While I agree that section 230 is useful, your comparison to talk in a supermarket isn't accurate. Talk is ephemeral and easily forgotten.

A real comparison would be someone putting a defaming note on the supermarket bulliten board at the entrance and not leaving it there for several years even after knowing it to be untrue. I'll bet the plaintiff would have better luck in that lawsuit.

I am certainly not an expert in cryptocurrency, but my understanding is that it was conceived not as a mechanism to exchange between two fiat currencies, but as a
  more secure, semi anonymous way to buy stuff without physical presence of the two parties and without involving banks and their 'fees'/'tracking', and maybe more important as a way to avoid inflationary aspects of fiat currencies where governments skew the supply/demand curve simply by printing money. Buying stuff anonymously can be done today simply by sending cash through the postal system. But it is certainly not secure. Hedges against inflation also exist today by attempting to purchase something that has a perceived constant value.

Greater fool theory applies to any object where people are buying it without any other reason than simply because they hope some other person will want it more in the future. If I buy shares of stock, it "should" be because I believe the company issuing that stock has a product or service that is valuable and can earn that the company profit and I want to share that profit, or I believe that this product/service will increase in value because other people purchase it to actually consume it. People who buy bitcoin do not buy it because they want to buy something denominated in bitcoin, or as a hedge against inflation, they are currently buying it because they believe someone else will want it 'more' in the future without any reason for those people to want it more in the future. Classic Greater fool theory.

Your examples of "perceived scarcity" are not really perceived...vintage wine, classic cars, works of art all have a finite number that will not change and may even go down as objects deteriorate or are lost. And there is a subset of the world population (collectors) with too much money and a desire to brag that they own one of these objects and hence the 'demand' can be assumed to be constant or even a bit rising as that collector population increases or becomes wealthier.

But there are plenty of 'scarce' things that nobody wants now. Or scarce things that people did want for period of time, but only until there were no greater fools. Beany Babies are my classic example that are IMHO exactly the same as crypto. They were conceived with one purpose in mind (cute toys for children), and somehow morphed into these 'collectibles'. But the big difference between these and your examples, was that they were not finite...Ty, the manufacture, could manufacture an endless supply.

Banks do certainly drive unwanted behaviours and Greater Fool Theory can apply to items that don't have scarcity. The USA Housing bubble of the mid 2000's is a classic example. Banks were loaning money using 'liar loans' to anybody who appeared at their doors, packaging those loans into 'securities' to sell to other investors, getting the security rating agencies to apply top ratings to those securities with the idea that since there were houses out there for the taking if the loans defaulted, and telling other 'investors' that these were super secure (hey! you can take the house!!! this is super secure). The problem was that people were not buying houses for their intended use (to live in). They were buy houses because they thought there was some other Greater Fool to sell them to in a month or two.

I know the crypto crash is coming....I just don't know how to profit from that crash. But somebody will.

You are correct in your definition of ponzi scheme, but you are incorrect in its application to cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrency is not a ponzi scheme in the classic since since today's money is not really paying off yesterday's investors...if that definition were to be accepted, then ANY asset that rises in value would be a ponzi scheme (Google stock?)

What sets crypto apart from Google is that crypto has no intrinsic value other than the belief that someone else will want it at some point. The only reason that any fiat currency has value is that other goods and/or services are denominated in that currency. You want to buy crude oil? Better buy some dollars first! You want to ship something out of China? You will need some Yuan for that.

Nothing is denominated in any cryptocurrency, except perhaps illegal stuff (drugs, ransomware, etc.). Hence there is no "real" reason to buy cryptocurrency.

What cryptocurrency really is, is a great example of the Greater Fool Theory (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/greaterfooltheory.asp). People are buying crypto only because they hope to sell it to a greater fool, and when we run out of greater fools (and we will....) the whole thing will collapse.

But it is not a ponzi scheme, and hence it is not illegal. There are plenty of people looking to find/recruit greater fools, and unfortunately there are still plenty of potential fools out there.

All of this is great stuff....but this one always raises my hackles:

My company harks about 'don't click on links in the Emails'...they hire companies to send EMails to us unsuspecting peons with links so that they can slap us when we click on them....

Then the IT department, Training Department, Yammer, and all the other tools they run go and send thousands of Emails with links that need clicking....

I think they have suckered me twice to click on one of their test emails...uhhh.

Of course it matters. The whole point of this discussion is that MTG does not want to answer the question, and she does not want to say "I don't want to answer".

If she were to simply say "This is private and I don't want to answer", then the sheep that vote for her may get an inkling that what she is saying contradicts what she does.

But if MTG says "I might break the law by answering" (which is total BS), then it gives a completely different perception to her sheep.

Exposing someone as a hypocrite is important and that is the goal of this entire discussion. I again assert it is her right to say "This is private and I don't want to answer", but she is NOT saying that....and she knows she is not saying that....

Scenario I am thinking is:

1) badguy wants to convert to $$ and transfers coins to a conversion site account. Private key required.
2) on conversion site badguy sells bitcoins to someone else by tranferring to their wallet.
3) Third party then transfers $$ via traditional banking system back to badguy.

If the Third party cooperates with government, then the money can be recovered in step 3. As far as I can tell it says the 'ransom' was recovered...doesn't say it was in bitcoin form when it was recovered.

