02.20.14
Posted in Fiat money fear and loathers at 4:55 pm by George Smith
The BitCoin community has turned on Mt. Gox, it’s old favorite exchange, at least for the moment.
Today the rate hit a low of $109 with the average being $159.
At the Financial Times, the feeling is the jig is up:
Protester Kolin Burges, who started dabbling in virtual currencies last summer, says that he should have known Mt Gox was “a bit dodgy???, and accepts that he should not have stashed all his Bitcoins – the proceeds of a well-timed sale of Litecoins – in the exchange’s vaults as late as January 28. (To see Kolin, check “They had a Bitcoin sad” where the programmer indicated he had “hundreds” of them locked up at Mt. Gox.)
In the vacuum between Mt Gox’s public statements, he notes, rumours and conspiracy theories are rife.
“Exchanges need to prove that they have X amount of coins, and X amount of cash,??? says Mr Burges, an Android games developer hoping to “semi-retire??? if he gets his coins back.
Prices on Mt Gox have been removed from a benchmark Bitcoin index run by Coindesk. BitcoinEast, a start-up incubator, says it will take Mt Gox off its site, howtobuybitcoins.info.
An online petition to remove Mt Gox managing director Mark Karpelès from the board of the Bitcoin Foundation, a non-profit that serves as the industry’s governing body, has attracted more than 750 signatures.
A Los Angeles seller of BitCoin who I have linked to is currently advertising at $112, pegging his asking price to Mt. Gox. One might come to the conclusion he is trying to unload.
All other sellers are keeping their prices high, at anywhere from the high 500s to mid-600, in effect, seemingly market betting that Mt. Gox will fail and be removed from the BitCoin economy.
This has led to what has typified BitCoin, speculation, and behavior that is just like that of Wall Street with some rushing to buy the rights to Bitcoins at Mt Gox at the depressed price, betting that eventually the system will restore itself and they will have turned a nice profit.
Of course, if it does not, they lose everything.
“BitCoin exchange faces ‘Whirlpool of Death,'” reads the International Business Times.
Of course! You can donate to this blog in BitCoin, through Coinbase.
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Or, if my system is up, you can send direct to my old Bitcoin wallet.
1AVgAs6MmoFGfDCUaWvJVKtJurZFyqt9ps
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02.18.14
Posted in Bioterrorism, Fiat money fear and loathers, Ricin Kooks at 12:06 pm by George Smith
A 19-year-old boy in south Florida is set to be imprisoned, possibly for life, as the result of a federal investigation of the Black Market Reloaded website, a replacement for the infamous Silk Road, where there were “numerous offerings for the sale of illegal and harmful goods, including but not limited to biological agents, toxins, firearms, ammunition, explosives, controlled substances, counterfeit goods and fraudulent documents,” according to an FBI document here.
Jesse Korff of Labelle, Florida, was arrested by agents of the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations when he delivered two vials of liquid containing a small but detectable amount of the poison abrin to them. It was the final part of a transaction started on the Black Market Reloaded site when one of the undercover men contacted Korff, inquired about buying the poison and advanced him 1.608 Bitcoin for it.
Like the Silk Road, Black Market Reloaded was hosted on the encrypted Tor network where many people seem to still believe federal agents cannot get at them. Black Market Reloaded was subsequently taken down and the sting shows that Homeland Security and the FBI are well into operations aimed at keeping similar websites and Bitcoin markets for crime under heavy surveillance.
From the Department of Justice website:
“HSI has worked tirelessly with the FBI and other law enforcement partners to combat underground websites such as BMR,??? said Andrew McLees, Special Agent in Charge of HSI Newark. “Anyone who can sell abrin, a potential agent for chemical terrorism, must be stopped. The arrest of Korff shows HSI’s commitment to protecting the public from individuals who show a callous disregard for their safety in the interest of making a buck.???
Beginning in April 2013, HSI special agents conducted an investigation of illicit sales activity on BMR. The website provides a platform for vendors and buyers to conduct anonymous online transactions involving the sale of a variety of illegal goods, including biological agents, toxins, firearms, ammunition, explosives, narcotics and counterfeit items. Unlike mainstream e-commerce websites, BMR is only accessible via the Tor network – a special computer network designed to enable users to conceal their identities and locations. Transactions on BMR are conducted using Bitcoin, a decentralized form of electronic currency that only exists online.
