Topic: The Legal Fiction Perpetuated by BitcoinTalk - page 2. (Read 5238 times)

You may need a new pair of glasses then. The entire board has went to altcoin hell.

They come for the idea and not exactly for the software.


Please, show some examples of "negatively effected" forum users.


I am still want to know who are this donators and VIP forum participants which have been "negatively effected" by a mere section of the forum...

I use the term donated loosely, be it time or money, people came here for Bitcoins. The Alt Coin section was added later with the invention of the early Alt Coins, just as a place to move threads from Bitcoin mining discussion to their own section.

The point is, the people that actually come here for Bitcoin info, or to discuss Bitcoin are being negatively effected by the Alt Coin section. Obviously, we don't want to remove the Alt Coin section as a whole, because then we will have the problem of people posting Alt Coin stuff back in with Bitcoin discussion. However the issue as of late is how Giveaway threads have far outspammed anything else, and leak out to the rest of the forum in a variety of ways. Although I'm not entirely sure if this thread is about that or not.

I did not donated a considerable amount of money exactly for that. Why are you speaking for something you were not asked for? Who are the donators and VIP which are against the "alt coins"?

If we are strictly talking about legal definitions, and no longer discussing anything to do with the forum, you may be incorrect there. Assuming we are talking about Common Law jurisdiction, with Crypto Currencies being a thing that could not be precidented based on previous cases, a judge would try to draw connections to somewhat similar cases, in other words Software name and branding cases.

If a software comes out under a MIT/X11 License called "Duck" obviously they cannot patent or trademark the word "Duck" they can trademark logos, but that is unimportant for this example. Under the MIT/X11 license as you posted, people are free to make whatever modifications they wish. However! If someone decides to make another competing software that performs the same task as "Duck" and then they name it "Duck" the creators of the original "Duck" could indeed sue. If they decided to name it "Duck2.0" they could also sue, claiming that the name infringes on their software and confuses brand confusion. Now if they decide to name it "Goose" techincally if the software is close enough, "Duck" may still have a case against it, however that would depend on other circumstances and how good one's lawyers are.

Bitcoin is a SHA based Crypto Currency created by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009. If a coin has any other description other than that, it is not Bitcoin. It can be a Bitcoin derivative, but you could not claim under any jurisdiction, that another coin is also Bitcoin. The MIT/X11 License gives people the rights to edit the Bitcoin source and create their own coins under other names, but should someone make Bitcoin2.0, Satoshi could techincally sue them over it, again not that he would.

None of that applies to the forum in anyway, but if Satoshi decided to indentify themself or themselves, while they would not have legal authority over Litecoin, Namecoin, etc etc, they would have legal authority over anyone who tried to misrepresent themselves as Bitcoin, in a way that infringes on his/her/their intellectual property. Satoshi designed Bitcoin for everyone, but everyone did not create Bitcoin.

He's almost as delusional the Astrocoin Dev Team. Almost

I'm clueless. Care to explain again why I'm on the opposite side of where your beleifs stand, please?

I agree, so long as they do not violate the terms of the MIT/X11 License.



Believe it or not, I agree with you here too.  

Confusion between the original Bitcoin and other iterations of the Bitcoin source-code is a very real problem and any other versions of Bitcoin should clearly differentiate themselves for the sake of those genuine concerns you mention.

My point is simply that, as per the MIT/X11 License, this forum perpetuates a legal falsehood that there is legally one official Bitcoin.

Fully appreciating and addressing this point, I believe, will provide a better framework to deal with the very real problems you mention.  On the other hand, ignoring this point is denying the legal reality and  equivalent to simply punting the issue to deal with it later when it inevitably comes back in another form since it's permitted under the MIT/X11 Opensource License Regime.

Privately, using whatever resources one has at one's disposal.

Sure, it could be, but that would be harmful to the goals of this forum and the vast majority of its users.

If a merchant says, "you can pay me with Bitcoins", we all know what that means. Creating confusion over that would be harmful for Bitcoin.

It is extremely important for everyone who cares about Bitcoin to keep the word "Bitcoin" unambiguously associated with a single block chain.

lol.  If you read the posts, a commentor does seem to be angry but it's not me.  

But what I'm basically saying is the opposite of what you posted.

Where use of the unmodified term Bitcoin is inherently clear (e.g., the original Bitcoin SHA256 blockchain referred to as simply Bitcoin) I don't think anyone has a problem. As long as people are clear as to which blockchain any Bitcoin fork refers to, the use of the original Bitcoin, Bitcoin 2.0, Bitcoin Prime, Bitcoin Scypt, etc..., is legally permissible outside the forum and is generally subject to the forum's private-property rights inside the forum.

