Topic: Shrem to jail for two years!!! Holy shit! (Read 8191 times)

Guys if you read news about the trial of Charlie, he indirectly accepted accusations about him. There is nothing to discuss after that IMO...

the guy is a crook

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/charlie-shrem-is-scammer-watch-out-817069

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No, I'm pretty sure it's because they were using Purex instead of Tide.

LOL. If DPR3 can figure out how to transact tide pallets digitally without allowing them to be traced then it may be difficult to figure out their sales volume.

Both SR1 and SR2 were shut down because of weaknesses in their .onion site security, it has nothing to do with the fact that they were using bitcoin (except that bitcoin may have shut down other, more traditional avenues to shut them down)

Silk Road 3 will never get busted because they intend to use Tide instead of Bitcoin.

I'm usually not a conspiracy theorist but this sentence seems outrageous and I just don't trust it.  This seems like a backwards move in American justice that should reward pioneers for daring efforts rather than impede technological growth. 

He should get off well before 2 years but wow...  I'm taken aback.

Exactly. To make an example of brutal justice.

Cash fiat does not need to be moved by banks each time it is transferred from one person to another. I would think that most movements of physical cash are done outside of the banking system. It is also very rare that banks will keep track of the serial number of the bills they have (unless the bills are specifically marked as robbery 'bait' money).

I would argue that to an extent bitcoin is more difficult to launder then physical cash is because every transaction is recorded on the blockchain so in theory even if you used a mixing service, the laundered money can still be linked back to you (plus you need to take the risks of the mixing service being some kind of honeypot).

I'd guess there could be a kind of clearing house requiring a % of issued containers of Tide being represented as coins held physically as collateral. If someone needed to do laundry and ran out of detergent (or the dealer/launderer demanded physical detergent instead of the IOU), they could hit up the closest clearing house warehouse and redeem one of their Tidecoins, similar to what's done with that biogas/cryptocoin company whose name escapes me. They refine fuel from cow manure...

Indeed we could very well start putting Tide barcode hashes on the blockchain and start exchanging them for various denominations... But does it still count if you use the tide detergent within?

That would be a hell of a story coming from tide... I can almost see a movie made out of this. lol

Thanks. At any rate, people will probably still buy laundry detergent except the most paranoid weirdos insisting there's some kind of detergent manufacturers' conspiracy pumping up the world's largest drug exchange. If Shrem left "Tide" - keeping in mind it wasn't company policy to aid money laundering (AFAIK) - "Tide" would probably be fine if it ever re-opened, so long as Shrem was still left out of operations. This isn't like a company decision to close a factory because employees uninionized or a decision to operate a factory in a disputed geographical region, this is Charlie Shrem being Charlie Shrem (or maybe Charlie Shrem being Yankee, but probably not Charlie Shrem being BitInstant - and the LEOs apparently didn't look at it that way, either).

Wow, that's a depth of rationalization that few people possess.  I would agree with your analogy if the Tide compliance officer met with a known money launderer and told him how to subvert the law.

Also, BTW, customers do care what companies they use are doing. There are many examples in history.

Laundry detergent (specifically, Tide) aids money laundering. USD can be serial-tracked each time it's moved around by banks, but Tide isn't. Even if most people DID think poorly of aiding money laundering, and the head of Tide (the market leader in laundry detergents) plead guilty to aiding money laundering by posting Facebook tips detailing the best practices in Tide-weed exchanges, only Tide has a chance of being affected (and the head of Tide, obviously), while it probably won't have any impact on whether or not normal people are going to use Tide ("What does it cost?" "What are its benefits?" [and yeah, I'm assuming almost all people don't spend time wondering what other people will think their laundry detergent brand selection says about them, which could be off-base]). We're still thinking too much like speculators.

The thing is that these examples associate bitcoin with a bad name. You are correct that Charlie does not represent bitcoin and his name is not 100% tied to bitcoin however he is an effective figurehead for bitcoin

Bitcoin's credibility derives from its use, not its individual users' use practices. Unlike most technologies, there's no central authority here to tarnish the reputation of the product (unless perhaps there's a "The Bitcoin Foundation" and you have a significant percentage of board members being child molesters, serial scammers, and outright thieves). Shrem can go bite off a baby's head and force the mother to drink its blood, but it'd be completely irrelevant to bitcoin's credibility, and the same would be true if Shrem demanded a BTC1000 payment to not have to bite off the baby's head, and maybe he even offers to take her USD and exchange it through BitInstant without a fee -- bitcoin unaffected.

-Or, to change the thinking process around a bit -- Tide is a popular (and unusually expensive) laundry detergent here in the US. There was a slew of stories last year covering it being stolen in extraordinary quantities from retail stores across the country and being used as a drug currency. -So I'd look at Tide like BitInstant, Charlie as the CEO of Tide offering tips on making safe and LEO-free trades, and Bitcoin like the whole laundry detergent category. Charlie's tips make for an interesting story, feds busting him for something appearing so benign elicits an eye-roll, people might smirk a bit when they see Tide again, but laundry detergent's pretty much completely unaffected. ... Though I suppose there aren't many "laundry detergent enthusiasts" trying to suggest laundry detergent is a superior form of payment, as proven by people involved in drug transactions rejecting USD to swap suds. .... Probably over-thinking it, now.

he is young so he has time to recover and come back,  for bitcoin credibility this must be accepted;  bitcoin people respect the law:  we are in a state of law

This is 100% true - literally. The crime that he plead guilty to was aiding a money launder, which means he was helping someone break the law

There are plenty of reasonable people who promote Bitcoin and I am convinced they will propel Bitcoin forward.  Those people DO NOT include the usual people you hear about on the discussion boards, like Shrem, Vorhees, Rassah, Ver etc. are all pushing a fantasy agenda, not Bitcoin.  They don't get much traction promoting their agenda alone so they linked their agenda to Bitcoin.  They misrepresent things, make wild claims, talk like it some kind of religion, and act like people will be walking around with Ayn Rand books under their arm once they do a Bitcoin transaction.  If those people ran things there would be zero chance of mass adoption.  Once the nut job wing nuts get pushed out by the reasonable people I think things will be fine.  Not that their ideas are 100% wrong, they just push things to a ridiculous extreme.

Gotta make those terrifying examples so the other sheeple don't get any ideas.

This is herd management 101. Think of government as people-farmers and it all makes sense.