Topic: All kinds of stuff for sale with BTC. we need to be careful (Read 2511 times)

of course its must

Very True..

OP: I'm not sure what, if anything, you're proposing. There's a long history of people coming up with policing measures like address blacklists etc., which I think you may find some readers here will assume you're talking about as well. It's not a popular idea, and anything even whiffing of reduced freedom on a protocol level gets people really agitated.

Maybe you're just making the point it pays to be prudent. That's entirely true, and worth keeping in mind, but I think it's kind of assumed any serious business will have enough self-preservation instincts to keep their names from being linked to anything illegal. The ones that don't, won't be around long.

As for keeping Bitcoin's image clean, ultimately there's not much any one here can do to stop illegal activity, so a better course of action is to work on building benign businesses.

From when it started until the beginning of this month, Satoshi-Dice had been responsible for 54% of all Bitcoin transactions.
So I think it is a pretty safe statement that drugs and gambling make up the bulk of bitcoin transactions.
For the more general statement, it depends how you define economy.

I'm pretty sure any attempts to sell alcohol or drugs over the internet through bitcoins would be shut down pretty quickly.

To be frank, the entire INTP personality type matches up very well with autism.  I know I'm guilty of throwing around "autism" too, but it seems the more I learn about this condition, the more I realize it's not; or at least, the qualifiers for autism are loose enough to apply to a naturally-born 3% of any given population.  We're not going to call Alby autistic, are we?  He was different, certainly, but he wasn't the victim to any psychological condition, not that I'm aware of anyhow.

As for libertarians; it seems there's a divide between American libertarianism and...I guess that "other" libertarianism which acts as the direct opposite of authoritarianism.  You people and your semantics!  One day, liberal might actually mean liberal again.

I actually did not mean that statement to be as offensive as it may sound, though I did anticipate that it would be taken that way by most people.  Oh well.  It would not be terribly offensive to me, but I am unusual in that regard.

In actual fact, though I only have a minimal understanding of neuroscience, I find the concept of self awareness pretty fascinating.  If you prick your finger, it simulates activity associated with pain in a certain part of your brain.  If I watch you prick your finger, it stimulates activity in the same part of MY brain but to a lesser degree.  This actually makes sense for complex creatures who's life-ways are normally social.  There is neurological wiring that explain this phenomenon and obviously a lot of individual variation in how active the circuits are.  On one end of the spectrum there is a genuine malady which is genuinely disabling.  I conjecture that this set of neurological systems is tied to 'empathy', and is also associated with the ability to see things from a different point of view.  Or 'self centered' in short-hand.

My hypothesis is that one will find statistically different degrees of neurological activity in populations who describe themselves as being of one political group or another.  That is not really a 'dis in my mind, but again I can understand how others would take it as such.

how will your exmaple "fuck everything up" and why do we need to be careful. the government cannot easily shut off bitcoin... if it could, it would have already.

Wow this degenerated into name calling rather quickly...

So getting back to it, a person's perception is their reality.  Some questions: Do we as a community have a responsibility to shape perception if we care about bitcoin?  If so, how do we do that?  I'm asking because 99% percent of media stories about bitcoin mention Silk Road whether relevant to the story or not.  People's perceptions, outside the bitcoin community, are being shaped by such tidbits.  How do we get away from that? My co-workers, for example, are familiar with bitcoin and dismiss it as nothing more than a way to buy illicit products anonymously.  That's a real problem long term.  I acknowledge there are no easy answers.  Hoping to hear constructive input...

Wow. Nice to know what you really think of people with different political views than you.

(Reminds me of my ultraconservative friends who quite literally believe that serious progressives suffer from some sort of drug-induced brain damage, or some form of PTSD from childhood at the very least. Sheesh.)

After the article today on Forbes, in their upcoming issue, SR will have a bigger light shinning on bitcoin underworld.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/meet-the-dread-pirate-roberts-the-man-behind-booming-black-market-drug-website-silk-road/



Oh on another note: I bought my dinner tonight with bitcoins. Ordered a pizza from Pizzahut through pizza for coins!

Bitcoin is an effect of the control of e right wrong Christian agenda

I always thought you were a hard-core Libertarian.  Or maybe there was another person with a very similar username some time back who was.  Or I'm just remembering things wrong...there are a lot of Libertarians here to try to keep track of.

Or maybe (shudder) you are one of the very unusual people (and almost unheard of for Libertarians) who can analyze their own ideological system and recognize 'faults' and generally amusing properties of it and those who share it.

we have had sellers come and try to sell illegal products on our site coingig.com but we simply just remove them and notify the buyer that they are not allowed in our inventory.

Silk Road has 1.22 million pounds (as in currency) worth of purchases made every month. That's 14.64 million a year.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/01/silk-road-crackdown (Note that this article is not purely about SR's revenue)

The bitcoin economy is worth 822,435,072 pounds total (Bitcoin Watch).

That means that SR in one year, which is one website, is worth 1.8% of the entire bitcoin economy (and that article refers to a 2012 study when bitcoins were lower). When the figures come up for this year, I'm sure that SR will take up a much larger portion.

And of course, SR is not the only illegal site using bitcoins.

And keep in mind that there are legal sites too. Bitcoins are used to buy alcohol and tobacco, and there's gambling.

Whilst I agree with the first part, but I think you underestimate the number of people using bitcoin in legally accepted ways.

Pulling numbers out of...you know / wink /wink

+1

We must be wise in how we choose to use Bitcoin. Businesses bqeing totally hands off regarding how they let others use their services could lead to consequences they did not predict nor desire. That could bring unwarranted restrictions for all of us.

You can buy meth and heroin off of SR. Who cares if some 11 year old gets drunk. He can go through his parents' liquor cabinet for that anyways.

And at this current time, drugs and gambling make up the bulk of the bitcoin economy, so blocking vices does more harm than good...

Less charitably, in my view Libertarians have a tendency toward a very self-centered conception of the world.  This is in fact a clinical marker for autism and it is interesting to observe people like Rand Paul who display other characteristics of the malady.  The point is that many Libertarians seem to completely lack the native ability to see the nuances and limitations of 'freedom' since they cannot put themselves into another parties frame of mind.

Libertarians often have the right sort of basic intuitions about a lot of things such as liberty, freedom, war, etc, but to a large degree these are no-brainers to run-of-the-mill left wing progressives like myself.  These things are good, but nothing special.  I distrust a lot of Libertarians because I bet that if/when the shit hits the fan they would find some way to justify any role they wish to play.  Many of them do seem to convert into totalitarianism quite rapidly (and amusingly) when given power over things.  OTOH, so would a lot of progressives, and a fair number of Libertarians would probably stick to their philosophical principles in their actions as well.  So maybe it's a wash.  Hopefully we'll not find out for a while.