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LibertyReserve.com Shuttered, Founder Arrested In Spain
hypnosec writes "Libertyreserve.com has been shut with the founder arrested by police in Spain this week over his alleged involvement in money laundering. Libertyreserve.com has been down for over three days now and the arrest seems to be the reason behind the outage. Arthur Budovsky Belanchuk, a 39-year-old male, has been arrested by Spanish authorities as a part of their ongoing investigations into money laundering. U.S. officials may very well seek his extradition."
There is something profoundly broken about our justice system in that the general public takes joy in imagining the likelihood of prison rape.
Each processor would proceed sequentially as if it had been better for them not to rise against Saul.
wtf is libertyreserve? how about a proper sumamary?
It's not the justice system (alone) that's broken, it's the general public.
He should use the HSBC defense.
Or does that only apply if you money-launder billions of drug money?
I'm not sure why you are laboring under the impression that it was ever different. I'd say that despite all the corruption we have now, we still have more in the way of fairness and peace than we've generally had during most of the agrarian age.
People of every age like to disasterbate about how bad it is. Yet every objective measure continues to show increasing lifespans and quality of life. Hell, our worst problem now is too many cheap calories per person, throwing a monkey wrench into one of the most historically useful measurements.
These indicators all scale directly with economic freedom, regardless of political narratives of either party. Hell, there shouldn't even be political narratives anymore. We have solved the problem: let people be free.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Shuttered and closed have different implications in this case. Closed implies an orderly wind down, while shuttered implies a rapid and disorderly cessation. It's akin the difference between closing time at night a local restaurant, and the owners throwing everyone out in the middle of the day.
If we put peace and fairness on a scale from 1 to 100, with 100 being perfect justice and no war/fighting, then if we go from a 15 to a 25, it's still an improvement, even if there's much left to be desired. Far more people in the world today do live safe and prosperous lives, lives that were once only for kings and clergy. A lot of people still don't, but it hasn't really gotten worse over the last 1000 years, say.
...Except everything with Bitcoin is open. Think there's something shady going on? Look at the source yourself! This isn't some ultra-secret proprietary blob where no one has a clue what's happening, its a well-documented, open ecosystem where anyone can understand how it works.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Remember that time when biggest Wall Street and City of London banks were found guilty of laundering drug money? They all went to prison!
And by prison I mean got bonuses.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
I do not expect this to be common knowledge amongst the general public, seeing as most people are still coming to grips with the concept of an e-currency via their interaction with (or hearing about) Bitcoin, but...
There was an entire selection of e-currencies to choose from before cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin being the first, and premier, example) were even invented by Satoshi in 2009. Liberty Reserve wasn't even the first example of such, but indeed an often trusted replacement for the original e-Gold service that came under fire by the US Department of Justice already over 6 years ago in 2007. There seems to be a basic confusion in the comments so far as to the blatant fundamental differences between services like LR (and e-Gold before it) and Bitcoin (and cryptocurrency derivatives thereof). As a user of centralised e-currencies multiple years before Bitcoin existed, I would like to make a couple of things clear:
The difference between services like Liberty Reserve and e-Gold and Bitcoin is that the former are centralised services operated and controlled by a single collection of people, often legally protected by an incorporated entity in the Central American/Carribean region of the Earth. The pioneers of Internet "e-currencies" such as these specifically chose to create their corporations in this part of the world within known tax havens. It is only natural for the creators to wish to legally establish such a corporation designed specifically to manage money transfers in a place that will minimally tax such transfers.
e-Gold's creators incorporated in the Carribbean island state of St. Kitts and Nevis, and the Liberty Reserve creators incorporated in Panama (altho I truly did not know where the masterminds lived or where from they operated until now, but it seems from this article the answer is España). The entire difference between them and the pseudonymos 'Satoshi Nakamoto' is that old generation e-currency operators maintained central control of monitary transactions using their service. You managed your account by connecting to their website, logging in, and checking your funds, managing transfers, and so forth, but all of this was always under their full control. If they had any issues with your use of your own account, they had the right to shut off your access to it and confiscate all of your funds, with essentially no capability of retrival (I know of people who lost access to thousands of USD this way). They taxed every transfer you wished to make, which affected both transfers between 2 users within the same system (sending LR LR) or to exit/enter the system (exchanging LR to/from USD). They could monitor all transactions made between every user and geolocate non-anonymised users' IP addresses to log all financial activity within their system; with Bitcoin, all transactions are public to all, as opposed to only a select few being able to monitor all else who use this system to transfer money.
The most essentially incorrect aspect of confusing this story with anything to do with Bitcoin, is that Bitcoin is exciting and inspiring exactly because it is the antithesis of centralised architecture, or at least the closest successful example thereof. When we were using Liberty Reserve (or other centralised e-currency), we were completely under the creator's control. LR eventually forced upon users a captcha based in Flash that prevented us from using Tor to login securely as we could for multiple years before. When LR attacked our technical ability to use the service anonymously, many moved to Pecunix. Whilst Pecunix has a better login system (one that blatantly allows for anonymous access), it was still a centralised e-currency controlled by a single group of people operating behind a
I tried reading the source but it was all written in code.