Bitcoin

And just by the way, tax avoidance is NOT illegal. Tax evasion is.

after you had bit coin, does tooth hurt?

http://idle.slashdot.org/story/11/05/24/1257229/increased-power-usage-leads-to-mistaken-pot-busts-for-bitcoin-miners

The Canadian town of Mission, BC has a bylaw that allows the town's Public Safety Inspection Team to search people's homes for grow ops if they are using more than 93 kWh of electricity per day. There have allegedly been reports floating in IRC of two different cases of police showing up at a Bitcoin miner's residence with a search warrant. Ohio police and the DEA file at least 60 subpoenas each month for energy-use records of people suspected of running an indoor pot growing operation. DEA Agent Anthony Marotta said high electricity usage does not always mean the residence is an indoor pot farm and has surprised federal agents. 'We thought it was a major grow operation ... but this guy had some kind of business involving computers. I don't know how many computer servers we found in his home.'"

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Typical GOP unconsciousness

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Internal Revenue Service may be missing potential tax dodgers who report their foreign accounts but who avoid paying penalties by not reporting previous years' returns, a government watchdog said in a report released on Friday.
To avoid steep penalties for offshore tax evasion, some taxpayers are making "quiet disclosures" to the IRS, reporting for the first time offshore accounts that could appear to the IRS as newly opened accounts, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), an investigative arm of Congress.
The government re-opened a voluntary amnesty program in 2009, the same year Swiss Bank UBS AG agreed to pay $780 million to settle charges the bank was helping Americans stash income abroad to escape U.S. taxes. It has collected $5.5 billion from about 38,000 complying taxpayers since then.
Under the program, taxpayers turn themselves in and pay a percentage of the account balance as a fee.
Taxpayers making quiet disclosure filings, on the other hand, would avoid paying any delinquent taxes and penalties, unless otherwise audited, GAO said.
In its analysis of tax filings from 2003 through 2008, GAO said it found "many more potential quiet disclosures than IRS detected."
From 2007 through 2010, the IRS estimates taxpayers reporting foreign accounts nearly doubled to 516,000, GAO said.
The IRS has not researched whether sharp increases in taxpayers reporting offshore accounts for the first time is due to efforts to escape taxes, GAO said.
Taxpayers who get away with quiet disclosures undermine the IRS's Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Program, resulting in lost tax revenue, GAO said.
The IRS has started analyzing the method GAO used to uncover quiet disclosures, Steven Miller, the acting IRS commissioner, said in a response letter to GAO accompanying the report.
"The IRS agrees that we must continue to explore additional methods for effectively identifying quiet disclosures," Miller said.
(Reporting By Patrick Temple-West; Editing by Kim Dixon and Bill Trott)

For any one who would like to take a look at the limit of governments power go to the following site the silk road.

http://silkroadvb5piz3r.onion.to/silkroad/home

Warning the location of the silk road website can not be found however by using the above address you are going to the darknet by way of a gateway where your IP address can be track.

Tor and the Silk Road takedown
Posted October 2nd, 2013 by arma in download warnings fbi hidden services operational security silk road tor
We've had several requests by the press and others to talk about the Silk Road situation today. We only know what's going on by reading the same news sources everyone else is reading.
In this case we've been watching carefully to try to learn if there are any flaws with Tor that we need to correct. So far, nothing about this case makes us think that there are new ways to compromise Tor (the software or the network). The FBI says that their suspect made mistakes in operational security, and was found through actual detective work. Remember: Tor does not anonymize individuals when they use their legal name on a public forum, use a VPN with logs that are subject to a subpoena, or provide personal information to other services. See also the list of warnings linked from the Tor download page.
Also, while we've seen no evidence that this case involved breaking into the webserver behind the hidden service, we should take this opportunity to emphasize that Tor's hidden service feature (a way to publish and access content anonymously) won't keep someone anonymous when paired with unsafe software or unsafe behavior. It is up to the publisher to choose and configure server software that is resistant to attacks. Mistakes in configuring or maintaining a hidden service website can compromise the publisher's anonymity independent of Tor.
And finally, Tor's design goals include preventing even The Tor Project from tracking users; hidden services are no different. We don't have any special access to or information about this hidden service or any other. Because Tor is open-source and it comes with detailed design documents and research papers, independent researchers can verify its security.
Here are some helpful links to more information on these subjects:
Technical details of hidden services:
https://www.torproject.org/docs/hidden-services
Our abuse FAQ:
https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq-abuse
For those curious about our interactions with law enforcement:
https://blog.torproject.org/category/tags/law-enforcement
https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq#Backdoor
Using Tor hidden services for good:
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/using-tor-good
Regarding the Freedom Hosting incident in August 2013, which is unrelated
as far as we can tell:
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/hidden-services-current-events-and-free...
Some general hints on staying anonymous:
https://www.torproject.org/about/overview#stayinganonymous
The Tor Project is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to providing tools to help people manage their privacy on the Internet. Our focus continues to be in helping ordinary citizens, victims of abuse, individuals in dangerous parts of the world, and others stay aware and educated about how to keep themselves secure online.
The global Tor team remains committed to building technology solutions to help keep the doors to freedom of expression open. We will continue to watch as the details of this situation unfold and respond when it is appropriate and useful.
For further press related questions please contact us at [email protected].

http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/04/deep-web-users-are-ready-to-launch-silk-road-2-0/

Deep Web Users Are Ready To Launch Silk Road 2.0
JOHN BIGGSFriday, October 4th, 201374 Comments
SR-2
In an interesting post-mortem release by the creators of the defunct anonymous marketplace Atlantis there is information that the former admins and users of the Silk Road are planning to resurrect the service. User RR writes: “We have SilkRoad v2.0 ready to launch and is now in its final testing stages. Our site has all the features of the original one and we have kept the same style of forum for your ease.”

The new SilkRoad will be sending out anonymous invites to former vendors and then open to the Tor-using public soon after.

The representatives of Atlantis write:

From a quick scout around I’ve counted at least 5 publicly stated projects with the said aim of replacing becoming “Silk Road 2.0″ and many many more gathering info and building alliances.
And this is what Law Enforcement is now parading as a victory? Over two years of investigation, millions of dollars spent and for what so a couple of armchair programmers can build it again in a few days while in the meantime vendors simply move to other site’s .
Users are already planning ways to keep the new site secure. This includes the creation of something called BitWasp, an “open source, anonymous bitcoin marketplace specifically built for use in conjunction with Tor or I2P via the hidden services such as .onion websites and eepsites.”

how-to-build-new-SR-1024x224

What does this mean for law enforcement and fans of the original Silk Road? First SR won’t be dead for long and I suspect that hackers, now emboldened, will produce many more SR-like sites than any government can police. While the last mile problem of shipping products to and from vendors and clients can still be controlled by customs and postal authorities, I doubt it will be as easy to take down these variegated new services.

“What’s striking to me as an outside observer is there seems to be no shortage of well educated American males in their late 20′s (Manning/Snowden and now Ulbricht) willing to sacrifice bright futures and their own personal liberty to highlight the draconian laws and downright totalitarianism being inflicted by their government on the populous,” writes the Atlantis representative. “History will show it’s the will of the people that’ll win in the end and not that of the dictators in power and I thanks to the actions of DPR and others like him I believe I am now witnessing a full revolution in progress and I for one will be sticking around to document it.”

Tags: silk road, deep web, hackers
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