[ExI] i miss intrade

[spike]

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Stathis
Papaioannou
...
>
> How could any American not see what his happening?  Apparently they 
> never read or understood Hayek's Road to Serfdom.
>
> I think it is dangerous for Americans to own bitcoins.  There is no 
> law against it specifically, but there is no effective law against the 
> IRS destroying you without evidence either.
>
> spike

But cash is at least as anonymous as Bitcoin.
--
Stathis Papaioannou
_______________________________________________

It is, but that makes my point.  In the USA, it has become functionally
illegal to carry a lot of currency.  If you go around with a suitcase full
of it, the authorities can seize it and argue that surely you were dealing
in dope.  Their standards of evidence are low in those cases.

This was a huge issue in 1989 when we were having an enormous land boom in
the SF Bay Area California.  The game was to advertise a home for sale at a
certain price.  The inventory was low and the prices were going up every
day.  So the game was to advertise the home, the owner would get scarce for
a week or two, people would overbid, owner returns, goes thru a pile of
bids, picks out his favorite, house sells for 20 or 30k over asking price.
At Lockheeed, a group of engineers pooled their funds, hired a real estate
specialist, rigged up a cell phone with a laptop computer (hot new tech in
89) had him drive around, then when a new property came on the listing, he
would look up in a database and find its value, then show up within minutes
with a suitcase full of cash the exact amount the owner listed, along with
an implied threat that if the owner failed to accept the cash, it would be
evidence he was refusing on some racial basis (the agent was African
American.)  In most cases, the owner would sell on the spot, the buyer group
could resell for 20 to 30k more the next day.  The group was making money
hand over fist.  Then the earthquake hit.

In the meantime, they realized it was a huge risk to have a person going
around with a quarter of a million dollars cash in a briefcase.  He wasn't
doing anything illegal.  But had they known, the authorities would likely
have figured out some way to seize all that lettuce.  As it turns out, the
group doubled its money in about 5 months, from June 1989 to October 1989.
I wasn't in on that.  But it caused a change in the way people sell houses
during a land boom.  We are in another one of those now.  If a person goes
to sell a house, they need to be absent when the home goes on the market, in
some place they cannot be contacted or found for a couple weeks.

It will be interesting to see what happens when the first land transaction
happens in BTC.

spike