Like any speculative market because that is what we are really talking about, not Bitcoin itself, the value really rests in the realized profit. Any value Bitcoin has had before it can have again because the "new investment" had to exist to bring it there before. All realized profit on Bitcoin represents incentive to invest again, if you made money on it before you believe there is money to make again and so are likely to reinvest. If there is a huge amount of unrealized profit there will eventually be realization of that profit and that will create a huge amount of unrealized loss causing people to cling to their BTC... the people who realized that profit will invest again. At no point does everyone go broke or the value of BTC become zero.
And it can collapse. Bitcoin has been going through a bubble and collapse cycle for over 10 years, it never collapses to below the rate at the beginning of the cycle and the subsequent cycle will go higher. This is only a problem if you are looking to get rich quick on the current phase of the cycle. This can and should continue until there is no longer a large enough new influx of investment to cause a "bubble", at some point the price is high enough that the adjustments due to speculation at the moment are noise compared to the boulder that is the price of bitcoin.
As for how high that price should be... just like most things we speculate on, the only relationship between the speculative price and the underlying thing being speculated on is psychological. Stock prices don't relate to the profitability of the underlying company except in the sense that people speculating choose to link them... a stock doesn't always move in proportion to the actual performance of the underlying company, all you can really count on is that people will generally sell if they think the company is doing poorly and buy if they think it is doing well and others agreeing makes them right whether they are actually right or not.
In reality, the force that often drives the speculative value of something be it MSFT or BTC is the amount of unrealized profit and loss. The higher the price goes, the more temptation there is to realize those profits, unrealized losses on the other hand are the bedrock of a commodity, these are people who value the asset at a price higher than the current speculative price and aren't about to sell if they can help it. As the price goes up the unrealized losses first negate then become unrealized profit... so long as profit is occasionally realized all will be well because whoever buys the asset is neutral and invested at the current price but with less commitment.
So as you can see, the actual number doesn't really matter and doesn't need to relate to the underlying economy at all, all that really matters at any moment is unrealized profit, loss, and neutrality where the weight of that unrealized profit and loss reflect commitment. There is a huge amount of unrealized profit because bitcoin swung up so hard but if bitcoin swings down hard there will be a huge amount of unrealized loss as a consequence, this is the invisible inverse bubble and when it "pops" the bubble will be another big swing up.
"Secondly and more importantly, if no-one's buying or selling BC the mining infrastructure will collapse making BC transactions impossible. Running the mining operation is insanely energy intensive and only gets more intensive with time as the calculations required to maintain the blockchain get increasingly complex."
You aren't following all this through. The more miners who quit mining, the less complex the calculations required to unlock a block become. The complexity is almost entirely artificial and scaled by an algorithm to the amounting of mining power on the network. If bitcoin goes down, fewer people will mine, making mining yield a higher return in BTC for those who are left. Maybe you don't think it will work out but the system was definitely devised by some people with their mathematical proofs in order and has been working perfectly bubble or crash for over a decade.
"Firstly, If people stop buying BC that means BC will lose its market value which means there's no reason for anyone to accept BC as a payment."
Market value is not binary. There is no point in talking about any outcome should EVERYONE stop buying BC or BC losing its ENTIRE market value because those are impossible outcomes. Bitcoin can drop, Bitcoin could become less liquid but bitcoin is never going to zero.
I admit I don't quite know how this Bitcoin Cash thing changes the equation. Every change to Bitcoin is a fork... nobody has ever called the result something besides "Bitcoin" before. Just like any transaction submitted for the blockchain, if the majority of people accepted the update and used it that fork became "Bitcoin." So if we are pretending "Bitcoin Cash" isn't just another proposed updated for "Bitcoin" but rather something distinct I'm not sure how that impacts things. Traditionally, if most of us think the new update is superior the others have no choice but to follow and "Bitcoin Cash" would simply be another name for "Bitcoin."
You do know a currency conversion doesn't negate a purchase right? If my dollars get converted to rubles to buy your caviar my dollars still worked to buy the caviar. Similarly if my BTC gets converted to rubles to buy your caviar my dollars still worked to buy the caviar.
You can buy everything you can buy with a fiat currency with bitcoin because you can buy all the fiat currencies with bitcoin. Best of all there is little to no chance of having your bitcoin stolen by customs when you travel internationally.
"At 4-5 transactions/sec globally it is not a serious transaction system."
