nice catch. I'm picking that we could have a good night or two swapping similar stories over some bottles ... edit: just noticed that there were still nothing in the comments after 8 years for that damning article about the countrywide CEO making off with $150 million before the company collapsed (and was bailed out?) i spotted Angelo at a charity event i was attending last year. he's short; and tanned  |
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A crash is never announced in MSM. I guess it will take a few more years until faith is lost.
... you would be surprised about how many articles, like this telegraph one, I read in MSM before the 2007 seizure in the CDO, CDS markets in august that ultimately led to the 2008 stock crash. No one can say they "never saw it coming", BIS, IMF and others all were warning. I believe it depends totally on your filtering mechanism (read normalcy bias), now that there is so much information available. It is snippets from the trade floor and signs that insiders are getting out, CEO early retirements, moving to other sectors, etc, that are most valuable. If a room of traders anywhere near the capital markets, i.e. money market funds, MUNIS, corporate paper, T-bonds, gilds, LIBOR, gold, etc is saying they sense something different, pay attention. This is by no means a MSM article anyway, it is a side note by a financial section read by very small percentage of overall population. I suggest you go ask the man-on-street what the mood in the corporate bond market is currently to test your stupid comment if you believe the MSM is spouting this stuff. Basically, I think you wrong and you will lose money because of it.  this was one of the clearest things going on in early 2007 that caused me to put on a huge stock short in Oct 2007 starting with New Century: http://www.housingwire.com/articles/countrywide-ceo-continues-unload-stock |
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Would you mind telling me exactly how, from a technical standpoint, you would even white or black list BTC?
Given that there is no such thing as a coin but just a series of inputs and outputs, what do you taint and how is that sustainably identifiable throughout the life of a "coin"?
Just make people register. That was Yifu's angle as a principle at CoinValidation. UTXO's which are not registered to a known user or entity (e.g., Coinbase or blockchain.info) would halt a transaction from being valid. Very easy to justify in the name of 'fighting terrorism and child exploitation' and whatever. You can go before congress and argue all kinds of economic mumbo-jumbo about fungibility and freedom and what-not if you like. Good luck with that. Sharp eyed viewers might notice that if one does not register, one cannot pay one's taxes. And there are well established ways to make people pay their taxes in almost all but the most failed of states. I'll register my stash the day I'm mandated to do so (which is why my conception of the best strategy is to avoid a mandate ever being practical rather than to resist compliance after it is been mandated.) As a function of my Coin Validation service, I'd also run a service for miners so that they can ensure that they don't waste their time mining unvalidated UTXO's as inputs and their transaction set thus remain clean. If the choice is between taking this easy and popular step of using my government chartered service, and facing shutdown of their network support and confiscation of their gear, it will be a fairly easy decision in most cases. It seems to me that the new inverted bloom filter thing it could be remarkably efficient for a miner to ensure that they are not wasting their time with transactions which are going to be legally invalid because they contain unvalidated inputs. A side benefit of using a sorted transaction set. I also find your suggestion that the likes of Russia and China are going to change their policies and welcome crypto-currencies with open arms to be laughable. And in case you have not noticed, piss-ant countries without nukes pretty much do what they are told by whoever's sphere of influence they fall under. Sure, there is a chance that your rosy dreams about totalitarian countries suddenly discovering the joys of individual freedom and geo-political power politics will come to pass, but I'm not betting a huge percentage of my financial statement on it. this is exactly the sort of drivel i'd expect from your socialistic mindset. "i'd just mandate it be so". notice that there is no depth to your assertions as they just represent your lips flapping once again. let me spell it out for you. the working assumption here is that there will be mass disobedience of your pronouncements as most ppl who are even remotely familiar with how the protocol works understands that it is impossible to "taint coins" as there is no such concept in reality. the trick for you is how to enforce your pronouncements. there are just inputs and outputs which get split & joined constantly giving "coins" that are ever lessening shades of grey as time goes by. and w/o a mechanism to identify owners of whatever unit you choose to monitor be it addresses or UTXO's, there is plausible deniability at every hop. the only way to prove someone guilty of a theft is to catch them with the private keys on their computer used at the time of the theft. I actually agree with