Daily Archives: October 2, 2013

Heisenderp

By Dan Kervick

The Bitcoin phenomenon has always been an interesting concoction: part radical libertarian currency scheme inspired by the anti-government monetary musings of Ron Paul and Austrian school of economics; part black market drug exchange empowered by a hackertopian computer architecture providing anonymity to its aliased participants; and part speculative Ponzi-scheme-in-the-making based on a strange built-in deflationary coding that seems designed to make its early adopters filthy rich – if they can somehow succeed in getting enough other suckers Bitcoin enthusiasts to buy in.

The speculative dimension of Bitcoin has sometimes crashed up against its alt-monetary aspirations in comical ways, as was noted earlier today by John Carney:

But now Bitcoin has really broken bad in a whole new direction, as federal prosecutors have indicted one of the Bitcoin marketplace’s star performers for a variety of crimes, including conspiracy to commit murder.  The FBI claims to have unmasked and apprehended the man behind the Bitcoin-powered online drug market Silk Road.  His name is Ross William Ulbricht, and the charges are rather amazing:

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The Divine Right of Bankers: Sorkin Proves Baroness Orczy Correct

By William K. Black

In yesterday’s column I discussed the fact that Andrew Ross Sorkin (ARS) of the New York Times and CNBC has unmasked himself in a video entitled “Two Myths and One Reality” as the scourge of Wall Street who had worked tirelessly for five years to find the “criminal element” that caused the financial crisis.

“If there’s one question that I get just about more than any other, ‘So why didn’t anybody go to jail, and did nobody try?’ And there’s an answer to that too.

A lot of people had an incentive to try to find a way to bring not justice, but to put people away.  Prosecutors, law enforcement, journalists; it would have been a better story.  But for the last five years we’ve tried, all of us have tried, to find that criminal element.”

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