There’s another concern here. Given the general US government history of strongly not liking things like Bitcoin, (see for example what happened to e-dollar) I’m not sure being involved with bitcoin is a good idea for the long-term success of the Singularity Institute. This is activity that is possibly illegal and it may seriously damage the SI’s status in the general public if it becomes associated with it.
EFF accepts donations in Bitcoin, so their lawyers must have decided that it’s not clearly illegal or bad PR. On the other hand it makes sense for EFF to signal support of Bitcoin, even at some legal/PR risk, since that fits into their core mission, whereas it’s much less clear what accepting donations in Bitcoin now buys SIAI. It seems unlikely to be a significant source of revenue at least in the short term.
EFF accepts donations in Bitcoin, so their lawyers must have decided that it’s not clearly illegal or bad PR.
I’m not sure that follows. What’s more, if people generally use that reasoning, and EFF is wrong (or lacked due diligence in such an estimation), then people will now be able to cite both SIAI’s and EFF’s actions when using such reasoning.
And then you have an information cascade, where everyone believes Bitcoin “must be okay”, all based on an expert judgment that never existed.
Have any other cryptography experts published critiques of Bitcoin? I’d contribute to a fund to get Bruce Schneier to spend more time on this.
I’m not sure that follows. What’s more, if people generally use that reasoning, and EFF is wrong (or lacked due diligence in such an estimation), then people will now be able to cite both SIAI’s and EFF’s actions when using such reasoning.
Perhaps you weren’t aware that EFF is a “digital rights advocacy and legal organization”? If we can imagine that Bitcoin might have legal issues, how could that have escaped the people at EFF? On the other hand, SIAI is hardly known for its legal expertise, so the fact that it accepts Bitcoin offers little additional evidence for Bitcoin’s legality.
We don’t fully understand the complex legal issues involved with creating a new currency system. Bitcoin raises untested legal concerns related to securities law, the Stamp Payments Act, tax evasion, consumer protection and money laundering, among others. And that’s just in the U.S. …
We don’t want to mislead our donors. When people make a donation to a nonprofit like EFF, they expect us to use their donation to support our work. Because the legal territory around exchanging Bitcoins into cash is still uncertain, we are not comfortable spending the many Bitcoins we have accumulated…
People were misconstruing our acceptance of Bitcoins as an endorsement of Bitcoin. We were concerned that some people may have participated in the Bitcoin project specifically because EFF accepted Bitcoins, and perhaps they therefore believed the investment in Bitcoins was secure and risk-free. While we’ve been following the Bitcoin movement with a great degree of interest, EFF has never endorsed Bitcoin. In fact, we generally don’t endorse any type of product or service – and Bitcoin is no exception.
Perhaps you weren’t aware that EFF is a “digital rights advocacy and legal organization”? If we can imagine that Bitcoin might have legal issues, how could that have escaped the people at EFF?
I’m aware of that. I’m just saying it doesn’t follow that they put it through the rigorous examination you seem to imagine, given that e.g. they may not expect many such donations, had more pressing priorities, knew it would have issues but were prepared to be the test case, etc. Or maybe they just reasoned, as you are doing, that “X accepts it, so it must not have legal issues”, not expecting the pseudo-evidence to cascade to others.
What I wrote originally was that EFF’s lawyers must have decided that Bitcoin is not clearly illegal. You seem to have interpreted me as saying that they decided that it is clearly legal.
There’s actually a whole lot of significance in being endorsed by a respectable institution. As several other people have remarked in this thread, if the feds decide to throw the book at you, you’re screwed no matter what. The only way to immunize yourself against this threat is to have backing by high-status people who are able to sway the public opinion and the legal establishment in your favor (so the feds will get bad press instead of accolades if they attack you, and you have a good chance to persuade a court to order the feds to leave you alone). EFF is far from being a decisively powerful player in this regard, but getting its endorsement is definitely a large step in the direction favorable for the Bitcoin people.
Again, I agree there are benefits, I just dispute their characterization by Wei_Dai et al. EFF is not “endorsing” Bitcoin in the sense usually meant; they’re saying they’ll accept donations that way. There’s a huge difference between that and “Oh, but these respectable lawyer guys told this big organization it’d be okay!”
Anyway, I did join up. If you look at the map of users, I’m the singular dude in Waco.
EFF is not “endorsing” Bitcoin in the sense usually meant; they’re saying they’ll accept donations that way.
The Activism Director of EFF wrote a substantial blog post on Bitcoin, calling it “a step toward censorship-resistant digital currency”. Earlier, they had another post listing Bitcoin as a project that “digital activists” should contribute to.