Korff maintained a seller’s profile on BMR, through which he negotiated the sale of two liquid doses of abrin to the undercover agent. During their online conversations, Korff told the buyer about his delivery methods – concealing vials in a carved-out and re-melted candle – and discussed how much abrin was needed to kill a person of a particular weight and how best to administer the toxin.
Korff and the buyer agreed on a total purchase price of $2,500 for two doses of the poison. The undercover transferred a deposit – the equivalent of $1,500 in Bitcoin – from a bank account in New Jersey to Korff on Jan. 6, 2014.
A federal task force then raided the house where Jesse Korff was living. A local news report reads:
Investigators tell WINK News they found a pipe bomb, firearms, ricin and meth labs at Jesse Korff’s home in Muse. After hearing of the evidence, the judge said Korff should stay behind bars.
The photo of the task force raid is from this blog.
Abrin, a poison extracted from the fairly common Precatorius, or rosary pea plant, has, to my knowledge, never killed anyone in the US during my time. It doesn’t happen. It’s not a hazard, even accidentally.
Seeds and the plant can be easily purchased on-line. It is even common in the woods of south Florida.
Nevertheless, abrin is a poison, related to and more toxic than ricin.
And well over 20 years ago, before Jesse Korff was born, young men began copying the poison and bomb-making self-published pamphlets by America’s survivalist right into cyberspace. From there, they traveled around the world.
So one reads in the FBI document:
Abrin can be extracted from the seed. The extraction of the abrin from the seeds is relatively easy and does not require technical expertise. Procedures and methods for extracting abrin are available from open sources on the Internet.
With regards to abrin recipes and the poison’s lure as an efficient and untraceable way to put someone to death, Maxwell Hutchkinson’s pamphlet, The Poisoner’s Handbook, published by Loompanics in 1988, is the main source.
Many readers are familiar with my comment on it, which can be reviewed here.
Terrorists have never used abrin as a weapon of mass destruction although the FBI and Homeland Security special agents mention their expertise in WMDs in the Korff document.
Nevertheless, eight years ago at the height of the war on terror Homeland Security conducted exercises imagining they could.
This was part of the national security megaplex belief that everything deadly that could be dreamed up or theorized was “easy for terrorists” to do.
From Steve Aftergood’s Secrecy Bulletin in 2005:
The notion of a hyper-competent terrorist who can easily overcome the physical and technical obstacles that perplex and detain ordinary mortals has become a common rhetorical trope in public discussions of terrorism.
George Smith of GlobalSecurity.org conducted a Nexis search for the phrase “easy for a terrorist” (and similar formulations) and found about one hundred mainstream media citations over the past two years.
Judging from press reports, nearly everything comes “easy” to terrorists:
“From food terror, to manipulating the flu virus, to blowing up chemical plants, to getting driver’s licenses, to coming across the Mexican border, to buying large caliber guns, to shooting down planes with ground-to-air missiles, to spreading hoof-and-mouth disease and destroying the cattle industry, to paralyzing Los Angeles by attacking power stations, to causing major blackouts, to putting anthrax in bagged rice,” Smith found. “There really is no end to it. It’s stupefying in its universality.”
Such glib assessments of terrorist capabilities are worse than simply wrong. They spread fear and a sense of helplessness, doing the work of the terrorists, and they threaten to dissipate limited security and financial resources in a hundred different directions.
I wrote about the Homeland Security exercise positing abrin as a terrorist weapon on the blog around the same time.
It was also published at The Register and here are parts, excerpted:
Did you know you can buy a WMD on eBay? It’s true …
[It’s] rosary peas, seeds of the Crab’s Eye weed, which is commonplace in Florida and known as ratti in India. It also contains the protein abrin, which is more toxic than ricin, another similar enzyme.
Somehow mankind has muddled through, managing not to exterminate itself with rosary peas, which have been used in ornamental jewelry and ripped out of lawns by annoyed gardeners.
