He uses the word "chattel" because it's a term that was used in the slave trade, but he can get away with it because technically it's just another word for "currency".
It's a disgraceful smear. This is clearly going to get ugly.
EDIT: Some stats from Google search, since this is a sensitive point and people are questioning what I'm saying (quotes included in the search):
The level of perceived persecution in the bitcoin community is pretty humorous.
Chattel is just tangible personal property that is moveable and hard to value. [1][2]
Bart Chilton is probably most well known for his outing of the manipulation in the precious metals markets.[3] This guy is not bitcoin's enemy.
Edit:
From a writeup in which the EFF describes Trespass to Chattels in the context of digital goods[4]:
"A trespass to chattels occurs when one party itentionally uses or intermeddles with
personal property in rightful possession of another without authorization,"
Does that not sound entirely relevant to bitcoin exchanges?
Yes, this is what I wrote. Now type chattel into Google with autocomplete and tell me the first item that comes up for you as an autocomplete option...
> Interpreting a statement that uses a word with many definitions by looking at what Google's autocomplete comes up with is the height of fucktarded.
But it doesn't have many definitions. It has one definition. (Okay, two: one as a noun, and one as an adjective which essentially restricts the noun it modifies to the subset of the thing that noun refers to that also meet the noun definition of "chattel".) And what is being done (for which "fucktarded" may still be a valid description) isn't choosing a definition by autocomplete, its assuming that any other use of the adjective form is a reference to the use of the adjective form that is behind the autocomplete.
Which is about equivalent to assuming that any use of "green" as an adjective is a reference to "green acres" (which is what autocomplete suggests first for "green", at least when I use it.)
OK, so what methodology do you propose for determining whether the word "chattel" is more commonly used in the context of discussing slavery, or is instead used most often when talking about things unrelated to slavery?
What does this have to do with anything? "Chattel" is a basic legal term; it's used in every state of the US.
Rayiner, who is a lawyer, presumably typed his comment with his mouth wide open and his forehead bleeding from being pounded on the desk. There isn't a lawyer in the country who doesn't know what the term means. Presumably, your comments are to a legal professional what the guys who invent their own ridiculous substitution ciphers are to professional cryptographers.
I wouldn't expect many if not most people to know that 'chattel' is a basic legal term. I would generally expect most people not to commit the logical error of assuming that just because two words are commonly used together, whenever one word is used it must be in the context of the other word.
If I say: "I had to tape my rims back together so I could see" is it relevant that Google's first completion for the word "rims" is "rims and tires?"
It doesn't matter how it is used popularly, what matters is what this particular person meant--who is a financial regulator, a field which is full of jargon and terms of art.
The course of analysis you're following is like trying to prove programmers don't like allocated memory because they refer to it as "garbage" that needs to be "collected."
Oddly I get the Merriam-Webster definition which shows
n item of tangible movable or immovable property except real estate and things (as buildings) connected with real property. 2. : slave, bondman · See chattel ...
I wonder if past search history affects results, my second result was from the free online dictionary and referenced cattle.
I am not sure how I would take offense, perhaps certain groups are predisposed to do so?
Worse, google won't even autocomplete the word "currency" after you type "chattel" and a search for "chattel currency", with quotes, returns fuck all other than stuff about this article.
> Worse, google won't even autocomplete the word "currency" after you type "chattel" and a search for "chattel currency", with quotes, returns fuck all other than stuff about this article.
It actually returns quite a lot of things other than this article, though much of it is chaff (things where you have something like "... chattel. Currency, ..."). Quite a lot of it, though, is sites unrelated to this article using it as a reference to non-legal-tender currency, most of which appear to be goldbug conspiracy theorist sites [1].
Though a couple of them [2], the use happens to reference the use of humans as "chattel currency", so I guess that's the closest thing to actual support to the "chattel currency" = "slavery" meme that is being peddled upthread. But even these uses actually are using "chattel currency" precisely as a something which is not legal tender used as a medium of exchange.
That is what I meant by "fuck all". Aside from standard background search noise, the phrase "chattel currency" is virtually unused.
I am guessing, as suggested by others, that he actually said "shadow". Still loaded language (bitcoin is hardly shadow; the blockchain is public..) but it makes far more sense in the context.
> That is what I meant by "fuck all". Aside from standard background search noise, the phrase "chattel currency" is virtually unused.
Its used prior to the article at issue here, numerous times, in the exact sense used in the article (a derogatory reference to non-legal-tender currency), by a community that it has been widely observed overlaps with the bitcoin enthusiast community, and which it would be quite likely to expect that the speaker quoted in the article at issue here would, therefore, be likely to be directing his comments at.
That's not "background search noise", that's directly relevant to the usage in the quote in the article.
I didn't say it was never used. I said it was virtually never used. That those few usages are all that you can find is my point.
