Quote from: Lethos on September 01, 2012, 08:08:32 PM

After doing the survey, I can smell the bias almost every question asked.
As with any research based work you do at university level, if it's seen as biased you better have a really good reason to be able to still use it as supporting evidence for you opinion on a idea or statement.

Sorry you smell bias - as I said, I'm not trying to prove any hypothesis with this survey. It's a follow up to results I've got already in the study. I don't quite understand what you mean how if it's seen as biased then it's better. Showing biased in research, particularly when gathering the data is a very bad thing, because it affects the validity of the results.

Quote from: Lethos on September 01, 2012, 08:08:32 PM

Currency is not the problem, it's the people involved that is. You don't see people blaming the British pound or US dollars since it sometimes is use to buy drugs, buy weapons or hire hookers. Some is illegal or at least controversial, the people are doing the act, the medium of currency doesn't matter that much.

As I said in the original post, I'm not trying to blame Bitcoin for crime, I personally believe Bitcoin doesn't cause crime. I'm not even anywhere implying that Bitcoin is used for more crime than standard pounds & dollar. (small aside: we had some interesting discussion on technological determinism vs social construction of technology, and personally, the most legitimate sounding theory is social shaping - e.g. people create technology based on social requirements and such, and the technology changes the social requirements and such, so it's cyclic.)

But, a possible reason as to why people don't blame pounds or dollars for crime is because there's measures in place to try and reduce crime with them. There aren't as many of these measures in Bitcoin, and it's a possibility that this could mean more criminal transactions with Bitcoin as opposed to PayPal. E.g. pirateat40 may not have been able to get away with what he did with a recognized currency with the necessary measures. It is a possibility that if it was considerably harder to pay for illegal things online, then not as many people would do it, and if they did, they maybe easier to catch.

It maybe interesting to see what amount of people support measures to curb criminal transaction which may help towards policy making and recognition of Bitcoin as a proper currency.

Thanks again for taking the time to fill it out and providing some feedback, it's really appreciated.

Dom