That is, until the US-led war on terror, a war in which the incompetent concoct terror scenarios about weapons of mass destruction, scenarios which toss common sense and critical-thinking out the window. With GlobalSecurity.Org Senior Fellow T-shirt on, it has been determined that this is done so that “readiness” may be practiced and the public convinced the tax dollars going to the Dept. of Homeland Security are well spent.
By-lined FORT INDIANTOWN GAP (a dilapidated Pennsy US army post where Cuban refugees were once held and DD rode in an armored personnel carrier as a Boy Scout), the Lebanon Daily News reported a week or so ago:
“With the early morning frost still coating the grass, the men raised their guns and slowly moved in.
“Clad in white-and-blue HazMat suits, bulletproof vests and gas masks, the men split into three groups and waited for the signal. Then, with the sudden crash of battering rams smashing into doors, they sped into action.
“The raid at the Gap was part of ‘Exercise Wide Vigilance,’ a bigger training simulation held yesterday by the South Central Pennsylvania Regional Counter-Terrorism Task . . . ”
And what was the terror plot that was being broken up? A lab said to be using rosary peas to make a weapon of mass destruction.
Terrorists planned to explode bombs at the two sites, sending the [abrin] into the air. [One man who designed the exercise] said that, according to his calculations and the size of the lab, enough of the chemical was made to kill 2,500 people.”
But abrin has never been used as a WMD.
Without getting into the technical details, it’s not possible to make rosary peas into a WMD. Technically speaking, it is possible to envision people being individually poisoned by abrin, if they were a target of a single assassination, or somehow mistakenly chewed and ate a couple rosary peas. Because of the latter, the FDA has been doing a small bit of work aimed at examining how to look for abrin in food.
But the US government has gone well beyond this, constructing a public belief system in which demonic menace is said to lurk everywhere and where death by exotic means is easy to achieve. It’s a system in which terror advisors and consultants simply make things up on a frequent basis. And they make such useless exercises up because it is a way in which to get paid by the government for aiding in alleged terror preparedness.
“Yesterday’s exercise, the biggest of its kind in the region, was funded through the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security” wrote the Lebanon newspaper.
Readers of this blog may suspect that the addled concept of rosary peas as a WMD has filtered down from sources it has read of previously. Like the benighted chemical warfare recipes in the Afghan Manual of Jihad or Maxwell Hutchkinson’s Poisoner’s Handbook.
And they’re right!
The Hutchkinson book, which has been responsible for so much trash belief re the capabilities of terrorists and their chemical dreams of mass death, does not disappoint. It furnishes the usual “wisdom” – wisdom in this case meaning the lack of it – on the subject.
On abrin, from page 8, in a section entitled “precatory beans:”
“Precatory bean plants may be purchased at nurseries nationwide.
“Some years ago, a few very stupid people came up with the idea of using the attractive scarlet and sable beans for rosary beads… If your target is strongly religious, then these beads can easily be modified to kill.”
Hutchkinson continues with the advice to scarify the rosary peas so that the abrin might leak out and poison anyone who handles them. Since abrin is a protein, it can’t be much of a contact poison, any more than you can eat a piece of meat by putting it on your skin, but Hutchkinson, of course, does not know this. He is more interested in poisoning the Pope.
“As the abrin slowly kills your target, an interesting cycle will begin,” he writes. “The worse your target gets, the more he will pray with his rosary beads, which will only make him worse… ”
“These items make wonderful presents for the religious target. We’d send one to the Pope, but he already has nineteen hundred years of Christian spoils to adorn himself with.”
So what is to be thought when a local government carries out a terror exercise in which the threat is based upon such wretched mythology? To paraphrase Hutchkinson, “Some days ago, a few very stupid people came up with the idea . . .”
“[When] you handle the abrin you should were [sic] gloves,” Jesse Korff writes to an undercover agent at one point, indicating the lore of Hutchkinson, that you can poison someone with it through their fingers, has passed down through the terror age.
Well over a quarter of a century ago I was always able to find Hutckinson’s recipe for abrin at the end of a telephone line. With the squeal of a US Robotics modem you’d find it archived, along with lots of other alleged means to easy mayhem and malice, on bulletin board systems run off PCs in the bedrooms of young men.