That is ridiculous. Bitcoin is definitely not limited to 4-5 transactions/sec. All the miners out there are processing transactions in parallel, the delays don't come from the transaction processing rate but from the process that is used to determine when to call a block of transactions "done" and attach it to the blockchain.
You do know Bitcoin has been in a cycle of bubbling up high and then crashing down... but not to where it started... then a gap and then repeat with the bubble/crash/gap length proportionally larger for over ten years right? It is almost like the entire thing was built on math and is extremely predictable with an algorithm. If $20k was the peak we'll probably see Bitcoin "crash" to about $6-8k then stabilize around $10. This will then be followed by a gap of around 5yrs during which time investors will gradually gain enough confidence that Bitcoin isn't actually going anywhere and it will slowly increase. At some point that growth will hit critical mass, people will determine the previous round of sell off wasn't appropriate and realize there is now even less Bitcoin floating around. We'll then see new record bitcoin prices.
Can you use some form of fiat for those things because you can buy fiat with Bitcoin. I can't pay my rent in Italy with my USD royalty checks either but I can buy euros with USD.
Nobody "needs money" like they need potatoes, they instead know they can get what they need or want or get something closer to it by buying something with that money, that is what makes it a functional currency. Whether or not they buy some other kind of money is irrelevant. If I want to buy something from Russia either the guy I'm buying from is going to immediately buy Rubles or my transaction processor is going to do so on my behalf (like Coinbase does for merchants). The same is true for a Russian buying from me.
That doesn't mean either isn't a real functional currency. I would however agree that the transaction fees have become a bit of a bug in the base Bitcoin. I anticipated $10,000 Bitcoin and that the fees would be inappropriate at that point, the developers apparently did not.
Someone who sold their house for BTCs a few weeks ago would have effectively gotten 4x the asking price.
What I don't understand is why all these updates were called "Bitcoin Cash" or something similar like they are some kind of new coin, they are just updates to Bitcoin, the result is "Bitcoin" with a slight version number increase not Bitcoin Cash or segwitz or whatever. EVERY update to Bitcoin is a "fork" in the past we haven't given them new names.
"Contrived example, suspect is accused of DUI causing death after having 2 drinks and having a pedestrian jump in front of his car. Cops get a warrant for his blood, takes months for test results to come back (saying.09 or.01 over the limit) so trial is delayed for that."
Yes, but so is an arrest. You can't just deprive someone of their freedom on suspicion. You need proof
"So you have years of evidence gathering, then a possibility of a chain of trials and meanwhile the need to keep this nutcase of the streets."
Most of those years are after he was convicted of the initial charges but for the rest your "need to keep this nutcase of[sic] the streets" again works from the presumption of guilt. I agree that finding some clothes was enough to justify a warrant, keep searching, and even bar travel but not bring charges. By all means do take advantage of your 24hrs to hold him for questioning. Just because he subsequently proved to be guilty doesn't mean it was retroactively okay to assume he was guilty until proven innocent rather than innocent until proven guilty.
Part of the problem is that we tend to have an obsession with going CSI on everything these days. Just because DNA exists doesn't mean we must spend months gathering it and introduce it in every murder trial. If there was blood on those clothes, arrest him, establish a differing blood type, if you've got bone fragments from behind the wood chipper then introduce those. The clothes, blood, bone fragments, and whatever justified the search are more than enough to convict in 1940 and it is more than enough now. Save the DNA for subsequent charges (or at least identification for the families/closed cases, not sure there was a point in additional charges) and the defense to show he didn't do it.
"Are you seriously suggesting that the reason Mexico hasn't invaded"
At one time, sure. But lets not pretend that invading US soil requires being a border country or that the Political, Economic, and Military disposition of other nations today is particularly relevant when talking about a policy that applies in perpetuity into the future. In another couple hundred years we could be to Mexico what Mexico is to us today... again.
"is that they're more afraid of civilians with hunting rifles than the Army's tanks and the Air Force's bombers"
I certainly would be considering it certainly wasn't tanks, bombers, and battleships that resulted in our losing in Vietnam and Iraq. A hunting rifle is a poor counterpart to a proper 50 cal sniper weapon but keep perspective and remember it is dramatically superior to anything used by a sniper on either side in WWII. You might be able to roll your tanks in and say you've taken a city but would they get you to patrol the streets knowing there is a sniper in every other house? Not the the Constitution limits arms to civilians to hunting rifles.
