Topic: Pulled- Ron Paul's Presidential Campaign Now Accepts Bitcoins through Tradehill! - page 2. (Read 8135 times)

I've been a huge Ron Paul supporter - remember that story last campaign season about how Ron Paul received more donations from people employed by the military than any other Republican candidate?  That was me, based on a post I made on facebook that was turned into a blog post that exploded on Digg overnight.  I also helped set up the speech he gave to a few thousand people on my campus.  I worked with his official campaign on some stuff for a while too.

Anyways, I definitely not like this.  I haven't done business with Tradehill and will not even consider it now.  Not only do I not like the partisan aspect of it, but there is no real way of knowing how much is actually going to Ron Paul's campaign and how much Tradehill is pocketing.  It just is wrong.

Who said a distributed currency wouldn't change the world... I mean, we're at least giving corporations and the well-off new methods to buy the US government! :p

(I'm just joking, don't take this as flamebait please, I'm not necessarily against this initiative, it does however give an interesting look into what a world with anonymous distributed currencies looks like)

The argument that "BTC isn't money" for the sake of the FEC would be viewed as nonsense in any US court.

Bitcoins do not have intrinsic value. There, you are wrong. Resolving this argument is not possible without lots of lawyers so I suggest you get whatever candidate, in whatever country you prefer to accept bitcoins and stop hating on progress.

So if you hand me 1000 Bitcoins and I convert them to USD and donate 10 000 USD I did not get reimbursed? What about gold then? Dwolla? Euros? These are all not allowed as donations but are all possible reimbursements!


Hell, if someone values tomatoes a lot and promises to donate 100 USD for every tomato I send by mail, he still gets reimbursed for that money and wouldn't have donated without me sending a tomato in the first place!

So you don't seem to get that in the eyes of the law, BTC isn't money. What's up with that?

I find it weird that you need to hand your politicians money to send positive signals, but that's not my business/country luckily.

Anyways, according to http://www.ronpaul2012.com/acceptable-donation-methods/:

Tradehill DOES get reimbursed in bitcoins for these donations, they are a corporation and direct Bitcoin donations are out of question.
If Jered does donate as a private person, he still breaks rule #3 by being reimbursed and not using just his own money to pay.

All in all I would find it weird if I shop at Amazon for example and then get asked if I want gift wrapping and/or donate to a presidential candidate. Seriously, if you want to have donations, by all means do so if you can't help it, but do it on a clearly seperated page, not directly above Red Cross and EFF (who no longer accept Bitcoin donations btw.).

Especially since there are only 2 big parties in the US of A I find it quite weird from a business perspective to screw with the political opinion of ~50% of your US customers and 100% of your foreign ones.

Tradehill needs to clear up some questions, but this is a really good start. Just because he gets USD, doesn't mean he doesn't know it's from the bitcoin community. Even if he ends up returning the donations, this is a very positive message for the bitcoin community to send Washington. This is the kind of thing that will enable bitcoins longevity.

There is a lot of precedent for this kind of donation bundling. However, because bitcoins aren't recognized by the government as money, a lot of campaign laws are a big question mark. People claiming it's against the law need to show some JDs. The Ron Paul campaign's initial response to me points to a lack of legal understanding by the FEC, "it would probably confuse the FEC".

I thought he was joking in the last thread 

https://www.tradehill.com/WithdrawOverview/BTC

Wow...

   

Actually I don't usually shop in those places. I tend to use either smaller locally based businesses or online shopping as much as possible. And I never use any Georgia-Pacific/Dixie products either. Granted sometimes I need something immediately that only one of the big box stores can fill...but none of them have a place on the pinpad when checking out to donate to a specific candidate. If they did something that obvious they would lose a lot more customers (if it were legal, and I don't think it is.)

That's uhh... kind of the definition of science. Science is a quest for knowledge, which is ever more refined. The most exciting times in science are those days when something we knew for a fact yesterday turns out to be wrong.