With regards to the poison and other informations from the computer underground, what it was called back then, not much has changed.
You can do it cheaper and faster, and find a black market for it on the Tor network. You can even pay in Bitcoin!
But selling vials of a solution containing the grinding of rosary peas is a terribly awful way to earn money.
Why, yes! This blog now accepts BitCoin!
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02.17.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Fiat money fear and loathers at 2:26 pm by George Smith
This morning, Bitcoin could be purchased in Los Angeles, as USC, for $317, the average price on Mt. Gox.
The same seller is now advertising 268 with the caveat, “Price is Mt. Gox market price at time of transaction.”
Mt. Gox, as of right at post publication, is offering an average $320, a low of $248, and a high of $411.
Linking is pointless as the exchange rate is so changeable.
Bitcoincharts dot com offers a spread of pricing, from $629 at BitStamp in the US to a low of 207 from Mt. Gox (in Euros), 278 in dollars.
But why would you buy any BitCoin that offered at an online exchange for higher values? Isn’t the purpose of the network to grease the best, most frictionless, most advantageous deal? It is, by design, an every-man-for-himself currency.
There is no advantage in buying a Bitcoin at any of the elevated rates, either from local traders or on-line exchanges. If there is a wide spread in valuation, this money is only as valuable at the lowest price, presumably sold where the most volume is conducted.
One of the ways to restore the value, then, is by price fixing. The Bitcoin sellers all look at the charts and unilaterally agree to not sell at anything below the highest number. Ha-ha.
Thought exercise: How much have the Winklevoss twins lost on their Bitcoin holdings over the weekend?
Yes, I’ll try anything once. This blog now accepts BitCoin charity.
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02.16.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Fiat money fear and loathers at 12:40 pm by George Smith
Bitcoin won't buy Colt 45 to ease the pain of being spit on the sidewalk of America like used chewing gum.
I maintain Bitcoin is the perfect currency for our time. Or, at least, the most fitting. Take the example of the
experts called to testify to its goodness by the state of New York: the Winklevoss twins.
Why are the Winklevoss twins so wealthy? What have they materially contributed to society that is so valuable that makes them so?
They were born into the upper class.
By dint of association/connection with Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard they were eventually able to chisel a settlement fortune from him and Facebook to go away. Are they programmers? No.
Would such a legal option have been open to average Americans without the resources of an upper class? No.
Why did they get a pistachio commercial offer? Because they were famous for being semi-famous in the Social Network movie and chiseling Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.
Why were the Winkelvoss twins able to become Bitcoin experts?
Because they had the money from the upper class and sucking cash from Zuckerberg, enough to at least buy up 1.5 million and somethings worth of Bitcoins.
And why are they successful at getting others to invest in their consulting services, hedge funding and so on? Because they are famous to semi-famous for being famous or semi-famous and people see the money sloshing in news articles in which the Winklevoss twins appear.
So the Winklevosses are wealthy because they were born to it and became adept at siphoning big money from large pools of it as the opportunities are presented when it splashes around.
Bitcoin, which is for hoarding, gaming the system, deception, chiseling and speculation, is a perfect match with them.
The majority of people cannot do anything with Bitcoins except pay too many dollars for one. Therefore they either do not know what Bitcoins are or just shrug their shoulders at the idea. Bitcoin is not for the hoi polloi. The Winklessvoss twins are the class who appreciate Bitcoin.
When I entered my name to create an account at Coinbase, the Bitcoin exchange, a week or so ago, I was offered, like everyone is, a button and mechanism to sell goods or accept donations in the currency.
To sell, the service conveniently auto-filled a good I might want to sell for Bitcoins: alpaca socks.
I asked Google whether I could buy Colt 45 or King Cobra malt liquors with Bitcoin. The internet did not provide an answer.
I take that as a ‘No’.
From the Wall Street Journal:
Bitcoin is proving to be the joke of a currency that many experts and pundits had predicted. This is too bad, because the world could use something akin to Bitcoin …
It was recently reported that a Silk Road 2.0 site had been hacked, and that all 4,474 Bitcoins had been stolen. The heist was valued at close to $2.7 million at the time …
The cheapest price for a Bitcoin in Pasadena, today — $344.
