group claims to have Romney's tax returns, holding them for ransom

Dachs said:
Buttcoins aren't accepted as a valid medium of exchange by anybody except for drug dealers. Not even that one New York Mediterranean grill takes them now.

So if you're purchasing buttcoins to buy something with them, you're either a criminal or an idiot.
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https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade

I wish some of these places would sell me drugs.
 
Souron said:
This doesn't explain how they work, instead ranting about why bitcoins are a bad investment. It also fudges the distinction between investing in bitcoins, accepting bitcoins, and investing in mining bitcoins, which are three different things with different reasons for participation.
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What are you talking about? I told how they're made, how they're stored, how you trade them, what they're used for, oh and the fact that they suck.

When talking about the gestalt currency, you'd think the whole "it's a failed garbage currency" would be important. It'd be like talking about how amazing Esperanto is while omitting that nobody speaks it and it is a dead language.

Bitcoins have no future and aren't accepted by anybody but drug dealers, crooks, and criminals.

Zelig said:
I wasn't aware that Mt. Gox was so dominant in terms of volume; I'll concede this point, but I don't think it substantially changes my argument.
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Why not? Even if the bank manipulating the value isn't central nor an authoritative printer, if it controls the flow of that currency and the trade value then it... well, controls the flow of the currency and the trade value. So when they artificially manipulate the value of the currency because the market crashed, people will go with it because they can't very well pull out at this point.

What's more, they don't want to. Mt. Gox essentially has a monopoly on trading bitcoins and when it changes the value to fix a market crash, none of the bitcoiners complained.

Even if Mt. Gox isn't literally a federal reserve, for all intents and purposes it fulfills the role of one. Except it's way less secure.

You're seeing intrinsic problems where there are none. It's basically like a gold standard where mining new gold is prohibitively expensive, but you can conveniently divide up pieces of gold for arbitrarily small values of exchange.
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And every time you have to divide up the pieces, you're cutting someone short somewhere. It should be well-publicized fact by now that the gold standard is economic stupidity; you want to be growing the money supply. This problem is exacerbated with bitcoins, however, when people straight up lose all their money when websites crash or fiends abscond with all the bitcoins.

I still don't see the problem in using bitcoins as a medium of exchange. If I purchase bitcoins on the spot in order to buy something else using those bitcoins, there's no particularly extravagant risk.
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There's nothing inherently bad about voluntaryist crypto-currency. If you want to buy drugs online, there's no better alternative. But what it is is a gimmick, and not a particularly good one at that.

What makes bitcoins bad is the fact that it caters extensively to a.) starry-eyed kids with dreams of libertarianism, and b.) con-men. What's more, in practical execution it has fallen victim to either incompetent or unscrupulous bankers and trade site managers, and is consistently the target of hacking attacks and similar that often cost large swaths of people small fortunes in bitcoins.

Like any other currency, bitcoin value comes from market forces. For a while, it worked. But now it doesn't. It's a novelty commodity for buying hash online. It isn't useful in the real world and it definitely isn't the long-heralded freedom of all peoples everywhere from government fiat money.

El_Machinae said:
If the electricity is not worth it, then there's a market incentive to reduce the cost of electricity. That would be cool, on its own.
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The real reason anybody mines bitcoins is not to make a profit, not anymore. They just want to grow the currency. For some reason they consider this necessary even though fiat inflation (when the government does it) is bad.

Kozmos said:
Are the files available? Can't someone just brute-force the encryption if it isnt -strong?
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People have tried, iirc. The bitcoins and wallets themselves are tight as all hell. The security problem is in the incompetents who try to manage the online trading sites.

edit: oh yeah, and some rational self-actors villains in the Bitcoin community have developed scripts for hijacking part of a person's bitcoin-enabled computer to mine bitcoins for them, under the radar.
 
Crezth said:
People have tried, iirc. The bitcoins and wallets themselves are tight as all hell. The security problem is in the incompetents who try to manage the online trading sites.
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I think he's talking about the tax return files, not the Dunning Krugerrand wallet files.
 
Dachs said:
I think he's talking about the tax return files, not the Dunning Krugerrand wallet files.
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Oh. Well, that's a much more useful question, actually.
 
Yes although I suppose the bitcoin stuff is useful in case I decide to become a cliche Balkan route drug dealer.
 
downtown said:
1) Do you think this is legit? If not, do you think this scenario is POSSIBLE, where a 3rd party releases the tax returns?

2) If you're Mitt, and you could do this without anybody knowing it, would you pay the ransom?

What do you think?
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1. I find the method of gaining access in the story to be implausible. But I do think the rest of the scenario is possible, assuming that a someone did indeed get copies of his returns one way or the other.

2. I don't think Mitt should pay - without some sort of provable guarantee that the extortionists can't release them in the future, he has nothing to gain and $1M to lose.

This sort of criminal action should be pursued aggressively by law enforcement, just as they would with any other sort of blackmail scenario. Obviously this doesn't rise to the level of kidnapping, but I hope to see at least the same level of effort as we'd see for any other citizen.

Now that the obligatory "This is a crime, let's not mince words" stuff is out of the way...

I hope this is true. Schadenfreude, and all that.

I love a good plot twist :popcorn:
 
This all happened really close to where I live. I actually saw it on my local news before I heard if from CNN. Since there was some question about the website Downtown posted, here's a link to the CNN article My favorite part of the article was this:
Jean Barwick with the Williamson County, Tennessee, Republican Party told CNN that her office found the package -- a padded envelope -- on Friday outside the door to the party offices. The package "didn't seem credible," partly because it said "for learders" instead of "leaders," she said. Inside were a letter -- one that has been posted online -- and a flash drive.
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It says later the envelopes were hand labeled in blue highlighter. So either these guys are great hackers and poor spellers or this is a hoax.
 
Dachs said:
Buttcoins aren't accepted as a valid medium of exchange by anybody except for drug dealers. Not even that one New York Mediterranean grill takes them now.

So if you're purchasing buttcoins to buy something with them, you're either a criminal or an idiot.
Click to expand...
FWIW, I had never heard of bitcoins before this thread, but once you called them "buttcoins" that convinced me to support your POV.
 
Plausible or not, we're talking about his tax records again....
 
RobAnybody said:
FWIW, I had never heard of bitcoins before this thread, but once you called them "buttcoins" that convinced me to support your POV.
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They've got loads of great nicknames. Buttcoins, Autist Kroner, Dunning-Krugerrands, Douchemarks, Ron Paul Fun Bux...
 
contre said:
Plausible or not, we're talking about his tax records again....
Click to expand...

Whaddaya mean we, paleface? A bunch of Civfanatics don't count - what's the biggest mainstream media play this story has gotten? I haven't heard one word about it yet thru the MSM.
 
The Dunning-Kruger effect is that the less someone knows about something, the more likely they are to believe they are knowledgeable in that field.

Also, Krugerands were used for similar purposes in the 1980s.
 
Brilliant. Dunning-Krugerrand it is.
 
From the wiki:
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.[1]

Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. As Kruger and Dunning conclude, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others"
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I had earlier thought that my favorite slur was DoucheMarks, but I now feel that Dunning-Krugerand takes the cake.

I see that this ties into the ubiquitous quote I see attributed to Bertrand Russell that says the world is full of idiots who are so sure of themselves, while also full of wise people who are equally unsure.

...or something like that.
 
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