tvbcof on this, and that doesn't make me against bitcoin. There are strong historical precedents for governments to outlaw forms of money and mandate the usage of their currency. FDR's ban on gold possession is the the most recent US based example. We can say "well many people ignored the ban and kept their gold", and that is true, but they weren't able to use that gold publicly for business, transactions with most firms, taxes, etc. So it didn't matter that many people kept their gold, it only matter that most people couldn't use their gold. Also, most people are either apolitical on money or against bitcoin's libertarian purpose, and would happily comply with any Presidential mandate as tvbcof lays out. Especially if compliance is required to receive healthcare through obamacare, social security, mortgages to buy housing, student loans to go to school, food stamps, welfare checks, etc. etc. An apolitical/collectivist population is an effective weapon for current governments against any sound money system. It's not super simple. There is a reason why you do not pay tax when you buy firewood from your neigbor. He and you say no. There is a reason why they can not say: You to can not have sexual intercource, how could you think that, here it is WE who decide who is to have sex and not to have sex. But the people says no, no way. There is a reason they can not say that you have to go to church every sunday. Everybody say no, no way, basta! This is also what people will say to the blacklists or the whitelists. They will say, no, not a chance, basta, the coins are mine. Mine! Get out of my face. That is what everybody will say. Not super simple at all. Without support, they can do nothing. Whitout you giving them resources, they have no resources. Bitcoin will make that clear to a lot of people.
That only works for small private party to private party transactions. Try telling that to your locally owned pizza shop who's owner relies on his business to feed his family. He/she will happily comply with a mandate in order to stay in business. Sure, maybe if the two of you know and trust each other you'll agree to under the table transactions, but that is a small minority of transactions. Point is, any mandate will be followed by most businesses, and that is what matters. i'm not making the argument with tvbcof that gvt won't enforce unreasonable laws onto Bitcoin. that probably is in Bitcoin's future. what i'm arguing is their ability to actively taint tx's, either thru addresses or UTXO's. that's not technically possible for them and also for those they demand to do so. thus, their work will be cut out for them, assuming they need to actually track and enforce against those who disobey. |
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i think BTC-e is temporarily deluded at best.
first, they have no clear way of proving which coins were stolen. it makes no sense that the thieves would send stolen coins directly to BTC-e for sale w/o a few intermediate hops at least. similarly, "mule" activity can only be suspected, not proved. secondly, while i agree BTC-e has the right to choose to behave as they wish (it being a free mkt), the consequences of such actions will be to destroy their own business as internet of money (Bitcoin) will choose to route around them if their behavior persists. thirdly, i doubt they're acting out of pure ethics; the behavior is suspicious as the owners have been anonymous from the beginning making this freezing of coins highly suspicious. my bet is that they had some of their own coins on Evo and they're just trying to retrieve them. thirdly, do you really think they will just freeze the coins and then destroy them? hell no, they'll eventually have to decide to return them to their rightful owners, destroy them, or turn them over to some law enforcement agency (think DOJ). in the first instance, those owners will then merrily go off and spend those coins freely as if nothing happened and recipients of those coins will do likewise. in the second instance, destroying them would be an untenable act as the rightful owners (if they can even be identified) would scream bloody foul again destroying their customer base. if they try to hold them "forever", suspicions will arise that they might eventually spend them themselves (BTC-e). in the third instance of turning them over to DOJ or some gvt (and here's the real zinger) what do you think they would do with them? Voila! we already have 3 instances of exactly what the feds would do: auction them off. and this is where the ultimate hypocrisy comes from all this moral and legal parsing going on about this tainting issue. when gvts believe they have the moral authority to do what's right for them and them only (auctioning and running off with the proceeds from "illegal activity") they undermine confidence in themselves from the viewpoint of the people. i know that when i see these auctions going off on SR coins or the auction the Aussie authorities are planning, i think hypocrisy, ie theft. this is why the Bitcoin community will ultimately give those tainted coins a pass and accept them in everyday trade. if the gvt can do it, so can they. this "pass" just takes time. in 2 wks, this Evo thing will have blown over. furthermore, if the community refuses to do this, it means the end of Bitcoin as what is paramount is the principle of fungibility.
