Bitcoin Forum

My head just exploded reading this.

Sanitizing Bitcoin: This Company Wants To Track 'Clean' Bitcoin Accounts
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/11/13/sanitizing-bitcoin-coin-validation/ (http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/11/13/sanitizing-bitcoin-coin-validation/)

After causing several million in losses for those who ordered chips (both delays and loss of assembly funds), Yifu is now working with old money bankers to start a firm who purpose is to create a system to help government track ownership of bitcoin addresses.

"Their plan is to compile a database of the known identities associated with Bitcoin addresses in the hope that Coin Validation will become the one-stop-identity shop for law enforcement when trying to find out who’s doing something nefarious with Bitcoin, while providing a red-flag system for businesses who have customers trying to use Bitcoin that’s associated with illicit use."

You can see where this would go, after being "opt-in" for a while, it will be legistlated that to use bitcoin in the US you have to validate all your addresses.

I'll let you decide for yourself if you think Yifu is continuing to support the bitcoin community and project.

I thought I read that too.Holy fuck he's an asshole.He's worse than Josh Zerlan  :o

"One business is already committed: Guo’s Bitcoin mining equipment maker, Avalon. A big question is whether they can get others to sign on as they’ll need a network effect to make the database useful."

So,I'm assuming he's already gave up his customers info....................................

I think this was just a matter of time. Governments want to know everything...
Besides this the blockchain is very interesting for data mining.

After all one bitcoin is still one bitcoin, no matter if someone, especially "Yifu" validates it- ;D

I have no need to hide my identity, but basicly this is something Im not going to opt-in or accept. As Bitcoin develops something like this is sure coming... but for privacy concerned users - fortunately bitcoin is not us based and I doubt that companies all around the world are ready to jump in this kind of privacy violations. I have been quite polite, even as not so happy ex-Avalon customer...  but now I can show middle finger for those all involved in such f*cking idiotic "project". I really hope that Bitcoin gore dev team stays against about privacy violations or if not I hope all miners reject all plans supporting this kind of development lines possibly planned for.
 

We're not going to be able to prevent well funded business people from attempting to promote horrific architectures against the long term interest of Bitcoin and the public... if we could, the same stupidity would have been prevented in the wider world and there would be less need for Bitcoin.

It's hard to count the number of times newbies have made proposals which would have centralized Bitcoin completely in the name of some fool result or another. Powerful businesses interests are now reliving the same history of bad ideas, but this time the bad ideas will be funded and they don't care if luminaries tell them that they're horrible ideas, they don't necessarily care about any of the principles that make Bitcoin a worthwhile contribution to the world.

It's not, of course, a question or "anonymity": thats silly. If you have "good" and "bad" coins, that destroys fungibility, rapidly everyone must screen coins they accept or risk being left holding the bag. Fungiblity is an essential property of a money like good and without it the money cannot remove transactional friction.  Privacy is also essential for fair markets: Without privacy your counter-parties and competition can see into your finances— get a raise and get a rent hike, and as long as there are power imbalances between people privacy is essential for human dignity.

To stop this nonsense we have to make it impractical to pull off by changing the default behavior in the Bitcoin ecosystem: We consider the lack of a central authority to be an essential virtue, which means that we can't be protected by one either. We must protect ourselves. This means things like avoiding address reuse, avoiding centralized infrastructure, adopting— and funding!— privacy enhancing technology (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.0).

Miners can play a role in this as Bitcoin users, but also by supporting mining pools and methods that promote privacy.  They want to force people to use identified addresses so they can blacklist?  What happens when miners start deprioritizing transactions that use addresses that have been previously seen?

It's bizarre how little research journalists consistently fail to do though. I mean a simple google search and it could have been an entirely different article!

And to some some extent, way more interesting!!

Further reading material:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=332918.0

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=333117.0

Lots comments:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1qj7sw/sanitizing_bitcoin_this_company_wants_to_track/

i dont like this chinese guy

I don't like this guy regardless of his nationality.

He is an American.

I'm also imagining this angle: "Don't you want to discourage Bitcoin theft and CoinVault ransomware? This is the ONLY way to do it, you must hate Satoshi too!"

The solution is technical, as gmaxwell says. Bitcoin's power has always been that it solves real world problems with technical innovation (as well as us skinbags to provide the network effect and rational self interest, of course). Let's not stray from that line of reasoning, it has served us well, indeed given us more or less all of what we have with Bitcoin right now.

someone sue yifu's ass already to keep his scammer ass preoccupied. he looks to smug in the photo

Considering how many people lost money in the ASIC chip scam due to his obviously illegal activities and business practices, it is rather surprising there has not been an organized effort to sue him. Even if you recieved your chips, they arrived so late that you lost all of their value.

He is simply asshole, regardless nationality...

