Bitcoin Forum

And the hacker can't sell his coins.

Zhoutong need not buy the bitcoin at once. He can earn the bitcoin he needed in the next 3~6 months.

How come the cracker can't sell the stolen BTC.

Has zhoutong said so? Nope. So stop your penny stock rumors. Thanks.

We know he holds enough Bitcoin profits to be able to cover this.

Because Mtgox will ban them.

He can't be holding 40k Bitcoins ?

If he do, he's really bullish!  

He should buy them ASAP.

What I should have said is how will they know the BTC are stolen?

I don't know, ask MtGox, they've done so before.

Yes, I have heard him say that he holds quite a lot of Bitcoins, as he is bullish long term.

MtGox holds lots of Bitcoin profits, too. They don’t sell them either.

They can track the address's  - but the the coins are being spread around to many wallets
and probably will be diluted so much that it will very hard to catch.

They coins can be sold very very slowly and not necessarily through mtgox

I bet you're right.

If he's bullish then presumably he would wait and buy on dips. He could handle withdraw demands from offline holdings and replenish on dips thus stabilizling the market. Whether that's in his best interest I don't know. Maybe he makes more off certain kinds of market volatility. Whatever the case my impression is that he's plenty smart enough to figure out the best way to handle it for his best long term interest.

There is no way to ban hacker's address. He can move them around thru different bitcoin services, then sell them OTC or use them to buy something, then what? Someday you will get some of the coins that came from his address and mtgox will blame you. This is stupid, but completely expected from mtgox.

Well, if the majority of miners refuse to process transactions originated by thiefs, then the address would effectively become banned. Think of it as a "51% defense" (homage to 51% attack).

The most likely action the thief will take will be to use the coins on SilkRoad. They don't need to cash out on any of the normal exchange.

Right now they're worth less than a clean bitcoin but still have value, and will be traded into oblivion in the black markets until they eventually seep out into the general economy.

The same problem is still there. I sell something for bitcoins (instant purchase), the hacker immediately spends his bitcoins (before some central authority decides to ban the address) and I am left with a bunch of worthless bitcoins in the end.

This would undermine the whole p2p currency, "controlled by no one" concept. I think every sane miner would stop using a pool that would try to control the network in any way.

So, yes it could be done, but it would destroy bitcoin as we know it.

no it's not stupid, it's ethical and it is the bitcoin community regulating itself ( buying/selling drugs? cool  Stealing bitcoins? not cool)

those bitcoin services will have to check if these bitcoins are suspicious before accepting them, otherwise they might have worthless bitcoins in their hands

How would you check them?

Banning coins is much more detrimental to Bitcoin as a whole. It destroys confidence in the system.

MtGox has temporarily locked accounts in order to to try and trace stolen coins, but I don't know of any instances where they confiscated any.

I suppose they go through all the parent transactions. If these stolen coins go through an anonymizer, or other stolen coins from another hack, Mtgox will ban every transaction that are child transactions of bitcoins that come out of that anonymizer.

I don't blame them.

> Banning coins is much more detrimental to Bitcoin as a whole. It destroys confidence in the system.

Seems to me like the system is evolving. Nothing you can do about it, except starting a different cryptocurency.
In the end, if it regulates itself, Bitcoin might end up looking just like the current banking system and that would be logical, since this is a deterministic system after all.

Not MtGox. How would you check them? Are we going to have to ask MtGox permission before exchanging any Bitcoin? Any business that's accepting BTC will have to send queries to MtGox to see if it's "ok" to accept coin from a customer? That's ludicrous.

If Bitcoin "evolves" into the current banking system it will lose a lot of its inherent value.

yeah.

maybe in the future, there will be a cryptocurrency that is legal and traceable like that. maybe Bitcoin itself.

and then there will be unofficial cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin today

1000% THIS^
the idea of ​​"ban the coin" is killing the principle idea of the project. It is necessary to catch the thief, to monitor transactions. Traditional money is also anonymous, is not "ban coin", the coin has an identifier number, a figure aid - catch the thief. cash I had in mind .. That's all.

LOL


if I was the hacker.. and with no forethought besides for the time it took me to type this, I would just buy shit on silk road(shit you can buy dollar bills), slowly use the btc laundry services, buy as much as much shit as you can from all the different sites that let you sell shit.. Clean out the want to sell here on bitcoin talk.

you can move the coins and avoid the exchanges all day long. And then one of them silk road sellers or a guy who just shipped off his video card, will try to get cash from mtgox and find their coins are banned.


Then what starts to happen.... people will start to wonder... "HOW CAN I ACCEPT BITCOINS IF I DO NOT KNOW WHICH COINS ARE BANNED"

how could you sell on silkroad? is silk road going to have to take in deposits first verify the cons are legit bfore allowing the sale to go through?

what about people that sell in the forums?


One of the biggest problems BTC faces it , it is hard to near impossible to develop real trust.

The only think this ban will do is increase the level of distrust... yeah I get you want to slow him down, hobble his efforts to trade his coins to cash, but the only people you will hurt are people not involved. I wouldnt touch the exchanges with a ten foot pool and think he isnt reading these threads?

BAH!!!

WE cant afford knee jerk reactions to these things, we got to think consequences through. ANd frankly I think this idea is a bad one.

Coin taints would kill mixer services, I think. It takes time to notice a theft. In most cases, a thief will be able to pass stolen coins along before anyone notices, and the taint would actually just punish anyone unlucky enough to receive them before the theft is noticed.