Thanks to the right to bear arms and our seemingly perpetual wars there are millions of armed and trained former soldiers amongst our civilian population at any moment, a good chunk of them with some form of actual combat experience. Those "gun nuts" people like to talk about, those are largely former military, veterans, police, and people who are in clubs and training with former military, veterans, and police. That asshat NRA guy touting private hunting farm rights only represents their common interest in protecting the 2nd amendment. Sure some of these people are poor and they hunt because they are hungry (certainly applied to all the poachers I knew when I was young) but the second amendment isn't about hunting and it isn't about beating tanks and bombers, it's about enemies, both foreign and domestic not being able to safely walk the streets without riding in a tank and about making sure federal power was kept in check by being denied access to ground forces that could be used against the states without requesting them from the states and a formal congressional declaration of war.
The cure for that is massive piles of money, cocaine, and smoking hot gold digging coke whores... just ask Charlie. I'm sure in the middle of that Ajit will stop every now and then and feel about having fucked over everyone else for his unhappy life.
"Had the shooter just fired rapid aimed shots the number of casualties would have been much higher."
That's highly unlikely. This is exactly the scenario that full auto is designed for. If you are shooting a target or three at any distance aimed shots are the answer, if you are shooting a crowd and have effectively unlimited ammunition full auto is the better choice. From my understanding he didn't run out of ammo and was also using a slide-fire rather than a bump fire stock, if that is the case the design of the stock actually encourages appropriate technique forcing you to lean forward and down to keep firing.
In my experience this type of stock actually doesn't shoot as fast as true full auto, but it shoots more than fast enough while at the same time giving you a few seconds on each 40rnd clip while retaining a decent amount of control, which is plenty if you can keep the clips coming.
That said you can't outlaw existing stocks and you can bump fire without any special stock so there is no point in outlawing anything. All this should have done is highlight the very big difference between military rifles (full auto, 50cal+) and non-military rifles (civilian AK-47, AR-15, and the much more powerful hunting rifles).
"The main difference between semi-auto and a bump stock in a large crowd of people is how fast you run out of ammo. Lethality is about the same overall."
No, no it is not. Unless you assume an unarmed crowd who just stand still. In either case, bump stocks are not the point.
The shooting in Vegas was a tragedy, of that there can be no doubt, but the shooting related death toll in the US is rather insignificant compared to any leading cause of death and certainly is nothing compared to the lives saved because an invading power knows how costly a ground invasion of the heavily armed US would be. The patriots whose blood renews the tree of liberty? Who said they would all be soldiers? Have we really become a nation of cowards who tuck tail and sell out the freedoms so many of our troops have died for just to get a slight gain in our social agendas or at the first indication there is some kind of civilian risk or price for those rights?
"I don't know what the limits should be but I do understand it takes time to gather and organize evidence."
True but that is or should be over before anyone is accused or arrested.
"There's also the defenses right to take as long as needed to formulate a defense."
Yes, but how does that delay the start of trial? That is a delay that can occur during the trial after the prosecution has proven they even have enough evidence for the case to go to trial.
"Up here, at least in theory, it is illegal to discriminate against convicted criminals who have served their time unless it has a direct bearing on the job. Peoples privacy rights are also important enough that just being arrested is not usually published and even having charges laid is often not broadcast too much though the court records are usually open to anyone who wants to look."
That is a more sane policy than we have in the US. In the US employers are free to discriminate against convicted criminals, period. Every position requires disclosure of past criminal offenses and failure to disclose is always grounds for termination. Background checks to discover and verify any past criminal record are pretty much standard process and there are a number of employment screening companies that employers utilize to check for criminal history, credit history, and verify employment history. It has gotten to the point where a gap in employment history or poor credit can also exclude someone from a decent job.
You might have been the manager of a major downtown city bank branch before but if you lost your job and took six months searching during which you missed a couple credit card payments you won't be one again. If during that time the cute young thing you encountered at the bar after a few drinks turns out to have been 17 you won't be anything but a fry cook on a sex offender registry for the rest of your life. By the time you are done with all the counseling they are going to put you through they'll even have you convinced you deserve it (happened to someone I knew).
If we are declaring too many people criminals to be able to give them a trial within a couple weeks we are obviously labeling too many things as criminal and need to start relaxing our laws.
Especially considering that the moment we enter a guilty verdict (even a plea) that person's gainful employment prospect is effectively destroyed if it wasn't destroyed the moment we accused them.
