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Except that regulating things is not the same as holding a monopoly on regulations. If government is so completely confident that its currency is much more supe

by snitko 14y ago

Except that regulating things is not the same as holding a monopoly on regulations. If government is so completely confident that its currency is much more superior and stable, well, allow the competition! Make it legal to receive whatever I want to receive as a payment. Let businesses regulate the currency market and determine what currency is reliable. Oh wait, except that then government cannot tax you, of course. Also, this incident has nothing to do with regulating bitcoins. It has to do with Rails and this particular exchange site, whose reputation is now damaged and who's going to lose business. Note how free market works great in this case: the organization costs people their lost money and will most likely go out of business. Unlike big banks.

chez17 14y ago
This has everything to do with regulating bit coins and the exchanges. No bank in the US would ever dare run a stock rails site, I would bet they would be rightfully sued. On top of that, funds in a bank are insured to a point so if someone at a bank messes up, the innocent people who lost their money won't lose everything they own. The free market is cruel and so are it's proponents, we've advanced past this "fuck you I've got mine" mentality as a species. If bit coin was regulated like a bank, this wouldn't be a problem. Since anti-regulation people fail to grasp this point, let me add that I do not support every bit of regulation ever passed. There is good regulation and bad regulation. Only intellectually childish people view it as ALL good or ALL bad.
- snitko 14y ago
  My point is not that all regulation is bad. People decide if a regulation is bad or good. One may think a guns regulation is a good thing, the other may decide that a drugs regulation is a good thing. You can't reach objectivity in most cases. And then regulations have side effects: we always have to look not at just the intentions of those regulations, but also at the incentives they create (and that we cannot always foresee, example: minimum wage law).
- Xylakant 14y ago
  > No bank in the US would ever dare run a stock rails site, I would bet they would be rightfully sued. Why so? Even banking websites build on frameworks and if you'd have chosen Spring for example, there was a Remote Code Execution vulnerability in 2010. And even if you roll your own framework, you're just as likely to introduce a critical flaw. The Dutch governmental DigiD service runs rails [1]. The critical difference between the BC service and a bank or the government is that a responsible party would have secured their app immediately. The DigiD service was taken down pretty quickly and stayed down until patched. There were multiple workarounds that did not involve major patches and even if you didn't know which of your apps was vulnerable, you could filter the payload at your load-balancers if you had some [2]. [1] http://lwn.net/Articles/532224/ http://lwn.net/Articles/532224/ [2] An xml tag with the type "yaml" was required to trigger this. It's a pretty specific payload that is very unlikely to be used in a regular request.
  - illuminate 14y ago
    Because, as you're aware, "build on frameworks" is not necessarily "stock rails".
rmc 14y ago
Make it legal to receive whatever I want to receive as a payment. This is already. You can legally trade things for other things. There is no law saying that you have to use Euro (or your local government issued money)( for everything. The only think you have to use it for, is taxes or paying fines.
- pfedor 14y ago
  Not true, see e.g., http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2451629 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2451629 or http://www.fbi.gov/charlotte/press-releases/2011/defendant-convicted-of-minting-his-own-currency http://www.fbi.gov/charlotte/press-releases/2011/defendant-c... "Along with the power to coin money, Congress has the concurrent power to restrain the circulation of money which is not issued under its own authority in order to protect and preserve the constitutional currency for the benefit of all citizens of the nation."
rprasad 14y ago
Note how free market works great in this case: the organization costs people their lost money and will most likely go out of business. Unlike big banks. That sounds horrible. If a bank gets hacked and "loses" my money, they owe me that money. Federal and state law requires them to put that money back into my bank account, at the bank's expense. (Note, this is not the same as FDIC insurance, which applies in the event of a bank failure.) The free market still applies: on top of getting their money back, customers can take their money to more secure banks. Make it legal to receive whatever I want to receive as a payment. Let businesses regulate the currency market and determine what currency is reliable. Oh wait, except that then government cannot tax you, of course. You can receive whatever you want to receive as payment; this has been a basic principle of English-based law for hundreds of years. The currency requirement is merely that any debt obligation must be satisfiable through the use of currency equivalent to the value of the debt. Also note that the government reserves the right to tax you regardless of the currency you use. This has been basic law in some form or the other for hundreds of years, and is explicitly stated in I.R.C. section 61.
- makomk 14y ago
  > The free market still applies: on top of getting their money back, customers can take their money to more secure banks. Unless the bank goes bankrupt. Basically, if the bank plays fast and loose with customers' money the customers shoulder the risks whilst the bank owners get the rewards - and there's no way customers can tell whether this is happening, since they neither have access to the bank's internal records and systems nor the skills and resources to make sense of them. Actually, the only reason the baks have to return the money in the first place is because of Government intervention, and even that's not enough. Unfortunately, thanks to binding arbitration the US has a free market of sorts in dispute resolution, and the banks and financial providers have so much more market power than consumers that they can effectively pressure arbitrators into siding with them. If they don't, the bank won't do business with them and they can't find work, whereas most consumers only need to use arbitration a few times in their lifetime at most.
  - rprasad 14y ago
    FDIC insurance applies if the bank goes bankrupt (and has since the 1930s), ergo, I would still get my money back. It is not a matter of arbitration; banks have gone bust frequently enough that there is a settled procedure for issuing insurance proceeds to depositors of a failed bank. Banks pay for FDIC insurance coverage as part of their capital requirements for being a bank.
saraid216 14y ago
> Oh wait, except that then government cannot tax you, of course. There are actually some voices saying that Bitcoin needs a taxation protocol.

