Why should the DoJ even bother? This is what the libertarians want - money that is untouched by the federal government so why should we waste tax dollars investigating this? The people who lost their money with bitcoins were fools to have invested.

If you're going to whine about the evil gubmint interfering with your currency, you can hardly go running to them when somebody steals it from you. Heck, that's just the 'free market,' in the extreme sense of the word.

And the government that is pursuing the issue.

It's a general comment about the short sighted hypocrisy of complaining about government regulations on financial transactions, followed by complaints about the government failing to regulate financial transactions.

which is about the article - as was the post you replied to, which asked why the DoJ should bother with the case.

And theft does not only apply to things that the government regulates; if I raise chickens on my property, and someone steals them, it's still theft and illegal, even if the value of them did not come from regulated monetary exchanges.

There's no fundamental difference between physical cash and bitcoin (other than value, for which Bitcoin has been remarkably stable for the last year). What you are essentially arguing is "Hey, if you're a drug dealer, and cops come in and steal your cash and pocket it, that's ok, you should have had a bank account".

A better analogy (for this particular case) would be cops coming in and stealing cash from drug dealers, and then the drug dealers complaining about the cops engaging in criminal activity.

But none of this is related to my comment or the comment I was responding to. I was speaking generally about the hypocrisy of people who object to the government making regulations on currency, building a system outside government in order to avoid both the regulations and the taxes that pay for the agencies that regulate it; and then complaining about governments failure to protect it, or secure the non-governmental system. It's the kind of double standard most faux-libertarians use, but it's not directly related to this article.

but at its current price of around $248, it is more than $400 off its high of $655 that it reached in June of last year.

http://www.kitco.com/finance/bitcoin/

in BITCOIN. Poor libertarian fool that he was. (That's probably the real reason Jesse Pinkman shot him. "Yo, dude, you wanna bribe me not to shoot you with BITCOIN?&quot