That's a good idea, because the least accountable branch of government is surely on your side! /s

The judicial branch and the supreme court serve much the same purpose as the Tsar in old Russia. No matter how bad it gets, it's not the Tsar's fault. It's the noblemen's fault. The Tsar just has bad advisers. If only we could get past them and talk to him and make him understand, it'd all be OK.

Frankly, you're not impressing anyone with your tough-nose naturalism. Mosquito bites me because that's it's nature. I murder mosquito with prejudice as often as I can because that's my nature.

Not an entomologist, but it seems you have some awfully mammalian assumptions here.

I hope this is satire to mock climate deniers.

Yeah. Pretty much everyone agrees on the first bit, that somehow Mt Gox got into trouble, and tried to get out of it by gambling with the customers' money like a bank (but uninsured!). The question is what that trouble was. It does not go back to when bitcoin was worth pennies, that I'm pretty confident of. I'm also pretty confident that it wasn't the transaction malleability bug itself - at worst, that could have drained the

However, the transaction malleability bug might have been the trigger - or rather, the bank run it provoked was the trigger. As people were trying to withdraw bitcoin, Gox tried to dip into their long-term storage (cold wallet) - and they made an unpleasant discovery.

What? That some of the cold wallets were empty, drained by an unfaithful employee? That they'd lost the passwords to some cold wallets? I don't know. Anyway, they briefly tried some desperate things with the money they had, in order to fix the problem before anyone knew. It failed. Then they went to other exchanges for a "bailout", trying to buy more time to fix the issue. Then the other exchanges demanded they come clean and reported them to the authorities.

Don't put your ignorance on display. The bug in bitcoin was that something you would think could be used as a transaction ID, wasn't in fact usable as such. Making it possible to trick people to resend money they had in fact already sent. No money was duplicated, and by itself, the bug did not allow theft (it only enabled some form of social engineering attacks).

Not this again.

There are a number of things that are valuable, even if you personally think there's no reason they should be valuable. Old Magic the Gathering cards, most of the stuff on exhibit in MoMA, pieces of paper with numbers on them from foreign lands, etc. If you steal these things, you're still a thief in the law's eyes.

For that matter, if you steal something which has no market value, but only value to the owner, you're still a thief. Don't go stealing people's family albums.

In some jurisdictions, even the stuff people throw into the trash is illegal to take.

Bitcoin does not have to be a currency to be recognized as valuable. Since it provably has a market value, the state would have to preemptively declare it worthless, or claims about it unenforcable, for it to lack protection. If you steal bitcoin and get caught, you're going to jail.

So the question becomes, do you trust your government?

Well, do I have any choice? Not a meaningful one that I can see. Since I already have to trust government in umpteen areas of my life already, trusting it one more (money) doesn't make much difference. But it's worth thinking about how we can decentralize all that trust. Right now, no one is asking more interesting questions around that than the bitcoin folks.

These are problems, but they aren't insurmountable problems. One of the things which changed my mind about bitcoin a bit was seeing all the damn clever stuff they've come up with - paper wallets, offline transaction signing, etc. Yeah, if my machine gets hacked, I may lose what's in my desktop wallet.. but presently, that is so little that it's an acceptable price to pay to find out I've been hacked ;)

About exchanges, you know what Bismarck said ... Those who know how laws and sausages are made, do not like either. There's a lot of shoddy security in our conventional banking system, too. Think about credit cards, about how rotten security they actually have if you look objectively on it. With bitcoin, I at least know there's some really smart cryptographic design at the core of it.

You can't be sure. You can never be sure. The question is what risks you're willing to take. Right now you (and me, and everyone else) trust a lot in "too big to fail", or "too many to fail" - that we're in the same boat as enough people, or enough powerful people, that if something gets messed up too bad the powers that be (government and non-government) will set it right. To avoid food riots if nothing else.

Wouldn't it be nice with a little more decentralization, a little more democracy, a little more trusting in math than trusting in the self-interest of a powerful few? Bitcoin is at heart an experiment in distributed consensus-mechanisms. It's an interesting experiment.

EU isn't a country, and yes, free speech is protected as a human right. You can insult famous people in Britain all you like, as long as you don't allege something about them which is not true. The problem is how Britain's libel laws favor ligitive rich accusers, but Britain is hardly the only places that favors rich, ligitive bastards.

There is no burden of proof on GEMA, they can demand the takedown of any video, whether it contains something they hold rights to or not. Thus, "it may contain" is the strongest thing Google can say. It is also the undeniable truth that Youtube does not have a license, as such, it's 100% correct that GEMA hasn't granted one. It's true no matter what the demands are on either side.

Youtube has no obligation to paint GEMA in a favorable light, as long as their statements are true. They can say GEMA are evil, unreasonable greedy misers, and it would be perfectly legal free speech (as it should be).

So your work filter blocks Human Rights Watch? Interesting.

"Two men"? You mean two CIA agents, or two torture victims?

It got no meaningful consequences for anyone, either in Sweden or the US. Italy at least had the guts to issue arrest warrants for the CIA criminals, no such thing in lapdog Sweden.

I'm not here to entertain your easy dismissals. I'd say the burden is on you to show Sweden's government has changed character. Got anything?

They used to blindly give the US what they want, even when it violated fundamental human rights .If it was your human rights that were at stake, I think you should be forgiven for not trusting that they have changed.

Instead, what we should really do is improve the drilling techniques to avoid/minimize leakage.

No. In order to say that, we need to know how feasible it is to reduce leakage. It's by no means certain it's easy or even possible.

Try dangling this in front of your nose. After a day or two, you might see it.

http://www.hrw.org/news/2006/1...

UK is more powerful , and more nationalistic. The Conservatives may be just as deferential to the US in private as Sweden's ruling party, but they would pay a big price with their constituents if they acted like lapdogs in public.