uncurable mlady posted:

honestly i think the biggest surprise i got out of this was that bitcoin enthusiasts use apple products. they never seemed the type

duTrieux. posted:

somebody should convince the military to build a giant railgun that launches marines sealed up in shock-absorbent sabot-like pods for delivery anywhere on the globe so that we can use that technology to shoot crap into space (because the only way we'll get the money to do that is with an insane military idea)

duTrieux. posted:

that's not ridiculously baroque enough imo

Robawesome posted:

FCKGW posted:

alright i fixed the hn mode and it took way too long so i'm not doing any more

http://www.butwithbitcoins.com/hn/

FCKGW posted:

alright i fixed the hn mode and it took way too long so i'm not doing any more

http://www.butwithbitcoins.com/hn/

FCKGW posted:

alright i fixed the hn mode and it took way too long so i'm not doing any more

http://www.butwithbitcoins.com/hn/

Proteus4994 posted:

wrap the trash in bacon and fire it at muslims

StopMakingSense posted:

Whoa Gox is about to dip below the other exchanges.

duTrieux. posted:

i said baroque, not racist

FCKGW posted:

alright i fixed the hn mode and it took way too long so i'm not doing any more

http://www.butwithbitcoins.com/hn/

Proteus4994 posted:

i'm american, everything means "racist"

Heresiarch posted:

don't forget to link it from the front page

[edit] oh god the usernames i literally just choked at "dogdickcoffeetable"

FCKGW posted:

http://www.butwithbitcoins.com

quote:

How about a hemp-based giftcard bookkeeping guide
... but with bitcoins!

quote:

What about a steam punk travel backpack operating system
... but with bitcoins!

quote:

How about a secret travel backpack pyramid scheme
... but with bitcoins!

new york times posted:

Legal Troubles Barely Subdue a Bitcoin Evangelist’s Sermons
By NATHANIEL POPPER

A few weeks before his arrest at Kennedy Airport, Charles Shrem was standing behind the Manhattan bar he invested in with some of his Bitcoin fortune, buzzing about his big plans for the virtual currency and himself.

With the frenetic pace of a sports announcer, Mr. Shrem, the co-founder of a popular website where Bitcoins could be bought using dollars, jumped between his idea for a Bitcoin debit card; his recent conversations with the owners of a private jet company who wanted to take payment in Bitcoin; his goal of unifying the country’s money transfer laws; and his travel plans to just about every corner of the world, including the trip to Amsterdam he was returning from when he was arrested last week.

“Bitcoin really allows you to have such a global life — it allows you to be able to move anywhere within days if you want to,” the scruffily bearded Mr. Shrem said, standing in front of the sign announcing that the bar, EVR, would accept Bitcoin.


These days, though, Mr. Shrem’s exploits in Bitcoin have him restricted to his parents’ home in Brooklyn, where he awaits trial on federal charges that he smoothed the way for drug transactions online. Mr. Shrem was also accused of buying marijuana himself. He has pleaded not guilty.

The 24-year-old Mr. Shrem, who went through millions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin over the years, is not the first person in the virtual currency world to end up in handcuffs, but he is the most central player to face charges. His recent reversal of fortune — and the meteoric ascent that led up to it — makes him a living symbol of the peaks and valleys that have so far defined the Bitcoin experience, as the value of all the outstanding coins has shot above $10 billion.

The virtual currency — digital money that can be traded between online wallets using virtual keys — has given rise to world-changing ambitions, new-money fortunes and global jet-setting. But all the high living has often seemed just a hairbreadth away from a police raid or government crackdown.

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Shrem said that, particularly during the early days of Bitcoin, it often was not clear what was right and wrong.

“You had so many bad things going on, and so little good, that you had to dive down into it to bring it up,” he said. For his own part, he acknowledged, “back then I wasn’t as educated on what was legal and what was not legal.”

The uncertainty stems, in no small part, from the lack of clarity about what laws apply to Bitcoin transactions — and the relative lack of interest from law enforcement. But in addition to that uncertainty, Bitcoin’s troubles have arisen from its tendency to attract maverick characters who want to test the established order. Before his arrest, Mr. Shrem talked about his difficulties with traditional banks.

Charles Shrem, left, leaving the Manhattan Federal Courthouse with an unidentified friend, where he appeared Jan. 27 on money-laundering charges.
Lucas Jackson/Reuters
Charles Shrem, left, leaving the Manhattan Federal Courthouse with an unidentified friend, where he appeared Jan. 27 on money-laundering charges.
“I don’t actually have a bank account,” he said with an impish grin that he has flashed during many speaking engagements. “No real bank would bank me.”

Jerry Brito, a senior fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, said that Mr. Shrem was “quite a compelling story — a sort of rags-to-riches story, made possible through Bitcoin.”

But, Mr. Brito said, many of the early entrepreneurs may not have had the proper tools for the world they were entering.

“These people were not ready for what they found themselves in the middle of,” Mr. Brito said.

Since Mr. Shrem’s arrest, some of the top figures in the Bitcoin world have distanced themselves from his activities. The Bitcoin Foundation, where Mr. Shrem was vice chairman, said in a statement after he resigned that it was “worth noting that the indictment itself is not against Bitcoin or the community at large.”

But a few have come to his support. Roger Ver, an early investor in Mr. Shrem’s company, said that Mr. Shrem was a “trustworthy person, who would never commit a crime in which there is a victim.”

Nearly everyone who knows Mr. Shrem agrees that he was a charismatic salesman for Bitcoin from almost the first moment he encountered the digital money.

Mr. Shrem has said that he began dabbling in Bitcoin during his final year at Brooklyn College in 2011. He had grown up in Brooklyn, graduated from Yeshiva of Flatbush, a private Jewish school, and founded a start-up during his first years in college.

