Bitcoin Forum

I made my thread on the Beginners & Help board and I feel there is possible demand from community (from my perspective and I could be wrong) to have Tag and Scam report buttons on bitcoin explorers.
It will be better if the site: https://bitcoin.org/en/, has those buttons to check.

Here is link to my thread: Where and how to check a bitcoin address is used for scam purposes? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5199676.0)

I understand that scammers will change their bitcoin addresses to new ones but I think they will use one address for each scam project. It is why I thought tag and scam report buttons are helpful (in case they have not yet changed their scam addresses to new ones).

Among explorers as I know of, there is only one explorer (https://btc.com/) that provides a Mention tab to fight scammers. Unfortunately, that tab is likely hidden out of our eyes so it is nearly useless.

Bitcoin is a leader of cryptocurrency ecosystem so I think it is very good if bitcoin shows its fight against scammers with tools:

• Tag / Scam report buttons
• Warning textbox in Red

Please share your ideas and I am sorry if I am proposing something stupid.

Yeah that will be good but it will put a lot of pressure on those owning the explorers since it would allow anyone to report it and someone could use it to falsely report someone. In that scenario, the owners had to verify those reports before adding a warning which puts a lot of work. I think that's why most of explorers don't have such and gives a page where address were being referenced earlier (that's how I think).

Everything has its costs and benefits but if there are outweighting benefits than negative effects, and can help to have a healthier environment for bitcoin (in reality, for the whole cryptocurrency), why not?

If Ethereum has its tag and warning message for ETH phishing addresses (I don't know there are other altcoins have such things), why not bitcoin?

It would be abused as crazy. Expect retaliatory feedback against anyone that doesn't like the other person. There would be a similar problem like we have with the trust ratings on Bitcointalk. A scammer gets tagged for scamming and retaliates with bullshit comments.
Your idea is not bad but the community would make a mess out of it. 

There are always two opposite sides and I know potential abuse but as I wrote I thought benefits outweigh negative effects and it is worthy to consider for real implementation of Tag/ Report buttons. It is a kind of optional feature and explorers can integrate it or not.

Then, if there is a real feature with those buttons, let's see how bitcoin community react by the way they choose which explorers to use.
Technically, developers can build some kind of algorithm to prevent and minimize potential abuse (but there are always abusements on all systems, no matter how good they are). It is not too difficult to solve like scalability, ie. Next, for potential adverse effects from potential abuse, yes, Tag/ Scam report buttons and Warning textbox are supplements and which have to be supported by further investigation from each user.
Sooner or later, we will see it on most of bitcoin explorers (we already have a third-party site provides that feature) because there are demands there are supplies to bring satisfaction to users. We do have real demands on it, for general healthy bitcoin ecosystem.

It is something potentially open to corruption, in an environment where information is supposed to be neutral. And contrary to what you think, the negative effects could be much more important than the positive ones. I can already imagine how easy it could be to destroy so many companies related to the industry.

I would say it's up to the user to do his due diligence, a block explorer is supposed to only show information available.
There is a difference between providing information and talking 'in the name of a community'

That will never benefit anyone that does not use that forum, because the tagged addresses will be recorded on that sites database and not directly

linked to the Bitcoin address on the Blockchain. I think Satoshi Nakamoto deliberately omitted that function in the protocol, because he saw that it

might be exploited and someone can use that function to deliberately sabotage his project. Imagine a government or one of Bitcoin's competitors

flagging all tokens as scam coins and not having a single coin in circulation as a result of that. Sorry this is a bad idea.  :P

I don't really support this idea even though practically it will never work out since they could just get away with it by using a different address for every transaction. Also, how would someone know if an address is a scam? Someone needs to do some investigation with proofs right? Which website would want to invest money to do that? Sure community and stuff can help but then it wouldn't be hard to get a legit address get tagged as spam. Besides all this, it kinda takes away the decentralization if addresses start getting tracked.

I did not understand what is bitcoin.org's relationship with this matter? You are looking for an explorer that provides this property when searching for a specific address.
Explorers can be asked to do so as they may collaborate with sites (badbitcoin, bitcoinwhoswho, and others) to update their database but this requires more staff to verify and therefore need to review the financial benefit of it.
It doesn't need much you can try out any open source explorer^{[1] [2]} and add this feature to it.


[1] https://insight.is/
[2] https://github.com/janoside/btc-rpc-explorer