value of human life by Nobel prize winning economist George Stigler of the University of Chicago School of Business. He measured the effect of danger on wage rates in different professions. Prison is more of a danger in some lines of activity than others. We should be able to apply similar analytic techniques to the relationship between taxation and the prison system.
(6) "Prison Rape: Every Man's Greatest Fear", August 1995, Penthouse.
(7) Although the thesis of this paper does not necessarily predict it, an increase in the rate of prisoner suicide negatively correlating with the rate of inflation would be supportive.
(8) A final anecdote on silence: When the author of this white paper was called in for an audit by the IRS in 1994, he sought a tax attorney to represent him. During an interview with a prospective attorney the author told the attorney he thought the audit might have been politically motivated. When asked for details, the author related that the author had published articles on the Internet advocating a judical review of the legitimacy of the ratification of the 16th Amendment about one month prior to the notice of audit. The attorney then told the author that he could not represent the author. According to this tax attorney, he had attended a seminar given by the IRS in which the distinct impression was given that "tax protesters" were not to be defended and that any attorney who defended a "tax protester" would be subjected to a lifetime of audits. This was later confirmed during an interaction with a prominent southern California tax attorney when it became known that the IRS auditor had verbally admitted to his consulting accountant that the author was being audited because of his advocacy of a judicial review of the 16th Amendment's ratification.
In a related situation currently ongoing in China, a spokesperson for the Falun Gong Practitioners in North America has stated that: "lawyers in China have already been told not to defend these innocent civilians unless they agree with the government propaganda." The U.S. House and Senate unanimously passed resolutions on 1999-NOV-18 and 19 which criticized the Chinese government for its crackdown of the Falun Gong.
Seastead this.
"Joshua Norton, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico... He lived in the [19th] century and got to be emperor by proclaiming himself as such. For some mysterious reason, the newspapers decided to humor him and printed his proclamations. When he started issuing his own money, the local banks went along with the joke and accepted it on par with U.S. currency. When the vigilantes got into a lynching mood one night and decided to go down to Chinatown and kill some Chinese, Emperor Norton stopped them just by standing in the street with his eyes closed reciting the Lord's Prayer....
"Well, chew on this for a while, friend: there were two very sane and rational anarchists who lived about the same time as Emperor Norton across the country in Massachusetts: William Green and Lysander Spooner. They also realized the value of having competing currencies instead of one uniform State currency, and they tried logical arguments, empirical demonstrations and legal suits to get this idea accepted. They accomplished nothing. The government broke its own laws to find ways to suppress Green's Mutual Bank and Spooner's People's Bank. That's because they were obviously sane, and their currency did pose a real threat... But Emperor Norton was so crazy that people humored him and his currency was allowed to circulate."
from The Eye in the Pyramid
Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson
---
Quiquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
This is of course something which can be argued both ways; that's a good thing, it's how we get at "the truth," through the process of rational disagreement.
I would hold, though, that gold doesn't have all that much practical value in the end. You can't eat it, it can't keep you warm, and you it's not any more useful for building things than, say, copper or aluminum or plastic. We like it because it's cool, and this somewhat irrational but nearly universal valuation of it makes it a good media of exchange and representor of wealth. It's not valuable b/c it's useful, it's useful b/c it's seen as valuable. It's value is entirely demand dependant, just like $100 bills. With either one, the world could decide tomorrow that either one isn't especially desirable, and they'd lose all value. (NB: the burst bubble in the stock market, where demand wasn't tied to anything concrete like production or utility, just the perception of value, or future value. When the perception changed, the demand dropped like an ugly rock.) That's fundamentally diferent than something like shelter or food, the demand for which is based on a basic human need.
Quoting from http://www.e-dinar.com/en/main_parts/6/6_advantage s.html:
It's probably got the same back-end, but they outline a pretty cool kiosk system where you can freely exchange your e-dinars for physical gold or silver Islamic dinars. e-gold's site seems pretty mum about how you can turn your e-gold into a physical bar of the shiny yellow stuff, and they seem to have gotten flamed for it, maybe deservedly.--the very un-halal mdecerbo
who didn't know a dinar was anything but the battered Yugoslav currency,
and wondered who the heck would want an electronic one.