ETA: Even without these explicit endorsements, it seems obvious to me that a prominent activism/lobbying/legal organization does not just do something like accept donations in Bitcoin without considering what kind of signal that sends.
The point of that comment was that Bitcoin is not clearly illegal but there are legal/PR risks, and it’s not clear why SIAI is choosing to take those risks. How much “less significance” could I have implied?
Most people don’t rationally weigh evidence, but rather examine the status of who supports each side. The nature of EFF and SIAI is less relevant here than their popularity.
Sure, as long as it becomes expansive enough. My concern is if it cascades the geek community while still seeming weird and criminal to the rest of the world.
Your link doesn’t indicate that users of e-gold were found to have been in any violation of the law—the only thing that I saw happened to people who had not been violating the law in some other manner was that 56 accounts were locked/blocked (though I’m not sure why these were blocked, since it looks like they were just e-gold/money traders.)
Do you see any specific legal hazard for users that I don’t?
Do you see any specific legal hazard for users that I don’t?
There have been a few others discussed in this thread and in the other thread on Bitcoin. They include the argument that since individual users are making the currency they are counterfeiting (plausible legal argument), or that each individual is acting as a bank(weak), or that all users of Bitcoin together make up an organization for purposes of RICO (plausible). Since Bitcoin is not as centralized as e-coins it is much more plausible that a government response would go against actual users rather than any central organization. In any event, the primary problem for the SIAI would probably be the public status hit if there do end up being legal issues, not the actual legal complications.
hey include the argument that since individual users are making the currency they are counterfeiting (plausible legal argument), or that each individual is acting as a bank(weak), or that all users of Bitcoin together make up an organization for purposes of RICO (plausible).
Counterfeiting is less plausible than the banking claim, not more.
Given that WOW has it’s own virtual currency, with a fairly brisk USD-WOW exchange existing (albeit in violation of a EULA), I’d say the counterfeiting claim does indeed seem very unlikely. Certainly, I’ve never heard of actual criminal charges—the few Google results for arrests seem to be from other countries or other crimes that just incidentally used WOW Gold.
Is there a specific reason to think so? It doesn’t look like any e-gold users were prosecuted, or like the grounds for prosecuting the operators of e-gold would generalize.
Bitcoin is designed specifically so there is no central agency to prosecute. So who would the government go after aside from the users?
Furthermore, if SIAI is involved with Bitcoin and Bitcoin undergoes some sort of legal investigation, I speculate SIAI might as well just because the FBI thought that they looked interesting. This feels like it would be a Bad Thing.
Generally speaking I don’t think the FBI investigates things “just because they look interesting,” and since SIAI (to the best of my knowledge) isn’t doing anything illegal that’s not particularly worrisome anyway.
and since SIAI (to the best of my knowledge) isn’t doing anything illegal that’s not particularly worrisome anyway.
Unless they are taken seriously, in which case there is most likely a law there somewhere that they could be said to be violating. They are, after all, trying to create a weapon of mass destruction. :)
What? No they aren’t, they’re trying to establish protocols within which a general artificial intelligence can be safely created. Whether a general artificial intelligence should qualify as a weapon of mass destruction is a different argument, but it certainly doesn’t qualify as one from a legal point of view, and if the SIAI safety/friendliness plan works, it shouldn’t from a practical point of view either!
but it certainly doesn’t qualify as one from a legal point of view
I’m not nearly so confident. The Powers That Be don’t need to be all that reasonable about these things. Because of the bit about the Power.
I expect a security oriented government body would be able to come up with as many ways for creating a superintelligence to be illegal as MoR!Harry could find ways to weaponise Hufflepuffs. Calling it a WoMD would just be one of them.
It’s conceivable that, at some point, building design frameworks for friendly artificial intelligences (or, more plausibly, artificial intelligences in general) might be made illegal, but it certainly isn’t illegal now.
Legality really doesn’t seem to be a huge factor in whether the Secret Service can inconvenience you. And if they raided a gaming company, I could see them plausibly raiding an AI development organization.
That said, I don’t see anything to suggest it’s particularly likely, but a government investigation, all by itself, is incredibly disruptive even if you don’t end up guilty of any crimes.
Edit: Response was written to original (brief) version of the parent (quoted below).
No they aren’t, they’re trying to create an artificial intelligence.
Encryption software has, at times, been legally declared ‘munitions’, the export of which can be a serious crime. Since an AI actually could be deployed as a weapon—and even a ‘Friendly’ version will be perceived to be causing massive destruction by at least one interest group—throwing that sort of label around would be comparatively reasonable. Not that I would make that designation. But I’m not a paramilitary organisation with relevant official status.
