*Updated: Mr. Guillot AKA yankprintster (4225) responded and is interested in answering some questions. Ask him your questions below in the comments*
B.J. Guillot is one of three candidates currently seeking to represent Washington's 2nd Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. Mr. Guillot is also a reader of SoylentNews. In a recent interview with CoinTelegraph about his enthusiastic support of cryptocurrency, Mr. Guillot was asked "When did you first hear about Bitcoin, and when did you get into it?" He explains that he got turned on to Bitcoin while reading a certain news for nerds site, and then mentions:
Since I have the floor, let me just state for the record, the new Slashdot web design and user experience is really poor. I've since moved on to SoylentNews.org for my daily science and tech news.
Perhaps Mr. Guillot would be kind enough to answer a few questions about his positions on topics of particular concern to the SN community. I invite him to answer directly in the comments below, or if he would prefer, I will collect and forward the highest-modded comments to Mr. Guillot, and then submit a new story with his responses.
According to his campaign website, Mr. Guillot holds a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics, and has software development experience.
The Crypto Crimson reports that while many politicians are "quick to jump on the bitcoin bandwagon" following the U.S. Federal Election Commission's recent opinon declaring that political committes may accept contributions in the form of Bitcoin, unlike these other politicians, Mr. Guillot is an active miner who "currently achiev[es] a hashrate of five Terahash per Second - certainly the fastest bitcoin mining politician".
The top item to appear in the "Issues" section of Mr. Guillot's campaign website is "NSA Spying". Mr. Guillot's stated positon on this issue is: "The Federal Government needs to immediately stop its spying and metadata collection of its citizen's phone calls and emails. It's also time to discontinue the Patriot Act. No more extensions!".
On his campaign website, Mr. Guillot also states his positions on: "Internet Freedom", "Patent Reform", "Bitcoin", "National Debt", "FairTax", "Military", "Second Amendment", "Energy", and "Education".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday July 08 2014, @12:01PM
You are absolutely right that it is the threat of going to jail that will actually change things.
Think about this: You're some underling in HSBC, and you're told to take part in their multi-billion dollar money laundering scheme for drug lords. And this went on for years. Why would you not tell the appropriate authorities? Almost definitely because to do so would be to lose your job, that's why. And once your name got in the paper, you would probably also be unable to work in the banking industry again as well. I mean, losing your career is a big deal, and I wouldn't be surprised to see ordinary people avoiding that fate.
That is, unless you threaten them with something more serious. You have to make it more risky to not say anything, to protect bosses, etc than it is to rat them out.
Fines will never work: Even if you fine the corporation more than the profits they made from the criminal activity (which has not been happening), the managers who made the choice to commit the crime are not directly affected by it and thus have no disincentive to repeat the behavior.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Tuesday July 08 2014, @02:46PM
Things change once people start going to prison.
If you're going to put small fry in prison for money laundering, then when HSBC is caught doing it, someone should go to prison too (it's bullshit that billions of dollars can be transferred so easily without anyone knowing about it - so I'm pretty sure you can get enough names if you really bothered to look). If some individual would go to prison for doing X, then when Large Corp does X the people/person responsible should go to prison too.
As I said, this is just "The Government taking its cut". And it's more evidence that the War on Drugs is bullshit. The billions of laundered dollars is blood money. Without those billions, the drug lords would find it much harder to fund their wars and armies.