Separate partition for/home/ and it doesn't matter what happens to the OS.
I have a copypasta for Windows users for when they get hosed, and part of the copypasta is "give windows and software 50GB in a system partition and use the rest of the drive for user data and configure your users to use the user partition, so you can wipe the system partition at any time and not touch the user data."
I consider this standard practice, at a minimum.
On Linux I also recommend/usr/local having its own partition for all your custom software so it can survive upgrades.
And people look at me as if I have an extra head growing out of my neck like Mrs. Grales/Rachel.
Thank you for your enumeration. I will respond to these one by each.
#1. Interactive tiles "The Metro start screen may not be everyone's cup of tea," Well, that's putting it very mildly. Metro specific. Start screen specific. Who cares. Just get that start screen out of my way, plox. #2. Task Manager Improved. Decent. One of the nicest task managers I've used. Now if only someone could port htop to Windows. #3. Run ISOs and VHDs natively About friggin' time. Linux has been doing this since forever ago. But you won't be able to play DVDs out of the box. Noooo.... You need to buy the Plus Pack for that. It's as if it's really 1998. #4. No new hardware requirements Well, considering the bloat going from XP to Vista/7 one would hope not. It's still too big for virtualizing. #5. Airplane mode Woopdedoo. Here is my airplane mode: Put on headphones. Listen to music. Sleep. Ignore person in seat next to me as much as possible. #6. SkyDrive integration This should be expected. SkyDrive doesn't suck. #7. Windows Store But forget about buying non-metro apps in it. #8. Interactive lock screen Tits on a bull useless. A lockscreen should show nothing but a prompt for a password and possibly the screensaver. It's a lockscreen for a reason. #9. Split-screen apps Don't we call these things windows? *looks* OH REALLY. IFRAMES ON THE DESKTOP. KILL IT WITH FIRE. #10. Split touch keyboard - an on-screen keyboard that is divided up into left and right sides Saying this to a touch-typist gets you nothing but ridicule. #11. App contracts KDE has had something like this since forever ago. #12. Fewer surprise restarts How about none? Please? The only surprise restart should be a STOP error, and at that point, it's a hardware/driver issue. All other restarts should be optional, like in sane operating systems. #13. Cross-device synchronisation Marketing fluff that means "rsync" #14. Improved 3G support But how does this help me as a desktop OS? #15. Built-in antivirus It would be nice to not need this, wouldn't it? #16. Picture passwords Only useful on touch devices. #17. Instant search Oh, you mean like what Linux has had since forever ago. Also, see Dolphin, Semantic Desktop etc. #18. Windows To Go Live distribution. "Innovation" as if Knoppix never existed. #19. Secure Boot Something that is designed to lock out other OSes from "windows certified" devices, enabled by default and unable to remove. Also: the army is always fighting the last war. Most malware runs in userspace now. #20. Revamped Explorer It still sucks. #21. Restore PC Only Windows users think it's normal to re-image the machine every quarter. #22. Thumbnail previews of active applications Woop, de, doo. old news, even on Windows. "But it's android style!!!!!" Wait, who is doing the innovating here? #23. Metro groups UI specific. Metro sucks. Therefore MetroGroups sucks. #24. Kinect for Windows This is actually useful and a Good Thing (TM) #25. AppLocker Listed, but article does not describe what it is, something to do with policies, therefore it is meaningless to the end user. This is a stretch, especially in an article targeted toward end users. #26. Reset PC dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda ; walk away, get lunch. #27. File copy revamp A user interface deal that does nothing about the suck-ass throughput when copying non-trivial amounts of files, like moving movie archives from one drive to another. #28. Faster boot times Yeah, well, this will be nuked by the user as soon as he or she installs $BONZIBUDDYCLONEOFTHEDAY from the app store. Purple gorillas for everyone! #29. Native USB 3 support In modern operating systems, this is pushed out with a kernel module update on existing systems. No idea why you would need an entire OS upgrade just for usb3. #30. Panoramic background images Oh my fucking god, we need this. We need this so much. TAKE MY MONEY ALL OF IT
Except that the guy was curious and actually had nothing to hide in his car. So why not let the police officer search the car an in return ask him to show you the device that spots you to satiate your curiosity?
If you are old enough to get a cardiac stress test with gamma emitters, you are old enough to have a teenager.