That and they've held him for a year without trial, even if it did crash he has the right to sue them for the lost opportunity to sell before the crash.
"On the other hand, it's probable that the guy bought/acquired the Bitcoins as a result of selling bogus drugs. If so, those assets were obtained unlawfully. However, if he's acquitted or he can prove they were obtained legally"
In our system the accused are innocent until proven guilty. You've defined a system of assuming he is guilty until he manages to establish otherwise. In this case he has been held a year as an assumed innocent, that violates the six amendment so it really no longer matters if they could have proven him guilty of something. He should walk.
Maybe we just think the people we trust to protect the innocent from criminals and the crimes of false arrest and prosecution shouldn't have a financial incentive to falsely arrest and prosecute people.
We have a tax system, whether you agree with the system as it stands or not it is our societies best effort to charge the public for public services in a fair manner. There should be precisely zero other ways we pay for public services.
He has a right to a speedy trial. It doesn't matter what he's accused of, they didn't give him a speedy trial instead they held him for a year without due process and the state holding people without due process is a MUCH bigger crime than shooting at random buildings.
Yup, it's sketchy enough that Regan era drug war policies letting police steal the property of someone who has committed a crime related to drugs are still in affect (seems to conflict with the accused being able to pay for their defense for starters) but now you can sell their property out from under them?
If you accuse me of a crime and steal my house then sell it out from under me while I await trial I'm going to be pissed. I don't even care if the price went DOWN in the meantime and you give me more money than it would be worth when I get out money is not the same as the actual item.
"Shamo was arrested over a year ago -- his trial has not yet been scheduled."
That alone should be an automatic get out of jail free card. I don't know what the limits precedent sets on it but if they allow the prosecution to keep you jailed for over a year without proving you've committed a crime they are definitely in conflict with the right to a speedy trial guaranteed by the sixth amendment. When this guy does see a judge it should be an automatic "not guilty" without regard to evidence.
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Like any speculative market because that is what we are really talking about, not Bitcoin itself, the value really rests in the realized profit. Any value Bitcoin has had before it can have again because the "new investment" had to exist to bring it there before. All realized profit on Bitcoin represents incentive to invest again, if you made money on it before you believe there is money to make again and so are likely to reinvest. If there is a huge amount of unrealized profit there will eventually be realization of that profit and that will create a huge amount of unrealized loss causing people to cling to their BTC... the people who realized that profit will invest again. At no point does everyone go broke or the value of BTC become zero.
And it can collapse. Bitcoin has been going through a bubble and collapse cycle for over 10 years, it never collapses to below the rate at the beginning of the cycle and the subsequent cycle will go higher. This is only a problem if you are looking to get rich quick on the current phase of the cycle. This can and should continue until there is no longer a large enough new influx of investment to cause a "bubble", at some point the price is high enough that the adjustments due to speculation at the moment are noise compared to the boulder that is the price of bitcoin.
As for how high that price should be... just like most things we speculate on, the only relationship between the speculative price and the underlying thing being speculated on is psychological. Stock prices don't relate to the profitability of the underlying company except in the sense that people speculating choose to link them... a stock doesn't always move in proportion to the actual performance of the underlying company, all you can really count on is that people will generally sell if they think the company is doing poorly and buy if they think it is doing well and others agreeing makes them right whether they are actually right or not.
In reality, the force that often drives the speculative value of something be it MSFT or BTC is the amount of unrealized profit and loss. The higher the price goes, the more temptation there is to realize those profits, unrealized losses on the other hand are the bedrock of a commodity, these are people who value the asset at a price higher than the current speculative price and aren't about to sell if they can help it. As the price goes up the unrealized losses first negate then become unrealized profit... so long as profit is occasionally realized all will be well because whoever buys the asset is neutral and invested at the current price but with less commitment.
So as you can see, the actual number doesn't really matter and doesn't need to relate to the underlying economy at all, all that really matters at any moment is unrealized profit, loss, and neutrality where the weight of that unrealized profit and loss reflect commitment. There is a huge amount of unrealized profit because bitcoin swung up so hard but if bitcoin swings down hard there will be a huge amount of unrealized loss as a consequence, this is the invisible inverse bubble and when it "pops" the bubble will be another big swing up.
"Technically, it probably isn't a Ponzi scheme. There are many similarities, though."
Not really, simply because early investors get rewarded doesn't make it anymore of a Ponzi scheme than Microsoft.