Not to mention it gives the supposed victim a lot of power. Bitcoin transactions are supposed to be irreversible, this has been a big deal for many merchants, not to be at the mercy of their customers. Taints shift the balance of power towards the buyer. How do you prove a theft occurred in the first place? Would these taints also be used for claims of fraud?

I can see the need for protection measures. These need to be separate from the base system itself. Paypal - as much as it's a bad word here -  provides buyers security they wouldn't have with cash transactions. (not to mention convenience, but that's not as applicable here.)
The rest of the payment system provides security for the merchants too - payment processors handle the risks of theft, at a cost of course.Similar services can be provided for Bitcoins, and merchants can accept straight payments or payments through a processor of some sort, according to their own best judgement, pricing the costs into their fees or not.

And you trust the keys to expensive car - a stranger? Or sleep of a wooden door? Or do not carry a knife (gun, depends on the laws)? I truly understood that Zhou did not have its own dedicated server? Fuck, my neighbor, the owner of a small business, (4 ... 5K USD per month). Even he has a dedicated server! Safety - in the hands of everyone!

launder the money like normal bank robbers do.  Go to the casino.

That is not true.  If 51% of miners refuse your transaction and 49% don't then it will simply take twice as long to get confirmations.

You think the thief is going to buy $200k worth of drugs?

on silkrd you can buy cash dollars, gold or silver.

Yes he will, to himself, by being both the Seller and the Buyer, if for nothing else at least to use the Silk Road laundry to clean the coins for a measly 1.5% fee. Pretty cheap, no?
After that the real drug dealers will be left with the hot coins.

Hot Coins is an absurd concept. The coin cannot be "guilty", the coin is just the storage of a fluctuating value. That number was worth whatever the exchange was at when it was stolen, but immediately afterwards that value changes up and down. If the value increases is that portion "clean"? No. It is estimated that 95% of US $20 bills carry traces of cocaine on them, should those be "hot"? Cocaine is illegal. Saddam Hussein dumped an estimated 4 billion in counterfeit $100 bills into the world economy, should we ban $100 bills?

A far better solution would be to aggressively investigate Linode, and find out if there is any responsibility there, and prosecute accordingly. Imagine the positive buzz generated by accurately finding the guilty parties and then bringing them to justice! And then this little piece of garbage Leo needs to be held accountable. He is at the very least an accomplice to grand larceny, and is bragging about felony level involvement in this crime. Dox his sorry ass wide and far- how about the IRS? Think he has reported his sudden $200,000 in earnings? What about Homeland Security? Moving $200,000 in funds that are being laundered might interest them. This little piece of work needs to be brought to full accountability. I say cry havoc and let loose the dogs of justice on him. 

...Except if homeland security, CIA or some other government organisation (even non US) is behind the hack. I know some people will scream "conspiracy" again, but if I was in a secret or not so secret service with a mission to protect the banking system and considered BTC a threat, I'd hire a team of excellent hackers/crackers to figure out a weakness in the system. Literally, with pools/providers/exchanges and metaphorically concerning Bitcoin as a whole.

Whether this was planned or not, there it is - a definite weakness, possibly powerful enough to blow up the community, splitting us up between those who are in favor of tainting coins and checking them, and those who believe this would be the end of Bitcoin for all reason stated in this thread above and other threads.

In any case, it may cause confusion and definetly hurt the bit of trust that was left after last year's incidents. We need to find a common ground on this and send a VERY clear and unambiguous message to the less tech-savy people out there that coins stolen or not, should never be declined at any exchange. Unless we do that, bitcoin is screwed. If MtGox freezes accounts with whatever percentage of taint - no, let me rephrase, if they freeze them for further investigation it's still acceptable but if they confiscate those coins, MtGox needs to be boycotted. What percentage of taint will make a bitcoin tainted? Who is to decide? MtGox? I'm afraid in any case, particularly because MtGox is the biggest and most important exchange boycotting Gox will become a mess. It's like an autoimmune reaction. Could someone have planned such a thing?

I have already switched to OTC transactions.

You are correct if the "blocking" happens during the assembly of new blocks. If however it's integrated into the blockchain checking, then I'm right.

I hardly believe that MtGox is really doing this. Why should they, it will make their income smaller, disgruntle custumers which are trying to sell previously stolen coins without knowing it.

But if, Bitcoin may be decentral and P2P, but MtGox isn't. They can do what they want.

It would also have interesting consequences. If stolen coins cannot be spent, they will effectively be lost from the system.

It could also be interesting that the victim of a robbery could say to the thief "I will let you spent my stolen money if you give me back at least x percent of it", some kind of out-of-court settlement if you want to see it this way.

Well, my last post was 1 month ago. By now I think the reputation of MtGox has already suffered a bit, at least that's one reason why I think they have this half-price promotion campaign right now for their so called birthday. Now I think they won't get away with it and will unfreeze accounts (as they did I think). The attempt alone was a ridiculous thing to do. Today, I'm more worried about the MysteryMiner who mines empty blocks as a threat for Bitcoin.

There have only been 3 0 tx blocks in the last 120 and remember sometimes 0tx blocks occurs naturally.  "Mystery" was never a real threat.  Economic pressure would have eventually forced all miners (including mystery) to include paying tx.

I believe he means moneyPak codes, WU transfers and other forums of exchange.