Your teenager may have left his baggie in your car by accident. It happens.
I've addressed your other points in other messages
But I don't think it will get that popular and neither do you (as far as I can tell). If it really were just a scam, the time to cash in has passed,
I don't think so. You need the market to have some buffer before you start dumping all your bitcoins if you are a hoarder. You will simply drive the price into the basement and get only pennies a piece.
The volume is not that big, relatively and it is fragile.
The scam is that the early adopters are counting on popularity to increase the value of their holdings. It did not cost them much to create the bitcoins. Pennies, if that, each. If bitcoins become popular, they make out like bandits. If bitcoins do not, they have not lost anything, really. It's all upside for the hoarders. Really, there is no way they can lose any money in this unless the price really does go to 0, and they will not have lost any real money at that.
And by "making out like bandits" I mean rich like Sultan of Brunei rich, and the hoarders are true believers, so I don't expect any of the hoarders to be dumping their bitcoins any time soon, even at $20.
It is a pump-and-dump as you said, but it is a long pump for the hoarders.
My point was that there aren't any legitimate services being offered. Thus, it really doesn't matter how many times you jumble around the bitcoins, they never get clean.
But money laundering does not have to be successful to be money laundering. It merely has to be the exchange of property/money with the *intent* to obfuscate the source of the money. And it only needs to be *one* transaction to be money laundering.
I'll repeat that: It does not have to be successful to be money laundering.
That is how the law is written.
I don't know what else to tell you.
(which I interpret to mean "pump and dump"), and money laundering. Even though these things are possible,
They are not only possible, but matters of fact that even people like Jared Polis know about. He's a pretty net-savvy guy if you ask me.
Money laundering means taking money earned from illegal activities, using it in a legal activity that makes it hard to figure out where it came from, and then receiving a portion of it back again
...
What would make it difficult is if there was a legitimate, legal service being run in the middle. Then the bitcoins going out the end could be ordinary people. But there is no such service as you point out. Virtually all the money being used in Bitcoin is for illegal activity.
In the US, it doesn't have to be a legal activity. Any transaction designed to conceal the source of cash from an illegal activity is per-se money laundering. Merely transferring a bag of cash from one car to another and driving away constitutes a transaction.
The act of cash -> bitcoin -> cash is not illegal in itself. I illustrated this with gold in a previous message with a real world example. However, attaching this to the exchange for drugs or other contraband, the feds can, and will, nail people eventually for money laundering for this. Because that is the definition in the law itself.
In especially sticky situations, where specific coins could lead to dangerous assumptions, there are Bitcoin laundry services (or âoetumblersâ). The concept is pretty straight-forward, coins sent through the tumbler are exchanged for different coins and sent on to another address of the senderâ(TM)s choice, minus a small percentage as a fee. This is unlike money laundering in the fact that it doesnâ(TM)t serve to aid in reintegration of illicit funds into a legitimate system but it does make the transaction almost impossible to track.
The lie here is that it is not money laundering because it's a transaction with bitcoins and not cash. The other lie is that you need conversion to cash for it to be money laundering. The law itself does not specify cash as the instrument. It specifies "property" and is inclusive of cash. Bitcoins are property. It's funny how the article actually comes out and says "laundry" and then denies what it is. Under US law, any transaction involving "specified unlawful activities" (drugs, etc) with the intent to disguise the source of money is, per-se money laundering. There is no lower limit. The definition is broad. You're screwed if they tie your transactions to illegal activity and a method of obfuscating it by a single transaction. There is no getting around this.
More than you ever wanted to know about money laundering, which includes the law itself and commentary on the law and current use.
If the brokers/exchanges "knew or should have known" by the standard of the "reasonable person" that Bitcoin is being used explicitly for illegal activity, then whoever runs a brokerage/exchange is probably in trouble for RICO and/or money laundering too. The "intent" part of the law probably covers their asses for now, but it's a pretty thin cover. They should pray every day that more people use bitcoins for legitimate uses. Unfortunately that does not seem to be happening.
There are many stocks which are almost certainly going to be worth more tomorrow than they are today, yet they are still being traded by thousands of investors. Are they all 'crazy'
There are people who gamble with stocks, then there are people who take long positions, and those that take shorts.
