Bitcoin Forum

Recently, a thread posted on the Bitcoin foundation forum that was 'leaked' by a member gained much popularity (Mike's comments on redlisting). Due to this, it has now become clear that we, as a community, need to be able to view all of the threads posted on the Bitcoin Foundation forum, which is closed to paying members only.

My plan is to set up a Bitcoin Foundation mirror. I would create a script that scrapes all new posts and threads on the Bitcoin Foundation forum at a regular interval, allowing us to view them but not reply or post new threads. It will use the useragent and browser fingerprint of a common web browser and would scrape at a random interval to hide the fact that it is scraping content.

I offer to set up such a website available as a clearnet website and also as a Tor hidden service in order to prevent any interference by the Bitcoin Foundation should they not approve of such a website. The website would be available to everyone free of charge with no registration required, no ads and no IP logging.

I will personally cover all costs of running the website. If in future this becomes difficult to do I will ask for donations to pay for this, and possibly add advertising similar to what BitcoinTalk currently has. I will not be running this website for a profit.

The only problem is that in order to do this I would need a Bitcoin Foundation forum account.

I do not have an account and they cost 25BTC, so if anyone likes my idea and is willing to donate their account please get in touch, you can send me a PM or preferrably use my GPG key below.

See https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=334520.0

I am happy to mirror everything. Do NOT contribute any more money to the Bitcoin foundation.

I'm pretty sure it does not cost 25 BTC to get forum access. That's about $11,000 at current exchange rates.

 ???

Yes it does unfortunately, the cost is pegged to Bitcoin and will not change with the USD exchange rate according to the website. It has been 25BTC since the Foundation launched.

To put into perspective, it is 50BTC to get VIP status on BitcoinTalk.

It's 0.06 BTC per year or 0.6 BTC for a lifetime individual membership (they update the prices occasionally to account for the BTC/USD price changes), and 2.4, 6.1, 12.2, 61.1 or 244.5 BTC for silver, gold or platinum industry memberships.


https://i.imgur.com/wh1J0RZ.jpg


About a year ago the individual memberships were priced at 2.5 BTC (annual) / 25 BTC (lifetime)

Or, in other words, not much more than 2 USD a month.
But hey, yeah, we definitely need to invite Edward Snowden over to leak our secrets ::)

They can just add this as a violation of their TOS, see which account is scraping, and ban your account quickly. There are a variety of techniques to determine which account is scarping that ignore user agent and number of page request but reply on fingerprinting your user account.  Using a custom honey pot post, picture, hidden ascii character,  in which each account will be severed a unique one, you can determine which user is rehosting the content. There are way to defeat this but I won't go into it.

I doubt many people will care about the TOS.

To prevent any such watermarking of pages by the forum operators, simply buy a couple of accounts.

No need to provide an exact mirror, just republish the content of the forum posts.  You can easily check if they are watermarking the content (subtle differences in character spacing/punctuation) by cross checking across multiple accounts.

A Python script would do ~ couple of hours work max.

I think the bigger question is what the point is? You realise that changes to the Bitcoin software are already all done out in the open, right?

If you actually get an account and go take a look around, you'll probably lose interest in this project, because it would suddenly seem kind of a waste of time.

The Foundation forums don't get that much traffic and don't have much of interest in them. Bitcointalk has 10000x more threads. What's more, no decisions are taken there and no software development does either.

But by all means, go buy an annual membership and take a look.

Correct me if I am wrong, but proposals such as Redlisting would not require any changes to the Bitcoin code but could have a significant impact on Bitcoin users.

The mining pools should start a foundation. Using the same filtering software, do not include any whitelisted address transactions in the block.  Good look to everyone in the USA getting confirmations.

So, you're basically suggesting redblacklisting?

It would only impact people that chose to use it. That voluntary nature is very important and my previous writings on this topic (which are on bitcointalk by the way) describe some crypto protocols that can be used to achieve this.

Even if the people you're trading with all did choose to use it, there's no implication of guilt to having marked coins - there can't be, because it's so easy to send coins back to yourself a few times and then it's impossible to know how many people the coins passed through. All it can be is a clue for an investigation. So if you chose not to use it, and lots of other people decided differently, the worst case scenario is that one day some detective turns up and says "We'd like to chat to you about where you got these coins from, because we're looking for an extortionist and we think you might have information that can help". And maybe you can help or maybe you can't.