There is scientific support for much of the theory of evolution - we can observe many things in nature and in the lab that lend support to it (such as the bacteria in a lab experiment which was frozen at different generations, and spontaneously evolved to eat a new kind of food - they can unfreeze any of that same generation and they will repeatedly keep evolving in the expected way if the circumstances are kept the same).

The fact that Ron Paul, a doctor, puts his personal religion before this rudimentary understanding* is disheartening... it doesn't fully disqualify him from leadership, because unlike much of the religious right his position is averse to allowing religion to enter into politics. It just doesn't look that good on him.


I take it you never shop at Home Depot, Target, Walmart... and you choose your toilet paper really carefully? Almost every company out there has some kind of political slant. The political slant isn't what's wrong with this, the fact that they've not (I don't believe) reasonably demonstrated they're even allowed to do this is where the issue lies.

That's the thing:
You have NO IDEA how much is donated, to which address of by whom: Tradehill will just cash out your donation in USD, RP EXPLICITLY mentions no donations in bitcoin are allowed!

should give the option to donate to anyone running, not because i support any of them, i doubt anyone who gets elected will do any real good- things will just be a bit different. i don't like the idea of favortism.... so i won't be using tradehill anymore as well

Using the anonymous currency to donate to charity is a way to know for sure that you're money is being received by the receiver. If Haiti took Bitcoin donations we would know for sure that most of it arrived without administration, third party, corruption fees.

Donating anonymously to political protagonists, while not without faults(if you can do it, so can the opposition), is another one of Bitcoin's great features. No one plays fair with such high stakes. Fair is just an out side illusion. If you are serious enough about winning, this is one for the war chest.

When you donate  to TH fro RP with Bitcoins, we can all check and see exactly how much was donated to that address. However, I dont know how we would verify if that same amount was sent to the intended destination or not. Many details unknown.

I thought they were running an exchange, not a PAC. And I cannot guarantee that my transaction fees are not being put in with those donations. Since this business openly supports a candidate that I do not, I will not conduct any further transactions with it. Plain and simple.

Oh, and the FEC takes a real dim view of foreign based businesses donating to presidential candidates. I would hate to have my money tied up somewhere like that when the legal troubles start. The US does have an extradition treaty with Chile.

There's a difference between voicing an opinion somewhere and (ab-)using your own business to do politics. Tradehill has a lot of customers that are NOT in the US and for whom it is illegal to donate to Ron Paul.

In the end discussions here are pointless. All that needs to be done is to send Mr. RP a (few) mail(s) with links to the "donation" page at tradehill. I hope his team is not that stupid to take donations that might get Mr. Paul in a lot of trouble. Also you could send this to a few "real" newspapers/media companies and tell them that Mr. Paul might get some illegal donations. This might harm him probably much more than those few USD help.

So you are using your own political bias to hate on someone else's political preference? It is not like he is forcing every customer to donate an amount. Why wouldn't you just commend his open and honest nature? Do you really like businesses and politicians that just tell you whatever they think you want to hear? Or any amount of truth or fact once in a while?

Unfortunately because of this I will no longer be doing business with Tradehill. Up until now I have had the utmost respect for the way they have run their business and how they have been open and forthright with information. I cannot, however, in good faith continue to do business with a politically slanted exchange. While I am sure there are many RP supporters on this forum, there are still a number of people who use bitcoin that are not. Bitcoin != Libertarianism, and the more you try to make it so, the more you push away the mainstream.

He'll get 0 Bitcoins in donations, all he gets is some USD. He won't ever know/care they came from bitcoin donations.

Can we please get back to topic here?!

It's not about any political views, votability or anything else - this thread is about tradehill LYING and saying you can donate for some Republican candidate via BTC while all they (maybe) do is collect BTC, cash them in and send a check claiming it's just from them (everything else would be illegal) which is lying.

I'm going to let this go too, since a discussion on the merits of evolution and science in general is well outside the scope of this thread.

I'm still interested in determining whether or not a US political candidate or PAC can legally receive anonymous contributions.  To me this seems no trivial matter, either way.