Taking a long position on something that you have spent pennies on to create that sell for 20 dollars each, is not crazy. If you believe that whole bitcoins are going to go above 100 dollars within the next 10 years, selling them would be crazy.
As constructed, bitcoins are wildly deflationary. If they get as popular as a small country's monetary system, the hoarders make out like bandits.
The same could be said of converting a bank balance to cash.
No. You're assuming that bitcoin is the same as a bank account. It's not. There is no converting either. It's dollars in/dollars out. You are deliberately stretching what I say into nonsense.
Your implication that using Bitcoin = jail
No. My implication is the anonymizing of the cash stream through bitcoin conversions *is* money laundering. You have to show intent that the money was for illegal goods/services. If it can be demonstrated that you did indeed purchase goods/services through bitcoin, you can be put in the can for money laundering.
Now you can ask, why aren't the principals of bitcoin in jail then? Because they never said or intended bitcoin to be a money laundering operation - the intent was to always be legal. Most crimes require mens rea to be classified as actual crimes. Money laundering is one of them.
makes me wonder what your concern is against people being able to spend their money as they wish.
This is just retarded and paranoiac ranting and assuming bad faith on my part.
The conversation was civil until this part. Now i'm going to call you a retard.
Because bitcoins, by their virtue of being limited at a hard number, are deflationary. You are crazy to spend a currency that, over time, chases more goods as economies expand.
So you hoard, gambling that the future is going to give you a bounty.
This is why the first bitcoins are being hoarded. They were easy to generate in large quantities by the early adopters. Why spend them when they didn't cost much to generate and further suckers down the road will exchange them for ever increasing amounts of cash/goods/services, at least in theory?
law enforcement haven't been bothered to really follow up on it. I suspect that will change someday.
Just because the feds have not gotten 'round to actually arresting people yet does not make the acts themselves legal.
Only stupid people would use this for money laundering. Using it for large scale illegal transactions would pretty much be like having a neon sign over your head saying, "Arrest Me"!"
They are using the relative obscurity of bitcoin.
Also: the prisons are not exactly filled with geniuses.
It still doesn't make using bitcoin to buy/sell/trade contraband any less money laundering.
>your cheerleading for bitcoin
Bitcoin is useless for buying actual, legitimate, goods and services. Whatever its price is in the exchanges is purely fantasy, as they are traded in the vacuum of the brokerages without much contact with the outside world.
There was a jeweller in town who is in prison for the rest of his life and a few hundred years after that because he did conversion of cash to gold and back to cash for the mob.
Exchanging cash for gold is not illegal Exchanging gold for cash is not illegal Exchanging cash -> gold -> cash in order to help someone hide where his cash came from is so illegal it is more illegal than most crimes of violence and more illegal than the original crimes of drug dealing, numbers running, bookmaking, etc.
When you convert dollars to bitcoins, buy drugs with bitcoins on SilkRoad, and then those bitcoins are converted back to cash by your dealer, that is money laundering.
>dirty money >black box (bitcoin) >"clean" money out
Any time you obfuscate the source of money in a transaction to hide illegality or "synthesize" transactions after the fact to hide illegality, that is money laundering. You may argue about the finer points, but that is the overall definition and rule of thumb.
And the penalties for money laundering, if caught, are steep, especially these days with "truth in sentencing" legislation requiring you to serve 85 percent of a federal sentence at a minimum.
"an FBI document (PDF) about Bitcoin found it way onto the internet. It seems they're worried about the virtual currency's potential use in criminal activities."
During the televised SOPA hearings with the House Judiciary Committee, Jared Polis - after introducing the song "The Internet is for Porn" into the Congressional Record - waxed poetic on the underground economy, Bitcoin, drugs, TOR and Silk Road.
Those watching on/g/ were aghast. "OH GOD HE KNOWS!" was the reaction.
Yes, folks, they've known for a while.
Bitcoin, when it's not a scam, is a method of money laundering.
But will whatever is output make any sense and be verifiable?
To quote thusly:
How can the purple yeti be so red, Or chestnuts, like a widgeon, calmly groan? No sheep is quite as crooked as a bed, Though chickens ever try to hide a bone. I grieve that greasy turnips slowly march: Indeed, inflated is the icy pig: For as the alligator strikes the larch, So sighs the grazing goldfish for a wig. Oh, has the pilchard argued with a top? Say never that the parsnip is too weird! I tell thee that a wolf-man will not hop And no man ever praised the convex beard. Effulgent is the day when bishops turn: So let not then the doctor wake the urn!