As for things that are not Weapons of Mass Destruction, try biological and chemical weapons (of the kind that actually exist). If you want to cause mass destruction use a nuke. Don’t have one of them? Use conventional explosives. If you want to do serious damage with a chemical weapon… pick a chemical that explodes. That phrase is broken.
I’d guess they would go after a few particularly high-volume, high-profit, high-profile traders like Mt. Gox, because this is the basic strategy used against Bittorrent.
It doesn’t look like any e-gold users were prosecuted, or like the grounds for prosecuting the operators of e-gold would generalize.
The government’s response to a currency or payment system that could be shut down by shutting down a single “point of failure” is not particularly informative for predicting its response to a payment system that does not have a single point of failure.
The government correctly perceives allowing the man in the street to transact business or earn money outside of the awareness and control of the regulated banking system to be a threat to its revenue stream and to be an enabler of crime and terrorism.
That the government is likely to spin or outright create laws to protect its interests is a different thing to “this activity is possibly illegal”.
I was given related advice while a cofounder of a startup venture. Forget whether you are legally in the right. If a powerful competitor is threatened they can sue on a vaguely credible premise they can destroy either your company or years of your life regardless of whether their superior lawyers foist it past the judge.
The letter of the law just doesn’t matter all that much if there is a power imbalance.
The government could if they wanted to go after individuals on counterfeiting charges. See also the remark by pjeby about banking laws (although as I said there, that seems hard to pin down). Unfortunately there are a large number of different federal laws about money and taxes, so it shouldn’t be that hard to find some federal crime to use. There may also be ways of tying in RICO charges which could be potentially used to then prosecute anyone using Bitcoin based on the most illegal activity of anyone using Bitcoin (so murder for hire, drug running, kidnapping, etc. from anyone on the network could potentially result in charges for anyone on the network.) In general, when the feds want something to be illegal and it involves money, they’ll find a way.
Why would the US government go after Bitcoin? Indicting the directors of e-gold was one of the greatest accomplishments of Bush’s Department of Justice and hopefully we will never again see such an insane justice department.
Also, there is no US entity to even prosecute, just an IRC channel to gain control of. Some cyberpunk future where the world governments are trying to hack Bitcoin is almost more likely than any of the users being sued for things for things other than committing crimes while happening to be using Bitcoin at the same time.
Why would the US government go after Bitcoin? Indicting the directors of e-gold was one of the greatest accomplishments of Bush’s Department of Justice and hopefully we will never again see such an insane justice department.
The government generally frowns on alternative modes of currency that aren’t in their power. They really aren’t going to like a form that is essentially untraceable. Either one of those would be enough for the government to be unhappy with. I’m also pretty sure that e-gold was very low down on Justice’s priority list during Bush, and it doesn’t take an “insane justice department” just a government that wants to be able to track money, control the size of the money supply, and be able to effectively tax.
Also, there is no US entity to even prosecute, just an IRC channel to gain control of. Some cyberpunk future where the world governments are trying to hack Bitcoin is almost more likely than any of the users being sued for things for things other than committing crimes while happening to be using Bitcoin at the same time.
When confronted with a problem, do you first try to use your existing skills and powers to solve a problem or others? Now, what ability do federal prosecutors have that most of the world doesn’t? (Hint:The correct answer is not “an army of skilled of hackers”.)
There’s another concern here. Given the general US government history of strongly not liking things like Bitcoin, (see for example what happened to e-dollar) I’m not sure being involved with bitcoin is a good idea for the long-term success of the Singularity Institute. This is activity that is possibly illegal and it may seriously damage the SI’s status in the general public if it becomes associated with it.
EFF accepts donations in Bitcoin, so their lawyers must have decided that it’s not clearly illegal or bad PR. On the other hand it makes sense for EFF to signal support of Bitcoin, even at some legal/PR risk, since that fits into their core mission, whereas it’s much less clear what accepting donations in Bitcoin now buys SIAI. It seems unlikely to be a significant source of revenue at least in the short term.
I’m not sure that follows. What’s more, if people generally use that reasoning, and EFF is wrong (or lacked due diligence in such an estimation), then people will now be able to cite both SIAI’s and EFF’s actions when using such reasoning.
And then you have an information cascade, where everyone believes Bitcoin “must be okay”, all based on an expert judgment that never existed.
Have any other cryptography experts published critiques of Bitcoin? I’d contribute to a fund to get Bruce Schneier to spend more time on this.
Perhaps you weren’t aware that EFF is a “digital rights advocacy and legal organization”? If we can imagine that Bitcoin might have legal issues, how could that have escaped the people at EFF? On the other hand, SIAI is hardly known for its legal expertise, so the fact that it accepts Bitcoin offers little additional evidence for Bitcoin’s legality.