"Secondly and more importantly, if no-one's buying or selling BC the mining infrastructure will collapse making BC transactions impossible. Running the mining operation is insanely energy intensive and only gets more intensive with time as the calculations required to maintain the blockchain get increasingly complex."
You aren't following all this through. The more miners who quit mining, the less complex the calculations required to unlock a block become. The complexity is almost entirely artificial and scaled by an algorithm to the amounting of mining power on the network. If bitcoin goes down, fewer people will mine, making mining yield a higher return in BTC for those who are left. Maybe you don't think it will work out but the system was definitely devised by some people with their mathematical proofs in order and has been working perfectly bubble or crash for over a decade.
"Firstly, If people stop buying BC that means BC will lose its market value which means there's no reason for anyone to accept BC as a payment."
Market value is not binary. There is no point in talking about any outcome should EVERYONE stop buying BC or BC losing its ENTIRE market value because those are impossible outcomes. Bitcoin can drop, Bitcoin could become less liquid but bitcoin is never going to zero.
I admit I don't quite know how this Bitcoin Cash thing changes the equation. Every change to Bitcoin is a fork... nobody has ever called the result something besides "Bitcoin" before. Just like any transaction submitted for the blockchain, if the majority of people accepted the update and used it that fork became "Bitcoin." So if we are pretending "Bitcoin Cash" isn't just another proposed updated for "Bitcoin" but rather something distinct I'm not sure how that impacts things. Traditionally, if most of us think the new update is superior the others have no choice but to follow and "Bitcoin Cash" would simply be another name for "Bitcoin."
You do know a currency conversion doesn't negate a purchase right? If my dollars get converted to rubles to buy your caviar my dollars still worked to buy the caviar. Similarly if my BTC gets converted to rubles to buy your caviar my dollars still worked to buy the caviar.
You can buy everything you can buy with a fiat currency with bitcoin because you can buy all the fiat currencies with bitcoin. Best of all there is little to no chance of having your bitcoin stolen by customs when you travel internationally.
"At 4-5 transactions/sec globally it is not a serious transaction system."
That is ridiculous. Bitcoin is definitely not limited to 4-5 transactions/sec. All the miners out there are processing transactions in parallel, the delays don't come from the transaction processing rate but from the process that is used to determine when to call a block of transactions "done" and attach it to the blockchain.
You do know Bitcoin has been in a cycle of bubbling up high and then crashing down... but not to where it started... then a gap and then repeat with the bubble/crash/gap length proportionally larger for over ten years right? It is almost like the entire thing was built on math and is extremely predictable with an algorithm. If $20k was the peak we'll probably see Bitcoin "crash" to about $6-8k then stabilize around $10. This will then be followed by a gap of around 5yrs during which time investors will gradually gain enough confidence that Bitcoin isn't actually going anywhere and it will slowly increase. At some point that growth will hit critical mass, people will determine the previous round of sell off wasn't appropriate and realize there is now even less Bitcoin floating around. We'll then see new record bitcoin prices.
Can you use some form of fiat for those things because you can buy fiat with Bitcoin. I can't pay my rent in Italy with my USD royalty checks either but I can buy euros with USD.
Nobody "needs money" like they need potatoes, they instead know they can get what they need or want or get something closer to it by buying something with that money, that is what makes it a functional currency. Whether or not they buy some other kind of money is irrelevant. If I want to buy something from Russia either the guy I'm buying from is going to immediately buy Rubles or my transaction processor is going to do so on my behalf (like Coinbase does for merchants). The same is true for a Russian buying from me.
That doesn't mean either isn't a real functional currency. I would however agree that the transaction fees have become a bit of a bug in the base Bitcoin. I anticipated $10,000 Bitcoin and that the fees would be inappropriate at that point, the developers apparently did not.
Someone who sold their house for BTCs a few weeks ago would have effectively gotten 4x the asking price.
What I don't understand is why all these updates were called "Bitcoin Cash" or something similar like they are some kind of new coin, they are just updates to Bitcoin, the result is "Bitcoin" with a slight version number increase not Bitcoin Cash or segwitz or whatever. EVERY update to Bitcoin is a "fork" in the past we haven't given them new names.
It just might work(TM)
-Steve Jobs
"Contrived example, suspect is accused of DUI causing death after having 2 drinks and having a pedestrian jump in front of his car. Cops get a warrant for his blood, takes months for test results to come back (saying .09 or .01 over the limit) so trial is delayed for that."