by snitko 14y ago

chez17 14y ago

This has everything to do with regulating bit coins and the exchanges. No bank in the US would ever dare run a stock rails site, I would bet they would be rightfully sued. On top of that, funds in a bank are insured to a point so if someone at a bank messes up, the innocent people who lost their money won't lose everything they own. The free market is cruel and so are it's proponents, we've advanced past this "fuck you I've got mine" mentality as a species. If bit coin was regulated like a bank, this wouldn't be a problem. Since anti-regulation people fail to grasp this point, let me add that I do not support every bit of regulation ever passed. There is good regulation and bad regulation. Only intellectually childish people view it as ALL good or ALL bad.

snitko 14y ago
My point is not that all regulation is bad. People decide if a regulation is bad or good. One may think a guns regulation is a good thing, the other may decide that a drugs regulation is a good thing. You can't reach objectivity in most cases. And then regulations have side effects: we always have to look not at just the intentions of those regulations, but also at the incentives they create (and that we cannot always foresee, example: minimum wage law).
Xylakant 14y ago
> No bank in the US would ever dare run a stock rails site, I would bet they would be rightfully sued. Why so? Even banking websites build on frameworks and if you'd have chosen Spring for example, there was a Remote Code Execution vulnerability in 2010. And even if you roll your own framework, you're just as likely to introduce a critical flaw. The Dutch governmental DigiD service runs rails [1]. The critical difference between the BC service and a bank or the government is that a responsible party would have secured their app immediately. The DigiD service was taken down pretty quickly and stayed down until patched. There were multiple workarounds that did not involve major patches and even if you didn't know which of your apps was vulnerable, you could filter the payload at your load-balancers if you had some [2]. [1] http://lwn.net/Articles/532224/ http://lwn.net/Articles/532224/ [2] An xml tag with the type "yaml" was required to trigger this. It's a pretty specific payload that is very unlikely to be used in a regular request.
- illuminate 14y ago
  Because, as you're aware, "build on frameworks" is not necessarily "stock rails".

rmc 14y ago

Make it legal to receive whatever I want to receive as a payment. This is already. You can legally trade things for other things. There is no law saying that you have to use Euro (or your local government issued money)( for everything. The only think you have to use it for, is taxes or paying fines.

pfedor 14y ago
Not true, see e.g., http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2451629 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2451629 or http://www.fbi.gov/charlotte/press-releases/2011/defendant-convicted-of-minting-his-own-currency http://www.fbi.gov/charlotte/press-releases/2011/defendant-c... "Along with the power to coin money, Congress has the concurrent power to restrain the circulation of money which is not issued under its own authority in order to protect and preserve the constitutional currency for the benefit of all citizens of the nation."

rprasad 14y ago

Note how free market works great in this case: the organization costs people their lost money and will most likely go out of business. Unlike big banks. That sounds horrible. If a bank gets hacked and "loses" my money, they owe me that money. Federal and state law requires them to put that money back into my bank account, at the bank's expense. (Note, this is not the same as FDIC insurance, which applies in the event of a bank failure.) The free market still applies: on top of getting their money back, customers can take their money to more secure banks. Make it legal to receive whatever I want to receive as a payment. Let businesses regulate the currency market and determine what currency is reliable. Oh wait, except that then government cannot tax you, of course. You can receive whatever you want to receive as payment; this has been a basic principle of English-based law for hundreds of years. The currency requirement is merely that any debt obligation must be satisfiable through the use of currency equivalent to the value of the debt. Also note that the government reserves the right to tax you regardless of the currency you use. This has been basic law in some form or the other for hundreds of years, and is explicitly stated in I.R.C. section 61.

makomk 14y ago
> The free market still applies: on top of getting their money back, customers can take their money to more secure banks. Unless the bank goes bankrupt. Basically, if the bank plays fast and loose with customers' money the customers shoulder the risks whilst the bank owners get the rewards - and there's no way customers can tell whether this is happening, since they neither have access to the bank's internal records and systems nor the skills and resources to make sense of them. Actually, the only reason the baks have to return the money in the first place is because of Government intervention, and even that's not enough. Unfortunately, thanks to binding arbitration the US has a free market of sorts in dispute resolution, and the banks and financial providers have so much more market power than consumers that they can effectively pressure arbitrators into siding with them. If they don't, the bank won't do business with them and they can't find work, whereas most consumers only need to use arbitration a few times in their lifetime at most.
- rprasad 14y ago
  FDIC insurance applies if the bank goes bankrupt (and has since the 1930s), ergo, I would still get my money back. It is not a matter of arbitration; banks have gone bust frequently enough that there is a settled procedure for issuing insurance proceeds to depositors of a failed bank. Banks pay for FDIC insurance coverage as part of their capital requirements for being a bank.

saraid216 14y ago

> Oh wait, except that then government cannot tax you, of course. There are actually some voices saying that Bitcoin needs a taxation protocol.