Bitcoin Used For the Narcotics Trade 535
An anonymous reader writes "A story on Aljazeera tells how bitcoin is being used to pay for cocaine, marijuana and other drugs at various eBay style drug websites. From the article: 'Two US senators are asking federal authorities to crack down on an online narcotics market that accepts "virtual" currency. The "Dark Web," an anonymous and secretive online community that trades in heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines among other drugs, has been operating unhindered for months.' Who said bitcoin is not used in the real world?"
It's not just Bitcoin. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It's not just Bitcoin. (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of these alternative-currencies (Bitcoin, e-gold, etc) find themselves on the shady side of things pretty quickly - especially money-laundering and the like. This is not at all surprising, really.
It's going to be that way until we finally repeal the idiotic War on Drugs and admit that in a so-called "free country" it is wrong to ever tell consenting adults what they may do with their own bodies in their own homes. War on Drugs is a total failure anyway. Anybody who wants drugs can get them. It has done nothing to stop them.
Re:It's not just Bitcoin. (Score:4, Informative)
Amen, brother. If you're serious about wanting liberty in your lifetime, check my
Re:It's not just Bitcoin. (Score:4, Informative)
And the solution to that is to fight an unwinnable war that increases violence all over, drives the profit of making drugs higher, and spends billions of our tax dollars to make shit worse for us?
Why don't we treat drugs like the public health problem they are, rather than something to be "fought"? You can't protect everyone from themselves, but you can help them help themselves. And you'd have a lot fewer women and children beheaded [cnsnews.com] because of attitudes like yours.
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Re:It's not just Bitcoin. (Score:5, Informative)
Drug usage dropped here in Portugal when it was decriminalized.
Re:It's not just Bitcoin. (Score:5, Insightful)
"People are bad enough with alcohol and cigarettes. I'd hate to see what happened if you let people have unrestricted access to harder drugs. Most people can barely look after themselves as it is, let alone the children that those type of people tend to churn out, Idiocracy style."
Except that it doesn't happen that way. Places that have decriminalized some drugs (like the Netherlands) and even all drugs (Portugal et al.) have experienced NO significant rise in drug use! Further, there are a lot of societal benefits: lower crime rate, dramatically lowered costs for courts and incarceration, no need for as many police, etc.
Your comment reminds me of an elderly woman I know. She plays Bingo with friends regularly. She tells me that whenever she talks about decriminalization, she gets shocked reactions from all the other old ladies. Once, one of her friends said, "But if drugs are legal, everybody will start taking drugs!"
She looked at her friend calmly, and said "Really? Which ones would YOU take?"
Shut her right up.
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You know, I was reading a news story about a "dry" county here in the US. Possession of alcohol was illegal.
There were locals who were very insistent that alcohol would cause civilization to collapse. Worse yet, they were discussing plans Walmart had to open up a store there. It was to have a full grocery store and pharmacy. They were predicting that people would go into the store, buy prescription drugs and alcohol, and go back to the parking lot to consume both. Moments
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My brother-in-law was 16 when he was murdered by an acquaintance who was high on drugs at the time.
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And my grandfather smoked 40 a day and lived till he was 97. That doesn't mean smoking's good for you.
Whilst I have every sympathy with your situation, there are exceptions to every rule and quoting one case as evidence against a general theory serves nobody well.
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"Even with the alcohol and prescription drugs being legal, we still have a large number of so-called consenting adults not hurting anybody but themselves actively hurting everyone and themselves."
FTFY
Re:It's not just Bitcoin. (Score:5, Interesting)
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I don't. Just look at Alcohol (which is a drug don't forget). Leads to violence, money issues, domestic disputes, etc.
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But are there more messed up families due to drugs than there are due to drug prohibition? I doubt it.
But why do you doubt it?
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Because most of the negative effects of drugs are directly caused by prohibition. It's entirely possible for an opiate addict to hold down a job and raise a family. This is a proven result from heroin maintenance programs. The problem comes when addicts are stigmatized, and prices are artificially inflated. Then they can't get a job, and can't afford their fix, so they turn to petty crime. Entirely due to prohibition.
Similarly, it's easy to smoke a lot of pot in college and still do well. Happens all t
Re:It's not just Bitcoin. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure you would, but at least if drugs weren't illegal, we could save the billions and billions spent on prisons, and enforcement and redirect some of it to helping those who do want help (and wouldn't be as fearful of coming out of the shadows for help), and also go towards paying off the US debt....not to mention, if you take that much profit out of criminal hands, violence should decrease accordingly.