Doc, please. Paragraphs. Because my eyes! I agree BTC-E has painted themselves into a no-win corner (*checks popcorn supplies*). I share your suspicions w/r/t some 'self-help' going on. I agree there is no way to prove technically the taint. The problems arise because people nevertheless believe, and vehemently insist, some coins are less legitimate than others. It's a social thing, the opposite of neatly provable/disprovable coin 'color.' That's why it's such a sticky mess. My model here is diamonds. They are all made of blameless carbon. But social, market, and media pressure (sorry for pun) has created ex nihilo a de novo problem and furor over 'blood diamonds.' There is no way to ask a diamond about its origin. So a whitelist, in the form of Happy Diamond Certification, is now in place and presumption is of guilt. I agree a BTC whitelist is problematic and unenforceable for all manner of good reasons. But I also have full faith Statists and other do-gooders will ignore those fine reasons and proceed to blunder about with (un)pleasantly futile regulatory schemes. "We have to make sure people don't use Conflict Coins from nasty dark markets; it's For The Children" they will undoubtedly say. Today we have Know Your Custom, tomorrow it will mutate into Know Your Coinbase. BTC-E vs Evo is only a first skirmish, among the first drops in an oncoming monsoon. Would you mind telling me exactly how, from a technical standpoint, you would even white or black list BTC?
Given that there is no such thing as a coin but just a series of inputs and outputs, what do you taint and how is that sustainably identifiable throughout the life of a "coin"?
It's not a 'what does the code output say' technical point. It's a subjective matter of he-said-she-said/who has the most juiced-up legal team. IOW, nightmare stuff. Best to sidestep the entire tar pit by making claims of taint nigh-impossible to prove, even for TLAs. except that blood diamonds are NOT critical for world trade as a form of money. Bitcoin, otoh, has the distinct possibility to enable frictionless payments across all borders with a strictly known and fixed supply. yes, a gvt can perform irrational tainting acts but they risk isolating themselves and cutting themselves off from what has the potential to fundamentally change commerce. which nation wants to risk that? sure, i agree that anonymity could be better provided in the code. but is it good enough? maybe. |
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let me ask you a further simple question.
let's say you receive 2 inputs of 0.5 BTC into the same new address, thus creating 2 UTXO's of 0.5 BTC each. one of them is 100% tainted, the other perfectly clean. you now want to spend 0.5 BTC to buy an ipad. according to your laws, will you allow it? if so, why? i could argue that you have 1 BTC in that "address" that is 50% tainted uniformly, therefore, it would illegal to spend even the clean 0.5 BTC. how fair is that? again, i am not aware of any wallet software that allows you to preferentially pick certain UTXO to be spent. or what if you want to spend 0.51BTC for a laptop? ignore tx fees for both these examples. would you allow that? i could argue that you're "dipping into" the tainted UTXO thus it should not be allowed.
the flipside is you could argue that you're just a merchant that innocently received these coins from ordinary customers who also claim they have no idea where they got them. therefore, they should be allowed to be spent. ppl will spend their coins no matter what laws you pronounce and it will be up to you to enforce them in a reasonable manner.
Firstly, note that when things are working after the switch (grandfathering and initial validation) you should never have an unvalidated UTXO in your wallet, and if you do, that's your fault. Should have used Coinbase if you could not work it out for yourself. Secondly, your 'address' is irrelevant. It's needed to sign stuff but that's about it. It's not a factor in formulating spends. That is just straight up aggregation of UTXO's and acceptance of change. If you don't have the appropriate UTXO's to make the desired spend that the recipient will accept, you don't have the money. It could be in practice that a validation service can re-validate an unvalidated UTXO, but I expect that it will cost you the price of an investigation...and then some as their profit margin. I would expect that part of a government charter would allow a validation service to perform such actions. Lastly, try to imagine the look on Big Brother's face when you complain that his requirements are destroying Bitcoin. Seriously, Bitcoin's best hope is probably that the govt considers Bitcoin more useful alive than dead. They probably do currently for the honeypot effect, and in the future they very well might in order to detract from exploration of alts. In order to do so, they may actually be pretty relaxed about things. no, but i don't want to start at the grandfathering. i want to start with allinvains theft. no doubt, you have some of his coins in your wallet. humor me and go back and find out which of your UTXO's and what % of those UTXO's have his coins in them. you might want to read this thread first: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583579.0i'll bet you have no idea where to start and would have a difficult time at best finding out just what you have today. btw, here's the algorithm: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1077/what-is-the-coin-selection-algorithm/29962#29962 |
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let me ask you a further simple question.
