Scammer McScammerson

How to spot a scam

In the wake of this morning’s Bit-Trader.biz announcement, I thought it was time to finally write an article about spotting scams. I’ve been “doing” Bitcoin fo-re-ver. You haven’t heard of me because, for the most part, I’m a lurker – and I like it that way. But recently, I’ve come out of the closet a bit more loudly in public.

For a little background on me … I’m a marketer. I have handled large brands, small brands, and everything in between. Nowadays, I run my own home security company, Alarm Grid. I’m the director of marketing and an avid Bitcoiner. Those are probably the two activities that I spend the most time on these days. I occasionally jump into the limelight, like last week, when I spoke at Refresh Miami on mobile payments next to one of the co-founders of Square in an absurd outfit consisting of a suit, a bowtie and a hat that said “EA$Y” on it. Such a costume lends to me an air of credibility that suits the internet Monopoly® money we invented and are using.

I’m in the middle. The photo is from the Miami Herald.

I have seen every scam come and go: every Ponzi scheme, every so-called hack, and the plain old professional thieves like Neo & Bee. Every time people get scammed, the mantra is the same. The afflicted take to Reddit, cry foul, talk about how someone should have warned them. Then the commenters start saying things like, “serves a person who believes [insert something] right.” The thing is, in the aftermath of a scam, everyone whose hackles were raised when they first heard the scam’s pitch comes out in droves claiming that they knew from day one. Just like when Bitcoin went up, everyone and their mother came out of the woodwork saying things like, “I was just about to invest, but then I didn’t.”

These sorts of statements are antithetical to my personal investment philosophy. But they are also the kinds of statements that indicate a mindset that is ready to be scammed. Very simply, I do not believe one should investing in vehicles that they do not understand. There is a lot of information out there. Some of it is knowable, and some of it is unknowable. There is a spectrum of knowability in there, and somewhere on that magical spectrum as it is applied to public companies in the US is where insider trading begins. If someone is making money on knowable things, their returns will be predictable. If they are making money or even just predictions with regard to unknowable things (like, for example, the day and hour that Bear Stearns will collapse), then they are being fed information. But that’s just how I feel. I don’t believe in oracles.

So anyhow, if you’d like to further explore why I think what I think, feel free to ask any questions in the comment section below. I’ll be around to participate. That said, let me share with you some really simple principles that have kept me from getting scammed over the years.

“If It’s Too Good to be True…” What That Phrase Actually Means

You’ve heard this before. But what does it mean for something to be too good to be true? In the investment world, it’s pretty simple. You have a few baselines that you can measure against. One of the most important is the S&P 500. This has a highly consistent 10%-ish/year rate of return over 30 years. It’s a bit volatile, however, and goes up and down with the markets. That said, its returns are consistent. There are plenty of criticisms of investing in the S&P, but as a benchmark, it’s pretty much the best we have.

So when someone tells you that they have an investment opportunity for you, how can you know it’s “too good to be true?”

It’s not a universal law, by any stretch of the imagination. But if it returns more than 10%, or anywhere near 10% per year, that’s a big red flag. Professional money managers (in spite of what they say) have a hard time returning anything near or above the S&P over long periods of time.

If you’ve ever wondered what a Ponzi looks like, consider looking at one of the greatest Ponzis ever executed. Madoff’s returns were about 15%/year. Many Bitcoin scams promise between 15% and 20% or more each month. People were screaming Ponzi for years when it came to Madoff. In the real world a 15% return is unheard of. Madoff’s return was unprecedented.

A very simple way to gut check this is to apply the very simple rule of 72. If you divide the percentage promised by 72, you can get a good approximation of how much money you will make in an investment. In the case of Madoff, 72/15% per year = doubling every 4.8 years. At between 15% and 20% per month, you’re talking either 72/15% or 72/20% per month = doubling every 4.8 months or 3.6 months. So consider, while real-world investors were suspicious of a doubling of their money every 4.8 years, many Bitcoiners put their money into products that promise to go through 22 doublings in that same time period. So Berney would have turned your $1,000 investment into $2,000 over a nearly 5 year time span. Over that same time period, Bitcoin-Trader.biz – the most recent scam to be uncovered – was claiming that they could turn your $1,000 investment into just under $2.1 billion over the same 5 year time period. I’m not going to cast aspersions, but sometimes if you just run the numbers, the scams are obvious. Just for comparison, if you bought $1,000 worth of Bitcoin at $.20 and sold it at $1,000, you would have made about $5 million. And I think we can all recognize that that is absurd growth (also a pretty good explanation for why financial institutions are pretty suspicious of BTC).