Re:It's not just Bitcoin. (Score:5, Insightful)
Drug use is a family problem. Making it a criminal/family problem only makes it worse for everyone involved and does nothing to address the core problem.
Being pro-war on drugs is to be pro slavery, sex trade, murder, empowerment of the biggest pieces of shit the world can create, and actively encourages the militarization of our police forces. Absolutely nothing good comes from the war on drugs aside from eroding constitutional rights, wasting billions annually, discarding billions in taxable revenue, and training police to be as big, if not bigger thugs, than the thugs they are supposedly fighting.
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"So we should imprison people for falling victim to basic human flaws?"
Get real. Just about every crime in the book is a variant of some basic human flaw. Greed, anger, jealousy, neglect, and even plain laziness are all outlawed in one form or another. Everything form killing someone in anger, to being too lazy to put on a seat belt, are all outlawed. Those are all social issues too, should we decriminalize them as well?
Look at it a different way. Some drugs are outlawed for very good reason, such as c
Re:It's not just Bitcoin. (Score:5, Insightful)
Percentage of State and Federal prison inmates who reported being under the influence of drugs at time of their offense, 1997
Not sure what you're saying here - looks to me like the majority of people said they weren't on drugs.
The logical conclusion to this data is that not being on drugs should be outlawed, no?
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Careful! You may give some conservative blogger evidence that the war on drugs is actually working. You just admitted that the over whelming majority of people who have a tendency to commit crime were not using illegal drugs at the time. Also since the cause for the majority of incarcerations aren't drug related then the war of drugs isn't placing an undue burden on our prison system.
DISCLAIMER: For the humorless - this was a joke. I am not a blogger (well not at this very moment) and the conservatives won
Re:It's not just Bitcoin. (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile, entire populations of foreign countries are buried in mass graves, if they're lucky, dissolved in a barrel if they're not.
A factory I work with has a customer in Monterrey, Mexico. They had advised the factory's sales director not to visit the city because the violent crime rate is so out of control. For all intents and purposes, Monterrey is a developed city, and it has gone backward very rapidly largely due to the funds and weapons flowing from the U.S. government. The nation is at war with itself and we feed the fire with our abolitionist laws.
Certainly the death of your brother-in-law is a tragedy in itself, but the fact that it occurred supports the argument that the drug laws don't work. It always has been and still is easier for young people to get illegal drugs than legal ones.
But on the flip side, what about the Iraq veteran who was recently killed by a swat team [lewrockwell.com] who thought he was a drug dealer, when in fact he was a working class husband trying to survive? That family is devastated and the kid is going to suffer terribly for the rest of his life. Without a doubt this is a family that would still be together, the father alive, the kid some semblance of normal, if we did not have a 'war on drugs'.
I know we want to believe that passing a law solves a problem, but in this case the drug laws create far more problems than they solve. The violence worldwide, the violence at home. I have a friend who went through college with a guy who ended up becoming a public defender. He tells these terrible stories of people hopelessly addicted to meth (he's in a rural area), with terrible health, no teeth; visibly, clearly in a state of helplessness, sentenced to 1 year or more for possession of a drug. This is solving problems? Making people's lives better? Improving our society? Even Pat Roberston is beginning to see the failure of these policies. Surely you can, too?
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Bullshit. So you're advocating that victims should remain silent?
First of all the parent post asked "Have you ever seen a dude high on on some drug fighting? NO! they're all like peace bro!"
So I answered yes by using my brother-in-law as an example. It's not like I mentioned his name or started a PSA featuring his image. People who use that bullshit argument are upset that they can't counter a real li
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Is "emotionally compromised" a derogatory term for having a life experience that makes it harder for you to convince me to agree with you?
Other than my post what evidence do you have to back up your claim?
Let's assume you supported the legalization of all drugs. Did I mention a position for or against the legalization of drugs? No.
I think it's ridiculous that people are quick to condemn me for answering the grandparent's question, yet take the premise that the use of drugs would miraculously keep people
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Bullshit. I don't know what he smoked, and I'm awfully sorry for your loss, assuming you aren't a troll, which you probably are. But nevertheless it serves as a good opportunity to remind everybody that overdosing on THC via smoking is basically impossible.
