If you say you will return them and you don't, then you're the criminal (fraud) and I am the victim. A stupid victim, but so what? It wasn't me who committed the fraud.


I wouldn't say there's a crime on pyramid schemes since the whole thing is explicitly described in contracts to which all parties agree. There's no fraud there.

True. But it only got publicly know on the 22th...


There's no easy way that I'm aware of, you must use the blockexplorer, assuming that you know addresses that have being used to deposit "dirty" money.

That's why I'm also expecting MtGox pronunciation on the matter.


What? Wait. Everyone has the right to be naive or stupid if you will. Nobody has the right to fraud or steal.
Don't blame the victims, blame the criminals. Calling a scam victim a scammer too is absurd. (unless of course he was a scammer on other situations, but that's definitely not 90% of them)

Oh come on, so if you see somebody getting robbed on the street and you're capable of stopping the thief, you wouldn't do it because you're not "police/judge/executioner"?
I'm much more for these behaviors than yours.

You're right that MtGox hasn't said too much, I'm also expecting the evidences. But people, this whole thing has what, two days? Chill down, not everything can be done on "real time"...

Police? Seriously? What do you expect them to do, besides filing a report?

Any decent system should consider not only the reputation of those who make crime accusations, but proofs too. This someone would have to prove the theft, otherwise his unprovable claim would be just some negative points on his/her reputation.

Or do you mean someone who has acquired stolen coins without knowing it? This is more complicated, and I don't know how such system could solve this issue. Basically it's a matter on who should be the final victim, the first one to be stolen, or the last one to receive the stolen coins before they get caught.
Leaving it for the first victim has an advantage since it "forces" people to be more responsible with their belongings.
But leaving it to the last one increases the range of such protection system, making it much more difficult for the thief to get away with the coins, since people would now start to worry with the sources of the payments they receive. Banks could automatically detect dirty payments, the standalone client could have add-ons to indicate dirty payments and so on.

Anyway, it's a complicated and delicate issue, of course I don't have all the answers, but it would be interesting to see how free market interactions will deal with criminals.

And honest random users would give back the tainted coins they freely received to the true owner...

I also think some service of this kind could be useful if it manages to be quick enough. For example, a exchange has some coins stolen. In less than 24h, it publishes it and all addresses touched by such coins become tainted. No bank which agrees with the terms of this service will accept any of those coins anymore, if they ever receive them, they transfer back to the original owner.
Eventually, such service could even write a patched version of the standalone client that recognizes dirty incoming transactions.

To think about... it opens dangerous doors, but it may have a positive balance in the end... it's how voluntary justice is supposed to work, through ostracism. The dirty coins would get ostracized...

MtGox is no "public" anything. It's private property, and if its owner wants to allow people to trade in secret there, nobody else has anything to do with it.

You were defending a voluntary court system in this very topic... if that's not an ethical base (voluntary is ok, coercive is not) than what is it?

No, Bimmerhead, it seems you didn't understand what I meant.

Nobody has the right to steal, so, if Baron is proven guilty of theft, he's not the rightful owner of the stolen bitcoins. If MtGox can really prove that, he has all the right to retain such coins - and the rightful owner could reclaim them.

Now, we must wait for the evidence...

Like you or not, everybody has the right to sell widget on the internet. But nobody has the right to steal. This is basic ethics.

If he can really prove that it was a thief, I see no problem at all. Actually, I'd congratulate MtGox for that.
But, I'm expecting the evidences...

+1.
There's nothing wrong with dark pools.

I'm not sure I understood this "long term optimization". By smallest I believe you mean in BTC amount, right? The goal would be to spend smaller addresses quicker in order to have less addresses with money in it, is that it?
Besides shrinking people's wallets, what optimization could this bring? These addresses would remain in the block chain anyway...


Can old transactions be really forgotten like this? I've seen people saying this around here before, but it sounds a bit dangerous to me. (deleting data is always a dangerous decision)
I mean, isn't it a problem at all to have a missing link in the chain? Suppose every miner does it, there would be no proof left that certain bitcoins are really linked to its generation block...


Well, I think - I might be wrong - that bandwidth is a scarcer resource than disk space. So, to me, it sounds more reasonable trying to focus on reducing the bandwidth necessary to be a miner. So maybe minimizing transaction size is more interesting...
By the way, it will probably be on transaction size that fees will be charged anyway.

Only Bitcoin-central and Bitcoin-market deal with PecunixGAU directly, and the volumes are low.
But it's true, it would be interesting to have charts of BTCvsGold or BTCvsSilver, even they have to convert from MtGoxUSD to precious metals using some standard quoting available.

Another chart I think would be interesting to follow is the total value of all bitcoins in existence. This graph would take BTC inflation in consideration, showing that its rise in value is even more significant than what it looks only by the unit value.

Wouldn't it be better for the network if the client tried to minimize transaction sizes? (for the network and for the user, as soon as we have to pay for transactions...)

Actually, talking about it, why does the change mechanism exists? Is it to improve anonymity? It's not very clear to me how does the change improves anonymity, but anyway, if that's the case, I'd suggest to make it optional, and disabled by default. Only those really worried with anonymity would activate it. That would make transactions smaller.

What really distributes wealth in an evil manner is inflation. The most poor are the most damaged by it, since they are the ones who tend to have a larger percentage of their possessions in the form of money.

Tiago, you may use CoinPal. It doesn't allow a large volume but it's a start.

It would be nice if someones that happens to know Ruby on Rails and has some spare time could implement a PagSeguro plugin to bitcoin-central. PagSeguro is a sort of Brazilian paypal, but they don't do chargebacks. Of course, they charge quite high fees for credit card payments, but Brazilians could use less expensive forms of payment (boleto, TEF). More info: https://pagseguro.uol.com.br/en/what-is-pagseguro.html

Thank you for pointing me to this extension. I really thought that was a default behavior of all SSL clients.

So, sites have no requirement in signing their new certificates with their old ones then... if a site changes a certificate about to expire, the extension will have no way to determine whether it's an authentic change or not, right?

If most people there are using silver already, why don't you set up a exchange between silver coins and bitcoins? That would be a good way to introduce bitcoins to other FSP members.

By the way, how geek is the FSP community? I heard there were many.

I find the FSP movement really interesting and I wish you all success! (If at least it was not so close to the north pole I'd maybe even consider the hassle of trying to migrate to the USA, but I don't think I'd bear the weather! )