Does It Guarantee Returns?

No one can guarantee anything unless they are doing something that is riskless. There are a few examples of quasi-riskless investments out there, but they are either 1) exploiting inefficiencies that will be closed once a certain amount of money is thrown at them, or 2) returning at or just above inflation. Arbitrage, by the way, falls under number 1. And while a lot of Bitcoiners believe that they are engaging in arbitrage, most of the time, arbitrage is regarded as (almost) risk-free. Bitcoin’s markets have a high chance of failure, themselves, which means that even keeping one’s money in there exposes it to high levels of systemic risk. So even Bitcoin arbitrage isn’t arbitrage.

If someone tells you that you will, almost guaranteed, get some high rate of return on your money, it is probably a scam. What’s a high rate? Well, remember, a riskless investment will probably return about what US inflation returns (3-ish percent). An incredibly high-yield, risky investment might return 10-12%. Understanding this with regard to legitimate investments will help you get a really fast understanding of your exposure to risk in any investment.

By the way, I see the debates about inflation being a false number coming. I can smell them. Even if you believe that, I don’t care. Take the debate elsewhere, this isn’t the forum.

Is Your Money Illiquid?

A lot of investment schemes tie your money up for a period of time. In Bitcoin, a lot of these are Ponzis. But there are a lot of products in the real world that do the same thing. Non-trade REITs, for example, are a great way to run what looks legitimate but acts a lot like a Ponzi scheme. Oftentimes, wealthy people invest in them because their financial advisor recommends the product and they promise big returns. You can’t pull your money out of the product because it requires that you stay invested for some defined term. Locking your money in is a great way to bide time. While some legitimate investments will lock up money, this is a pretty big red flag.

Are You The Sucker? Because Someone Is the Sucker…

I feel like it’s stage 3 of becoming a Bitcoiner. Everyone buys mining rigs. They spend a ton of money on some rig they read about on the internet that promises that bitcoins will shoot forth like one of those infinity-coin boxes in Super Mario Brothers. That’s not how things work.

I believe in the efficiency of markets. Remember what I said about knowable and unknowable information? Well, money is not made by information that everyone can know. Why are mining companies selling you their rigs if they could have made more money simply running the rig? And don’t get all high and mighty on me here. You’re buying the rig which is a validation of that point. You purchase the rig because you believe that mining companies are selling the rig at a price that is so low that you will be able to make money on the purchase.

When I first heard about mining companies selling rigs, the first thing that came out of my mouth was very simply, “those people won’t get their miners for about 8 months.” And I was right. How did I know? Well, I knew because the place where people make their money is in the unknowable information. Do you know how to make an ASIC? No? Well, then you won’t be able to compete with others who do. Just a fact.

In every transaction, there is a trade going on. Hopefully, that transaction intersects at the point where you get a certain amount of value from the purchase, and the seller gets an equivalent amount of value by taking payment for the product or service. In the case where the company is doing something because they are “good guys” who want to help “make others rich” you are on the wrong boat. They are going to be getting a lot of value from your payment, and you will not be getting a lot of value from their product.

Opportunities Are Created Not Happed Upon

Remember, I’m an entrepreneur. I’m a little biased here. But let me tell you about how I’ve turned my investment of a small amount into an investment of a slightly larger amount. I showed up to work every day, I worked 18 hours a day for two years, I lost friendships and other significant relationships, I lost a lot of contact with my family, I stopped watching television and playing video games. I sleep in my car sometimes just to catch up on sleep so that I can go back into the office and work. Some entrepreneurs have it a little bit easier, but, I think if you read about the good ones (not that I’m equating myself with them), most have very similar tales of woe. For those who don’t have the itch, being an entrepreneur is awful. It’s not fun.

So what if I told you you could bypass all that heartache and pain and get wealthy? There is something appealing to the idea that we can all make money or create opportunity without giving up anything. For value to be created, something has to be sacrificed. In the Bitcoin system, it’s energy. In some ways, while more metaphorical than it should be, that’s one of the big philosophical problems I have with Proof of Stake systems that are not acknowledged as centralized systems. In order for value to be created, someone has to sacrifice something.