"One estimate of THC's LD50 for humans indicates that about 1,500 pounds (680 kg) of cannabis would have to be smoked within 14 minutes." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrahydrocannabinol#Toxicity [wikipedia.org]
That must have been one hell of a "pack of marijuana ci
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It's not about the users. The users typically become addicted to whatever substance they are using. It's those that control the supply, they control the users. In other words, it's power. No matter what side you look at..
It boils down to power and who is going to wield that power. You find a way to decouple power from narcotics and then you can have a free society in which people make their own choice. In any other situation the lever of addiction will be pulled to the greatest effect to line the pock
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Since when was PHP a drug? I know it should be restricted and all, but I don't think it fits!
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That's not the point. You're comparing apples and oranges here. The point is that the "war on drugs" has cost a lot to society while failing to decrease (for example) heroin usage. Attempts at banning alcohol are usually unsuccessful and short-lived too. Banning cigarettes is probably impossible - that's because, to go back to your flawed comparison, nicotine is massively harmless compared to heroin, and people know that so m
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BAH! Who needs bitcoin when the regular banks got your back [bloomberg.com]?
The entire market in contraband is too big to punish without trashing the economy even more... They don't want to stop drugs, they want to control them... It's the controlled substances act
Re:It's not just Bitcoin. (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, because its the currencies' issue. Its not like I've ever bought bags upon bags of pot with dollars and euros.
What would be surprising would be currency that wasn't ever used for illicit things. It doesn't and will never exist. Especially with conservative philosophies that don't let us decrim or legalize mostly safe things like pot or ecstasy.
Open your eyes, all these guys are doing is playing up "War on Drugs" bullshit so they can get larger budgets next year so that a SWAT team can no-knock your home and shoot you when you try to defend yourself thinking you're being robbed.
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Nobody's saying it's the currency's fault. Its just that such a setup as Bitcoin has is quite attractive to those who would like a little more discretion in their spending habits. Bitcoin provides that. So it's no surprise that it would be a target for money laundering and illicit sales.
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Re:It's not just Bitcoin. (Score:4, Insightful)
MDMA is safer than most forms of entertainment. You are much more likely to die in the car on the way to a rave than dying from MDMA at the rave.
Also, "weeds" aren't necessarily safer than "research chemicals". Jimson weed, for instance is far more dangerous than that unapproved synthetic (but totally non-toxic) research chemical LSD.
I don't usually complain about moderation, but the above post needs to be modded down.
Re:It's not just Bitcoin. (Score:4, Insightful)
How does this work? Bitcoin is anonymous right until you receive the contraband. If you're making anonymous drug trades with someone on the internet, there's even less guarantee that they're not a cop than if you're working with someone you know. If you have to receive the drugs in person, the extra anonymity doesn't help you.
And at this point, why are drug dealers the first to get on board with Bitcoin? Bitcoins are only valuable if you can trade them for something useful. If you can buy drugs with Bitcoins, that makes them valuable to the cusomer. But what will the drug dealer do with the Bitcoins?
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Exchanges like Mt. Gox will trade dollars for bitcoins and vice versa.
There was an article recently on a popular drug-purchasing website that is hosted as a Tor service and uses bitcoins. The drugs are sent to you in the mail. This of course gives you no anonymity at all. Only the money and the website are anonymous.
Re:It's not just Bitcoin. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's not just Bitcoin. (Score:4, Funny)
Great, now we have to ban baseball cards to protect our kids!
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They'll trade the bitcoin for actual currency.
I object to your use of the word 'actual' here. Perhaps you might use 'a more commonly traded' instead. Bitcoin is as 'actual' as any other currency.
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Try taking $10,000+ US cash out of your account without the bank having to fill out FBI forms.
Try sending $10,000+ US worth of Bitcoins to Eastern Europe.
Just like cash, but much easier.
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Ehm, I don't think you can put e-gold, a gold-bullion backed currency (that was used for money laundering) together with bitcoin.
And we've had enough bitcoin articles. Ok, I know the people who started bitcoin do everything they can to give it value and become rich, but enough with the slashvertisement!
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this is hilarious (Score:2)
alternative currencies find themselves doing illegal stuff?
what do you suppose real currencies do? the exact same thing.
This just in: it's actually harder to track with USD than it is via bitcoins.
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Poker chips? Dirty laundry? TELL ME!
