Bitcoin Forum

give individual miners the ability to blacklist

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=650425.0

feel free to reply with any addresses you would like to prevent from moving any coins thereby rendering them worthless

making it able to black list any address, makes bitcoin worthless.
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its like making it able to have anyone hack your bank account and put your balance to 0... no one would touch banks if that happened.

because there is no central authority to ensure only a certain account is frozen. allowing the protocol to let anyone delete coins will truly destroy bitcoins.

dont be stupid and mess up the protocol simply due to an emotion.

if you want to do something practical, contact all fiat exchanges flashmob style and request that the exchanges do not accept a fiat withdrawal from accounts using the known bitcoin addresses.

make it a bitcoin business ethics rule to blacklist.. not a bitcoin protocol rule

See my response to this wonderful idea here:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=650311.msg7285354#msg7285354

my thought process is.. if 99% of the people wanted to block coins they couldn't because 1% of the time times how ever many blocks in the longest chain to have it included the coins could still move.

on the other hand if 99% of the people think an address should be ignored.. is that not consensus?  forget 51% crap

i doubt 99% of the miners would be targeting just a list of the big time btc millionaires as opposed to those pesky addresses we all hate.

you do not like my thinking and that is fine.  but what if everyone else except you agreed?

should we not all be able to actually have a say in the network rather than just talk about it?

The only good thing the action of the SR bitcoins will give is a precedent of the fungibility precedent:
http://m.seekingalpha.com/article/2287953-government-sale-of-bitcoin-establishes-fungibility-precedent?source=feed

Blocking any coins (either these or any others) would remove that completely!

As much as I think everyone here has been taken advantage at one point and would love to teach those scammers a lesson, for the greater good of the experiment I think most of us would give up that ability. I know if a scammer took all my bitcoins I wouldn't use blacklist of any sort and take responsibility as my own fault.

No I wouldn't. You guys really need to do a quick search, I've seen this kind of thread literally like a hundred times recently. I'll make it simple - if you 'blacklist' coins and make them unusable you set a precedent for it to be done in the future. Unless you get everyone's consent (including the owner of the coins) you're effectively playing God with people's wealth and that opens up issues with abuse of power in the future. Even if it could be done, who would regulate it to see it wasn't abused, and who regulate them to ensure they aren't acting corruptly? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes.

Blacklisting someone else's money happens if you have ownership over their money. I'm not talking BTC right now, I'm saying for example parents who take money off their kids.

So if we were to allow that in the BTC ecosystem, it would imply that no single person would have ownership over their coin. They could use their coin as long as a pool or superior hashing individual lets them.

That wouldn't do too good for the value of bitcoin.

A "group of people" or a government with bad intentions might take advantage of this and try to kill bitcoin. Imagine a service like coinbase which has one of the largest bitcoin transactions, gets their wallet addresses blocked, this would definitely destroy the bitcoin "world"

So i don't think this should ever be implemented.

seems this is another topic originating from the SR auction topic, so lets clarify the point
blacklisting attempts are already happening. with over 50% of mining pools. the end result is just a delay in it reaching a block.

eligius ignores transactions that have no fee's attached, so do most mining pools. basically the protocol rules are
"if you got no fee, your not getting in"

the result is that instead of the transaction processing instantly by being added to ghash/eligius blocks people have to wait an hour+ for the pools that dont have such rules, to then add it to the blockchain. (when the smaller pools finally get a chance to solve a block.)

so do not be fooled that blacklisting does not happen. because it does. the only difference is the reason to ignore them, at the moment it is out of greed but can easily be dome out of "stick it to the man" mentality.. either way its just a couple lines of code.

to outright destroy coins so they are useless. (the De-fungibility form of blacklisting) requires all client wallet programs and services to prune out a certain address..

so would you use a bitcoin-core update that would prune out addresses with unspent coins in it, based on the mentality of "stick it to the man"

true, if that is the case then the same government with money robbing people. however, the government of the country where you can do that because coinbase belongs to all countries. or if they ask for help FBI, haha. such as the FBI did not have another job to take care of it.

If we allow address blocking, it may be used against us in the future. Government can seize our coins and forbid us to transfer bitcoin away. The same goes to blacklisting coins.

Never

I don't think this would make bitcoin worthless, it would just make it worth much less. It would make it so people would not want to associate their address with them personally out of fear that their opinion could piss enough people off that your coins would be blacklisted. This would make it extremely difficult to do commerce.

That's not blacklisting - that's demanding payment for the service of including a specific transaction in the blockchain. Perfectly rational. When the Bitcoin well runs dry, we'll be needing transaction fees as an incentive to the miners anyhow. This is just the first steps in the process of price discovery for this service.

Do you think you have the right to demand that others include your transactions?

The miners and the pools are under no obligation to include any transactions.  They can, if they wish, just mine empty blocks.  They can cherry pick which transaction they want to include - that is their right.  They can include only transactions that have a profitable fee and drop all other transactions.  They can if they feel like it included a certain number of free transactions.

With respect to the horrible smelly "FBI coins" that these hundreds of threads keep going on and on and on about: any pool can choose to not include them in their transactions and that would be just fine.  If there is a fee attached to the transaction somebody somewhere will eventually include the transaction so, worst case, the transaction would be delayed.

Were you dropped you your head as a child?

Of course, and the first one would be FBI dealing with siezed Silroad's bitcoins

If this were ever to happen people would leave bitcoin in droves. We can dislike other people and what they do but to block them from spending their coins is a form of theft. The precedent set by such an action would bring an existential crisis to bitcoin.