Dude, this is America.

We call Social Security a Ponzi Scheme despite the fact that it's not legally possible to be the last guy to receive a Social Security check. SS is funded by a tax on wages, so as long as somebody's making wages SS Beneficiaries will get checks. It's possible (and actually pretty likely) that the returns of this generation of small families will be lower then the return to previous generations who routinely had three kids, because three kids = three salaries to tax, but nobody is gonna lose all their money.

OTOH it's highly likely that Bitcoins will be rendered worthless by a combination off hackers and governmental regulations. If Bitcoins can be hacked then they are worthless. If they get regulated as much as real money they become worth less then real money because you have to change your real money into Bitcoins. If they don't get regulated they are highly likely to be hacked, because IRL the reason your bank account being hacked is not something you worry about is the thicket of government regulations (and associated agencies) making such an event a) unlikely, b) difficult for the hacker to make profitable, and c) forcing the bank to buy insurance so that you don't screwed.

Like I said in the comment above I got a file and it doesn't require the internet to play.

I suspect what's going on is that Flixter and Ultraviolet have a complicated relationship I don't understand, one (or the other) is supposed to be solely streaming, and the other sells files; and a bunch of people misread thew FAQ.

I'm a backer.

I got a 1.64 GB file, which plays fine even when I turn my WiFi off.

I thought that (by definition) made it a not-streaming video, but hey. Everyone's bitching it's streaming so clearly I don't know what I'm talking about.

You're ignoring a major part of reality:
When banks fail you only lose money if you've got an account with more money then the FDIC insurance limit (currently $100k).

That's one advantage of a government-controlled currency with mature institutions. The second advantage is it's value can;t actually go to zero because somebody will need it to pay taxes. OTOH another theft on the scale of Mt. Gox and nobody is gonna want Bitcoins anymore.

Yeah, but there're systems in place to protect you if you lose that shit in a real financial system.

I left my wallet on the bus in August. I lost a debit card. I realized it wasn't coming back when a $32 charge at Marathon showed up. So I cancelled the card, and contested the charge. It was a hassle, but I got the money back.

With Mt. Gox Bitcoiners are basically screwed. The week before Mt. Gox stopped letting people take money out they were praising Bitcoin's lack of government regulation, now they're demanding Mt. Gox be treated as a government-regulated bank.

You forget this is an audience of engineers. They tend to think outcomes are more important then process.

And the probable outcome of Bitcoin is gonna be the first few investors get incredibly rich, as they bought in for chump-change; with subsequent iterations of investors making less and less (as Bitcoin can't have the same % appreciation from $500 that it did from $5); with the very last set losing their entire investment when some asshole figures out how to use a quantum computer to hack the entire system and grant himself all the bitcoins.

The process actually works a lot like a Ponzi scheme. The first investors are paid off when they sell out to subsequent investors. As long as the next generations of investors can find new blood to buy in they make money. The only way to get around this is give Bitcoin some value by turning it into a commonly-accepted currency, but if it looks like Bitcoiners are creating a legitimate currency then various governments will immediately start regulating it as such, which will mean there's no reason to bother paying money to trade your dollars for Bitcoins.

Because every American has to pay taxes in US Dollars, which means 310 million people in the US need the damn things. Many expats need them, too, because the IRS taxes global income. If your salary is more then $98k you need to pay US Income tax, which means you need US Dollars. If you're gonna need a bunch of dollars every April 15th anyway, it makes sense to use dollars for most of your economic activity.

So the guys boasting about the US Army are kinda right, because the US Army coulda been called in if the Swiss hadn't amended their bank secrecy laws, but it's more IRS cops then troops that make the USD inherently valuable.

OTOH Bitcoin and similar schemes don't have any cops forcing thousands of people to pay taxes in them. Since currency is valuable only if other people will trade you shit for it, and other people are inherently fickle little sons-of-bitchs, it's entirely possible that two years from now Bitcoin will be worth very little. Since other people are also faddish, and prone to irrational exuberance, it's equally possible it'll be up to $10k. With no cops bullying bitcoiners into coughing bitcoin every year it's just not predictable whether anybody will want it in a few years.

I understand your argument perfectly. You think that if the Fourth bans massive, intrusive, law-enforcement databases in government hands then (under several common law principles) it bans the government from using those in private hands.

The problems with your argument are two-fold. First the databases are not explicitly banned. What's explicitly banned is government agents doing the search to find the information that can be put into the database. You can argue this means they are implicitly banned, but government access to the 18th-century equivalent of a massive database (ie: some dude's memory and/or paper records) is explicitly allowed by the "oaths and affirmations" clause. Given that the current Supreme Court's response to unwarranted GPS tracking was to consider whether the Founders would have thought it was legal for an 18th-century cop to hide in a carriage that's pretty important. They're gonna say "If the government can use 'oaths and affirmations,' then it can pay for those 'oaths or affirmations,' and it doesn't matter that the 'oath' comes from a database."

The second problem is that Common Law cannot trump the Constitution, or Statute, or even an Executive Order. Common Law provides a bunch of very basic legal principles that allow the government to function without bothering to recreate every legal idea that's ever existed. But it can't trump the laws that governments do create. Some states, for example, define the crime of "robbery" in their criminal codes. Virginia doesn't. That means in Virginia the common-law definition is used (in legal parlance it is "controlling), whereas in those other states the non-common-law definition is controlling. When common law contradicts a state-level statute common law loses.