>Did anyone complain? There's justified returns and there's bullshit returns.
It was a "valid return" because the customer didn't like the finish. No, nobody liked the fact that it was a return and we thought the customer was an ass. But we accepted the return. Note that we "made it right" for the customer by bead blasting the gears. So it counted as a return with regards to the quality program.
Live and learn with that particular customer. From then on, all gears were bead blasted.
It's called being an adult about things when it comes to manufacturing.
Typically apprentices are mentally separate, along with organizationally separate. When Scott came up to me to give me the cash, I said "I didn't expect this" and he said "You were here for the period. Everyone contributed."
Slashdot Mirror
Like the other guy said, there are only 3 Star Wars movies.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CfBhi6qqFLA
"Why are you doing this to us!??!!?"
"Fifty nine minutes!!!"
--
BMO
Separate partition for /home/ and it doesn't matter what happens to the OS.
I have a copypasta for Windows users for when they get hosed, and part of the copypasta is "give windows and software 50GB in a system partition and use the rest of the drive for user data and configure your users to use the user partition, so you can wipe the system partition at any time and not touch the user data."
I consider this standard practice, at a minimum.
On Linux I also recommend /usr/local having its own partition for all your custom software so it can survive upgrades.
And people look at me as if I have an extra head growing out of my neck like Mrs. Grales/Rachel.
--
BMO
Thank you for your enumeration. I will respond to these one by each.
#1. Interactive tiles
"The Metro start screen may not be everyone's cup of tea," Well, that's putting it very mildly.
Metro specific. Start screen specific. Who cares. Just get that start screen out of my way, plox.
#2. Task Manager
Improved. Decent. One of the nicest task managers I've used. Now if only someone could port htop to Windows.
#3. Run ISOs and VHDs natively
About friggin' time. Linux has been doing this since forever ago. But you won't be able to play DVDs out of the box. Noooo.... You need to buy the Plus Pack for that. It's as if it's really 1998.
#4. No new hardware requirements
Well, considering the bloat going from XP to Vista/7 one would hope not. It's still too big for virtualizing.
#5. Airplane mode
Woopdedoo. Here is my airplane mode: Put on headphones. Listen to music. Sleep. Ignore person in seat next to me as much as possible.
#6. SkyDrive integration
This should be expected. SkyDrive doesn't suck.
#7. Windows Store
But forget about buying non-metro apps in it.
#8. Interactive lock screen
Tits on a bull useless. A lockscreen should show nothing but a prompt for a password and possibly the screensaver. It's a lockscreen for a reason.
#9. Split-screen apps
Don't we call these things windows? *looks* OH REALLY. IFRAMES ON THE DESKTOP. KILL IT WITH FIRE.
#10. Split touch keyboard - an on-screen keyboard that is divided up into left and right sides
Saying this to a touch-typist gets you nothing but ridicule.
#11. App contracts
KDE has had something like this since forever ago.
#12. Fewer surprise restarts
How about none? Please? The only surprise restart should be a STOP error, and at that point, it's a hardware/driver issue. All other restarts should be optional, like in sane operating systems.
#13. Cross-device synchronisation
Marketing fluff that means "rsync"
#14. Improved 3G support
But how does this help me as a desktop OS?
#15. Built-in antivirus
It would be nice to not need this, wouldn't it?
#16. Picture passwords
Only useful on touch devices.
#17. Instant search
Oh, you mean like what Linux has had since forever ago. Also, see Dolphin, Semantic Desktop etc.
#18. Windows To Go
Live distribution. "Innovation" as if Knoppix never existed.
#19. Secure Boot
Something that is designed to lock out other OSes from "windows certified" devices, enabled by default and unable to remove. Also: the army is always fighting the last war. Most malware runs in userspace now.
#20. Revamped Explorer
It still sucks.
#21. Restore PC
Only Windows users think it's normal to re-image the machine every quarter.
#22. Thumbnail previews of active applications
Woop, de, doo. old news, even on Windows. "But it's android style!!!!!" Wait, who is doing the innovating here?