This obviously can happen to you even without Bitcoin, like if you witnessed a mugging in the street.

If it's not that big a deal why not have it be released by the foundation itself.  In the spirit of transparency and all.

Yeah I think I understand where you are coming from. But surely a criminal would just use a mixing service straight away?

Also I am confused because you stated on the private forum that mixing services such as Blockchain.info should *refuse* redlisted coins. To me this harms fungibility.

And of course P2P mixing services are unlikely to care about redlists.

TLDR; Criminals will use mixing services so what is the benefit of this proposal?

It cost only $25 USD to join for a yearly membership. A drop in the bucket for most.

I'd be OK with that actually - as this whole incident shows, a forum anyone can join and copy/paste stuff out of isn't really a private forum anyway - but it's not my decision to make. Other people prefer it that way. I don't care enough to argue about it.


Remember that the forum thread is basically a giant brainstorming session, not a design document or real plan. And my own thoughts on it evolved during the thread as I read things written by other people, and thought about it more myself.

Actually the way blockchain.info coinjoin works it could just propagate marks. So that specific implementation would be "compatible" if you want to call it that.

What if there are lots of mixer services that aren't? Well, because it's just about gathering clues, it turns out that marking can still be somewhat useful. Let's say you propagate the mark to all the outputs of a mix. Obviously that reduces the information value of the mark. However, if you keep doing this, then let's say 3 people turn up at an exchange or some other place where their identity is known:

Alice deposits 1 marked coin and 10 unmarked.
Bob deposits 2 marked coins and 12 unmarked.
Chris deposits 10 marked coins and 1 unmarked.

Where do you focus your investigation? On Chris, of course. Assuming you get good at finding victims and most of them help you, you'd expect most of the extorted coins to get marked. Even if some people end up with marked coins due to taking part in a mix with Chris, most of their other mixes would be with other innocent people.

The reason I switched to using the term "marking" and "mark lists" later in the thread is to try and reinforce this notion that having marked coins doesn't imply any kind of guilt or loss of spendability, it's just a way to gather clues that could point a detective in the right direction. The information is expected to be noisy and contain a bunch of dead ends, just like any real investigation does.

Who are the others that prefer it to not be open? 
Also your example reveals a problem.  You say focus on Chris of course but why?  If Chris is innocent but simply unlucky because he had a transaction that took the bulk of marked coins he now is in the unenviable position of being forced into revealing his private dealings while Bob and Alice are possible accomplices simply slowly leaking out marked coins.  So now everyone is worried about it but if the % of marked coins above which suspicion is cast is known and eventually it will leak out the bad guys will simply stay under that % and the marking is useless except to the innocent parties who make the mistake of not checking.

Sounds like you're just using an even more softened up, euphemistic expression than "red".

Whatever was wrong with calling it "black" in the first place?

What happened to "Taint"?


It's not about the gathering of this information, it's about how it gets used. You're making irresponsible suggestions that can be used to reduce the spendability of coins. It doesn't matter how optimistically you choose to present the potential use of address listing; when a usable listing system is available and adding to it is encouraged, the public have no recourse to whatever their national regulators choose to do with it.

China is seeing a huge upswing in Bitcoin right now, which benefits everyone else as well. What makes you, Mike Hearn, think that this type of authoritarian regime might choose a more repressive use for your "marks", hurting not just the value of the Bitcoin system for Chinese users, but also for worldwide exchange rates as a consequence?



I think you're not considering the implications in an imaginative enough way. Not every government is as liberal as the one you live under.

Because the word "blacklist" implies that you're supposed to reject or not touch something. People dislike the idea that coins would be harder to spend, I get that (I don't want to receive unspendable coins or "hassle coins" either). So the point is, go ahead and accept marked coins. It's no big deal. Worst case, someone gets in touch and wants to ask you some questions.


That's probably true in some parts of the world, but not all (there are even a couple of states in the USA that don't have any kind of licensing requirement to be a money transmitter).

But even in, say, New York, how would a regulator enforce that someone use such a list? If the assumption is we get to design the system and then they mandate it, OK, they're mandating a system we designed. And the designs I've been thinking about involve private set intersection protocols, Tor, and other things that prevent a list operator from knowing who is checking the list or whether they found a match.