Yes, but so is an arrest. You can't just deprive someone of their freedom on suspicion. You need proof
"So you have years of evidence gathering, then a possibility of a chain of trials and meanwhile the need to keep this nutcase of the streets."
Most of those years are after he was convicted of the initial charges but for the rest your "need to keep this nutcase of[sic] the streets" again works from the presumption of guilt. I agree that finding some clothes was enough to justify a warrant, keep searching, and even bar travel but not bring charges. By all means do take advantage of your 24hrs to hold him for questioning. Just because he subsequently proved to be guilty doesn't mean it was retroactively okay to assume he was guilty until proven innocent rather than innocent until proven guilty.
Part of the problem is that we tend to have an obsession with going CSI on everything these days. Just because DNA exists doesn't mean we must spend months gathering it and introduce it in every murder trial. If there was blood on those clothes, arrest him, establish a differing blood type, if you've got bone fragments from behind the wood chipper then introduce those. The clothes, blood, bone fragments, and whatever justified the search are more than enough to convict in 1940 and it is more than enough now. Save the DNA for subsequent charges (or at least identification for the families/closed cases, not sure there was a point in additional charges) and the defense to show he didn't do it.
"Are you seriously suggesting that the reason Mexico hasn't invaded"
At one time, sure. But lets not pretend that invading US soil requires being a border country or that the Political, Economic, and Military disposition of other nations today is particularly relevant when talking about a policy that applies in perpetuity into the future. In another couple hundred years we could be to Mexico what Mexico is to us today... again.
"is that they're more afraid of civilians with hunting rifles than the Army's tanks and the Air Force's bombers"
I certainly would be considering it certainly wasn't tanks, bombers, and battleships that resulted in our losing in Vietnam and Iraq. A hunting rifle is a poor counterpart to a proper 50 cal sniper weapon but keep perspective and remember it is dramatically superior to anything used by a sniper on either side in WWII. You might be able to roll your tanks in and say you've taken a city but would they get you to patrol the streets knowing there is a sniper in every other house? Not the the Constitution limits arms to civilians to hunting rifles.
Thanks to the right to bear arms and our seemingly perpetual wars there are millions of armed and trained former soldiers amongst our civilian population at any moment, a good chunk of them with some form of actual combat experience. Those "gun nuts" people like to talk about, those are largely former military, veterans, police, and people who are in clubs and training with former military, veterans, and police. That asshat NRA guy touting private hunting farm rights only represents their common interest in protecting the 2nd amendment. Sure some of these people are poor and they hunt because they are hungry (certainly applied to all the poachers I knew when I was young) but the second amendment isn't about hunting and it isn't about beating tanks and bombers, it's about enemies, both foreign and domestic not being able to safely walk the streets without riding in a tank and about making sure federal power was kept in check by being denied access to ground forces that could be used against the states without requesting them from the states and a formal congressional declaration of war.
The cure for that is massive piles of money, cocaine, and smoking hot gold digging coke whores... just ask Charlie. I'm sure in the middle of that Ajit will stop every now and then and feel about having fucked over everyone else for his unhappy life.
"Had the shooter just fired rapid aimed shots the number of casualties would have been much higher."
That's highly unlikely. This is exactly the scenario that full auto is designed for. If you are shooting a target or three at any distance aimed shots are the answer, if you are shooting a crowd and have effectively unlimited ammunition full auto is the better choice. From my understanding he didn't run out of ammo and was also using a slide-fire rather than a bump fire stock, if that is the case the design of the stock actually encourages appropriate technique forcing you to lean forward and down to keep firing.
In my experience this type of stock actually doesn't shoot as fast as true full auto, but it shoots more than fast enough while at the same time giving you a few seconds on each 40rnd clip while retaining a decent amount of control, which is plenty if you can keep the clips coming.
That said you can't outlaw existing stocks and you can bump fire without any special stock so there is no point in outlawing anything. All this should have done is highlight the very big difference between military rifles (full auto, 50cal+) and non-military rifles (civilian AK-47, AR-15, and the much more powerful hunting rifles).
"The main difference between semi-auto and a bump stock in a large crowd of people is how fast you run out of ammo. Lethality is about the same overall."
No, no it is not. Unless you assume an unarmed crowd who just stand still. In either case, bump stocks are not the point.