The current price on Coinbase: $618
The current price on Mt.Gox (in Euros): 187
The nerds who traveled about an hour to buy a Subway sandwich with Bitcoin in Allentown, WhiteManistan, very close to where I lived many many years ago! (Note: Story posted at one of the internet equivalents of giant hogweed, Medium, the blogging platform started by the Twitter man who realized 140 characters weren’t quite enough and “wanted to give rationality a fighting chance.”)
Make me a believer. I’ll try anything once. This blog now accepts BitCoin.
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Tip o’ the hat to Frank at Pine View Farm for scratch-padding.
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02.10.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Fiat money fear and loathers at 1:13 pm by George Smith
From the pipes:
Bitcoin’s value has dropped sharply after one of the largest trading exchanges said there was a flaw in the virtual currency’s underlying software.
MtGox said it had halted transfers to external Bitcoin addresses on Friday after detecting “unusual activity”.
It said an investigation had revealed it was possible for thieves to fool the transaction process so that double the correct amount of bitcoins would be sent.
Bitcoins fell from $700 (£427) to $540.
A spokesperson at the BitCoin Foundation said the problem was the exchange’s, not Bitcoin’s.
Today, Mt. Gox resumed processing BitCoin transactions.
Additionally: “The use of Bitcoin for alleged money laundering led to the arrests of two men in the US last week … Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle told Bloomberg in a statement that the ‘arrests may be the first state prosecutions involving the use of Bitcoins in money laundering operations.’ ”
The price of a BitCoin in Pasadena, today — $576 (Note trader has limited purchase to about a quarter of a Bitcoin.)
Thought exercise: How much have the Winklevosses lost in the last week on their BitCoin holdings?
Also simmering, Russia becoming hostile to BitCoin.
On-line public relations for BitCoin fanatic and fiat money fear and loather, Overstock’s Patrick Byrne:
Patrick Byrne says the zombie apocalypse is coming, and there’s one thing that can save us: bitcoin.
He tells me this during a phone call from his car, a black Tesla Model S that’s winding its way through the mountains above Salt Lake City, on its way to Byrne’s home in the Utah ski country. Byrne is the CEO and chairman of Salt Lake’s Overstock.com …
He has long warned that our economy is hurtling toward another massive recession — what he calls the zombie apocalypse — and he believes bitcoin can shelter us from the fallout.
If the digital currency reaches its true potential, he tells me, it might even avert this apocalypse all-together. “Someday, either zombies walk the Earth or something close to that,??? says Byrne, the son of the man who built the GEICO insurance empire …
“It can make our country more robust,??? says Byrne, a disciple of the Austrian school of economics, which holds that our economy should rest on the judgments of individuals, not a central authority …
Conveniently, from E. J. Dionne, today — on the Austrian school of economics:
Those who follow [Austrian economists] Hayek and Mises would have us forget this history, or rewrite it beyond comprehension. They would also have us overlook that Hayek’s “own historical justification for apolitical market economics was entirely wrong,??? as the late Tony Judt put it in “Thinking the Twentieth Century,??? his extraordinary dialogue with his fellow historian Timothy Snyder, published in 2012, after Judt’s death.
Hayek believed, Tony Judt said, that “if you begin with welfare policies of any sort — directing individuals, taxing for social ends, engineering the outcomes of market relationships — you will end up with Hitler.???
But to the contrary, postwar initiatives along Keynesian lines are precisely what prevented both the resurgence of fascism …
“Years later, when I spend a few days with Byrne at Overstock headquarters and sit down for dinner at his home, a jewel of a log cabin just outside the ski resort of Park City, Utah …” writes Cade Metz for Wired.