So there would be no centralised way to know if someone wasn't using the system like they were supposed to, or if someone found some marked coins and didn't report them. It'd be unenforceable. A regulator/police force would have to wait until someone did report them and then work backwards finding people who should have filed some report, but it's very very likely that those people are not in New York. They could easily be not even in the USA. So that approach seems like a ton of work and it'd yield a dead end very often.

Now you can say, "well they would just insist all those things would be taken out". But again, how do they enforce that? How can they make you use one wallet app vs another? How can they even know if you have a wallet app installed on your phone or laptop? The USA doesn't have any kind of infrastructure in place to know what you've got installed on your computer (at least ... not that we know of).

As we work through these questions there's always an answer of the form, "the government could do X" but each time it gets harder and takes more effort to enforce their rules, compliance goes down and the risk of constitutional/legal challenges goes up.

If you don't believe in any of those limits on government power then you might as well give up now - you believe you are living in a totalitarian state, at which point they can make you do anything and it doesn't matter what software or ideas the bitcoin community has.


I would love to see Bitcoin thrive long term in China. We have to remember though that China has capital controls. They don't allow you to send more than $50,000 abroad (I think that's the limit), unless you get a special license etc etc. Obviously Bitcoin circumvents that. So this places the Chinese government in a very interesting position, because on one hand they want the dollar to become less dominant, but on the other hand they want to stop their citizens exiting their economy. We'll have to wait and see what they do. I have no idea what they regard as more important.

However, also remember that China implements widespread internet surveillance and interferes with or automatically disconnects encrypted connections. They don't need any kind of marking scheme to tightly control who uses Bitcoin for what. They have the tools they need already.


I know, I get that. I'm frequently appalled by some of the things some governments do (thinking of China and the US here). At the same time, this cuts both ways - people who live in Iceland or Switzerland have criminals to deal with too, but they maybe aren't quite so afraid of their governments going going full Orwell. Even if you feel it seems unstable and problematic in some parts of the world, in other parts it might be just what's needed to convince the local government to take a hands off approach, especially if their local police forces start saying "actually the community has been great to work with and we're not seeing Bitcoin get abused so much these days".

Good Lord. Is this a serious proposition?  >:(

You make some good points but right there is the crux of the issue.  The criminalization of basic commerce without a shred of mens rea.  This issue already exists in fiat with AML.  Bitcoin because of its design has the promise of escaping that but accepting red listing or whatever name it is means accepting that bitcoin is no different even if such lists are as you claim unenforceable.

Unfortunately, as you point out, AML laws already exist. They don't apply only to fiat but to Bitcoin as well, but again there's a question of how enforceable it is.

If someone pays for something with a large quantity of cash you're supposed to file reports on that (in the USA). But the only time I ever read about someone getting busted for not doing so, it was the result of a sting operation. If that's the only way they have to catch unreported large cash transactions, well that technique works for Bitcoin just as well, it doesn't need any new technology.

The lack of mens rea post-PATRIOT Act is terrible and something US lawmakers badly need to fix.

While I disagree in principle against AML at least in large real life cash transactions there are other factors that could/should make one suspicios of the source of funds so if society in general agrees with such interpretation of crime and enforcement it is at least reasonable to ask members of said society to assist with such reporting.   But this bitcoin red listing means that every payment could/should be suspect since online payments have no other factors but the payment itself.  So this either totally destroyes fungibility or traps only the naive and innocent.  

Well they could quite easily enforce this rule on every Bitcoin exchange. The exchange would be obliged to report the identities associated with any marked Bitcoin to the authorities.

Chris (who lets presume is completely innocent) will now have the attention of the authorities when he tries to cash out at an exchange, possibly forcing him to disclose the identities of those people he received Bitcoin from. Understandably he is not too keen on this.

People will soon realise that there is a risk involved in sending marked bitcoins to an exchange and thus you create a premium for "clean" Bitcoin.

Exchanges already have to report suspicious transactions. It's very hard to really enforce this because who can say what's suspicious, really? This is one of the ridiculous things about AML laws. When it's entirely voluntary, that whole problem goes away. The moment it's made mandatory you get things like HSBC being accused of "money laundering" when what the US really means is "they didn't report some things that with hindsight we believe were suspicious". Well, that's very different.