#23. Metro groups
UI specific. Metro sucks. Therefore MetroGroups sucks.
#24. Kinect for Windows
This is actually useful and a Good Thing (TM)
#25. AppLocker
Listed, but article does not describe what it is, something to do with policies, therefore it is meaningless to the end user. This is a stretch, especially in an article targeted toward end users.
#26. Reset PC
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda ; walk away, get lunch.
#27. File copy revamp
A user interface deal that does nothing about the suck-ass throughput when copying non-trivial amounts of files, like moving movie archives from one drive to another.
#28. Faster boot times
Yeah, well, this will be nuked by the user as soon as he or she installs $BONZIBUDDYCLONEOFTHEDAY from the app store. Purple gorillas for everyone!
#29. Native USB 3 support
In modern operating systems, this is pushed out with a kernel module update on existing systems. No idea why you would need an entire OS upgrade just for usb3.
#30. Panoramic background images
Oh my fucking god, we need this. We need this so much. TAKE MY MONEY ALL OF IT
--
BMO
>If they don't have a metro kill switch on windows 8 laptops/desktops - their done.
There was one. It was removed.
HTH.
--
BMO
No, it's not elaborate. It's quite simple.
You, however, seem to be miffed at my conclusion. I've said what I want to say on the issue.
Deal with it.
--
BMO
It's a crime today.
And that's what counts.
As for your "is it a scam" question:
It's a pump-and-dump.
--
BMO
Except that the guy was curious and actually had nothing to hide in his car. So why not let the police officer search the car an in return ask him to show you the device that spots you to satiate your curiosity?
If you are old enough to get a cardiac stress test with gamma emitters, you are old enough to have a teenager.
Your teenager may have left his baggie in your car by accident. It happens.
--
BMO
I've addressed your other points in other messages
But I don't think it will get that popular and neither do you (as far as I can tell). If it really were just a scam, the time to cash in has passed,
I don't think so. You need the market to have some buffer before you start dumping all your bitcoins if you are a hoarder. You will simply drive the price into the basement and get only pennies a piece.
The volume is not that big, relatively and it is fragile.
The scam is that the early adopters are counting on popularity to increase the value of their holdings. It did not cost them much to create the bitcoins. Pennies, if that, each. If bitcoins become popular, they make out like bandits. If bitcoins do not, they have not lost anything, really. It's all upside for the hoarders. Really, there is no way they can lose any money in this unless the price really does go to 0, and they will not have lost any real money at that.
And by "making out like bandits" I mean rich like Sultan of Brunei rich, and the hoarders are true believers, so I don't expect any of the hoarders to be dumping their bitcoins any time soon, even at $20.
It is a pump-and-dump as you said, but it is a long pump for the hoarders.
--
BMO
I'm not sure how money laundering works, but I think it's a bit more complicated than that.
What the law says - any transaction with the intent to hide the source of money from a "specified unlawful activity" (SUA) is per-se money laundering.
It can be one transaction.
The laundering does not have to be successful.
There is no lower limit on how small the transaction can be.
--
BMO
My point was that there aren't any legitimate services being offered. Thus, it really doesn't matter how many times you jumble around the bitcoins, they never get clean.
But money laundering does not have to be successful to be money laundering. It merely has to be the exchange of property/money with the *intent* to obfuscate the source of the money. And it only needs to be *one* transaction to be money laundering.
I'll repeat that: It does not have to be successful to be money laundering.
That is how the law is written.
I don't know what else to tell you.
(which I interpret to mean "pump and dump"), and money laundering. Even though these things are possible,
They are not only possible, but matters of fact that even people like Jared Polis know about. He's a pretty net-savvy guy if you ask me.
--
BMO
Money laundering means taking money earned from illegal activities, using it in a legal activity that makes it hard to figure out where it came from, and then receiving a portion of it back again
What would make it difficult is if there was a legitimate, legal service being run in the middle. Then the bitcoins going out the end could be ordinary people. But there is no such service as you point out. Virtually all the money being used in Bitcoin is for illegal activity.
In the US, it doesn't have to be a legal activity. Any transaction designed to conceal the source of cash from an illegal activity is per-se money laundering. Merely transferring a bag of cash from one car to another and driving away constitutes a transaction.
