Follow the lobbyists.<p>Figure out who was threatened enough by a bitcoin model to want the government to step in.<p>Because there is no way they have this kind of time on their hands to pursue this and have such in depth technical knowledge to know what to look for, without some corporate lobbyists spoon feeding it to the prosecutor.<p>Not that I believe tidbit could ever be profitable or useful, but still.
Can someone with a background in law tell me if or why it wouldn't be legal to turn over bitcoin private keys, complying exactly with a request, while also using your own retained copies of those keys to sign transfer transactions sending all those bitcoins held by the previous (now compromised) keys to your new ones that are not covered by the subpoena?<p>It seems to me that you'd be complying exactly with their request, as furnishing a copy of data does not obligate you to delete your own.
Hysteria aside, what happens when a court subpoena demands someone hand over something they don't have? Does the person just say, "I don't have it." and that's that? What if they lie about not having it?
If these New Jersey prosecutors fail with this one, I'm sure they can slap some felony computer fraud charges on them for violating X website's ToS agreement.<p>Prosecutors need to lose their immunity, then we might get some sanity back in the justice system.
I hope they are asking for sanctions in addition to quashing the subpoena. Whoever wrote this subpoena is not only ignorant but has a massive attitude problem, for which some jail time would be therapeutic.
Umm.... what were they issued the subpoena FOR!? I read the entire article waiting for this to be explained.<p>Or can you just be subpoena'd without any case?
This is the first I've heard of Tidbit and I have to say that it is absolutely ingenious!!!<p>If they do open source the code, I strongly hope that webmasters would actually replace obtrusive ads with the mining protocol and not just add it in addition to ad revenue.
I can actually see their point, although yes, they're going about it completely the wrong way.<p>Bitcoin mining using malicious javascript will cost people a lot of money in power bills if done without permission, and this project has good intentions, but I'd be unsurprised if it has already been forked to run without victims knowing. It's just another form of intrusive advert.
I'm all for state's rights, but, given what the article says, I cannot understand how NJ has any ability to issue the subpoena. It isn't an active product that has been used in production so no NJ resident has been "harmed". Its like the NJ prosecutor read some tech article and decided to act.
> Tidbit uses the Stratum protocol, which would enable websites to get paid based on total work contributed to the mining pool rather than total Bitcoins mined<p>No, that's what P2Pool, or really any pool, does. Stratum, as the link states, is just a long-poll protocol to reduce stale shares when a new block is found.<p>But speaking of pools, it seems like the best bang for their buck would be a scrypt profit-switching multipool, that mines the most profitable scrypt coin and exchanges for btc or dollars or whatever. This would potentially create a huge pool so p2pool is better in that respect, but it's just not profitable to mine BTC like this at all.
Ridiculous prosecution aside, something tells me Tidbit will be used in addition to, not as a replacement of display ads.<p>(That assumes there will always be a cryptocoin worth mining with a CPU/GPU. Right now it's silly to do so for bitcoin)
if you do something that is legally ambiguous and you get penalised for it then it is your own fault.<p>this is one reason why i am reluctant to buy any bitcoins or cryptocurrency in general - esp given the strong background of money laundering.<p>its a shame. i do think the future of currency lies in bitcoin or similar... its just not there yet.<p>sure if everyone ends up using it the legality will need resolving sooner, but to a very good approximation nobody uses it at the moment (!)<p>i base this on the data that there are a great deal fewer bitcoin addresses in use atm than enough to assign one of them to each out of 0.1% of the world population - given that many people use multiple addresses i don't think its unreasonable to consider it very close to non-existent in that naive sense... penalising all of the people currently involved is not out of the question yet... not by a very long way imo.<p>(source: <a href="http://blockchain.info/charts/n-unique-addresses?timespan=30days" rel="nofollow">http://blockchain.info/charts/n-unique-addresses?timespan=30...</a>)
I can't stand it anymore! Why are we prosecuting these people instead of Comcast who is on a course to destroy our infrastructure? Of course I know the answer. I just can't deal with it anymore. I will just stop reading any news.
I can't make heads or tails of this—why is New Jersey, specifically, issuing this subpoena? Do they have jurisdiction? Is the student from New Jersey?