let's say you receive 2 inputs of 0.5 BTC into the same new address, thus creating 2 UTXO's of 0.5 BTC each. one of them is 100% tainted, the other perfectly clean. you now want to spend 0.5 BTC to buy an ipad. according to your laws, will you allow it? if so, why? i could argue that you have 1 BTC in that "address" that is 50% tainted uniformly, therefore, it would illegal to spend even the clean 0.5 BTC. how fair is that? again, i am not aware of any wallet software that allows you to preferentially pick certain UTXO to be spent. or what if you want to spend 0.51BTC for a laptop? ignore tx fees for both these examples. would you allow that? i could argue that you're "dipping into" the tainted UTXO thus it should not be allowed.
the flipside is you could argue that you're just a merchant that innocently received these coins from ordinary customers who also claim they have no idea where they got them. therefore, they should be allowed to be spent. ppl will spend their coins no matter what laws you pronounce and it will be up to you to enforce them in a reasonable manner.
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that's assuming you or anyone else has the ability to determine whether or not a UTXO has 100% cleanliness. i'd say it depends on who is doing the analysis. you yourself admitted, after i pointed it out, that you might indeed have stolen coins from allinvain in your wallet. should we lock down your coins?
- grandfather all UTXO at a point in time. - validate UTXOs from then forward by the simple metric: 'do we know who is responsible for them?' there you go again with the socialist attitude. "just make it so" says you. care to tell me how all gvts worldwide will coordinate this simple action? and tell us how you would tell "who is responsibel for them"? wake me up when they do and maybe i'll pay attention to your FUD. and even if they do, i see no discussion from you as to how to practically implement your pronouncements.
This is as simple as the filter for general cryptography which we are likely to see:
- packet has a govt back-door?
These things are really very simple. If you want to sooth yourself by imagine them as complex, suit yourself, but don't whine and bitch when you lose your ass.
this is just you being a pessimist again. you really do think the gvt is all powerful, don't you? if it's so trivial, tell us how splitting out UTXO's works technically. wallet software follows a particular logic of UTXO selection when assembling for a specific tx which i've not been able to get a good sense of and i'm sure you haven't either. there's no such thing as "UTXO control" like there is "coin control" for addresses, afaik. tell us how you would construct a tx to select or exclude certain UTXO's that you'd deem tainted. from what i do know, the wallets select the most suitably "sized" UTXO's which when combined together fits the tx amount so as to minimize splitting and efficiently packages the tx at the least cost in terms of fees and data requirements. furthermore, for a UTXO that has 0.15% "taint", tell us how you'd split that out practically. stop pretending that Coinbase has a way to do this when you don't know that.
Formulating a spend from select UTXO's is a _very_ simple problem. It's not often needed these days (though it's been done to try to deal with the dust problem) but it's uncommon because it is not very useful rather than because it is difficult. the dust problem was not dealt with via filtering UTXO's. it was dealt with by increasing the tx fee.
As for identifying a UTXO as validated or not (to decide whether to spend it) that is not possible because there is no validation service at present. Here again, it does not mean that it is a difficult problem.
Alex Waters has figured out it won't work. you should too. I do suggest that you brush up on how to formulate transactions from abstract UTXO's in a desired way before the USGavincoin alt is pushed out. You can thank me later.
why don't you spare us all some time and tell us how you would technically separate out taint from a set of UTXO's with varying percentages of taint all within the same address? not only that, but tell us how you would make it practical and easy for avg Bitcoiners to comply with your law? |
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you still haven't answered my question about how the US gvt could get away with the hypocrisy of auctioning off the SR coins while at the same time tainting others drug coins.
It is written into the law that seizure auctions clean the title, same as with seized cars, houses, etc. If anything that might be one reason for strong interest in these auctions. If you are a buyer with repetitional concerns the only two ways to buy known untainted coins are from a government auction or direct from a (reputable and verifiable) miner. i know how the gvt couched this situation. my point is that there are alot of ppl in the community who think they should have returned the coins to the owners who left them on SR or flat out destroyed them. by selling them off under their own interpretation of the law, the gvt risks eroding faith in its sense of fairness in that application of the law. b/c of that, there will be alot of ppl transacting despite any attempt of gvt to "taint" coins. and then it becomes a matter of whether or not the gvt can trace what they've deemed tainted, hence the debate btwn tvbcof and me, as to whether or not they will be able to do this from a technical and politically correct way. |
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the concept of taint is all or none. either coins are spendable or they're not. for a UTXO that has 25% taint, is it spendable or not, bro?