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The also used cash to do this for many years (Score:2, Interesting)
Your government is responsible for aiding this trade!
I think we are going to see a lot of anti bitcoin smokescreen stories pushed down the pipe line at us. Until they tax bitcoin. Then you'll see "Baby heart transplant paid for with bitcoin" stories in the news.
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The lack of tracability probably makes bitcoin more apt for this task, which I think is the real story.
Overall, bitcoin has that same "cool concept used by too many of the wrong people" feeling as freenet.
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small non-sequential unmarked bills are equally untraceable, possibly more so if the bitcoin user neglected actively trying for anonymity.
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and BitTorrent.
Great. (Score:5, Funny)
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I, for one, do not want to have to explain to some thugtastic DEA jackboots that "hash-based currency" can be acquired by legitimately doing a bunch of math, as well as by other means...
Bitcoins are made of weed? Does the President know about this yet?
Huh. (Score:2)
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Who the hell pays for porn?
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Enough people that they keep making it.
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Ads pay for porn as well.
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There are a lot of people out there....either stupid or uneductated about things enough to have no clue you can find pr0n for free.
For a fun experiment, I've been thinking of doing some kind of USENET scraping...to gather some porn for free....set up a web server and charge suckers for it, just to see how many try to pay me for free porn I get.
I have to guess I'd get a decent amount of money....just got to target the code to be careful to NOT get anything illegal out there and
Problem will solve itself (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, at what point did it become a good idea to buy illegal drugs over the Internet? What exactly do you plan on doing when your 10k in Cocaine doesn't show up at your doorstep?
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It's ok, it says right on the item page that they definitely aren't cops and they only need your address for delivery purposes.
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Finally! A privacy policy you can believe in...
Re:Problem will solve itself (Score:4, Insightful)
I believe the idea with Silk Road and similar sites is that they are reputation-based. So apart from just making sure that you and the seller are in the same country you can also check his/her reputation, someone with a very good or perfect reputation is unlikely to screw you over.
Also, from what I've seen from checking out Silk Road it appears to be mostly smaller amounts of drugs being sold, 5-10 grams of marijuana, a handful of MDMA pills and similar quantities. So not exactly $10k worth of cocaine. Besides, most sellers are doing this to make money and if they want to stay in business they are likely to want to keep their good reputation (there's always the risk of someone deciding to abuse their reputation to scam people out of larger amounts of bitcoins or the police creating a bunch of fake accounts but overall the risk should be fairly low if you buy from sellers with a solid reputation, sort of how the drug trade works in real life only you don't have to come face to face with the dealer)...
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Agreeing to buy and actually making the transaction are different things. People have been buying over the internet since the 90's. AOL chat was a prime place to ask "poke smot?" then escalate.
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Someone is missing out on a good opportunity. [facebook.com]
I actually read it as smoke pot the first time too.
Hash Based (Score:5, Funny)
Nothing like using a hash to score some hash.
What country? (Score:2)
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Are these web sites and deals happening inside the US? If not what are US Senators going to do about it?
I'd imagine mandatory filtering of Bitcoin traffic by ISPs will be suggested, at some point. Inevitably we'll end up with the Great Firewall of USA; fortunately Cisco and friends have plenty of experience implementing that sort of thing already.
False Flag. (Score:2)
Welcome to the first sign that the Wunch of Bankers that lord it over us have spotted a threat..
Bitcoin features (Score:4, Insightful)
Bitcoin has the feature, that it can't be inflated (claimed by their proponents). However, that's very good reason, why government might want to outlaw it: you're avoiding a tax, the "inflation tax".
They just need some stories about some drug dealers, pedophiles, terrorists who use Bitcoin, and it will be pretty easy to crack it down.
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>Bitcoin has the feature, that it can't be inflated (claimed by their proponents).
More than that. If buttcoin actually becomes an actual alternative to paper currency, it has built-in hyperdeflation.
There are 21 million buttcoins (roughly) to be mined, and that's it. Over time you have fewer buttcoins (because they can be destroyed) chasing after more goods (because of economic growth).
This means that any leveraged purchases are a fools' errand - capital machinery, durable goods, houses, bought on cred
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> This means that any leveraged purchases are a fools' errand - capital machinery, durable goods, houses, bought on credit, are the worst deals in the world because you pay with money that is worth more over time. Deflation serves only the hoarders and creates a braking effect on an economy.
