Oh Em Effing Gee! Do not go making statements you are clearly unqualified to make.

The establishment of a group responsible for determining the legitimacy, or otherwise, of those seeking to trade one coin for another confers the notion of authority and, as such, ownership of the project. If there is anything that the owners of a cryptocurrency project can be charged with, in terms of breaching various national or international laws, the governing body of the project would be held accountable.

I don't think I'd sleep particularly well at night putting my nuts on the line to try and keep this monstrosity alive for 'the sake of the community'.

If it isn't 'open to all' then the governing body is taking responsibility for vetting those who it is open to.

One word: Minefield.

I agree with your point that it is probably impossible to identify all of the criminals, shysters, fraudsters, aiders and abetter, etc. in this scam so maybe its a moot point.

However, you keep saying that forking the blockchain and blacklisting coins in the process would "take or destroy" someone's property.  You are conflating "taking or destroying" of certain XPY coins (the private keys proving ownership of a coin) with taking or destroying one's ability to use and commercially exploit that same.  Conversion/theft is only concerned with the former, not the latter.

I will be happy to compare qualifications to make this statement with yours.


Really?  So in your crack legal analysis, all coin ICOs must be public, open to all?  You cannot limit for accredited investor status?  You cannot limit participation by criminals?  You cannot simply pick your friends?  This is a new legal idea, the ICo must be open to all.  Please enlighten us on the laws which require such.

Forget morally/ethically/legally right or wrong.

Why would you/anyone participate/hold/use/invest/develop in a coin if this is done. It can be done to bitcoins, but bitcoin works because it's so hard that it's almost impossible to do. Why would you bother wasting any time/energy/money on a coin that has shown can be taken away like that? It just doesn't make sense It can be done, but doing it should kill the coin so why do it?

I mean this saga (and crypto, in general imo) is full of people that suck at logic and common sense, but wouldn't this be a bridge too far? Forget the morality of the fork, look at the reality that will happen in the aftermath. A coin that has shown that it can easily be taken/blacklisted if you piss off a group of people that are either morally corrupt or incompetent to be involved in this mess up to this point. Doesn't seem like a smart idea to me.

No, that is not what I said at all. Nice try though.

What I said is that if it is not 'open to all' then there must be a qualifying set of conditions, which are defined by a governing body. It is this instance that then exposes the 'governing body' to liability for the project by way of them asserting their authority over the coin project.

Which is ENTIRELY different from declaring that all ICO's *must* be open to all.

Your legalese kung fu is extremely weak.

I hope you are not suggesting that I am involved in any way in XPY.  I have been calling this a scam since the original thread, and I even predicted back in October that Josh would exit the scene and blame it the SEC and FinCEN!

I hold exactly 1 XPY and 1 Hashtaker, which I bought only to create a second account on Hashtalk when my first account was shadowbanned (for asking difficult questions about the pre-mine).  I have used my account on Hashtalk to ask questions and try to bring some light to this scam as best I could without getting shadowbanned again.

My belief is that it might be a good idea to fork XPY to get rid of all Prime Controllers and get rid of wallets known to be associated with Josh/GAW.  You can question that all you want, but if you want to try to make me a part of this scam you better have your facts straight.

Agreed. This whole latest fork is simply to make Paycoin appear less scammy so that the scam can continue. If these people actually wanted to fix inflation they would pull the coins out of the Prime Controller addresses. If the statement " We will publicly burn the XPY staked from our PC's" bullshit smells right, you are very easily played for a fucking fool. Why create coins to destroy them? Empty the fucking address ya fucking moron, and then you don't create the coins to begin with. A fucking 5 year old could figure this out. What the fuck? Cmon, that is an obvious lie being tossed out to con gullible idiots to keep playing along with the scam for fucks sake.

This I completely agree with. The issue with forking out addresses on the same coin, without regard for if it can be legally enforced as theft or anything else, sets up a bad idea within crypto-currency as a technology. Imagine if the governments had said "fork out all silk-road coins" and "fork out all mt-gox coins"... then they decide to regulate coins so that to launch a coin you need to be able to put a freeze on any address at the drop of a hat if the court orders it.  

It is much cleaner to make a new coin and throw up an exchange where any coin that's over (days-since-announcement-of-new-coin) can exchange 1:1 into the new coin. That means all staked coins die in their original chain and only those holding coins at the point of the announcement can exchange, so no arbitrage crap.

I would really have liked if the discussion about the fork would have branched off to a different discussion thread instead of being in the middle of this huge 1600 page thread.

The reason why I am saying that this discussion is extremely important and unfortunately from where it is now, it will be buried in here and future generations cannot find this very important discussion.

