[asocial]

    The “police have been devoting a huge amount of resources to track down peaceful people engaged in voluntary trade     
    like Charlie Shrem and the operators of the Silk Road Market,” Ver says, “while evil hackers were busy terrorizing 
    quadriplegic Hal Finney and his family.”

"voluntary trade" makes it sound like said trade wasn't actually illegal (in other words, like something the police are actually supposed to stop, peaceful or otherwise.)

This is meant to suggest that the police were harassing innocent people while completely ignoring the actual crimes described, of course playing up the typical Bitcoin narrative of the violent, thuggish and incompetent police state.

Left completely unmentioned, is the fact that Bitcoin is designed, and intended, to make it infeasible to track users and enforce laws against transactors. It's an explicitly anarcho-capitalist system. Extortion rackets around Bitcoin are not a bug, they're a feature.

[Retric]

Somehow I think you missed the whole "Every transaction is public" part of Bitcoin.

Cash is difficult but not impossible to track, Bitcoin is ridiculously easy to track by comparison.

[ivraatiems]

Except that Bitcoin can be laundered quite effectively, and often is. [1] In fact, there are services that do so. [2]

[1] http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/72/how-is-it-poss...

[2] https://bitlaunder.com/

[Retric]

Try and launder a 1Billion to 10 Billion dollor transaction with bitcoin and that's going to fall flat.

PS: For comparison you can fedex ~170,000$ worth of gold in a vary inconspicious 15 LB box. Shipping ~60,000 lb of gold (1Billion$) is much easier to track and more risky.

[samatman]

There is no possible way to make gold inconspicuous. The density simply prohibits it: gold reflects easy-to-send parts of the EM spectrum that most anything else will pass.

[Retric]

Your assuming there is a test in place to detect gold in FedEx packages. That's not acutally a hard thing to test and I would be interested in the results.

[asocial]

That doesn't mean it's ridiculously easy to attach a transaction to a specific person. If it were, sites like Silk Road would never even exist.

[aminok]

   "voluntary trade" makes it sound like said trade wasn't actually illegal (in 

   other words, like something the police are actually supposed to stop, peaceful 

   or otherwise.)

No it doesn't make it sound like that. "Voluntary" is not synonymous with "legal". The quality of voluntary trade is that both parties to it want to be in it: it's consensual. Many consensual actions are illegal, and some would argue that is oppressive.

    Left completely unmentioned, is the fact that Bitcoin is designed, and intended, 

    to make it infeasible to track users and enforce laws against transactors. 

Yet they tracked Ulbritch, who was using Bitcoin and Tor. If they dedicated the same amount of resources to catching this extortionist, I think it's pretty likely he would be found.

[mycroft-holmes]

> "voluntary trade" makes it sound like said trade wasn't actually illegal

Just because something is illegal doesn't mean it's wrong.

[asocial]

That is completely true.

But the police don't arrest people for breaking ethical principles, they arrest people for breaking laws.

So also, in context, not entirely relevant.

[innguest]

> But the police don't arrest people for breaking ethical principles, they arrest people for breaking laws.

...Unless the police officer has ethical principles, in which case they will refuse to obey unfair laws. I remember watching an interview with a Danish cop that refused to arrest someone for smoking marijuana inside their own house. I think it's fair to say the government police system encourages unethical people to become cops.

[TehCorwiz]

Last time I checked extortion and making a false police report was against the law. I think context was that the police are participating in the SWATings while not putting in any effort to track down the perpetrators and at the same time they're putting a disproportionate amount of effort into shutting down otherwise peaceful markets.

[asocial]

What proof is there that the police are not putting any effort into tracking down the perpetrators?

[EpicEng]

Right, but the police do not decide which laws to ignore and which to enforce. They are the enforcement arm, not the legislative. No one should be alarmed that people when people are arrested for peddling illegal drugs.

[modeless]

> the police do not decide which laws to ignore and which to enforce

They absolutely do. For example, police in Seattle explicitly made marijuana enforcement the lowest possible priority years before Washington legalized it. It was a common sight to see policemen standing right next to people openly smoking pot on the street and completely ignoring them.

The police actually have a huge amount of leeway, and it can be a big problem. They often decide who to prosecute and who to ignore, and their decisions are often driven by race, revenue concerns, or other issues that have little to do with justice.

[ObviousScience]

Actually, in 2003, the voters passed an initiative mandating that police lower their enforcement of marijuana in Seattle[1].

[1] http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Two-years-later-littl...

[modeless]

That's true, but marijuana was still illegal, and some people were still prosecuted. Ultimately the ones deciding who would be arrested and who would be ignored on a case-by-case basis were the police.

[mycroft-holmes]

You're correct. My point was directed more towards people, like the parent I was replying to, who defend government actions simply because something is illegal. It would be equivalent to defending people who returned escaped slaves back in the day because it was the law to do so at the time.

[asocial]

Which would you rather have? Police enforcing the laws, or police enforcing whatever they personally felt was right?

If you disagree with the morality of a law, fine - but your assertion that enforcing drug laws is as immoral as enforcing slavery laws is debatable

[dpeck]

Actually, they do. http://thelawdictionary.org/article/police-discretion-defini...

[murbard2]

Police officers can, and should, use their conscience to decide whether or not to enforce certain laws.

If you want a legal precedent, the Nuremberg trials somewhat settled that question.

[mercurial]

Well, the likely continued impunity of the practitioners of "enhanced interrogation" means that it's a legal precedent that applies only to evil Nazis.