If someone tells you that they are giving you an opportunity to earn untold wealth, and all you have to do is sit back and enjoy the ride, 99 times out of 100, it’s a scam. Those aren’t real odds. My guess is that the odds of it not being a scam are even far worse.

The Best Scammers are Often Scamming Themselves; Many of Them are Really, Genuinely Good People

The reason this article came into existence at all was because last week at Coins in the Kingdom I made some noise about the Bitcoin-Trader.biz people. I just let everyone know that it was a Ponzi, I made sure to say it every time I saw a person talking to their reps at the center table. I’d walk over and just kindly inform them that I believed this to be a very blatant Ponzi. What was my proof? Math doesn’t lie. The two representatives behind the counter were probably genuinely good people. Both of them said that they had lots of money in Bitcoin-Trader. So with today’s announcement, I’m guessing they are in a pretty bad place.

The truth is, anyone can be scammed. We are all susceptible. Many early Bitcoiners have been through the ringer – scammed multiple times. The two representatives at Coins in the Kingdom were pitching what appears on the surface to be an obvious scam. Why were they so brazenly opposed to acknowledging it? I wish I knew.

I see what I think are obvious scams in this community all the time. But for the most part, these people are not going around trying to scam people. Some of them are – Trendon Shavers AKA Pirate was running a straight-up, unapologetic Ponzi. But there are scams out there that genuinely good people don’t know they are running. I’d say a lot of crypto coins based on personality cults fall into this category. The point here is that just because you met someone who is nice or competent, it doesn’t mean they aren’t pitching a scam.

Always be vigilant. Always be skeptical. And don’t be nice to scammers. Call them out. Because, there are a lot of people who don’t know quite what they’re getting into when they come to Bitcoin. And while it’s a good opportunity to learn for most of us, wouldn’t it be better if we could just ferret out the scammers at the outset?

October 16, 2014 at 11:57PM

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A (Working!) Web Broadcast from Space: Interview with Outernet

Thane Richard of Outernet is chatting with me while in a coffee shop (on the anonymous peer-to-peer chat platform Talky). His car is being repaired at the mechanic next door—ah, the woes of the terrestrial world!

Thane, what is Outernet?

I think we should start by saying that there’s a pretty big problem—gap, disparity, whatever you want to call it—in the world right now, that not a lot of people are aware of. That’s that only about a third of humanity right now has access to the Internet. Four billion people cannot access the Internet, which is essentially an enormous library. The largest library ever built. And that library enables you to access so much valuable information that everyday, people like you and me take for granted. Whether it’s news, entertainment (entertainment is an end in itself, I think), health information, weather data for farmers, courseware. What Outernet does is we broadcast the best of the content of this library, from space, for free.

And so anyone within our broadcast footprint, which right now is limited to North America, Europe, Middle East, and North Africa—anybody can build a receiver, which we publish plans to—openly—no one ever has to buy anything from Outernet. In fact, we encourage people to build their own receivers, and we hope that, sort of like FM radio, we can focus on the signal and allow others to manufacture the actual radios that tune in to the signal.

And everything that it is in the library, or in the broadcast, is selected and open for vote. So people can request. We just actually released this last week. It’s called WhiteBoard. You can go and paste a link—we ask that you tell us what the license for the content is—and then people can vote on it. It sort of moves up and down the queue based on demand. So, that is Outernet.

Excellent. With the system of voting, is that because you have only so many megabytes to broadcast per day, so the content must be prioritized?

Right. Right now we’re broadcasting 200 megabytes per day to those locations I mentioned. It’s like BitTorrent from space.

How could Outernet help in, say, a zombie apocalypse, in which a lack of electricity limits connection to the Internet?

[Laughs.] I’m a huge Walking Dead fan, too. Or I used to be at the beginning. I feel like the show’s kind of fallen off.

In the event of a zombie apocalypse—what you always see in the classic zombie movies—is all these little groups working in isolation. Everybody just sort of forms these camps, nobody has any idea what’s going on, the plots are always centered around getting to the “safe zone” but no one knows if it’s been built. It’s almost like we go from the two-thirds of humanity who don’t have access to this library, to everyone. In that situation, Outernet would be the oasis in the desert. We would continue to broadcast, because whatever is happening on earth, whether it’s a zombie apocalypse or tsunami or military conflict, has no effect on our ability to broadcast from space. We’d probably prioritize news, emergency information, how to best prepare and defend yourself from the zombie apocalypse—maybe that book by, who’s the guy who wrote World War Z? His first book about the zombie preparedness guide. Anyway, maybe we’d broadcast that book and a few classic zombie movies so that people can see what works and doesn’t work.