Why i think it is very important. In my opinion it very well exposes a key problem in PoS coins in general and the problem is that this kind of forking discussion sounds feasible to some people so that there is some nonzero probability that somebody is going to try to get it done. Whether that fork succeeds or not does not change the outcome. In both cases the coin gets killed if somebody even tries to do such a fork. Who in their right mind would like to buy or own such a coin for any serious purpose if those kind of forks can even be tried for real? This is the main problem in my opinion why PoS coins in general just are not good for anything else than pump and dump scams.

In bitcoin nobody so far has seen a similar fork for similar reasons to be even remotely feasible. And that is good. The reason why it does not seem feasible is that in bitcoin the important people to decide for this kind of issues are miners and the do not have a huge personal opinion about who owns the coins. That is a strength. The people making the decisions are not susceptible to fuck everything up for personal reasons.

As soon as people even start thinking about fucking with coin design for any personal reasons it will open the floodgates for much more to come. And those personal reasons are going the get ugly pretty quick.

I find it also quite funny that the whole thing started as a moral high horse position about righting a wrong and pretty soon it degerated into opinions that whatever is being done is right because it cannot be procecuted. There is a huge difference in levels of morality between being a white knight and not being procecuted and the later ones are not so hugely different from Josh that they should play white knights and condemn Josh.

But the people this is supposed to exclude are already in a position to take full advantage of this. I know for a fact that Garza was and still is mixing and parking XPY in varying amounts in many hundreds (probably thousands) of addresses. How does one prove who they are with a crypto coin? An Email address? Sorting out which coins belong to whom is simply not feasible, and returns to the same basic false assumptions used to try to justify forking coins out of the Paycoin Blockchain that belong to certain people. Garza & Co. have had a 6 month head start and have been laundering millions of coins 24 hours a day since the launch. Any plan to help improve the viability of or enable cashing out from Paycoin is going to help Garza and associates, there is no way around this.

P.S: These comments about a potential fix of Paycoin not being on topic here are every bit as absurd as the fix suggestions themselves.

My intent with discussing possible fixes to Paycoin here is primarily in relation to the fact that supposedly upstanding members of the crypto community are volunteering to do something that I know for sure will actually help Garza & Co. and the entire Paycoin  scheme and enable them to ensnare more victims. There are also some legal and moral quandaries involved in any potential Paycoin fix. If this discussion bothers you, then tough shit. You are quite free to go start or join some other thread to follow the topic as you see fit. I am not following that thread fork, thanks.

This will probably get the anti-lawyer folks up in arms, but here it goes:

A lawyer's primary duty is to his or her client, not the public and certainly not a potential defendant.  Except for certain limited instances, a lawyer is not required to fact-check a client to ensure that they are on the up and up.

The exceptions to that are:  (1) when a lawsuit is filed, because courts do not want to waste their time dealing with half baked  unsupportable claims, a lawyer must conduct a reasonable investigation to confirm facts and law, (2) a lawyer cannot provide advise or assistance to knowlingly aid a client in fraud or the commission of a crime (with apologies to Saul), (3) a lawyer must be honest and civil in deals with third parties (a lawyer could not lie in a C&D; for example, could not say "I have reviewed the Amazon agreement" etc.)

There are a few other very limited exceptions but those are the big ones.  That is **only** the ethical duty, however, not whether its a good idea to proceed to a C&D on the word of your client alone.

As far as whether it was a good idea for BM to proceed to a C&D without conducting an investigation, that is a different question as I said above.  It is **not** a good idea for three reasons at least.  

First, it does a disservice to the client IMHO.  When the bluff is called, the client (and law firm) lose a lot of credibility when they fail to follow through with a lawsuit.  Clients frequently ask me to send C&Ds to try to bully smaller companies, and I always say the same thing: I will only send a C&D if you are able to provide a sufficient retainer to pay my fees throughout a lawsuit, and you are ready, willing and able to initiate a lawsuit if there is no compliance by the deadline.  No bluffs, they are bad for the client's and the firm's reputation.

Second, sending a C&D without an investigation for any kind of internet activity risks a major backlash (as happened here).  It is a pretty common defense to simply post the C&D for the world to see, and let the public response do its job.  Absent a real wrong, most people hate it when lawyers send C&Ds (especially to journalists or web sites) .. doing so almost ALWAYS backfires badly, and I personally have dissuaded several clients from making this mistake.

Third, for the reasons above, if I send a C&D client I need to be ready to follow through with the lawsuit.  Which means, I won't send a C&D without first making sure I can sign my name to a lawsuit.. which in turn means I have to conduct an investigation anyway because filing a lawsuit requires such.  But that is just my practice (and the practice of most top lawyers I know), not an ethical requirement.