Yeah, this is exactly why Apple (or any other computer makes) has not sold a single computer in the 30 years it's been in business. People aren't stupid and realize if they bought a computer today, they'd be wasting a
Re:Bitcoin features (Score:5, Insightful)
>Deflation serves only the hoarders and creates a braking effect on an economy, because why spend money today when it will be worth more tomorrow?
BS. Deflation serves almost everyone. Deflation is the natural effect of technological progress and capital accumulation. Why spend money today? Because you want stuff. Take an industry with major deflation you may have knowledge of - computers. I see no one spends money today on a computer because they will be able to get a better one tomorrow - right. Fear of deflation and adoration of inflation are just nonsense promoted by the state and the status quo because it benefits *them*.
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Re:Bitcoin features (Score:4)
And that's one of the reasons we've moved from a hard currency economy to a fiat one - because hard currency economies are highly limited and difficult to grow. And hard currency economies aren't, contrary to popular belief, any more stable than fiat currency economies. When you literally cannot physically (or virtually in the case of Bitcoins) obtain the currency you need to make purchases or pay debts - the whole economy comes to a screeching halt.
Re:Bitcoin features (Score:4, Insightful)
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Right - being infinitely sub-divideable means you have an endless supply of them on demand. Oh, wait. It doesn't.
Um, no. You can only get bitcoins if someone is willing to give you bitcoins (as charity, or in exhange for goods or services). But, the problem is, like other hard currencies, their built in deflation means their is an incentive to hoard and a disincent
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No, I'm correct - you're just utterly clueless.
Crashes of exactly the kind I described have happened multiple times throughout history. The US, with it's rapidly growing economy, was hit by them several times in the 19th century - despite multiple gold rushes and expanding gold mining activities.
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Deflation serves only the hoarders and creates a braking effect on an economy, because why spend money today when it will be worth more tomorrow?
so what we have instead is economy greased with purchasing power stolen from savers and people on discretionary income, got it.
In theory it's a nice idea to have money pool and economy going hand in hand but in reality governments have every incentive to underestimate the inflation rate. That way they can tax people in almost unnoticed way for additional percent or two, borrow more to bribe voters with 'freebies' and repay less in terms of real purchasing power down the road. I don't trust politicians and c
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Inflation at a controlled rate is good for the economy. Deflation, which is what bitcoins are designed from the ground up to produce, is much more dangerous. In a deflationary system, your money is worth more tomorrow than it is today. Why bother investing that money in anything when the money will be worth more tomorrow than it is today? And if the bitcoin economy is increasing fast enough, you'll reach a point where there is no conceivable investment that is better than just stashing bitcoins in a saf
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I really hate to defend Bitcoin, but ...
Don't worry, this doesn't count as defending bitcoins.
How would you able to give more in loans, than what you've collected in debit accounts?
Oh, you can't. Well, you could, if people accepted promissory notes from your bank as acceptable payment. But let's assume they don't do that.
This is a ten-second lesson on how banks increase the money supply:
Alice deposits 100 bitcoins in the Bank. Alice has a 100-bc deposit receipt. The Bank has a 100 bc and a 100-bc liability to Alice.
Charlie loans 100 bitcoins from the Bank. Charlie has 100 bc and Alice has a 100-bc deposit receipt. The Bank has 0 bc
Strangely worded (Score:3)
Next story (Score:4, Insightful)
Dealers sell drugs to users using local currency, Senators pass a law to outlaw the $100 bill.
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Yes, the government has already required banks to report any cash transactions using a lot of 100 bills or transactions over I think it was $3000 that are unusual for a client to the government. I think the penalty was $250k for each unreported incident and they nailed one East Coast back as an example. I was working for a bank and had to write the reporting code when that first happened. That was about 8 or so years ago if I remember. So they have not outlawed the $100 bill but recognized its important ro
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Why use $100s?
Switch to $50s or $20s, or even better 500 Euro bills.
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Dealers sell drugs to users using local currency, Senators pass a law to outlaw the $100 bill.
€500 notes withdrawn over organised crime fears [telegraph.co.uk]
The Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), which coordinated the voluntary industry move, said there is ''no credible legitimate use'' for the note in Britain.
Presumably this just means the criminals will go to Ireland or some other Eurozone country, where there are legitimate uses for a €500 note. If you can smuggle that quantity of cash into the UK it won't be difficult to take it to France or Ireland -- there are no customs checks, just security (explosive/etc) checks if relevant to the means of transport (i.e. take the ferry, or your own plane/yacht).