I should clarify—Outernet is not the Internet. It’s not two-way communication. With Outernet, it’s a one-way broadcast. You receive what we broadcast, and you can filter it.

What would it take for Outernet to become a two-way communication system?

More funding. [Laughs.] If we had an unlimited, deep purse, we’d be able to switch on to two-way communication, but there are actually a few reasons why that’s not ideal, and why there should be a one-way broadcast, sort of as a baseline that is always available, and having a two-way broadcast as more of a premium service.

The first is that, when you have a two-way broadcast, you have transmitters, because now you’re not just having an antenna or a dish or a receiver that is purely a receive-only device, which is what you have with, like, an FM radio. Your FM radio can’t talk back to the radio station, so it’s not as heavily regulated. Whenever you start broadcasting information from a device, you’re going to run into enormous hurdles in terms of telecommunication regulation, pretty much in every country. So we’re able to mostly avoid that.

The second is that, because it’s a one-way data stream, it guarantees the end user anonymity of consumption. When you turn on your radio in your car, nobody knows you turned it on and nobody knows what you’re listening to. So same thing with Outernet. Nobody is able to know—we’re not even able to know—how many people have built a receiver, whether it’s on, what they have on it and what they’re reading. So for those who are very concerned with privacy, especially with all the revelations with what the U.S. government has been doing with the NSA, tracking Internet users’ online behavior, that’s not something we’d be able to give access to even if we wanted to. That sort of shield of anonymity is very important.

Do you yet take donations in Bitcoin?

We do! We have been accepting bitcoins for a little while.

How else can people get involved?

There are actually several ways. The first, as you mentioned, is to donate and support our work financially, which we always appreciate. The second is really pretty basic—just support what we’re doing by adding to the discussion. Go in our forums, talk about what you think about Outernet, why you think it’s important, whether you disagree with it. Some people disagree with it, and think we’re a total conspiracy. They think we’re like SkyNet [laughs].

We just released a video that we think is pretty powerful, about this idea of a world without censorship—what would this world look like if everybody had access to this information? So that is a huge help when people share that video. The more people around the world who know that Outernet exists, the better.

Outernet’s Bitcoin donation address is 12BvyAn2wYHzgCKcJvKfapKgo9G7anEcSX. They are currently holding a crowdfundraiser to make the Outernet broadcast completely global.

October 16, 2014 at 04:00PM

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Inside Bitcoins Heads to Israel in Less Than 1 Week – Get 10% OFF

by Adam Hofman on October 14, 2014 { }

Inside Bitcoins Conference & Expo, the leading trade show for the fast-growing bitcoin and related cryptocurrency, will be launching in Israel later this month after successful events earlier this year in Berlin, New York, Hong Kong, Melbourne, London, and Las Vegas. From October 19-20, thought leaders, virtual currency experts and business visionaries will converge at Kfar Maccabiah Convention Center to lead a discussion on the first digital, decentralized, peer-to-peer based global currency.

Whether you’re a venture capitalist, lawyer, technologist, or entrepreneur, the conference agenda offers a diverse and exciting array of topics that shed light on the implications of bitcoin, along with predictions on the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

Featured speakers include:

• Peter Todd, Bitcoin Core Developer


• Meni Rosenfeld, Chairman of the Israeli Bitcoin Association


• Tamar Zandberg of the Israeli Parliament


• Vitalik Buterin, Co-Founder of Bitcoin Magazine and Ethereum

And many more! View the full speaker list here.

Inside Bitcoins Tel Aviv will also feature a bi-directional Bitcoin ATM, which will be placed at your service.

We’re pleased to announce that Bitcoin Magazine is once again partnering with Inside Bitcoins to offer all readers 10% OFF a full conference pass. Enter code BMAG14 at checkout to redeem your discount. Register now !

October 14, 2014 at 11:37PM

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Storj Crowdsale Conclusion

The initial Storj crowdsale has finally come to a close, and the Storj team is pleased with the results, having raised at least 910 BTC. Although they are still hard at work on furthering development, the funding raised for their decentralized cloud storage platform exceeded their expectations.