WTF are you talking about? If you want to send me a transaction consisting of 100% validated UTXO's, I'll except them at 100% face value. If you want to throw in a fraction which are unvalidated I'll discount them accordingly. If/when unvalidated UTXO's cannot be mined or take a long time I'll stop accepting them altogether or accept an accourdingly deeper discount. This is utterly trivial. Coinbase will do it automatically which is why I'll just accept payment from you through them. you still haven't answered my question about how the US gvt could get away with the hypocrisy of auctioning off the SR coins while at the same time tainting others drug coins. that is more of a political question and i already know your answer.
Not hypocritical at all. You bought some coins at the auction? Register and validate them. No big deal. I anticipate that as things are rolled out probably every single UTXO will be considered clean by default. Nobody is stopping you from validating any of them so you've got no complaints...unless you are a criminal or whatever and don't want to register... that's assuming you or anyone else has the ability to determine whether or not a UTXO has 100% cleanliness. i'd say it depends on who is doing the analysis. you yourself admitted, after i pointed it out, that you might indeed have stolen coins from allinvain in your wallet. should we lock down your coins? if it's so trivial, tell us how splitting out UTXO's works technically. wallet software follows a particular logic of UTXO selection when assembling for a specific tx which i've not been able to get a good sense of and i'm sure you haven't either. there's no such thing as "UTXO control" like there is "coin control" for addresses, afaik. tell us how you would construct a tx to select or exclude certain UTXO's that you'd deem tainted. from what i do know, the wallets select the most suitably "sized" UTXO's which when combined together fits the tx amount so as to minimize splitting and efficiently packages the tx at the least cost in terms of fees and data requirements. furthermore, for a UTXO that has 0.15% "taint", tell us how you'd split that out practically. stop pretending that Coinbase has a way to do this when you don't know that. what you're proposing is "possible" is mostly likely not possible and certainly is not "practical". i've never seen any wallet with the ability to allow users to spend certain UTXO's. what would be the point except to satisfy your socialistic mandates? |
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...
Iirc, Yifu's idea was to white list addresses, not UTXO's. Yifu was specifically interested in identifying in pinning individual identification meta-data to that which exists in the blockchain as I recall things. So your idea is to taint UTXO'? How do you do that given they can be split, joined ad infinitum?
We've been through this years ago. Of course you taint UTXO's and summate them to characterize a wallet (as if it matters.) It's not only possible to have a percent taint, it's relatively trivial. It's also fairly trivial to associate UTXO's to other metadata and flags. That would be the heart of a validation service, and it is very far from rocket science. You are trying to say that Bitcoin has no scaling problems and because there is no danger of to many UTXO's (which pretty much will always need to be in fast access (which is, parenthetically, a long ago solved problem for large players who operate football field sized datacenters)) and at the same time that the UTXO set is so complex that they could not be analyzed even though the entire system is highly deterministic. Which is it, bro? People who use multibit-type clients will probably not even know any difference. Let the server to the heavy lifting. Just push the 'upgrade' button and a nice little 'percent taint' is a new addition which rapidly becomes one more feature. The handful of ancient dinosaurs who run a full node can easily check transactions against my government chartered service as needed. In fact, for PR reasons, I'll even make this free. This will allow folks to call Bitcoin a 'peer-2-peer' system if they can stifle a chuckle when doing so. the concept of taint is all or none. either coins are spendable or they're not. for a UTXO that has 25% taint, is it spendable or not, bro? you still haven't answered my question about how the US gvt could get away with the hypocrisy of auctioning off the SR coins while at the same time tainting others drug coins. that is more of a political question and i already know your answer. |
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tv,
Would you mind telling me exactly how, from a technical standpoint, you would even white or black list BTC?
Given that there is no such thing as a coin but just a series of inputs and outputs, what do you taint and how is that sustainably identifiable throughout the life of a "coin"?