Additionally, restricting or limiting the use of the Bitcoin source-code, name included, is a violation of the MIT/X11 License and an attempt to create a legal trademark where legally there isn't one; ergo, a legal fiction.  This forum can and should do whatever is in their best interest, but those actions do not create legal property rights where none exist to begin with.

The term Bitcoin should be used freely to describe the protocol and should legally be available for use by any fork of said protocol meeting the requirements of the MIT/X11 license so long as they do not fraudulently misrepresent themselves to be the original Bitcoin on the Bitcoin SHA256 blockchain.  


Fair?


And my apologies for any confusion.

Hold up there legal eagle.  You wouldn't be misrepresenting the law just to win a silly online argument would you?

To make sure we are on the same page, are you arguing that because some courts have recognized Bitcoin but made no mention of other Bitcoins, that use of the name Bitcoin by anyone but the official Bitcoin is illegal and will lead to liability in court?  Keep in mind that fraudulently misrepresenting oneself to be "Bitcoin SHA256" is an entirely different matter than representing oneself to be "Bitcoin Prime" or "Bitcoin Scrypt" or "Bitcoin SHA512."  Are you claiming that the latter is illegal and would lead to liability in court because of the unnamed cases you allude to?

If so, it's obvious you do not fully appreciate the MIT/X11 license attached to the original Bitcoin so I have included it below (with emphasis added):
http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT


Thus, if another cryptocoin modifies the original Bitcoin source-code and represents itself as "Bitcoin Scrypt" or "Bitcoin Prime" or "Bitcoin SHA512" they have a legal license to do so, so long as the modified Bitcoin source-code includes this MIT/X11 notice and they do not restrict others from doing the same.   Do you disagree with this statement?

How about the converse?  Could it be argued that the current successors to Satoshi's original Bitcoin source-code do not own the source-code, but rather, have a license to use the source-code  so long as they allow others, "without restriction, including without limitation" to freely use, modify and distribute it?  The million dollar question then becomes:  Would the successors to the original Bitcoin lose their license to use the original Bitcoin source-code if they placed restrictions or limitations on anyone else's ability to freely use, modify or distribute a modified version of Satoshi's Bitcoin source-code, as per the MIT/X11 license?

Taking this to its logical extreme, because the original Bitcoin client is licensed under the MIT/X11 regime and is not purely public domain, I would argue that you, anti-scam, as a licensee of the original Bitcoin would lose said license to use the Bitcoin client by taking any actions intended to limit or restrict someone else's ability to freely use, modify or distribute a modified version of the Bitcoin source-code meeting the MIT/X11 notice requirements.  



Finally, to prove me legally and factually incorrect, I challenge you to cite the cases for which you base your argument.  Otherwise, you are being dishonest and simply misrepresenting the law to win an online argument, truth-be-damned.  I've backed up everyone one of my assertions in this thread with independently verifiable facts and conceded where I was wrong.  

Are you honest enough to do the same?

To be fair, I just wanted clarification on whether it was your position that Satoshi utilized the MIT/X11 license so people would not create alternate blockchain clients, which, contrary to your post, you clarified was not your actual position.  Correct?

Other than that, I think you are correct that my romanticizing Satoshi's intent regarding his choice of MIT/X11 open-source may have been misplaced.  That said, that statement was dicta to my original point that this forum perpetuates the legal falsehood/legal myth/legal fiction that there is indeed one official Bitcoin in the legal sense.   If you take out the statement re Satoshi, the rest of my post holds true.

To be clear, this site has the right to perpetuate whatever it wants and to protect its interest it may even have a duty to do so.  I was just making a point that this forum perpetuates a legal falsehood that there is an official Bitcoin in the legal sense.  Similarly, this site could ban all users that use alt-coins "as scammers for copying the original Bitcoin source-code."  Again, this forum can perpetuate whatever it wants but that is a separate issue from whether the forum is perpetuating a fiction in the legal sense.

Once more, your point is well taken and I concede that I may have misspoke concerning Satoshi's intent, dicta or not.  Thanks for the thought-out response theymos.

On a side note, I went through Satoshi's post here on Bitcointalk but I couldn't find anything from him against the creation of alternate blockchains.
I checked here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/satoshi-3.
Is there a way to access the archives of the old forums which used to be here: http://bitcoin.sourceforge.net/boards/index.php

So basically, what you're saying is that you're very angry at:

- Merchants accepting bitcoins
- Journalists writing about bitcoin
- Anyone talking about bitcoin in the street
- etc.

For not mentioning which fork of which blockchain they're referring to?

Try advertising your Bitcoin scrypt or Bitcoin Skein or Bitcoin whatever as Bitcoin, sell them to people for dollars, and try your argument before a court when some very unhappy customers decide to take action. Many courts have already made legal recognition of Bitcoin and the idea of different Bitcoins (as opposed to different altcoins) was not found in their opinions, nor in any legislative hearings. You are wrong in both a factual and legal sense.