Storj, for the uninformed, is designed to allow users to store files over their peer-to-peer network. Using Metadisk, one can upload content to the network for distributed storage across its participating nodes; users either pay for this service in Storjcoin X–known as SJCX, the network’s native currency–or allow the network to store an equivalent amount of data on their own computer. This undercuts traditional corporate cloud storage services by an order of magnitude.

The Storj team promises to put the money from their crowdsale to good use. Some of it will be used to reimburse people for prior expenses paid out of pocket, and pay for salaries for full-time contributors as well as freelance work. The rest will go to further cloud storage development, research into decentralized technology, marketing and PR, community initiatives and projects, and legal counsel.

In addition to helping promote a decentralized Internet and earning Storjcoin X, crowdsale participants will receive early access to DriveShare. DriveShare is another cloud storage application, but its purpose is slightly different from Metadisk: primarily for those who just want to make SJCX and have plenty of hard drive space to spare, it allows users to rent it out to the network. As soon as the beta is live, contributors will be given access in the order in which they contributed, until it’s ready for full public release.

Transparency is very important to Storj, and they have released a full list of their team members upon request. They want to make sure all funding is properly allocated, so you can track all of the bitcoins they raised from the crowdsale at address 132aBrspLgL54cm9eQfGNFLGqXwBRQrugc, as well as the leftover Storjcoin X at 19KvumZgcs2owq9tF2obyg1SBmXDVdzNnW. Most of that will be used to reward users who contribute resources to the network.

Most SJCX has not yet been generated, but the developers plan to use a timelock transaction to ensure they cannot be arbitrarily spent. 75 million of those will be spent on community organization, such as elections. Another 75 million is reserved for platform developers working full-time or those seeking to earn development bounties. The rest will go to bounties encouraging the development of new apps on the Storj platform, and future crowdsales if necessary.

Going forward, the Storj team hopes to to make centralized services like DropBox a thing of the past, and are excited for the future. To get more news and updates as they come, you can subscribe to the Storj newsletter via their website, or register on their forums where there’s an active community to help you. You can email questions or comments to hello@storj.io

October 14, 2014 at 05:28PM

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Trezor, the Bitcoin Wallet Unicorn

In 2014 we saw the release of the first hardware Bitcoin wallets. Now the unicorn is real: offline coins that can be spent, using an Internet-connected and even malware-infected computer, all without risk of losing your money.

How is this possible? It’s important to first understand how bitcoins get stolen.

To say that someone’s bitcoins are “on her computer” is actually a misleading statement. What is stored on a Bitcoin-owner’s computer is actually the private key that corresponds to her Bitcoin address (the public key). When the owner wants to spend her funds, her wallet software combines her private and public keys to create a signature—the digital equivalent of signing the back of a check. This digital signature unlocks the funds and they’re now spendable.

This is why storing your private key in an Internet-connected laptop, desktop or phone—or with an online wallet service—always carries risk. It’s always possible that malicious software (“malware”) could enter your device through the Internet, enabling someone to discover your Bitcoin private key and spend your money.

Cold storage savings—that is, sending your bitcoins to a public address whose private key is not stored on any Internet-connected device—provided an answer to this problem. But it was inconvenient. You couldn’t spend from your savings without first importing the private key into Internet-connected software, defeating the whole purpose of cold storage. Could a “hot” wallet (spend-ready) and a secure wallet ever be one-and-the-same? This unicorn—cold storage you could spend from—was what we were all hoping for.

Hardware wallets appeared as the white winged creatures, and the most popular among them is the Trezor.

The Trezor, which is not Internet-enabled, stores your private key. Using the USB cable provided, you connect it to your computer and create a wallet at MyTrezor.com. The Trezor device then generates a seed of 12, 18 or 24 random words (your choice) on its own small screen, which you write down and store away. These words never touch the Internet and can be used to recover your private key if your Trezor is ever lost, destroyed, or stolen.

You can also choose to enable PIN and/or passphrase protection, so that if your device were ever stolen, the thief would also have to know two additional pieces of private information to access your coins.

Worried that your computer could be infected with a keylogger (malware that records your keystrokes)? You’re still safe. If you choose to enable PIN protection, MyTrezor wallet will ask for your PIN before a transaction is sent. The 9-digit number pad is only displayed in cleartext (scrambled out of standard order) on your Trezor itself. Only question marks appear on your computer screen, which you click with your cursor.