So you have to base your argument solely on the Constitution. Common law just is so low-level that state-level statutes can change it, therefore the federal Constitution kicks it's ass. Since Nixon started gutting Judicial activism in the 70s, your argument has to be based on a fairly literal reading of the Constitution. Judges who speculate on 18th-century GPS just are not gonna go for an argument based on a vague principle that isn't explicitly defined, and isn't related directly to the technologies available in 1789..

Are you sure you're not the one twisting the Constitution? Because it seems to me that you have an idea of what a reasonable Constitution should say, and you're subconsciously reading that into our Constitution. This is what our Constitution has to say about law enforcement's right to gather information:

That's not a blanket ban on information-gathering. It explicitly allows the government to gather whatever information it wants, as long as the method used to gather that information is not an "unreasonable search." It's allowed to do unreasonable searches, provided it gets a Judge to sign off on the warrant, and the warrant is limited in scope.

You'll also note that the Amendment cannot be used to protect you from things other people tell the government because those other people are agreeing to be searched when they snitch, which means the government doesn't need a warrant. In fact the Amendment assumes snitching is legal because "oaths or affirmations" from third parties about you are written into the Amendment. Which means you can't ban a business specifically designed to create aforesaid "oaths and affirmations" without breaking the Amendment you're claiming to be defending.

It would be very nice if the Founders had included a privacy Amendment that actually protected privacy. But they didn't. They wrote an Amendment that protects people from searches (but only unreasonable searches) by government agents. They also have a First Amendment allowing you to personally record any information you want, and tell that information to whomever you want for whatever price you want. It's called the First Amendment.

The US Constitution is not common law. Common Law is only binding on the Federal government to the extent that it supplies the definitions of words, phrases, and legal concepts that are actually explicitly in the Constitution. You "can't say "Common Law principle X restricts ordinary people, therefore it restricts the government." That just isn't the case.

The airplane analogy is quite instructive. Just as I am not legally allowed to fly a plane, the government is not legally allowed to create certain massive databases*. But since other people are allowed to do these things (ie: fly a plane or create a massive, intrusive database), both me and the government can pay them to do it.

As I've said before, this is actually the biggest security hole we've found in 200 years of Constitutional Law. It's trivial for a bad actor in government to get someone outside of government, and thus not restricted by any of the Constitutional bans on governmental oppression, to do the dirty work. He won't be as efficient as the Gestapo or KGB, and he needs some help from all three branches; but that doesn't mean he can't actually do his dirty work.

And the problem is in the basic architecture of the document. It can't be fixed without an Amendment or a bunch of Judges who are convinced the country will be much better off if they BS this one.

*The Census Bureau and the IRS are examples of perfectly legal extremely massive databases.

The difference is that instead of government lawyers making the point, it was their fellow judges. When a lawyer tells you you really should do what his clients always wanted because that'll hurt said clients you're not supposed to believe him.

When a Judge says the same thing you're legally required to believe him.

Which principle of common law are you referring to? Most principles of common law don't actually apply to the government. Sovereign immunity is a bitch. Even for non-governments, just because it's illegal for you to do something doesn't mean it's illegal for you to pay someone else to do that thing. If you don't have a pilot's license you can still pay someone with such a license to fly you places.

The Founders solution to the Patriot Act problem would probably have been periodic Constitutional conventions. Unlike us, they had lived under four very different Constitutional regimes (the Brits, the Continental Congress of the Revolution, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution); so they'd probably be very surprised that we decided to have a permanent Army but still hadn't amended the Constitution to allow ourselves a permanent army. Or that we'd decided Judicial Review was great but still hadn't written it into the Constitution.

Read the summary.

The FISA Court sided with you in ordering the data destroyed. But that really screws up the lawsuit against the NSA because if the data's destroyed it's trivial for the NSA to lie about how useful it was. You can't really prove that cell phone metadata wasn't a key factor in the capture of Criminal X if the metadata has all been deleted.

So the district court ordered the NSA to keep the data, and the FISA Court said that's okay as long as they don't look at it.

By this standard Snowden is also guilty of treason. He didn't protect US Democracy at all when he revealed the NSA and Aussies were spying on Australia. But he did certainly make it harder for the Indonesians to ally with us.

Of course that's ridiculous, which is why historically you have to be either actually shooting at the US, or supplying info to people actually shooting at the US, to count; and nobody involved in the NSA leaks has been doing that.

Re-read the Constitution. It's only about democracy in the wet dreams of particularly stupid high school civics teachers.

It specifically allows slavery, even tho it's too cowardly to use the word. It even gives slave-holding states extra votes in Congress. There is no right to vote. The Constitution was adopted partly because the preceding Articles of Confederation hadn't created a strong enough government to ethnically cleanse Ohio of Indians properly.

I'll admit that it turned into a fairly democratic, and pro-freedom document; and that the Founders were really good at pretending they only wanted to protect freedom. But we were not a Democracy in any meaningful sense of the term prior to the Abolition of Slavery, and we not really a very good Democracy until LBJ broke segregation. Since the legal definition of treason precede both events it cannot possibly be related to the US being a democracy.