The point of the quote I posted is to disprove your claim that Bitcoin is MIT-licensed because Satoshi wanted altcoins. He gave his real reason there: he didn't see any point in forcing people to duplicate his effort in creating a Bitcoin client. (If you read many more of his posts, you'll see that he also wanted Bitcoin-Qt to remain the main Bitcoin client for the foreseeable future. He didn't want competing clients destabilizing the network.)  He didn't say anything about promoting competition, decentralization, etc.

Satoshi was not a huge champion of decentralization. He viewed the Bitcoin network as being equal to his Bitcoin software, and he tightly controlled all code changes to this software. In several cases, he secretly changed some of the core Bitcoin rules in ways that would nowadays cause absolute outrage. For example, the 1 MB block size limit didn't always exist. He snuck that in along with some other changes without announcing it or asking anyone's opinion. Don't get me wrong: Bitcoin itself is very decentralized due to Satoshi's work, but if Satoshi returned, everyone complaining about current centralization issues would find him to be much worse. So your "appeals to Satoshi" are ridiculous.

On this forum, there is only one Bitcoin. Elsewhere, you can define things however you wish.

What you think of Bitcoin is irrelevant. Fact of the matter is, it's a forum created for and dedicated to it. Get over it.

I am not arguing against that and actually generally agree, especially in the context of a private forum like this.

All I am stating is that it is a fiction to state that Bitcoin SHA256 is the official Bitcoin in a legal sense.  Ergo, it is a legal fiction perpetuated by the mods of this forum which goes against the spirit of the MIT/X11 License.

Stated differently, legally it is not true (a fiction) that Bitcoin SHA256 is the official Bitcoin because legally there is no official Bitcoin in any legal jurisdiction (e.g., no one has the power to take any legal action against anyone claiming to be the official Bitcoin anywhere in the world).

I appreciate your arguments and generally don't disagree, but all I have been saying is that it is a legal fiction that Bitcoin SHA256 is the one official Bitcoin, as per my title.

If anyone still disagrees, please look up the words official, legal and fiction, in a dictionary before responding.

r3wt has it right. The text at the top of your screen says "Bitcoin Forum", which very obviously means to most people what the OP calls "Bitcoin SHA-256". Why should a private forum devoted to a particular thing allow something harmful to that particular thing? To use your Linux example, do you think that going to a Debian forum and trying to convince people to use some hacked up version based off of the Windows NT kernel would be allowed?

Well first, you can protect the name Bitcoin, by not mining/using other coin's named Bitcoin to your question above.

Second, the question to ban Scrypt Bitcoin or not to ban scrypt bitcoin came up over a month earlier (Staff forum)


At that point, I just asked that people put disclaimers make sure people were clear when saying Bitcoin vs Scrypt Bitcoin. There were issues with threads that said 1000 BITCOIN GIVEAWAY! And such, that was the preliminary issue. It was September 11th when I found out about the Dev's warning that the coin could overwrite SHA Bitcoin data,


Which is consistent with the date that I posted the ban in the first place. That leads me to believe, that we were concerned about the use of Bitcoin's name for a month before banning the coin for its potential threat. Really not that it matters to me anyway, knowing what I know now, I would disallow Scrypt Bitcoin again in a heartbeat, just because its annoying to be constantly confused as to what people are talking about. For example, if someone makes a 1 BTC bet with you, you win, and then pays you a scrypt BTC, its a pain in the ass.

I just want to make sure you guys know that even a decision as trivial as that, there was a month's worth of discussion. We don't just throw around bans on content willy nilly. Scrypt Bitcoin posed to be a massive inconvience for the forum users in general, and the moderation team, and the fact that we even allowed Scrypt Bitcoin for that month actually baffles me now. That being said, if there was that much discussion and lenience in a single coin, imagine how bad it would have had to be to put the smackdown on Giveaways of all types.




I couldn't say it better myself. We oppose censorship, but really there is a line that we must draw using our best judgement. Else no one would be able to post anything. I wont argue any Alt Coin's right to exist, that is solely up to the free market, however the Bitcointalk Admins and Mods are in charge of what content is allowed on their site. The "libertarian" policies are based on the owner's beliefs, not some fundamental or protected right. So if someone gets censored, we are accountable to ourselves and the rest of the staff, and we will give each other a hell of a hard time if a mistake is made and not fixed.

i agree on all points. on the surface, we oppose censorship, but in reality censorship is a gray area, and we must only oppose censhorship to the extent that a lack of censorship does not adversely affect us and our investments. this is a bitcoin forum and as such it is a major investment vehicle for bitcoin.

Therefore, I believe the main interest or goal of the staff should be to protect Bitcoin. Alt currencies, while sharing the protocol are not bitcoin and should therefore be seen as secondary to the issues that surround bitcoin.