I was waiting for this to happen.  Didn't think it would come from Mr. "Bitcoin will change your life".

What a sell-out.  Is there any doubt he was benefiting from the Avalon delays?

Seems Yifu is a sellout after that ASIC mess he did. Okay more like a traitor to work with bankers (paper money).

He is an asshole and an American of Chinese descent.

Chinese state media supports Bitcoin, which is as good as saying the government does too.

This is the natural result of ASIC centralization of Bitcoin. I've warned about this for ages.

Well at least the price will rise with government backing but expect a power grab on the coin production as it becomes more valuable.

If you want a distributed coin network, you better keep mining those Litecoins boys!

By delaying the chip orders so long, Yifu lost the trust of the Bitcoin community.

He singlehandedly destroyed the community mining projects and caused Bkkcoins, developer of the K16, to disappear without a trace with the firmware unfinished. This left Steamboat and Terrahash, both who took on great risk and hundreds of thousands of forum members' dollars to assemble miners, screwed. Terrahash took the money and ran, Steamboat gave partial refunds. Bkkcoins still has 8 of my bitcoins.

Yes, he refunded the chip orders. But he's done the Bitcoin community a huge disservice and we should actively work to boycott any business venture he chooses to be a part of.

I lost a lot of money due to his incompetence, and should we ever meet in person, the result will be less than cordial.

lol only say dont like some guy make me troll

anyway we have zerocoin
 for now nonsence mining litecoin

Maybe now we know the origination of those threats to his life that he was famously making a few months ago.

Maybe another alternative is to create a rival blacklist? Hear me out. We can have a traitors blacklist! Yifu's addresses need identifying first, obviously (shouldn't be too difficult for us previous Avalon customers to combine our knowledge). If there was a simple way for miners to blacklist addresses from block inclusion (bitcoin.conf runtime flag + public key parameter?), I'd gladly add any Project Avalon company owned address to my p2pool node. Deprioritising transactions with public keys that have been used already has been mentioned elsewhere.

Individuals miners must run more than 50% of the network, this really is in our hands. So if we though thought our mined coins would be blacklisted if we didn't provide identities to our pool, I wonder which way people would jump? I'm gonna be honest, you've largely been pretty weak willed: wanting to use the biggest pool, somehow reasoning that being part of the most "successful" pool will help at all towards your ROI or profits. This is desperate reasoning. A blacklist that gets observed may make or break the Bitcoin project as a whole; no-one will give up the fiat system that still has cash for one where cash has been effectively eradicated.

Blacklists are only as pernicious as what they're trying to achieve, why not blacklist the blacklisters? That's a blacklist worth having. If Yifu hasn't already cashed out, I would really love to hit him where it hurts most.

Uh, not to be defending scumbag sellout Yifu, but can you cite a source for this information?  Specifically the "caused" part.  That's a pretty serious accusation.

Just trying to keep my facts straight.

Sheesh. Was Trendon too busy to join Yifu's company?

May Yifu Guo get testicular cancer with mets to the bone  >:(

He didn't directly cause it, but Chris expressed multiple times that he was becoming disillusioned with the K16 project specifically because of Yifu's actions. I didn't mean to imply he ordered a hit on him or anything.

Chris has to take responsibility for his own failure whether or not Yifu caused it. I am more worried about Chris' health and safety as opposed to Yifu being the cause of the discord at this point and it would be great to find out definitively he is alive and well.

As for Yifu and this... I welcome him working with bankers given his past performance I can't see his work on this amounting to much more than heartache for the banksters.

Bitsyncom

he doesn't dare to show up these days because of a f..ck up with those pre-ordered chips, not to mention refunds, trade ins... well we now know where he's been so busy these days...

yeah, hope that guys never forget behaviour and business practices of this motherfucker.

On a side note i just realized that if this will happen then mixing services will spawn like mushrooms after rain and miners will benefit the most of it because there will be a lot more transactions than before. Opinions?

If they go after the coins not the adresses:
You have my opinion here : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=333586

well he can go yi-fuck himself!

Someone was always going to do it, may as well be someone the bitcoin community has already lost faith in....

Another solution is to use the green list like a black list: ask people to supply you with the address they will use to send you funds. If it's green listed, refuse. If they trick you, send the funds back to them, threaten to send it as fees.

If possible, miners should reject transactions to or from greenlist addresses. If not possible, start using p2pool and make it possible. Greenlisting and licencing will be coming to mining anyway. Fuck these people and their greenlist.

Blacklist the greenlist.

In the meantime , Mike Hearn is speaking about redlist"
"I would like to start a discussion and brainstorming session on the topic of coin tracking/tainting or as I will call it here, "redlisting". Specifically, what I mean is something like this"

This rainbow stuff if giving me a headache.

Blacklist all wallets/coins from Avalon / Avalon team?    ;D

+1  ;D :D This fat rat!!!