Just make people register. That was Yifu's angle as a principle at CoinValidation. UTXO's which are not registered to a known user or entity (e.g., Coinbase or blockchain.info) would halt a transaction from being valid. Very easy to justify in the name of 'fighting terrorism and child exploitation' and whatever. You can go before congress and argue all kinds of economic mumbo-jumbo about fungibility and freedom and what-not if you like. Good luck with that. Sharp eyed viewers might notice that if one does not register, one cannot pay one's taxes. And there are well established ways to make people pay their taxes in almost all but the most failed of states. I'll register my stash the day I'm mandated to do so (which is why my conception of the best strategy is to avoid a mandate ever being practical rather than to resist compliance after it is been mandated.) As a function of my Coin Validation service, I'd also run a service for miners so that they can ensure that they don't waste their time mining unvalidated UTXO's as inputs and their transaction set thus remain clean. If the choice is between taking this easy and popular step of using my government chartered service, and facing shutdown of their network support and confiscation of their gear, it will be a fairly easy decision in most cases. It seems to me that the new inverted bloom filter thing it could be remarkably efficient for a miner to ensure that they are not wasting their time with transactions which are going to be legally invalid because they contain unvalidated inputs. A side benefit of using a sorted transaction set. I also find your suggestion that the likes of Russia and China are going to change their policies and welcome crypto-currencies with open arms to be laughable. And in case you have not noticed, piss-ant countries without nukes pretty much do what they are told by whoever's sphere of influence they fall under. Sure, there is a chance that your rosy dreams about totalitarian countries suddenly discovering the joys of individual freedom and geo-political power politics will come to pass, but I'm not betting a huge percentage of my financial statement on it. this is exactly the sort of drivel i'd expect from your socialistic mindset. "i'd just mandate it be so". notice that there is no depth to your assertions as they just represent your lips flapping once again. let me spell it out for you. the working assumption here is that there will be mass disobedience of your pronouncements as most ppl who are even remotely familiar with how the protocol works understands that it is impossible to "taint coins" as there is no such concept in reality. the trick for you is how to enforce your pronouncements. there are just inputs and outputs which get split & joined constantly giving "coins" that are ever lessening shades of grey as time goes by. and w/o a mechanism to identify owners of whatever unit you choose to monitor be it addresses or UTXO's, there is plausible deniability at every hop. the only way to prove someone guilty of a theft is to catch them with the private keys on their computer used at the time of the theft. |
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tv,
Would you mind telling me exactly how, from a technical standpoint, you would even white or black list BTC?
Given that there is no such thing as a coin but just a series of inputs and outputs, what do you taint and how is that sustainably identifiable throughout the life of a "coin"?
Just make people register. That was Yifu's angle as a principle at CoinValidation. UTXO's which are not registered to a known user or entity (e.g., Coinbase or blockchain.info) would halt a transaction from being valid. Very easy to justify in the name of 'fighting terrorism and child exploitation' and whatever. You can go before congress and argue all kinds of economic mumbo-jumbo about fungibility and freedom and what-not if you like. Good luck with that. Sharp eyed viewers might notice that if one does not register, one cannot pay one's taxes. And there are well established ways to make people pay their taxes in almost all but the most failed of states. I'll register my stash the day I'm mandated to do so (which is why my conception of the best strategy is to avoid a mandate ever being practical rather than to resist compliance after it is been mandated.) As a function of my Coin Validation service, I'd also run a service for miners so that they can ensure that they don't waste their time mining unvalidated UTXO's as inputs and their transaction set thus remain clean. If the choice is between taking this easy and popular step of using my government chartered service, and facing shutdown of their network support and confiscation of their gear, it will be a fairly easy decision in most cases. It seems to me that the new inverted bloom filter thing it could be remarkably efficient for a miner to ensure that they are not wasting their time with transactions which are going to be legally invalid because they contain unvalidated inputs. A side benefit of using a sorted transaction set. I also find your suggestion that the likes of Russia and China are going to change their policies and welcome crypto-currencies with open arms to be laughable. And in case you have not noticed, piss-ant countries without nukes pretty much do what they are told by whoever's sphere of influence they fall under. Sure, there is a chance that your rosy dreams about totalitarian countries suddenly discovering the joys of individual freedom and geo-political power politics will come to pass, but I'm not betting a huge percentage of my financial statement on it. Iirc, Yifu's idea was to white list addresses, not UTXO's. So your idea is to taint UTXO'? How do you do that given they can be split, joined ad infinitum? |
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tv,
Would you mind telling me exactly how, from a technical standpoint, you would even white or black list BTC?
