Liberty Reserve was, in the most simplistic terms, an anonymous PayPal. I have never used it, mainly because I had no real use for it. If I were to use an anonymous currency, I'd stick to Bitcoin. It's proven itself in my eyes to have great cryptography and security through Silk Road. None of the staff running that beautiful site have been arrested, and I honestly think they never will. I don't want to jinx them, but so far they have been running the site off Tor, making a massive profit and helping sustain the entire Bitcoin economy.
And I really do mean sustain it. I remember just a few months ago, where the price of 1 BTC was, like, $20 dollars. Then as word of Silk Road spread, the price of 1 BTC went past $200, and then it crashed. But for a period of 2-3 months, it really looked like the currency was getting people a profit. Now it's around $100-ish? I dunno, I haven't checked in a while, and if I open a new tab my iPad reloads this page, and I lose all this valuable stuff I've lost. I could just cut and paste everything, but... ###$ that. Too logical.
Speaking of stupid logic, why have libertarians embraced Bitcoin and turned it into a political thing? It makes sense that people who love privacy and freedom like a currency that is designed to be incredibly private and can never be frozen, but why latch onto that and just run with it? It's kinda sad, actually, that a pretty massive political movement and ideology embraced by millions of sound engineers and other ponytail aficionados can be entirely swallowed up by this inanimate thing. I mean, you can BUY physical bitcoins, but that's it. There's nothing tangible you can touch with Bitcoin, except yourself if your a libertarian who gets hard looking at soft currency. I think that makes sense.
Libertarian sadness coins (not my term, someone on Gawker made it up), are an amazing technology I really love and would like to embrace. But the only things to buy are wool socks and drugs off Silk Road. CoinBase has made buying bitcoins SOOOOOOO much easier than it was off Mt.Gox. You can do it by linking a bank account. You don't have to drive to a bank and give them a special routing number that made you look like a suspicious weirdo. Now it's more like PayPal. You can do it all online. ###$. Yeah.
But lets get to Liberty Reserve, which was recently shut down by the US government for being a laundering operation. First, the libertarians have good reason to get pissed off here. This is a ######6 Ridiculous operation. I agree that they should have gotten shut down and arrests are needed since the law is pretty ######6 clear, and they willingly and knowingly broke it. They had this coming. But the fact that massive blue chips like Citibank, Western Union, JP Morgan & Chase & Co., and, most notably HSBC laundered drug money and had no ######6 problem doing it shows intense bias towards big banks and shows that "Too Big to Fail" isn't some catchphrase, its a sad reality. Liberty Reserve, according to The New York Times, laundered something like $6 Billion dollars and had 55 million clients, many I'd assume were one time accounts.
Liberty Reserve was set up so that it could accept money, but you could only do that with an account, much like PayPal. The major difference was if you make a PayPal account, you have to go through so many ID checks to verify legitimacy, which is both appreciated and understandable. Even if they have that stupid penny test where they deposit some amount into your account and you tell them how much they have you. I hate that ######6 thing. It takes too long. 3 days for 20 cents? ###$ that.
Anyways, Liberty Reserve had no identity checks. As it states in the Times article, one of the agents made am account explicitly made for cocaine buying, and set his address as "123 Fake Steeet", and he was able to do ######6 anything. And I'm pretty sure he bought coke with the account so that the agency could get 2 birds with one net (or whatever the metaphor is), get the seller and help prove the service was a laundering scheme.
Bitcoin is my favorite service because you can download the original software, the wallet, off the official site. Bitcoin is worth $1 billion now, so you bet your ######6 ass it's updated a lot. (Minor side note, as if there weren't enough already: Jeff Garzik is my favorite dev team member. I just really like his response to Adrian Chen's Gawker piece on Silk Road, and his twitter's not bad either. His blog is fantastic, and I recommend his work highly.) Since the wallet is 100% anonymous, it's a great, legal and safe way to send BTC. And then with online wallets, which are basically online bank accounts for Bitcoin, with some like Mt.Gox and CoinBase able to convert USD to BTC or just Satoshi, you have legal (ish, since Mt.Gox is in trouble right now), PayPal like ways to get Bitcoin.