I considered that, but it's difficult to prove the owners, you can only make an informed guess. Also, it makes it too personal, much as the Avalon Project would deserve to be blocked from spending their Bitcoin.

Blacklisting the greenlist works better. We can prove these people are trying to destroy the principles of security^1, fungibility and privacy for all Bitcoin users, sigining up and using this "service" is all the proof needed. And we also have no idea as to their real identities, we just have a list of sanitised public keys. We must organise to prevent transactions either from or to these green addresses from being processed by miners. They want to create a plague that infects all non users of their system, we can take their list and use it against them. Instead, they will be the sufferers.

¹This is a genuine concern. The more frequently an address is used, the easier it is for an attacker to compute valid signatures to sign transactions made from that address (knowing the private key is not required). This is one of the reasons it is discouraged to re-use addresses. The more valid signatures in the blockchain that exist made from a single address, the more information the attacker has to work with.

Too bad, soon we will need large scale money laundering in BTC too.  :(

Blacklist the greenlist. I cannot repeat this enough. Do not accept money from them, or send money to them. Do not process their transactions if you mine directly.

Actually in this way , aren't you doing the thing they shouldn't have done and the thing you are against them doing ? :D

A black-list Black-list still hurts fungibility, which will destroy the currency. A black list may do more damage than a successful 51% attack.


I like this idea. Would require a lot of user education so they can understand why their transactions are not confirming. Would make asking for donations harder, but maybe that is a good thing.

Edit: "Why is funding my brain-wallet taking so long?"
"Because your passphrase is not as unique as you think it is."

Not if miners value their security, privacy and fungibility too. The idea is to discourage people from using "green" or "white" lists, as they won't be able to spend the money from their supposedly clean address. Make clean dirty.


Well, this is just a form of psuedo-blacklisting; making it difficult for the green/white addresses that get used to process their transactions, instead of outright impossible.

Deprioritizing transactions attached to "seen" addresses is easy to work-around though: simply don't re-use addresses.

With rainbow lists, moving the coins does not remove taint. That means that somebody accepting coins has to worry about if they are on a competing list or not. This makes the coins harder to trade, and hurts Bitcoin's value.

Yep. But we need to discourage people from registering clean addresses to begin with, by making any inputs from clean addresses unspendable. Clean becomes dirty.

You have been repeating this all day. Please stop and think about it.

It's the only actual way to stop it. If you know a reason why it wouldn't work, then share it.

I don't know how to put it any more simply: A black-list is bad; no matter the intention.

I can think of reasons against if you don't want to discuss it.

People can petition miners (or bribe them) to blacklist someone they plain dislike. It becomes a political tool, basically, which makes it pretty powerful. However, I would argue that using transaction exclusion blacklisting against this proposed transcation acceptance whitelist is the lesser of the two evils; more people will lose out more if the CoinValidation scheme is allowed to operate as it is intended.

Anyone else interested in open debate?

Y I F U already fucked a good percentage of the mining community, he might as well fuck everyone now too I guess...  JFC what a stupid idea.

How about more meta than that:  Whitelisting schemes require you to constantly use whitelisted addresses.  Blacklisting schemes are more powerful when the blacklisted parties use constant addresses.

So there is a behavioral difference in transactions which are compatible with a white/black listing broken fungiblity universe: They constantly reuse addresses.  Reuse is already a long term known-bad for privacy thing— so why not depriortize transactions which reuse addresses?

You want the fastest confirmations? Transact in a way which is not compatible with white/black listing.

And its already a reality: Eligius (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=334316.0) (15% network hashpower) is now experimentally limiting reuse to once per block.

Yifu you are such a douchebag for doing this its almost inconceivable

How do we let such people come to such a level of influence in the Bitcoin world? We can sadly only blame ourselves...

I'm assuming Luke is using a hand-made mining client, but if not, how can we all institute these sorts of changes to mining nodes? I would add de-prioritising of re-used addressed to my p2pool node in an instant if it were just a few config parameters. If not, could LukeJr release or merge his mining client tweak?

Wow, what an asshole.

Of course, I had already figured that out when I received my Avalon miner 2 months late and noticed it still had the settings for the pools that Yifu was using to mine with it while it was "delayed".

What a sleazy business. I think a lot of people will never buy from Avalon or him again. He's lost a lot of respect in the Bitcoin community and I don't see how anyone will go for his crazy ideas.

In the meantime, we should start using zero coin.

Bounty for a Bill Gates style pie to the face?

My thoughts exactly. I feel like he stole money from my children.

But what if some people really, really want to make everyone else also believe their preferred horrific architecture of the month is truly Bitcoin, even though they can't explain why (https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoin_uncensored/comments/3hfzfm/i_heard_back_from_reddit_admins_in_regards_to/cu71mdo)?