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Qntra - Herald Of The Most Serene Republic |
AppleInsider is reporting that Apple Inc.1 is currently defending itself in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California against a class-action lawsuit accusing Apple of violating antitrust legislation. Continue reading
Apple is, of course, the company worth more than the entire Russian stock market. ↩
In a continuation of the saga of the subpoena sent to Theymos of Bitcointalk, the subpoena has now been released. Full plain text below: Continue reading
Earlier today Theymos of Bitcointalk revealed that he satisfied a subpoena by prosecutors in the United States related to the yet to be tried Ross Ulbricht case. He offered that he turned over posts related to the account "altoid" alleged to be connected to Ross Ulbricht. He also admitted turning a number of posts, including posts deleted by users from a thread titled "A Heroin Store" which posed and interesting thought experiment: Continue reading
Today's difficulty change marks the first time since the introduction of Bitcoin mining ASICs that the network difficulty has dropped. Network difficulty went from 40,300,030,328 to 40,007,470,271 which is a loss of 0.73 percent. The first difficulty decrease happened in 2011 when pool operators discovered the existence of botnet miners for the first time and banned several. Other difficulty decreases happened during the GPU mining era when price dips made the energy cost of mining unprofitable in the near term. Since January 2013, the month before the introduction of the first commercial ASIC miners by Avalon mining difficulty has increased by more than 1,300,000 percent.
In a filing with the Australian Parliament the Tax Institute proposed a number of changes and suggestions for future measures the Australian Government could consider with respect to Bitcoin. Among those changes were treating Bitcoin as a currency rather than a good which would end the burden of processing GST taxes on Bitcoin purchases, a bane which has lead at least one startup to leave Australia. Also proposed is a "voluntary registry" of Bitcoin addresses in order to: Continue reading
Today an amendment to the 2003 Communications Decency act went into effect that severely limits the acts that can be portrayed in pornography produced in the United Kingdom. The changes apply restrictions that the United Kingdom has placed on content produced for DVD porn and extends those restrictions to Video on Demand Porn. Pornographer Erika Lust regrets the changes as: Continue reading
According to CoinDesk the Reddit and Twitter tipping service ChangeTip has raised $3.5 million in a funding round lead by Pantera Capital.
A recent report by the United Nations High Commision for Human Rights Committee on Torture excoriated the United States for its human rights record at home and abroad in it first review of the United States since 2006. The United States record was reviewed along with those of several other parties to the 1987 U.N Convention Against Torture which was ratified by the United States in 1994. A number of issues raised in the committee's conclusions include: Continue reading
HSBC has reportedly cut ties with the "regulated" Global Advisors Bitcoin Investment Fund (GABI) over concerns related to "money laundering" risks. Notably in 2012 HSBC settled with the United States for $1.92 billion related to assistance it allegedly provided drug cartels in laundering money in Mexico and Columbia, likely making the money laundering issue a very sore subject for the bank.
The supreme court tomorrow will hear oral arguments in the case of Elonis v. United States. The legal question to be argued is:
(1) Whether, consistent with the First Amendment and Virginia v. Black, conviction of threatening another person under 18 U.S.C. § 875(c) requires proof of the defendant's subjective intent to threaten, as required by the Ninth Circuit and the supreme courts of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont; or whether it is enough to show that a “reasonable person” would regard the statement as threatening, as held by other federal courts of appeals and state courts of last resort; and (2) whether, as a matter of statutory interpretation, conviction of threatening another person under 18 U.S.C. § 875(c) requires proof of the defendant's subjective intent to threaten.
Elonis was convicted for the high crime of posting rap lyrics he had authored to his Facebook page and as a result was sentenced to 44 months in prison to be followed by three years of supervised release.