This couldn’t possibly be something he made up to get traffic to his blog.
OMG LOL HAHA stupid TSA wage slaves don’t understand tech stuff snicker !!! LOL. HAHAHAHA. Don’t understand that bitcoins are – hahahaha – virtual currency. HAHAHA!
Seriously, I’d be more worried about the TSA agents who don’t realize Washington D.C. is part of the U.S.
I’m kind-of torn here. I like that he makes a mockery of the whole “security” nonsense, but OTOH he seems like a bit of a dick.
To be fair, in mainstream media when ever bitcoins are discussed, the article is normally headed with an image like this: http://images.dailytech.com/nimage/largest-bitcoin-exchange-suspends-withdrawals.si.jpg or this: http://www.bloomberg.com/quicktake/files/2013/09/bitcoin11.jpg
I’m pretty inclined to feel sympathetic to a guy who feels some dickish impulses while being ritually humiliated by the organs of state security. Pretty much no matter what, the dick in a given situation is the thug who works for the police state.
“What a maroon, what an ignoranimus!”
That other TSA worker was actually misapplying their knowledge. “Washington D.C. is not a state!” is proof that something actually stuck to their brain in grade school. Unfortunately, they took the kernel of wisdom and then behaved in a grossly inept/under-trained/inexperienced/unqualified manner by not accepting the DC driver’s license as ID.
This bitcoin situation seems similar. “We’ve been hearing about these bitcoins for months and now we’ve finally found some!”
This would be difficult to answer. You would have to look up the current exchange rate to figure it out, who knows if the currency halved or doubled on your way to the airport.
This story does seem a bit dubious.
Maybe they thought he was the hacker that robbed Mt. Gox, and when he did it those stolen Bitcoins poured out of his hard drive like a slot machine payout.
You know, the same way a piece of paper gets rolled up into a thin tube and transported over phone lines from one fax machine to another.
Was this an international flight? I could be wrong, but as far as I know there’s no requirement to declare how much cash you’re carrying on a domestic flight, even if the amount exceeds $10,000.
I find it hard to take an article seriously that uses the phrase “state speech is hate speech” in response to someone asking him to please actually answer a straightforward question without being a snarky dick about it.
The article was a little unclear on this point: Was the female agent plump?
(For those who did not complete the reading assignment, the correct answer: Yes, six times yes.)
Imagine if Bitcoin had been represented as strings of binary instead. The TSA would have to confiscate all the numbers.
Not all the numbers. Just the ones and zeros.
The guy is kind of a moron. “Obviously, the TSA has been trained, although poorly, to look for Bitcoin. They are apparently now trying to catch money launderers in addition to terrorists”
No, dude, you’ve ALWAYS been required to declare when you’re carrying any monetary instruments in excess of $10K in or out of the country. This is nothing new. There’s no new policy, it’s just a case of someone at work that day had heard about bitcoin in the news, didn’t know much beyond the news (that bitcoins are worth lots!), spotted the bitcoin logos and discs, didn’t know what to make of that and passed the problem to their manager who also didn’t understand bitcoin. The usual TSA incompetence took it from there.
Aye, all 10 of them.
What a maroon, what an ignoranimus!
I think that you mean, MORON and IGNORAMUS
Is there even $10k worth of bitcoin anymore?