Can I claim vindication on this matter now? EFF now says:
They’re now accepting it again, and even spoke at the last conference.
I’m aware of that. I’m just saying it doesn’t follow that they put it through the rigorous examination you seem to imagine, given that e.g. they may not expect many such donations, had more pressing priorities, knew it would have issues but were prepared to be the test case, etc. Or maybe they just reasoned, as you are doing, that “X accepts it, so it must not have legal issues”, not expecting the pseudo-evidence to cascade to others.
What I wrote originally was that EFF’s lawyers must have decided that Bitcoin is not clearly illegal. You seem to have interpreted me as saying that they decided that it is clearly legal.
I’m saying that there’s a lot less significance to EFF deeming something “not clearly illegal” than you were implying.
There’s actually a whole lot of significance in being endorsed by a respectable institution. As several other people have remarked in this thread, if the feds decide to throw the book at you, you’re screwed no matter what. The only way to immunize yourself against this threat is to have backing by high-status people who are able to sway the public opinion and the legal establishment in your favor (so the feds will get bad press instead of accolades if they attack you, and you have a good chance to persuade a court to order the feds to leave you alone). EFF is far from being a decisively powerful player in this regard, but getting its endorsement is definitely a large step in the direction favorable for the Bitcoin people.
Again, I agree there are benefits, I just dispute their characterization by Wei_Dai et al. EFF is not “endorsing” Bitcoin in the sense usually meant; they’re saying they’ll accept donations that way. There’s a huge difference between that and “Oh, but these respectable lawyer guys told this big organization it’d be okay!”
Anyway, I did join up. If you look at the map of users, I’m the singular dude in Waco.
The Activism Director of EFF wrote a substantial blog post on Bitcoin, calling it “a step toward censorship-resistant digital currency”. Earlier, they had another post listing Bitcoin as a project that “digital activists” should contribute to.
ETA: Even without these explicit endorsements, it seems obvious to me that a prominent activism/lobbying/legal organization does not just do something like accept donations in Bitcoin without considering what kind of signal that sends.
The point of that comment was that Bitcoin is not clearly illegal but there are legal/PR risks, and it’s not clear why SIAI is choosing to take those risks. How much “less significance” could I have implied?
Most people don’t rationally weigh evidence, but rather examine the status of who supports each side. The nature of EFF and SIAI is less relevant here than their popularity.
There is very little more to being legal than an information cascade.
Sure, as long as it becomes expansive enough. My concern is if it cascades the geek community while still seeming weird and criminal to the rest of the world.
More affiliation with the mastermind behind cryptocurrency. :)
Your link doesn’t indicate that users of e-gold were found to have been in any violation of the law—the only thing that I saw happened to people who had not been violating the law in some other manner was that 56 accounts were locked/blocked (though I’m not sure why these were blocked, since it looks like they were just e-gold/money traders.)
Do you see any specific legal hazard for users that I don’t?
There have been a few others discussed in this thread and in the other thread on Bitcoin. They include the argument that since individual users are making the currency they are counterfeiting (plausible legal argument), or that each individual is acting as a bank(weak), or that all users of Bitcoin together make up an organization for purposes of RICO (plausible). Since Bitcoin is not as centralized as e-coins it is much more plausible that a government response would go against actual users rather than any central organization. In any event, the primary problem for the SIAI would probably be the public status hit if there do end up being legal issues, not the actual legal complications.
Counterfeiting is less plausible than the banking claim, not more.
Given that WOW has it’s own virtual currency, with a fairly brisk USD-WOW exchange existing (albeit in violation of a EULA), I’d say the counterfeiting claim does indeed seem very unlikely. Certainly, I’ve never heard of actual criminal charges—the few Google results for arrests seem to be from other countries or other crimes that just incidentally used WOW Gold.
Is there a specific reason to think so? It doesn’t look like any e-gold users were prosecuted, or like the grounds for prosecuting the operators of e-gold would generalize.
Bitcoin is designed specifically so there is no central agency to prosecute. So who would the government go after aside from the users?
Furthermore, if SIAI is involved with Bitcoin and Bitcoin undergoes some sort of legal investigation, I speculate SIAI might as well just because the FBI thought that they looked interesting. This feels like it would be a Bad Thing.
Generally speaking I don’t think the FBI investigates things “just because they look interesting,” and since SIAI (to the best of my knowledge) isn’t doing anything illegal that’s not particularly worrisome anyway.