The act of cash -> bitcoin -> cash is not illegal in itself. I illustrated this with gold in a previous message with a real world example. However, attaching this to the exchange for drugs or other contraband, the feds can, and will, nail people eventually for money laundering for this. Because that is the definition in the law itself.
To quote Bitcoin magazine for epic logic failure : http://bitcoinmagazine.net/some-measure-of-anonymity/
In especially sticky situations, where specific coins could lead to dangerous assumptions, there are Bitcoin laundry services (or âoetumblersâ). The concept is pretty straight-forward, coins sent through the tumbler are exchanged for different coins and sent on to another address of the senderâ(TM)s choice, minus a small percentage as a fee. This is unlike money laundering in the fact that it doesnâ(TM)t serve to aid in reintegration of illicit funds into a legitimate system but it does make the transaction almost impossible to track.
The lie here is that it is not money laundering because it's a transaction with bitcoins and not cash. The other lie is that you need conversion to cash for it to be money laundering. The law itself does not specify cash as the instrument. It specifies "property" and is inclusive of cash. Bitcoins are property. It's funny how the article actually comes out and says "laundry" and then denies what it is. Under US law, any transaction involving "specified unlawful activities" (drugs, etc) with the intent to disguise the source of money is, per-se money laundering. There is no lower limit. The definition is broad. You're screwed if they tie your transactions to illegal activity and a method of obfuscating it by a single transaction. There is no getting around this.
More than you ever wanted to know about money laundering, which includes the law itself and commentary on the law and current use.
http://www.justice.gov/usao/eousa/foia_reading_room/usab5505.pdf
As for the brokerages/exchanges:
If the brokers/exchanges "knew or should have known" by the standard of the "reasonable person" that Bitcoin is being used explicitly for illegal activity, then whoever runs a brokerage/exchange is probably in trouble for RICO and/or money laundering too. The "intent" part of the law probably covers their asses for now, but it's a pretty thin cover. They should pray every day that more people use bitcoins for legitimate uses. Unfortunately that does not seem to be happening.
--
BMO
There are many stocks which are almost certainly going to be worth more tomorrow than they are today, yet they are still being traded by thousands of investors. Are they all 'crazy'
There are people who gamble with stocks, then there are people who take long positions, and those that take shorts.
Taking a long position on something that you have spent pennies on to create that sell for 20 dollars each, is not crazy. If you believe that whole bitcoins are going to go above 100 dollars within the next 10 years, selling them would be crazy.
As constructed, bitcoins are wildly deflationary. If they get as popular as a small country's monetary system, the hoarders make out like bandits.
--
BMO
It is not classified as legal tender by the government but that doesn't mean it's illegal to use.
It was never stated that bitcoins, as such, are illegal. You can use anything for money. Bags of salt, etc.
You are not allowed, however, to do conversions and transactions to hide the money stream for illegal activities. That's money laundering.
You're dense.
--
BMO
The same could be said of converting a bank balance to cash.
No. You're assuming that bitcoin is the same as a bank account. It's not. There is no converting either. It's dollars in/dollars out. You are deliberately stretching what I say into nonsense.
Your implication that using Bitcoin = jail
No. My implication is the anonymizing of the cash stream through bitcoin conversions *is* money laundering. You have to show intent that the money was for illegal goods/services. If it can be demonstrated that you did indeed purchase goods/services through bitcoin, you can be put in the can for money laundering.
Now you can ask, why aren't the principals of bitcoin in jail then? Because they never said or intended bitcoin to be a money laundering operation - the intent was to always be legal. Most crimes require mens rea to be classified as actual crimes. Money laundering is one of them.
makes me wonder what your concern is against people being able to spend their money as they wish.
This is just retarded and paranoiac ranting and assuming bad faith on my part.
The conversation was civil until this part. Now i'm going to call you a retard.
--
BMO
I forgot to address this
>If that were true, why haven't they been spent?
Because bitcoins, by their virtue of being limited at a hard number, are deflationary. You are crazy to spend a currency that, over time, chases more goods as economies expand.
So you hoard, gambling that the future is going to give you a bounty.
This is why the first bitcoins are being hoarded. They were easy to generate in large quantities by the early adopters. Why spend them when they didn't cost much to generate and further suckers down the road will exchange them for ever increasing amounts of cash/goods/services, at least in theory?