As for the intrinsic value of paper money and stocks, we should distinguish between different risks. I've been referring to the risk of the commodity used as a value store losing its perceived value. When you say "abstractions such as shares in a company do not have intrinsic value", I think you miss the point. The abstraction entitles you legally to something with intrinsic value - an ownership interest in a company's assets and profits. Certainly, if the legal system that underlies this abstraction breaks down, you have nothing - just as you would if Dubai decided to nationalize e-gold's holdings, for example.
So the benefit you claim gold has is that it might retain its value even when other systems and mediums of exchange break down. I respect your paranoia, but frankly, if we get to that point, whether I have a pile of gold in my garage probably isn't going to make a difference. At that point, if I really needed gold, I'd just go and find someone who had some and steal it - I mean, we're talking about the breakdown of civilization here, and I won't be pussyfooting around!
As they might say in a cheesy beer commercial: I am my own gold.
I know this is offtopic, but I couldn't find ksheff's email address to email him privately.
ksheff, it's clear that you have a lot of bitterness towards your wife. You've posted about her horrible spending habits twice in this thread.
Have you considered a divorce?
That would probably make you much happier. You would only have to lose half your possessions, instead of letting her spend away all of them. That's my best advice, to get out of a bad situation, and get your financial life back on the ground. Find a woman who loves you and not your money...
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
But that just pushes the question further back. What is the "value" of the industrial uses? A lot, if somebody wants to run such an industry or use its products, zero if not.
"Value" is a strictly subjective labeling. The only objective measures we have of something's value are:
what someone will trade to obtain it
what someone will accept in return for giving it up
what someone will expend to defend it against loss or confiscation
And all three measures are distorted. (For instance: the third is distorted by the additional subjective negative value of having been ripped off and the positive subjective value of having successfully defended against an attack.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
When you trade a product or a service directly, you are giving something tangible. When you trade gold, you are trading something tangible. When you you trade currency, you are trading something that is tangible that represents gold. Assuming this representation is verifiable (i.e. one cannot flood the market with them via counterfitting), this will work as a medium. When you trade credit card numbers, you are trading an intangible object that represents currency (although not in as direct a way as currency represents gold). Since a credit card number is only a number, it can be duplicated (which you cannot do with gold or currency), and since it is not tangible, it is harder to verify as being legitimate. Therefore there is a huge difference between a shiny rock representing something valuable and a string of numbers representing something valuable (in part because the number only represents a representation of soemthing valuable). If for no other reasons than tangibility and lack of duplicatability, solid coinage (whether paper or coins) is a much better, safer, realistic representation of value than a string of numbers. Ibag
hawk, who just discovered 3 serious errors on his TRW report
> $150 in cash to the $8/hr employee at the airport rental return lot?
I've done that. It throughly confuses them--especially if they have to count it (I had a gaggle of 1's, and he just took my word for how many, iirc). Asking for change from a $50 or $100 also confuses them . . .
hawk
yeah, you just keep waiting for that to happen
hawk
If "Gold-Age" is buying shares for customers, then they're a broker, and have to register as such. If they're holding assets for customers, they're a depository institution, and have to qualify as a bank, an S&L, or a mutual fund. They don't seem to have done either. There's no way to tell if they just pocket the money. This could be a Ponzi scheme.
Effectively, this guy seems to have been running an unlicensed financial institution out of his house. That should attract some law enforcement attention.
Note that so far we don't have any information on this operation from a neutral party.
E-gold is a metals storage service and a payment system. It is not a mutual fund. It deals in metal, not securities (shares or obligations of companies).
Gold-age could not pocket your money without your finding out right away. Gold-age's business was buying and selling gold. They were an E-gold customer which means they stored gold in E-gold's vaults. Then if you bought gold from them on your credit card, they delivered the gold to you by spending from their E-gold account into yours. That meant you now owned that amount of the gold E-gold Ltd. was storing. You would know that Gold-Age had actually transferred the gold to you because you can check your holdings in real time at E-gold's web site. They consolidated small trades from random customers into larger trades with E-gold Ltd.