Unless they are taken seriously, in which case there is most likely a law there somewhere that they could be said to be violating. They are, after all, trying to create a weapon of mass destruction. :)
What? No they aren’t, they’re trying to establish protocols within which a general artificial intelligence can be safely created. Whether a general artificial intelligence should qualify as a weapon of mass destruction is a different argument, but it certainly doesn’t qualify as one from a legal point of view, and if the SIAI safety/friendliness plan works, it shouldn’t from a practical point of view either!
I’m not nearly so confident. The Powers That Be don’t need to be all that reasonable about these things. Because of the bit about the Power.
I expect a security oriented government body would be able to come up with as many ways for creating a superintelligence to be illegal as MoR!Harry could find ways to weaponise Hufflepuffs. Calling it a WoMD would just be one of them.
It’s conceivable that, at some point, building design frameworks for friendly artificial intelligences (or, more plausibly, artificial intelligences in general) might be made illegal, but it certainly isn’t illegal now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games,_Inc._v._United_States_Secret_Service
Legality really doesn’t seem to be a huge factor in whether the Secret Service can inconvenience you. And if they raided a gaming company, I could see them plausibly raiding an AI development organization.
That said, I don’t see anything to suggest it’s particularly likely, but a government investigation, all by itself, is incredibly disruptive even if you don’t end up guilty of any crimes.
Edit: Fixed from FBI to Secret Service.
Edit: Response was written to original (brief) version of the parent (quoted below).
Encryption software has, at times, been legally declared ‘munitions’, the export of which can be a serious crime. Since an AI actually could be deployed as a weapon—and even a ‘Friendly’ version will be perceived to be causing massive destruction by at least one interest group—throwing that sort of label around would be comparatively reasonable. Not that I would make that designation. But I’m not a paramilitary organisation with relevant official status.
As for things that are not Weapons of Mass Destruction, try biological and chemical weapons (of the kind that actually exist). If you want to cause mass destruction use a nuke. Don’t have one of them? Use conventional explosives. If you want to do serious damage with a chemical weapon… pick a chemical that explodes. That phrase is broken.
Well building an AI to take over the world would arguably qualify as plotting violent overthrow of the government.
I’d guess they would go after a few particularly high-volume, high-profit, high-profile traders like Mt. Gox, because this is the basic strategy used against Bittorrent.
The government’s response to a currency or payment system that could be shut down by shutting down a single “point of failure” is not particularly informative for predicting its response to a payment system that does not have a single point of failure.
The government correctly perceives allowing the man in the street to transact business or earn money outside of the awareness and control of the regulated banking system to be a threat to its revenue stream and to be an enabler of crime and terrorism.
That the government is likely to spin or outright create laws to protect its interests is a different thing to “this activity is possibly illegal”.
I was given related advice while a cofounder of a startup venture. Forget whether you are legally in the right. If a powerful competitor is threatened they can sue on a vaguely credible premise they can destroy either your company or years of your life regardless of whether their superior lawyers foist it past the judge.
The letter of the law just doesn’t matter all that much if there is a power imbalance.
The government could if they wanted to go after individuals on counterfeiting charges. See also the remark by pjeby about banking laws (although as I said there, that seems hard to pin down). Unfortunately there are a large number of different federal laws about money and taxes, so it shouldn’t be that hard to find some federal crime to use. There may also be ways of tying in RICO charges which could be potentially used to then prosecute anyone using Bitcoin based on the most illegal activity of anyone using Bitcoin (so murder for hire, drug running, kidnapping, etc. from anyone on the network could potentially result in charges for anyone on the network.) In general, when the feds want something to be illegal and it involves money, they’ll find a way.
EGold was a for profit corporation with operations conducted from Florida. Bitcoin is an open source project.
Why would the US government go after Bitcoin? Indicting the directors of e-gold was one of the greatest accomplishments of Bush’s Department of Justice and hopefully we will never again see such an insane justice department.
Also, there is no US entity to even prosecute, just an IRC channel to gain control of. Some cyberpunk future where the world governments are trying to hack Bitcoin is almost more likely than any of the users being sued for things for things other than committing crimes while happening to be using Bitcoin at the same time.
The government generally frowns on alternative modes of currency that aren’t in their power. They really aren’t going to like a form that is essentially untraceable. Either one of those would be enough for the government to be unhappy with. I’m also pretty sure that e-gold was very low down on Justice’s priority list during Bush, and it doesn’t take an “insane justice department” just a government that wants to be able to track money, control the size of the money supply, and be able to effectively tax.
When confronted with a problem, do you first try to use your existing skills and powers to solve a problem or others? Now, what ability do federal prosecutors have that most of the world doesn’t? (Hint:The correct answer is not “an army of skilled of hackers”.)