Robin Hood Hacker Donates $11,000 of Stolen Bitcoin to Help Fight ISIS (newsweek.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A Kurdish region of Syria that borders territory held by the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) has received an $11,000 donation in allegedly stolen bitcoin from a vigilante hacker. (paywalled, alternate source) The pseudonymous Phineas Fisher donated 25 bitcoins to a crowdfunding campaign set up by members of the Rojava region's economic committee, described by Fisher as "one of the most inspiring revolutionary projects in the world." Fisher claims that the bitcoin donation, recorded publicly on the blockchain ledger and listed on the crowdfunding campaign page, came from hacking into a bank. "The money did come from robbing a bank," Fisher said. "Bank robbing is more viable than ever, it's just done differently these days."Phisher adds: "Unfortunately, our world is backwards. You get rich by doing bad things and go to jail for doing good."

Comments

Good things?

[goobie123]

"Phisher adds: "Unfortunately, our world is backwards. You get rich by doing bad things and go to jail for doing good."

I had never heard of theft being called 'doing good' before.

Re:Good things?

[bluefoxlucid]

People have no sense of economics. The guys who did the (crappy) movie, In Time, kind of got it right, but not in any serious way: you steal from the banks, the banks start charging everyone a shitload. In the movie, they framed it the same way as all normal people think: the banks charged more because they're assholes.

In reality, the cost of production is, essentially, wage-labor time. Wage-labor time includes overhead that's diffused through production (e.g. the CEO doesn't do a damned thing to make hamburgers, but hamburgers carry the partial cost of his salary; I often have to point out this is like $20 or $200 per employee per year, except a Chipotle where their overpaid executive is making $3,400 per employee per year), and *risk* is overhead. Risk has to cover losses sustained in the long-term of operating by amortizing them, charging more than costs in near-term good times and less than costs in near-term bad times. In other words: you charge an extra million dollars per year because, once every 10 years, you experience an average $10 million loss; when you get hit with those, you don't raise prices, because you *already* raised prices.

Our society protects corporations perhaps a little... inefficiently. The basic concept of protecting corporations--from robbery, vandalism, and other risks--is *not* inefficient: if people spent their time stealing from the big bad businesses and passing it out to their friends, we'd have operating cost increases, and thus the price of goods would increase, effectively transferring money from the consumer base to whoever Robin Hood deems worthy. Businesses who don't carry out this transfer go out of business, because eventually they turn negative profits and carry negative assets and have no money to continue operating.

I've had people argue at length that it should be a crime to rob "normal people" because people like us (the guy was middle-class) need our money to get by. He was mad that the police shot someone who was trying to rob a rich guy, and arguing that it's okay for you and me and him to shoot someone who breaks into our homes and steals our shit, because it's wrong to steal from regular folks, but okay to steal from the rich. People see businesses and rich individuals as endless sources of income and, frankly, as a symbol of unfairness, and so they think all kinds of weird shit about that, and then get mad when wage increases turn into price increases.

Re:No, it is NOT fuzzy

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen, brother. Sing it!
All praise the god of personal property. What's mine is mine, no matter how I got it. Dirty. Clean. It's all the same under the graces of the World Bank.
Praise be to the currency!

Re:No, it is NOT fuzzy

[GLMDesigns]

You mean like the HUD Secretary under Clinton who sued banks for not making enough sub-prime mortgages (which were created in the first place by government officials in the Carter administration). Are you surprised that banks did not want to keep this paper?

The key people to blame are all kind-hearted progressives who commanded evil bankers to make loans to people the banks knew wouldn't pay back.

As a good progressive you ignore that and blame the banks.

Re:I'm going to steal some of your bitcoin

[Paco103]

That's the governments job. They call it taxes.

Re:No, it is NOT fuzzy

[AlphaBro]

I can't even read this crap, I just see word salad with "republican" sprinkled about. This is not a partisan issue. Do you understand that?