It is not a common term by any means. I find it extremely plausible that it was incorrectly transcribed in this instance.
Barring that, I find it plausible that it was picked for it's loaded connotations (If so many people have found this term objectionable, and the term is not in common usage otherwise, I find it plausible that all of the usages that you have found were picked with the common usage of "chattel" in mind. Were this a term that actually seemed to be in common usage, I would not find this to be plausible.)
The later was my knee-jerk interpretation, but I think I was wrong and my money is now on the former.
> I find it extremely plausible that it was incorrectly transcribed in this instance.
I don't. The context it is used in in the article (not just the reference to "chattel currency" but the reference to the user of such a currency being a "shill for the financial industry" is pretty dead on the the criticism by the subculture in which you find "chattel currency" used prior to the article makes of US Federal Reserve Notes as a scam that was promoted by the banking giants that are members of the Fed to get people to hand over their "legal tender" gold for not-legal-tender (as they claim) Federal Reserve Notes, the commissioner has just dropped bitcoin into the place of Federal Reserve Notes and the network of bitcoin miners in place of the banks that make up the Federal Reserve system.
Its not particularly plausible that the commissioner meant to say something else and it was conveniently "mistranscribed" into an attack on bitcoin that specifically uses both the terminology and the substantive logic of a attack by a subculture that has substantial overlap with the pro-bitcoin community against the trustworthiness of the US dollar and the system supporting it.
Yes, the sites that show that a particular use is common in a relevant conspiracy theorist community are, well, often somewhat unhinged sites. This should be unsurprising.
(And clicking the link works for me, don't know why it seems broken to you.)
> He uses the word "chattel" because it's a term that was used in the slave trade, but he can get away with it because technically it's just another word for "currency".
No, its not another word for currency. "Chattel" is a widely used legal term for personal property; its used as an adjective with "slavery" to specify a particular kind of slavery (the one in which slaves are legally treated as chattel, which while its probably the most familiar kind to most people is not the only thing considered "slavery"), but the term "chattel" itself isn't particularly associated with the slave trade.
More relevant, "chattel currency" is a term for things used as currency that are not legal tender (its not exactly commonly used because there isn't a lot of need to discuss that particular class of things.)
However, there is one place its pretty commonly used, and that's among the kind of conspiracy theorists (often goldbugs) who think (for example) that Federal Reserve banknotes aren't legal tender and are a scam to get you to surrender your "real" money (which these conspiracy theorists seem to think is still real legal tender) for "chattel currency".
Given that a not-insignificant number of those conspiracy theorists seem to have flipped from being goldbugs to "bitbugs", I wouldn't be surprised if it was the use of the term "chattel currency" was calculated, but it certainly wasn't a slave trade reference.
> Some stats from Google search
Counting search results isn't a substitute for knowing what you are talking about. I'm actually surprised that "chattel property" (which is a redundancy) has that many results, but that doesn't change that "chattel" means personal property, and that its use to refer to that is the most common use.
It is also true that "slavery" is a common context in which "chattel" is used as a modifier, and that use -- because specific discussion of that form of slavery as a class is much more common than specific discussion of non-legal-tender currency as a class -- is vastly more common than reference to chattel slavery.
But that doesn't mean that "chattel currency" is a reference to chattel slavery, any more than the fact that "green" is far more frequently used as an adjective to modify "eyes" ("green eyes" -> "about 500,000,000 hits") than "grocer" ("green grocer" -> "about 1,840,000 hits") means that the phrase "green grocer" is a reference to "green eyes".
I felt this deserved a separate response since it's attracted so much attention. It is immensely unhelpful to pretend to be offended by a phrase since you personally have only ever encountered it while reading Frederick Douglas.
The concept of trespass to chattels is a very import question in digital law. It would serve the community to understand it better since the theory is largely where the CFAA gains legitimacy.
You could certainly be right that the phrasing was intended in this manner. Clearly though Mr. Chilton was falling over himself to use the terms "money laundering" and "drugs" as much as possible. He was trying to use the nastiest, dismissive language he could to describe bitcoins, and given that the use of the term "chattel currency" is virtually unprecedented on the entirety of the internet it certainly seems worth raising an eyebrow at the use of this phrasing.
A fundamental advantage of BTC is that it's supposed to be free of government regulation or other forms of centralized control. The correct response to this is to (be absolutely sure that the government can't regulate it, and then) just ignore whatever the government says.
More realistically what would happen is that the government would start imposing huge fines and tracking down those that evade them (such as tax cheats, except easier because tax cheaters are smarter than the average BTC user at fooling government regulators).
It's a disgraceful smear. This is clearly going to get ugly.
EDIT: Some stats from Google search, since this is a sensitive point and people are questioning what I'm saying (quotes included in the search):