The rabbit hole now goes high up, as well as deep.
"In the months ahead, IGE hired more adults, a slew of VPs with decades of industry experience among them. The company also brought on a former Goldman Sachs investment banker named Stephen Bannon, whose mission was to land venture capital."
Wow, thank you for posting for that link! I just finished watching "An Open Secret" for the first time, and it chillingly corroborates most of what Fucked Company humorously presented in that South-Park style documentary, which is how I first heard about the story when Fucked Company covered it contemporaneously.
I only learned about about Steve Bannon's connection to Brock Pierce (who recently posted a Facebook photo of himself wearing a red "MAKE BITCOIN GREAT AGAIN" trucker's cap at Trump's Inaugural Lounge) when Mother Jones and Wired covered it during the last election. It looks like the "First Kid" is trying to work his way back into the White House.
And here's a a map of the rabbit warren: a timeline of the scandals that started at DEN, including Brock's attempts to whitewash his past and ongoing lawsuits around his online gold trading company IGE, which Steve Bannon was involved with, up to his election to the board of the Bitcoin Foundation and the resulting resignations:
DEN Sources:
A document-in-progress compiling firsthand reporting on DEN, Bitcoin, Brock Pierce and the Mike Egan / Bryan Singer lawsuit
You seem to have forgotten to post a link you intended...
The scary thing is that btc is likely the traffickers currency of choice these days. How traceable are btc transactions wrt what types of goods or services are supposedly purchased with btc?
Untraceable if you use a mixer. Why not blacklist coins that have been mixed? It's not hard to figure out whether a coin has been tumbled through e.g. bitcoinfog.
I think most of the resistance to this idea comes from people who've used Silk Road clones, most of which force you to mix your coins. But as bitcoin becomes more valuable and ransomware more prevalent, the argument that silk road is ethical and should therefore be able to function becomes less and less persuasive.
Blacklisting the coins would be easy: Exchanges simply close your account if you receive a large number of BTC that have been tumbled. It's easy to identify the coins and to easy to close the accounts while refunding the coins.
“Untraceable” is a strong promise and I'd be surprised if traffic analysis couldn't de-anonymize effectively with the investigatory resources which a nation-state can muster.
The other key thing is that Bitcoin fails open: if anyone anywhere ever makes a mistake or is subverted the blockchain is a public record of every transaction which is hard to deny and can never be purged. I'm not sure anyone has the operational competency to make assurances in that environment.
Blacklisting the coins would be easy: Exchanges simply close your account if you receive a large number of BTC that have been tumbled. It's easy to identify the coins and to easy to close the accounts while refunding the coins.
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Seems like the future will be full of black-market banks and money laundering (as opposed to how its always been ;-) #PanamaPapers)
Is this the most difficultt financial problem: We don't want government watching every single move we make, yet we dont want criminals to be able to easily hide all their nefarious actions...
Where is the correct balance?
We have those who are supposedly the beacons of the tech future now being revealed as just as bad as others...
Faith in humanity is being assaulted a fair bit more than it had been in the last few decades...
I think I included most of the links I intended (some were repeats from the previous message but bore repeating in context, and the last one to the timeline has a lot of other fascinating links), but here is another interesting one from Buzzfeed about An Open Secret:
I don't get why you were downvoted. The documentary "An Open Secret" is quite accurate and confirms everything I ever heard about DEN, provides a whole lot of background information and first person interviews, and is consistent with the information in the lawsuits that Brock Pierce tried to cover up and suppress. The video tape that the kid they molested took of Rector's house with all the pills, the gun safe, and photocopies he made of all the documents, the email with discussions and photos of kids Pierce and Rector were grooming, and the audio tape of the confession about molesting the kid, were all very chilling and quit convincing. This is no "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory: it really happened and is very well documented by many consistent sources.
Oh yeah: I guess the Bannon links are worth repeating in this context too, because it's one of the most mind blowing parts of this whole story, now that he's running the country into the ground.
Here are the links about Steve Bannon (Wired published an article in 2008 before Steve Bannon was widely known as the real President of the United States who dresses as Death, then in 2016 Mother Jones pointed out the old Wired article, and then Wired published another article mentioning it):
Oh yeah #2: thanks to Richard Bartle and Wired, here is the the original Debonneville lawsuit complaint and the amended complaint that Brock Pierce illegitimately and unsuccessfully tried to suppress, which documents in great detail the lurid story of DEN, IGE, the Debonneville lawsuit, "Pierce's Great Cover Up", and discusses Steve Bannon's involvement.
30. Steve Bannon ("Bannon") was hired around March 2005 to head the effort of obtaining private equity investment into IGE and eventually take IGE public. All the shareholders wished to cash out on their respective equity in the wildly successful business. From March 2005 to February 2006, Bannon and Pierce's primary focus was on raising investment money for the company. Upon information and belief, during June and July of 2005, Pierce determined that, based on IGE's incredible success, IGE would be valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Upon information and belief, Pierce wanted more stock for his own account. Upon information and belief, Pierce developed a scheme whereby he could pressure Yantis into selling his shares of the company for a value far lower than what Pierce believe the stock would be valued once an investment into the company was achieved.
51. In late January of 2006 and throughout February of 2006, Pierce advised Debonneville that Rector was blackmailing Pierce. Pierce stated that Rector was threatening to involve IGE in litigation which would severely cripple the likelihood of closing the GS [Goldman Sachs] investment. Further, Rector was threatening protracted litigation that would harm IGE and kill any future investment potential. It is believed that this was a false statement made by Pierce in January 2006.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmaRTZpJgPA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Entertainment_Network
Isn't that guy still running the Bitcoin Foundation?
https://arstechnica.com/business/2014/05/some-in-bitcoin-gro...
He has a history of doing business with other creepy people, too.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/stephen-bannon-w...
https://www.wired.com/2016/09/trumps-campaign-ceos-little-kn...
https://www.wired.com/2008/11/ff-ige/
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10155736654012782&se...