More side notes:
-I'd like to see a day where Bitcoin becomes big enough that people just use it like they do with USD, JPY, euro's, pounds, etc. Because right now it seems people do business with bitcoins, then convert back to traditional currency. They're only using Bitcoins because its a cool intermediary, and that's it. With fees from vendors, your better off just using Paypal right now, but I'd like to see a day that PayPal is as big as traditional currencies. And more stable too.
-A problem with growth is that its new, and people really enforce that $#%^. You go onto Mt.Gox, which does hundreds of thousands worth of transactions a day, and on the front page is that tacky "As seen on TV" picture. It's sleazy. It's what I see on scam sites trying to fool old people. So when BitPay gets core dev member Jeff Garzik and helps lead the way to making Bitcoin more legitimate for businesses, it doesn't make any ######6 sense for it to have on the front page that sleazy "As seen on TV" #######4. ###$ that. Get rid of that ######6 thing, its okay for the shamwow to have that $#%^ but your a ######6 billion dollar currency trying to grow. You want people to buy shamwow's with BitCoins someday, not advertise like them.
-The volaility of the market is ######6 insane, and I love it, because there is some ######6 moron that invested their life savings into Bitcoin only to see it go away because of volatility. You never throw all your money at something just because it seems big, you wait for growth. There is also a great study in how economies work with the volatility. If you don't have enough businesses using a currency, its a roller coaster, but if enough people are using it, it's fine and sustainable. Right now bitcoins are like Germany's currency when a cup of coffee would be worth $17 when you bought and and by the time it had cooled a little and you drank it, it'd be worth $9 dollars or $156, because the central government kept making money at an insane rate. ######6 idiots, right? Well, this system is ingenious, and yet its going through the same thing. And in a strange paradox, it is both like and unlike Germany in the way that Germany had many people using marks or whatever (... It's Germany) yet the currency was extremely volatile. Bitcoins have basically no customers, yet their market is comparatively safer. Yet the market still sucks. But it's not at Zimbabwe levels just yet (Look up "Zimbabwe Inflation", the Wikipedia page is one of the most fascinating things you will ever read). Why? Silk Road:
-Silk road, if you haven't looked it up, is "...The Amazon of Illegal Drugs" (Gawker). It's a Tor hidden service that sells not only drugs, but also slim Jim's to break into glass display cases in stores, wifi hacking books/kits/antennas, "Coin Washing" services, about a thousand e-books for $10 dollars (and not like those crappy ######6 "5,000 GAMES ON 1 CD!!!!!" bull ######6 $#%^. These are mainstream books like Twilight, the Dummies how to books, Game of Thrones, etc.). The list goes on and on, and maybe someday I'll buy something off of there just to see what it's like. The plan was that we'd buy heroin from our favorite vendor, Nod, but he's recently gone into stealth mode, so we can't buy from him. He was the highest rated heroin dealer on the entire site, a perfect 100% satisfaction rating he still holds to this day, last I checked. He dipped to 96% satisfaction one time because of blackmailers, and that's the lowest he ever got, and even at that surprisingly high low point, he still had an amazingly good attitude and spectacularly great customer service. We'd never use his product, instead we'd compare it with the local product just to see how pure his is. From what we've read, it's the best stuff on the ######6 planet. Nod: The Snapple of Heroin.
I'm sure more thoughts will come to mind, but the mods are probably sick of reading my Bitcoin talk, plus I've been writing this on and off for 2 hours while RedLetterMedia's Archive Collection Vol. 1 has been playing in the background. Was kind of a disappointing buy, in retrospect, as was Gorilla Interrupted, but only because I was expecting more features and behind the scenes work on Half in the Bag instead of just the outtakes/deleted scenes. What's in there is fantastic, and I highly recommend it, but I ######6 would have liked it a ######6 lot more if there was a lot more extra $#%^ in there. Overall review, 6/10. I'd give it 7/10, but I have an unhealthy fear of odd numbers lately.
Final review of RLM's Vol. 1 collection: 8/10. Boy, that was a random side... Thingy. Whatever it was.
-C.Nic
>>NEXT TIME: My disappointment with the CNN. (With a tie in story related to my personal experience with DID's representation on the CNN.) Stay tuned for the Boston Legal marathon... Holy crap, I'm in ######6 Boston... I need to find Crane, Poole and Schmidt ASAP.