If I had to guess, I would say that the money was seized at the point where they tried to convert it to fiat currency and introduce it into the traditional banking network. Many more possibilities exist for the governments to seize a wire transfer depending on the institution that it transits.

The problem is nobody has figured out what a crypto currency 'user' really is. How many users are using their crypto currency for what it was intended: actual transactions for goods and services? Nobody is going to flock anywhere because of the underlying technology. My take is that the so called 'investors' (aka gamblers), and 'criminals' who are the main drivers of these crypto coins really don't care about the PoW vs PoS and really don't understand the mechanisms behind it.

Perhaps 'speed' of transaction might become a thing. If it takes 10 minutes to complete one transaction while the miners/stakers create the blocks anybody who can do it quicker and more securely might have a selling point.

The original concept where I can show up on a WWW site click buy, checkout with crypto and somehow receive a good or service without giving any other ID is not a reality anywhere except on the Dark Web where I really don't want to be associated with the transaction. Or perhaps porn or online betting, or my VPN seller....

I know newegg uses bitpay to immediately convert into fiat currency. Bitpay also allows you to buy 'gift cards' for Amazon, but whats the point? If you are attempting to do something anonymously why would you use crypto to buy a gift card and then use that gift card to buy on Amazon unless you create a fake Amazon account.

It comes down to 'if you want to believe it, you are more likely to believe it.'.

That's why George C. Parker was able to 'sell' the Brooklyn Bridge, and Nigerian princes are able to get so much 'help', and cult leaders are able to convince their followers that aliens will be transporting them to Eden.

Not everybody will fall for the con, but there are plenty who want to believe.

Who pays attention to that outside the tech community? Almost no layman even understands 'internet security' and I am pretty sure that if you ask most purchasers of this product whether they even consider the possibility of 'losing control to someone else', the answer would probably be "I don't think that is possible".

They are a private company. All they are doing is saying 'we don't want you do use our platform for this purchase'. If you really want to buy GS, then I am sure there are others willing to let you do that. Hence you are not 'forbidden' by any stretch of the word.

Exactly! Windows10, Windows7, iMAC or Linux....none are secure from this type of crap. I have a neighbor with an iMac and a Javascript popup that said "OMG You have a Virus!!! Call this 800 number to fix this virus...". $200 later I have no idea what shit they put on the computer (if anything). I told her to dispute the CC charge with the bank and I tried to scan for keyloggers. I also told her not to login to any banks for a while..

For the unwashed masses this is scary stuff. Windows10 isn't going to solve anything in this area and lack of patches on Windows7 I contend is a 'good thing' for the crowd that just wants to surf the popular WWW sites and read Email (and maybe skype).

Why do you want him to upgrade? Do you think the machine is not secure enough that it will get pwned?

I would say get a good firewall, and an adblocker and tell him to stick with the well known pron sites and he should be fine until the PC dies. My 85+ year old dad keeps talking about buying a new PC, and I keep discouraging him because the windows10 changes are enough to confuse him and it will certainly be a less satisfying situation. So far the programs most older users need run just fine on windows7.

I am betting that as more PCs migrate to windows10, the attack surface for windows7 will become smaller and the bad guys will not want to put much effort to find new vulnerabilities. At this point, I believe for many of the ageing population the best road to safety is:

1) Use gmail or yahoo mail to allow them to weed most of the spam...they do a pretty good job and I don't find many emails where a bad click will lead to pwning.

2) Secure the browser with a decent ad blocker. More WWW sites are complaining wanting us to disable adblockers and it is probably safe to do so on the more well known sites, but every so often malicious javascript slips in claiming to be a virus and wants a call to India to fix. I just tell him to reboot....

3) give them a normal user account and make it more difficult to install programs that shouldn't be installed.

4) Use a password manager

If these occur, the lack of Windows 7 patches (where some new vulnerabilities are introduced) is probably a good thing.

Productivity, meaning, how much stuff you crank out in a given period is probably up as there should be less distraction at home (depending on the home).

Innovation, on the other had, is probably way down as it is pretty hard to 'brainstorm' over Instant Messaging or Conference calls. Nothing replaces 5 experts in a room and a whiteboard.

I have been WFH for 15 years for a major corp and in the begging I used to get trips back to the mother ship for the purposes of innovation....those stopped after a couple of years, and my (notably biased) opinion is that they are less innovative. That and outsourcing jobs to cheap countries doesn't help.

Why is this "funny"?

I would think that mail in ballots would be the easiest thing for the post offices around the country to handle. Every ballot should look the same, they are all pretty much 'local mail' if it is not a true absentee ballot, and they all go to the same place.

However the Trump cronies certainly could manipulate the post office in that most ballots need to be delivered on or before election day. All someone at the post office would need to do is collect and delay a given set of ballots so that they do not get delivered. Sure, Democratic operatives might arrange that in some post offices, but it is also easy to detect assuming the postal system finally does deliver them (an influx of late ballots would certainly be something to pay attention to).

If Trump and his cronies want a fair democratic election they should ensure that every registered citizen exercises his/her opinion. Oh...wait.... Republicans don't want democratic elections because they might lose. They want a sure thing.

In order to make the fraud pay off by flipping the election you need a LOT of it, or you need to be able to predict where the vote is so close that your efforts will pay off. I believe that anything in those quantities will be noticeable and the fact that we have paper we can audit. This isn't a case where you can add a zero or two to some final talley.