You may be wondering: what if I want multiple private keys because I (duh) want to have more than one Bitcoin address? No problem. The Trezor is a deterministic wallet, which means that an unlimited number of public addresses are recoverable from the same, single seed.

The Trezor is the creation of Prague-based SatoshiLabs, which was founded in fall 2013. All the software for the Trezor is open-source and viewable on GitHub, and the device ships for free internationally. At the time of writing, a Trezor costs 0.32 BTC ($119 USD).

If you own or plan to own bitcoins, and if you’re worried about computer security (who isn’t?), consider shopping around for hardware wallets. Store your private keys offline while retaining the ability to spend your Bitcoin easily.

October 14, 2014 at 01:00PM

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“The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin” is a Pièce de Résistance

As someone who spends one to two hours every day reading about Bitcoin, I assumed that the newly released documentary “The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin” wouldn’t have much to offer me. I assumed it would be some sort of primer for people who are unfamiliar with the technology.

Boy, was I wrong.

I wouldn’t have watched it, except that members of the Bitcoin subreddit kept posting rave reviews about it. One redditor even posted, “Just watched ‘The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin’. I immediately bought 5 Bitcoin during the credits.”

A film that stirs almost $2,000 worth of emotion in the soul of a crypto fan is enough to get me interested. So I headed on over to The Pirate Bay (which, to my delight, is going by “The Peace Bay” these days) and partook of a shared copy.

What I thought would be a primer was actually a rich chronicle of highlights of Bitcoin’s young history. But more than a yearbook, the film offered meaning for all of its stories, spoken by the people who lived them.

The documentary is narrated by Dan, a 35-year-old Bitcoin miner, father and computer programmer, as he travels the world for a year to record the history of Bitcoin firsthand. Dan attends Liberty Forum and PorcFest in New Hampshire, where almost every merchant accepts Bitcoin long before crypto fans were courted by the likes of Overstock. He takes us into the cozy Salt Lake City kitchen where Casascius Coins—arguably the most popular image of Bitcoin in the world—are made by hand.

We then visit San Francisco, where a shadow-faced “Mr. Bitcoin” explains how cryptocurrency and the Silk Road have removed much of the danger from his small-time drug trade. Dan visits Charlie Shrem, former CEO of BitInstant, right as his company triples its sales volumes. You can actually see the sweat on the brows of these young entrepreneurs as they fill a giant void in a trading world in which they only had one real competitor: Mt. Gox.

And speaking of Mt. Gox—want to see Mark Karpeles struggle to play piano? How about confront a guerilla journalist who wants his coins back? Or perhaps inside the “vault” where the coins held by Mt. Gox were said to be held? Then you’re in for a treat.

Next, watch Roger Ver single-handedly introduce Bitcoin to a grocer, convince him to accept it, set him up with BitPay and cryptographically purchase an iced tea from him all in one afternoon. See the grocer get a light in his eyes as it dawns on him what a future of decentralized money can mean for his business.

Eric Voorhoos in Panama, Vitalik Buterin camping, Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto during his now-famous “free lunch”: all these key players and more tell their stories in a filmed yearbook that could reasonably be called “Bitcoin’s First Five Years.”

Pièce de résistance is French for “piece of resistance” and is used to describe a highlight or main attraction. While this film is definitely that, there is also something more: resistance itself. Most individuals in the film, in one way or another, resist the paradigm that money must come from a monopoly. In doing so, they’ve created an infrastructure that has the potential to benefit all of humanity.

The film is available through a paywall on the film’s official site, and has also recently been uploaded to YouTube. After I finished viewing my shared copy, I went to the film’s site to donate my thanks to the producers. Unfortunately, they’ve posted no donation address anywhere that I can see.

And so perhaps while the makers of this film continue to promote the idea that money—that is, property—need not and should not be monopolized, they’ll also come to realize that ideas are not property , and that locking them behind “copyright laws” only slows the spread of information and—hence—innovation.

Now go pop some popcorn, gather your non-crypto friends ‘round (especially important), and enjoy this piece of literal resistance.

Update: Further hunting revealed that the film’s Twitter account, @BitcoinDoc, lists their donation address: 19xb2pAzyv7feFkBhbh3n3rtBJ9JPTufm. May we all one day contribute something of such value that people hunt down ways to give us money!

October 12, 2014 at 07:53PM

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