Frankly, my moral and ethical code is quite different to what is legal.<p>"State money transmission laws" belong to a set of legal rules that I don't care about as long as nobody gets harmed (physically or w.r.t. his property).<p>Also, one person being arrested doesn't imply that he has done something bad (unfortunately). These days there are even people that did something bad and wander freely the earth.<p>Please base you story on immoral or unethical behavior and not on infringement of arbitrary laws. I have no problem with trusting your judgement but I do know that I don't trust your lawmaker.
I don't know about others in the bitcoin foundation, but Peter Vessenes has left a trail of destruction behind him.<p>I'm based in Europe but personally know over 5 people who he has defrauded and he has cost me a lot of money and several days of headaches.
Knowing nothing about them, I automatically distrust them. The beauty of bitcoin is that it does not need this sort of thing. The less of this shit exists -- associated with the term "bitcoin" -- the smaller the attack vector for state interference.
The only reason they exist was to organize and pay developers a salary for working on Bitcoin F/T. Then they had the stupid idea of lobbying the US fed essentially begging to be regulated while everybody else preferred Bitcoin remain a commodity, and unregulated for as long as possible. They operate in secret as well which is strange for an open source project.
Yesterday, at Bitcoin Berlin, the Global Bitcoin Alliance was announced. It is an umbrella organization for national Bitcoin associations. This bottom-up approach sounds much more promising to me than the top-down attempt of the Foundation at creating local chapters.
So what role does the Bitcoin Foundation play in the Bitcoin world? Is this a threat to Bitcoin itself, or is this just some people who thought it'd be a nice name to give themselves some superficial credibility?
"It refuses to take part in relevant legal challenges to state money transmission laws."<p>No, it refused to participate in <i>one</i> court case filed by the Don Quixote of money transmission.
For people that have been watching the Bitcoin Foundation for a while the possibly shady nature of some of it's members isn't news. There have been complaints about it since its formation when some of it's members supported a company coinvalidation that wants the government to essentially require the registration of all BTC addresses so potentially illegal acquired coins can be blacklisted.<p>I think what we will see in the Bitcoin Foundation is the same thing we see happening in Bitcoin as it grows; a shake out of the less ethical players. So far Shrem is out if things don't go well at MtGox their CEO is next and hopefully this Vessenes guy as well if it turns out he really is up to this nonsense.
I trust it because it's open source, but I don't trust it because it's not regulated in any manner.<p>I still have to be convinced about bitcoin about a peer reviewed research on the subject.<p>I'd trust it to make a transaction, but not to keep a wallet with many bitcoin on it.
I don't think I had heard of them before the quite aggressive attacks against MtGox just recently. Which were day later shown to be quite hasty, given that Bitstamp suffered from the very same problem.<p>Criminal charges don't matter that much to me. An entity that's a potential danger for the global banking world would certainly get into legal trouble even they weren't doing anything wrong.<p>So no, not much trust.