The shooting in Vegas was a tragedy, of that there can be no doubt, but the shooting related death toll in the US is rather insignificant compared to any leading cause of death and certainly is nothing compared to the lives saved because an invading power knows how costly a ground invasion of the heavily armed US would be. The patriots whose blood renews the tree of liberty? Who said they would all be soldiers? Have we really become a nation of cowards who tuck tail and sell out the freedoms so many of our troops have died for just to get a slight gain in our social agendas or at the first indication there is some kind of civilian risk or price for those rights?
"I don't know what the limits should be but I do understand it takes time to gather and organize evidence."
True but that is or should be over before anyone is accused or arrested.
"There's also the defenses right to take as long as needed to formulate a defense."
Yes, but how does that delay the start of trial? That is a delay that can occur during the trial after the prosecution has proven they even have enough evidence for the case to go to trial.
"Up here, at least in theory, it is illegal to discriminate against convicted criminals who have served their time unless it has a direct bearing on the job. Peoples privacy rights are also important enough that just being arrested is not usually published and even having charges laid is often not broadcast too much though the court records are usually open to anyone who wants to look."
That is a more sane policy than we have in the US. In the US employers are free to discriminate against convicted criminals, period. Every position requires disclosure of past criminal offenses and failure to disclose is always grounds for termination. Background checks to discover and verify any past criminal record are pretty much standard process and there are a number of employment screening companies that employers utilize to check for criminal history, credit history, and verify employment history. It has gotten to the point where a gap in employment history or poor credit can also exclude someone from a decent job.
You might have been the manager of a major downtown city bank branch before but if you lost your job and took six months searching during which you missed a couple credit card payments you won't be one again. If during that time the cute young thing you encountered at the bar after a few drinks turns out to have been 17 you won't be anything but a fry cook on a sex offender registry for the rest of your life. By the time you are done with all the counseling they are going to put you through they'll even have you convinced you deserve it (happened to someone I knew).
If we are declaring too many people criminals to be able to give them a trial within a couple weeks we are obviously labeling too many things as criminal and need to start relaxing our laws.
Especially considering that the moment we enter a guilty verdict (even a plea) that person's gainful employment prospect is effectively destroyed if it wasn't destroyed the moment we accused them.
Well no actually, if you work for anyone who provides paychecks checks covered directly or indirectly by the treasury you get to pocket it.
No, they seize the property obtained by someone who has committed a crime whether that property was obtained by criminal means or not.
That and they've held him for a year without trial, even if it did crash he has the right to sue them for the lost opportunity to sell before the crash.
"On the other hand, it's probable that the guy bought/acquired the Bitcoins as a result of selling bogus drugs. If so, those assets were obtained unlawfully. However, if he's acquitted or he can prove they were obtained legally"
In our system the accused are innocent until proven guilty. You've defined a system of assuming he is guilty until he manages to establish otherwise. In this case he has been held a year as an assumed innocent, that violates the six amendment so it really no longer matters if they could have proven him guilty of something. He should walk.
"Why do you libs all hate the first responders?"
Maybe we just think the people we trust to protect the innocent from criminals and the crimes of false arrest and prosecution shouldn't have a financial incentive to falsely arrest and prosecute people.
We have a tax system, whether you agree with the system as it stands or not it is our societies best effort to charge the public for public services in a fair manner. There should be precisely zero other ways we pay for public services.
"that's the due process"
He has a right to a speedy trial. It doesn't matter what he's accused of, they didn't give him a speedy trial instead they held him for a year without due process and the state holding people without due process is a MUCH bigger crime than shooting at random buildings.
Yup, it's sketchy enough that Regan era drug war policies letting police steal the property of someone who has committed a crime related to drugs are still in affect (seems to conflict with the accused being able to pay for their defense for starters) but now you can sell their property out from under them?
If you accuse me of a crime and steal my house then sell it out from under me while I await trial I'm going to be pissed. I don't even care if the price went DOWN in the meantime and you give me more money than it would be worth when I get out money is not the same as the actual item.
"Shamo was arrested over a year ago -- his trial has not yet been scheduled."
That alone should be an automatic get out of jail free card. I don't know what the limits precedent sets on it but if they allow the prosecution to keep you jailed for over a year without proving you've committed a crime they are definitely in conflict with the right to a speedy trial guaranteed by the sixth amendment. When this guy does see a judge it should be an automatic "not guilty" without regard to evidence.