In the current system banks inevitably cave and pay huge fines (thus implying guilt) because they don't want to go in front of a jury of people who hate bankers. There really can't be any fairness or justice like that. It's a big problem but I don't know what the solution is, other than politicians putting back the mens rea requirement for AML crimes.

Fortunately most countries didn't remove it.


Let's pretend, for the sake of argument, Chris does not live in a scary country like the USA and isn't actually afraid of the police.

Let's also say that whoever is investigating this case (it doesn't have to be an officer of the state) goes to Chris and says, hey Chris, we suspect your jewel shop is being abused by a guy who is ransoming peoples data. Wanna help us out? Next time you see some guy turn up and pay with marked coins, make a note of the license plate of the car he arrived in and let us know.

Chris is probably not thrilled to be caught up on this, but who is? Nobody in the history of crime has ever jumped for joy at being a part of an investigation - but people do cooperate anyway, because that's a part of civil society. And Chris' job is pretty simple and does not involve leaking any private data of innocent customers. So hopefully this is an acceptable tradeoff for him to help bring a really nasty piece of work to justice.

I think you see that I understand the connotations of the labels, I was of course making a rhetorical point.


What I would actually say to the (bolded) question is, why ever implement such a de-clawed system in the first place? The law enforcement agencies could well have to rely on the cooperation of huge chains of people with 2 or less degrees of knowledge of the previous holder. It wouldn't just be unenforceable, it would likely have very low success rates in returning the proceeds of a crime to the original victim. And so why? It would certainly lay the psychological groundwork with which to promote a less permissive reporting infrastructure. All to solve the old "broken" system, which was designed to work in exactly such a dysfunctional non-achieving way.

The other aspect you're forgetting is this hard limit money supply we're using, and with that model, prevention is not only better than cure, cure just creates new victims. If a culture of majority reporting did come about, then what happens to the marked money? You're assuming that all deals are conducted money-first, goods-second, but if it happens the other way round, the seller has lost possession of the goods and the buyer can distance themselves from the situation in more ways than one. You end up robbing Peter to compensate Paul, or invite an excruciatingly high premium insurance culture, and I think this world has more than enough of that culture already.

Can we not just make theft and ransom crimes, committed via technological means, less easy to commit? There's nothing wrong with that model, and it doesn't introduce this host of issues with  the abuse of information systems that come with marks. I haven't even touched on the perverse incentives to mis-report, good grief that's a whole can of worms.


This is a gross oversimplification of the situation. We are not living in totalitarian states in the Western world, but there is a very slow and gentle creep towards that scenario, you yourself acknowledge the computer surveillance aspect of it, both in general terms in this thread, and when representing your employer in your professional life. Bitcoin has always been a reaction and a tool to use as a response to this direction that Western governments are taking us in. To present the idea that either one is to believe in the absolute power of limits to state power, or not at all, is entirely fallacious.


It seems the idea is that Bitcoin can usefully serve as a proxy currency to shield the yuan from too much external interference. Preventing any large quantity of renmimbi from being used to try and pull the Chinese State's political strings. Simultaneously, this promotes the idea of using Bitcoin for inter currency settlements, de-promotes the US dollar from it's incumbent settlement role, and promotes Bitcoin in general. Maybe that last point is too speculative, but it's certainly true that the disruptive effect of well designed and powerful decentralised information systems are a difficult problem for nation states to solve, the Chinese state are uniquely motivated to roll with the punches here, as it arguably solves more problems than it creates for them.



You're suggesting that the Chinese state can control the use of Bitcoin by it's citizens already, but that control can only be pretty coarse. Either you can, or you can't. I think the controls are currently set to a blanket "can".


Okay, well seeing as you do get it, then I think that it shouldn't be too much of an imaginative leap to see that adding extra layers of information tracking to a system that's viability dictates a strong incentive to resist such measures is a move in the wrong direction. We should be promoting the maintained separation of transaction information from any other quality or attribute. The fact that you work for an organisation whose business model is centered around the opposite principle is not going unnoticed. The culture of your employer permeates your mindset, particularly in someone who is successful in that organisation, the two are understandably related. It might be better to think more carefully about where best to see metadata opportunities and where to let them go, you are not being paid to work on this secondary project, are you?