So yes, Gold-age was a broker, but it was a metals broker, not a securities broker. Securities brokers have to be licensed, to make sure they follow the regulations about misrepresenting the prospects of companies they sell shares of and stuff like that ("XYZ Corp. is just an email spam joint now, but they're working on a secret deal to take over Microsoft next week!"). IANAL but I've never heard that metal brokers have to be licensed. It's hard to misrepresent the prospects of an ounce of gold.
E-gold Ltd's attitudes about money and banking are a little bit eccentric, but they're legit and have been known in the electronic payments crowd for quite a while. Their web site is quite informative. Please check it out before making unfounded assumptions about what they do.
what do you mean by "very little value is paper value"? If paper money is a "tiny" proportion of the total in circulation, what is being circulated? Stocks, bonds, T-bills are all paper. If there is actually non-paper money being circulated in a large amount, how come I never get paid by any of it? In fact, the dollar bill states that it is a Federal Reserve Note. This means that the Note is supposed to be a placeholder of some "actual" money. Back in the day, before abolition of the gold standard, I could trade in my dollar bill for some amount of gold, because it was established that "one dollar" in Federal Reserve Notes meant it was a placeholder for some amount of gold that actually existed somewhere.
/at the same time/. The apparent increase in liquidity isn't true, because the system collapses like an illegal pyramid scheme if every bank investor were to liquidate their holdings at the same time. However, the FDIC system does a good job of masking this discrepancy. I wonder how many people know that FDIC is a psychological tool that allows us to keep our faith in fractional banking. Thus, we can now BELIEVE that money comes from nothing.
"Another way liquidity is increased is through banks" - That's what fractional banking depends upon: that you and the borrower will not need the $1000
People who say Gold is volatile, should say what is it volatile towards. If you look at real world value such as power of purchase, gold has historically been a lot more stable than the dollar. So the question is, Is Gold volatile to the Dollar or is it the Dollar that's volatile towards Gold.
E-Gold says that they are backed by gold and they are. The gold is controlled by a trust with the E-Gold account holders as benificiaries. The gold is handled physically by an escrow agent under the following terms.
The amount held in reserve as well as the amount in circulation can be viewed realtime on their Account Examiner
Their most recent audit of the gold storage by Ernst & Young is also publically available.
The reason the gold is owned by an offshore trust, is to keep it secure for the owners in case of a court case.
All of these documents are freely available at their site and they are verifiable offline as well.
I am not affiliated with E-Gold, but have been using them for a couple of years now as a convenient means of transfering and storing money. They have come to be known as the most popular payment scheme for Multi-Level marketing scammers, but that is only because it is easy and cheap to interface with. Most people use it for legitimate payment means as well as a recession proof storage of value.
-Pelle
host e-gold.com e-gold.com has address 206.102.213.48 e-gold.com mail is handled (pri=30) by mail.e-gold.com PING e-gold.com (206.102.213.48): 56 data bytes --- e-gold.com ping statistics --- 13 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss sort of says it all doesn't!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
It already did happen, back around 1980, when the price dropped from around $700/oz; and again in around 1986, when it dropped again from around $400 to $300.
These drops don't reflect any change in gold's utility to the industrial market, or even its value as jewellery; they merely reflect the fact that gold is no longer considered the ultimate repository of wealth it once was. It took some time, after gold-backed currencies, especially the US dollar, went off the gold standard, for the market as a whole to realize what this meant for the long-term value of gold. To some extent, that process is still underway, as witnessed by the gold-bugs here arguing why gold has some special worth. The price of gold will drop more - perhaps by as much as 75% over the long term, and in real terms (inflation adjusted), it will drop even more.
The stuff on the e-dinar web site including the examiner cgi, a lot of the text, and the shopping cart system appears to be taken verbatim from the e-gold web site. It's either run by the same people as e-gold or in conjunction with them, or else it's a rip-off or parody. I wonder what the relationship is.
Yup. Says "previously-scheduled downtime." Check the site, we do that every once in a while...or you might just get interested in the actual issue? Whatever...
JMR
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
since the US dollar isn't backed by anything but the faith of its holders, people moving to a gold back currency (whether its digital or not) could have a drastic effect on the US economy. It sounds like this effect is what the Secret Service is trying to investigate. After all the SS is still a branch of the US Treasury dept, not the Justice dept.
RA7
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"Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds" - RWE