--
BMO
law enforcement haven't been bothered to really follow up on it. I suspect that will change someday.
Just because the feds have not gotten 'round to actually arresting people yet does not make the acts themselves legal.
Only stupid people would use this for money laundering. Using it for large scale illegal transactions would pretty much be like having a neon sign over your head saying, "Arrest Me"!"
They are using the relative obscurity of bitcoin.
Also: the prisons are not exactly filled with geniuses.
It still doesn't make using bitcoin to buy/sell/trade contraband any less money laundering.
>your cheerleading for bitcoin
Bitcoin is useless for buying actual, legitimate, goods and services. Whatever its price is in the exchanges is purely fantasy, as they are traded in the vacuum of the brokerages without much contact with the outside world.
--
BMO
>Using money to buy illegal things is not laundering in itself.
It's the conversion that makes it money laundering. Conversion to bitcoin is "anonymizing" a money stream to hide the illegality of buying drugs, etc.
Whether you agree with this or not, this is how the feds are going to present it to a jury and that's how you will go to jail.
--
BMO
Indeed.
There was a jeweller in town who is in prison for the rest of his life and a few hundred years after that because he did conversion of cash to gold and back to cash for the mob.
Exchanging cash for gold is not illegal
Exchanging gold for cash is not illegal
Exchanging cash -> gold -> cash in order to help someone hide where his cash came from is so illegal it is more illegal than most crimes of violence and more illegal than the original crimes of drug dealing, numbers running, bookmaking, etc.
--
BMO
When you convert dollars to bitcoins, buy drugs with bitcoins on SilkRoad, and then those bitcoins are converted back to cash by your dealer, that is money laundering.
>dirty money
>black box (bitcoin)
>"clean" money out
Any time you obfuscate the source of money in a transaction to hide illegality or "synthesize" transactions after the fact to hide illegality, that is money laundering. You may argue about the finer points, but that is the overall definition and rule of thumb.
And the penalties for money laundering, if caught, are steep, especially these days with "truth in sentencing" legislation requiring you to serve 85 percent of a federal sentence at a minimum.
--
BMO
"an FBI document (PDF) about Bitcoin found it way onto the internet. It seems they're worried about the virtual currency's potential use in criminal activities."
During the televised SOPA hearings with the House Judiciary Committee, Jared Polis - after introducing the song "The Internet is for Porn" into the Congressional Record - waxed poetic on the underground economy, Bitcoin, drugs, TOR and Silk Road.
Those watching on /g/ were aghast. "OH GOD HE KNOWS!" was the reaction.
Yes, folks, they've known for a while.
Bitcoin, when it's not a scam, is a method of money laundering.
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BMO
It is 34 year old computer history.
You may want to check and see if your geek dues have been paid up.
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BMO
But will whatever is output make any sense and be verifiable?
To quote thusly:
How can the purple yeti be so red,
Or chestnuts, like a widgeon, calmly groan?
No sheep is quite as crooked as a bed,
Though chickens ever try to hide a bone.
I grieve that greasy turnips slowly march:
Indeed, inflated is the icy pig:
For as the alligator strikes the larch,
So sighs the grazing goldfish for a wig.
Oh, has the pilchard argued with a top?
Say never that the parsnip is too weird!
I tell thee that a wolf-man will not hop
And no man ever praised the convex beard.
Effulgent is the day when bishops turn:
So let not then the doctor wake the urn!
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BMO
>Did anyone complain? There's justified returns and there's bullshit returns.
It was a "valid return" because the customer didn't like the finish. No, nobody liked the fact that it was a return and we thought the customer was an ass. But we accepted the return. Note that we "made it right" for the customer by bead blasting the gears. So it counted as a return with regards to the quality program.
Live and learn with that particular customer. From then on, all gears were bead blasted.
It's called being an adult about things when it comes to manufacturing.
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BMO
I'm not going to get into an argument about minutia with you.
Because you fail to see the forest for the trees.
I'm done here. Fox lies. Period. If you don't like my opinion, deal with it.
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BMO
This.
Typically apprentices are mentally separate, along with organizationally separate. When Scott came up to me to give me the cash, I said "I didn't expect this" and he said "You were here for the period. Everyone contributed."
That was one of the many lessons he taught me.
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BMO