Law enforcement is always supposed to have one hand tied behind its back. Hence warrants, rules of evidence, etc. Yeah so this summer we learned that big chunks of the US government have started to ignore these rules and break free of them, which is a pretty big deal and a good reason for everyone to be upset. But this is a pretty recent trend. They've certainly been de-clawed before.

Police having to rely on chains of clues, witnesses, community reports isn't new.

It's hard to know how effective it'd be, indeed.


Absolutely! And it must be done because in a reasonable society, the cost and difficulty of doing investigations to find criminals tends to be very high, so if there are too many of them it becomes untenable.

The internet is a pretty lawless place that relies very heavily on defence already. Realistically 99% of dos attackers, hackers, spammers, whatever never get caught. So defence is a big part of internet culture.

But like I said, it's tough to win 100% of the time. Bitcoiners are pretty savvy people relative to most, and we still see lots of hacking and scamming going on. And relying totally on defence opens the possibility of "overkill". Apple solved the CryptoLocker problem on its newest platforms by simply banning unsigned code. That means no CryptoLocker, yay, but it also means no P2P bitcoin wallets - crap.

I don't think there are any silver bullets. A good strategy usually involves a blend of everything.


Alright, fair enough. It's a bit of a tightrope walk I admit.


Yes, at the moment they seem OK with it. They can identify anyone who uses Bitcoin and/or simply block port 8333 any time they like though. Then they can say, if you want to use Bitcoin, you need a license from the state .... they do that kind of thing in lots of other areas already :(

It's not about a scary country.  The system is never static so after a few visits like this even if it's voluntary it costs Chris time and money so he either starts checking for these coins before accepting them or the likelier scenario is that he will figure out what % of bad coins causes the visits and he will stick do doing transactions below that limit.  So the only people caught up in this will be those who are innocent but unaware.

Are you are suggesting that somehow the West could not do the same?  In my observation, the East and West are approaching a common end-point in terms of certain freedoms...they are just approaching it from a different direction.

I suspect that China will/would say 'Use Baidu wallet' when the block 8333.  And the West would say 'Use Google wallet' when they do the same.  Unless they don't need to because it is the only realistic option anyway.

IMO (for the 50kth time here) Bitcoin's evolution should focus on making sure that this form of attack is not practical for technical reasons rather than to rely on such an attack going untried for political/ethical reasons.

Come on Mike. Are you serious?

This is a big deal. It's bullshit, it's 1000% anti-bitcoin and all it's principles.

I joined over there because I support the concept of Bitcoin.  I'm not even aware of any nasty drama going on, aside from this whitelisting somethingoranother.  I just wanted to participate in an organization that relates to bitcoin.  Just like im planning to start going to local Meetup groups related to it.  My only issue with mirroring the site is that they require first and last name.   And im no bigwig.  Just an average guy who values his privacy (cough! privacy cough! bitcoin). I wouldn't prefer that my first and last name get indexed in google pertaining to Bitcoin.  If there's any way to set a robots.txt noindex, so google doesn't index the mirror that would be cool.  As for mirroring it itself, I don't mind at all.  I think everyone is entitled to see whats being discussed.  As someone pointed out, there are almost no posts there on a daily basis.  Maybe 30 a day max?  im only guessing.  One new thread per every few days in the "General" forum.  Its definitely not some "meeting behind the curtains" at all from what i see.  

Any way to do that thing with the robots text though?

Yeah, if it kept happening that'd be a pain. But how common is it, really? Have you ever been interviewed by the police because you were a witness to a crime? If so, did it happen multiple times for unrelated reasons?

I don't know anyone in my circle of friends who has ended up like Chris even once. The combination of "make crime hard with defence" and "whack the few who try with offence" works and makes for pretty peaceful societies, at least in Europe. So I'd be really surprised if what happens in the above story actually became an everyday occurrence, when it hasn't so far.

How common is it now with cash?  Many major cities have cops checking for drugs AND CASH on the highways right now.  Plenty of stories of regular people having to fight to get their own money back.

Not everywhere, I can assure you. Bitcoin is about more than just America.

Sure but in Europe I see more financial police then regular cops.  :-\