Patrick Byrne, explaining what he believes in, poorly:
And when this Robespierre forces you to submit to him, he’s “forcing you to be free???, in Rousseau’s phrase. And that goes on through Hagel and [Marx] where the . . . you know it’s the …. And it’s [Lenin] where it’s the vanguard … party; Hitler, where it’s [das Volk] …. It’s the prerogative of . . . It’s the people . . . Real freedom is frowned on, and subordinating yourself to the work of the people …, [arbeit macht frei] as they said over in the concentration camp gates. And somewhere along the way, the intellectuals from the continent, I think, lost this sense of freedom, as this basic idea of people choosing their own ends in life. And it’s not . . . it’s . . . it’s a . . . it’s a . . . When I listen to people talk in politics, I go right back to this route. And it’s pretty easy to see that for most of them, they’ve just taken the wrong fork. They are, in one way or another, defining liberty and freedom as subordinating yourself to the ends that they . . . that someone else has chosen for you. And that . . . that’s valueless …
In fact Voltaire read a book by Rousseau where he . . . where when he read this stuff, he wrote Rousseau a letter where he said, “Dear Monsieur Rousseau, I’ve had the pleasure of reading your book against the human race.??? Well he had it exactly right. This philosophy . . . this continental philosophy from Rousseau, Kant, Hagel, Nietzsche, you know, Marx, [Lenin], of course – it’s anti-freedom. It’s . . . it’s [a] philosophy against the human race.
American plutocrat libertarians, a class unto themselves.
Make me a believer. I’ll try anything once. Escape from WhiteManistan, now accepting BitCoin.
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02.07.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Fiat money fear and loathers at 9:54 am by George Smith
BitCoin fans, hard at work, create problem for big BitCoin bank:
The price of Bitcoin dropped on Friday after one of the leading exchanges that handles trading of the crypto-currency halted withdrawals.
Mt. Gox, which calls itself the most established Bitcoin exchange, said all Bitcoin withdrawals “will be on pause.” It did not say when withdrawals would resume but said it would provide an update on Feb. 10.
Mt. Gox said an increase in withdrawal requests caused “technical” problems.
“To understand the issue thoroughly, the system needs to be in a static state …”
The price of Bitcoin in Pasadena, today — $763
“The price of a Bitcoin dropped to $701.56 on Friday, down 8.2% from $764.35 the previous day, according to Coinbase, a Bitcoin digital wallet and online platform,” reads USA Today.
Make me a believer. I’ll try anything once. Escape from WhiteManistan now accepts Bitcoin.
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From a New York Times profile on Charles Shrem, the 24 year old BitCoin millionaire recently arrested and charged with money-laundering by the US government:
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.???
Would Ronald Reagan have loved BitCoin?
Perhaps the Winklevoss twins could answer that. They helped raise a $1.5 million dollar investment in Shrem’s business.
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01.27.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Fiat money fear and loathers at 1:19 pm by George Smith
NYT:
One of the most prominent players in the Bitcoin universe, Charles Shrem, was arrested by federal prosecutors on Sunday and accused of helping grease the wheels for drug transactions on the now defunct online bazaar Silk Road.
Mr. Shrem was the founder and chief executive of a popular website, Bitinstant, where Bitcoins could be bought using dollars. The criminal charges unsealed on Monday by the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan claim that Mr. Shrem used his company to convert money anonymously for people interested in buying narcotics on the Silk Road site, and also personally bought drugs on the site. He was arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport …
[And the famously wealthy Bitcoin speculators, the Winkle-Nuisances]
Bitinstant stopped operating last summer, but the site was viewed as a pioneer in the industry, and Mr. Shrem had recently said that he planned to restart it. The company won early backing from Winkelvoss Capital, which is run by the Winkelvoss [sic, since corrected] brothers, who were early players in Facebook.
In a statement, Winkelvoss [sic] Capital said, “We were passive investors in BitInstant and will do everything we can to help law enforcement officials. We fully support any and all governmental efforts to ensure that money laundering requirements are enforced, and look forward to clearer regulation being implemented on the purchase and sale of Bitcoins.???
In the past few weeks, various reports have indicated that 90 percent of all Bitcoins are held by hoarders.
The current and ridiculous price of one BitCoin in Pasadena: between 970 and 1040 dollars.
Like corporate stock that rises in value when employees are fired en masse, BitCoin speculators rush to push up the value when bad stuff happens.
It is the perfect money for our time, a gift for wealthy tech sociopaths.
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