(€500 = US$730)
Oh great (Score:2)
This is an ad (Score:3)
Again.
Remember when we had the "mistaken pot busts" Bitcoin story where the first five paragraphs were just about Bitcoin, and the pot bust was not only buried in the article but attributed to an IRC chat?
This one is slightly better in that it's not mainly about Bitcoin, but it's obvious that Slashdot is being pumped full of Bitcoin articles by Bitcoin promoters.
Re:This is an ad (Score:4, Insightful)
it's obvious that Slashdot is being pumped full of Bitcoin articles by Bitcoin promoters.
Well, duh. Slashdot is also pumped full of Linux articles by Linux fans, pumped full of video game articles by video game fans, and pumped full of science articles by science fans. News for Nerds, remember? Nerds are interested in BitCoin, because it's an interesting bit of software.
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You think this is a promotion? I guess among drug users, but I don't think that's the majority of Slashdotters. Maybe I'm wrong about that of course. I just see this as an "oh great, the US government is going to crack down on bitcoin" story.
Another Bitcoin crap story (Score:3, Insightful)
Last week it was about an imaginary bust of a Bitcoiner "miner" who may be using too much electricity, making law enforcement potentially believe that it was a grow-op.
Today is a story about virtual currency that is barely used anywhere to be used on online drug trading. Not Bitcoin specifically. Paypal most likely ...
Honestly. Having a video "story" is bad enough. Having the story linked to Bitcoin on a vague premise is pretty bad.
Let's create a Bitcoin /. filter, so I can exlude these stories from my profile. Not sure how this relates to "Privacy". I'm thinking that there is a group of Bitcoin proponents working hard to get any publicity.
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It relates to Privacy because one of the main "selling" points of Bitcoin is anonymity.
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It relates to Privacy because one of the main "selling" points of Bitcoin is anonymity.
Yes, this has as much to do with Privacy as me taking off my license plates off my car so that I don't have to pay the tolls. Pardon the car analogy ...
They could have put on the Borg Gates icon on there since perhaps the Bitcoin software was running off a Windows computer?
Slashdot as arbitrage tool (Score:2, Informative)
https://mtgox.com/trade/history [mtgox.com] (click "all time")
In two months, the value per Bitcoin has increased from .5 USD to 20 USD, a 40 fold increase. Slashdot is being flooded by bitcoin speculators to increase prices. People are paying $20 for something worth 50 cents for no good reason. The price will collapse to less than $1 in the near future. People are throwing money away.
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Nonsense. (Score:2)
I don't believe it... (Score:2)
Bitcoin has no viable value. I dont understand why anyone, esecially drug dealers, would take bitcoin. Why not just draw on some paper with crayons and say it's money?
Bitcoin is not backed by any government, nor is it backed by anything of value. CPU cycles are not valuable after they are expended, and the work involved is not useful for anything else. So I really can't understand why anyone would give goods that ARE worth something in exchange for them.
Just because it takes a lot of effort to make them
Re:I don't believe it... (Score:5, Insightful)
There are bitcoin currency exchanges where you can trade for $US.
Money -- ALL money -- is only worth anything because people mutually agree it is. All of it is nothing more than a medium for exchange that is more convenient than barter.
Backed by government can mean zilch in a very short order if no one trusts that government any longer. See Wiemar Republic and Zimbabwe for example.
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How is the dollar backed by the US government?
Can you go to the US government and have your dollars exchanged for gold or land?
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How is the dollar backed by the US government?
Can you go to the US government and have your dollars exchanged for gold or land?
Excellent reply. I was hoping somebody would point out the hilarious fallacy of "backed by a government".
Goes to show how effective the propaganda is: a dollar is, in reality, dysbacked by our government, in the sense that its value is continuously reduced by the fed via issuance of additional M3.
I'm not an expert, but... (Score:2, Offtopic)
I'm pretty sure Marijuana isn't a narcotic. And I don't think cocaine is either.
A narcotic would be like morphine or heroin.
Narcotics are specific, not a generalization for all drugs.
If you're going to post Slashvertisements, at least get some of your facts straight.
Re:Interesting. (Score:4, Insightful)
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I suggest we outlaw cash too. Bitcoin is at least traceable, cash is not. Clearly, we should outlaw cash first.