But Bitcoin quickly became his passion.

“I became obsessed,” he told the website MeetInnovators last year.

He quickly realized how hard it was to exchange dollars into Bitcoin, and so he helped found his company, BitInstant, with another early adopter he met online. To raise money for BitInstant, Mr. Shrem turned on all his salesman charms, even with his mother.

“I said, ‘Mom, I love this idea and I put all my money into it, and we’re growing so quickly,’ ” he said during an interview last year with the Russian-owned television station RT. “She wrote me a check that day.”

He used similar powers of persuasion with Mr. Ver and the Winklevoss brothers, of Facebook fame, who helped lead a $1.5 million fund-raising round.

The brothers have said since Mr. Shrem’s arrest that, “We were passive investors in BitInstant and will do everything we can to help law enforcement officials.”

Mr. Shrem’s charisma quickly took him beyond the bounds of his company. He was a founding member of the Bitcoin Foundation board. He became a regular speaker at Bitcoin events. And he made an investment, in Bitcoin, in EVR, the bar founded by a few friends, which became a regular site for Bitcoin parties. He lived with the other owners in a five-bedroom apartment above the bar and hung out with his girlfriend, who sometimes worked as a bartender downstairs.

A profile of Mr. Shrem last year on the website Vocativ said that in the middle of all this, Mr. Shrem never stopped having fun. According to the article, Mr. Shrem said, “I won’t hire you unless I drink with you or smoke weed with you.”

Mr. Shrem said this week that the comment was taken out of context and was only a joke. But he has never been shy about how widely he ranged in the Bitcoin world. During the recent interview at EVR, he recounted a conversation with a former financial regulator: “She was like, ‘Charlie, you and some of your friends have become such super experts in finance, law and the Patriot Act and all these things.’ ”

“And I’m like, ‘It’s Bitcoin,’ ” he said.

In the end, it was his basic business that got him in trouble. The indictment on money-laundering charges, filed on Jan. 27, contends that he helped exchange dollars into Bitcoin for people who wanted to buy drugs on the online bazaar Silk Road despite knowing their intent and being warned by his business partner.

The charges were surprising given that Mr. Shrem often appeared at Bitcoin events talking about how to trade Bitcoin legally. At a Bitcoin conference last year, he boasted that BitInstant was “going to be the shining city on the hill.”

“We’re going to be the company that succeeded in the United States,” he said. “Worked with governments. Worked with banks. Did compliance.”

At the same time, Mr. Shrem acknowledged that he tested the limits of how much information the government required him to collect from his customers.

“You trust us, we trust you,” is how he described his company’s philosophy at the conference last year. “A lot of regulators frowned on that with me. But we said, ‘It’s going to work,’ and it has worked so far.”

A few months after that event, BitInstant’s bank shut down the company’s account suddenly. The company went offline soon after that and faced a lawsuit from customers who said the company had misrepresented its services, and sought class-action status.

But that had not put a crimp in his big plans. Last month, his goal was to reopen BitInstant in the first quarter of this year after more fund-raising. After the arrest, he is not supposed to deal in Bitcoin, but his big ambitions for the currency, and himself, have not faded.

“Given the opportunity, I will get back on the speaking circuit and be an evangelizer for Bitcoin,” he said on Thursday. “At the same time, the more high-profile you are, the more careful you have to be. It’s scary.”

...! posted:

Last ditch option for you die hard apple fans that are torn between apple & bitcoin. (self.Bitcoin)

submitted 3 hours ago by peilthetraveler

So like many of you that recently bought an iphone 5s, you are probably in a contract like me which makes it hard to get out of your iphone and into an android. I really love my iphone but this poo poo they are pulling has to stop. If they make me choose, I choose bitcoin. So I thought of one last option for us that do not want to give up our iphones and that will give apple a chance to redeem themselves. That option is Carl Icahn. For those of you that don't know, Carl Icahn is a corporate raider that has been trying to get Apple to buy back stock for months. He owns $3.6 billion of apple and he wants the share price to go up. Historically he has gotten the boards of many many companies to do what he wants. He is one of the best negotiators out there. If he knew that 100s of thousands of people are going to leave apple because of the whole bitcoin thing, he might do something to fix it. Carl hates losing money and best of all, he doesnt care about the future of companies, he cares about the present. And presently, apple is about to have a really bad 1st quarter in iphone/ipad sales if they dont change their stance on bitcoin. I say lets go and put replies all over his twitter account https://twitter.com/Carl_C_Icahn and let him know we are all going to stop buying apple products and make sure apple has the worst 1Q its had in decades if he doesnt do something.

hn posted:

Blockchain.info's app undeniably broke the rules and intentionally manipulated the reviewers to get it on the store in the first place. They presented it to the reviewers with only monitoring features, and changed the server it was talking to in order to enable sending features. Anything Bitcoin aside, they needed to be removed just for this one fact.

This is how the app appeared to the reviewers — http://i.imgur.com/pMYRCPL.png

This is how it looked post review — http://i.imgur.com/EsoY4sU.png

double sulk posted:

lol @ bitcoiners thinking that if every bitcoiner stopped buying apple products that it would make even a .00001% dent in apple's profit margins

Happy Noodle Boy posted:

apple is actually doing this

Heresiarch posted:

...! posted:

Mark Cuban Verified account ‏@mcuban

do you really think the mobile Internet is open ? I'm not a bitcoin fanboy , but this has larger ramifications http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/02/blockchain_apple/ …

[–]lolstate 3 points 2 hours ago

Cuban is a smart guy. I believe he proposed the long bitcoin/short gold hedge yesterday. He's probably long bitcoin.

Myself, I'm long bitcoin, short oil. It isn't a hedge, more a doubling down given the recent geopolitics and tells originating from the Winter Olympics.