Given that there is no such thing as a coin but just a series of inputs and outputs, what do you taint and how is that sustainably identifiable throughout the life of a "coin"?
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If whitelisting becomes a thing, I will make a point by only accepting black (non-whitelisted) coins.
We should talk! Seriously, there was a time when I would have sacrificed a lot for native Bitcoin. At this point, given the makeup of the ecosystem, hodler community, existence of the Bitcoin Foundation and it's minions (including the 'chief scientist' who they pay) and so forth it would be damn difficult for me to justify taking a BB, much less a bullet. I mean, what would one be sacrificing for? I actually might take the same tact as you (or at least what you say/believe will be your possition will be.) The only reason I would do this would be if a replacement for a demonstrably corrupt and useless native Bitcoin was likely, and likely to obtain it's value from a blockchain fork. Thus, if I could pick up some discounted BTC which have a reasonable chance of being re-valued higher I might be inclined to play that angle. To help support the current bunch of whales and a system which TPTB from mainstream-land have managed to subvert? Fuck no! Why haven't you sold all your coins then? Answer: because Bitcoin just might turn out better than you think. |
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If whitelisting becomes a thing, I will make a point by only accepting black (non-whitelisted) coins.
Looks like Alex Waters has capitulated on this. In one of the comments on reddit he flat out said that fungibility of Bitcoin was paramount to success. No white listing. |
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any news on custom homescreen images? haven't seen any tutes for command line import using 12.04.
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the thing is, the gvt is not going to get involved in a situation where drug dealers steal coin from other drug dealers and then try to sell them off on an anonymous exchange in Bulgaria. they only care if they themselves can get their hands on the BTC which in this Evo case, they cannot. so they'll just let the community shoot it out and the final result will be just like every other theft in Bitcoinland since Day 1; nothing.
The govt's role is super simple: - Mandate a license and enforce it on key retailers and service providers of the on-line wallet type (e.g., Coinbase...who probably won't take much convincing...) - Charter a service (e.g., CoinValidation) or two which do validation. The licensee just uses a simple API from the validator. When this occurs I will require that if you want to send me BTC, you do it through my Coinbase account. Yes, I'm vehemently opposed to the whole system, but I'm not going to take a bullet by absorbing your unvalidated BTC which I may not be able to spend and have to trade to someone else who will also will value unvalidated BTC at a lower rate. To make matters worse, anyone who is enough of a chump to accept unvalidated BTC will find people wishing to dump them beating a path to one's door. I would also caution against assuming that a validation solution cannot work because of the difficulty of the task. Validation need not be anything remotely precise or even accurate. I think we'll find that the amount of liability protection afforded to a validating service in association with their charter would make the vaccine manufactures blush. TPTB have a good friend in Mr. Andresen and thus a very strong hand. I won't go into the game theory, but there are still a bunch of ways to overplay the hand that they have here. A person who is on the ball, and who has a bit of luck, may be able to come out of this thing fairly well. the problem is this; you don't understand the game theory. the cat is out of the bag on this one. Bitcoin is global and growing rapidly overseas. take the worse case scenario; the US turns off its internet to short circuit Bitcoin. ok, big whoop. the rest of the world continues on. and given their clear tendencies, China and Russia may even embrace Bitcoin once they figure out they can't stop it and embracing could mean the end of the USD hegemony. many of us would route around or tunnel thru via VPN's. first off, turning off the internet will never happen. second, if it did, it would last probably <24 hrs as the banks themselves cry Uncle from the immediate destruction of their daily business and confidence. stock, bond, and USD markets would plummet. there is something called accountability and credibility that the US gvt must adhere to to a degree despite what you might think. they just got done auctioning off the 3rd tranche of BTC for cold, hard cash that they gladly accepted with open hands. they just got done making it legal via Fincen, the IRS via tax law, the NYDFS via BitLicense, the Senate Banking Hearings, the FEC donations, and various other state laws. the good news is that the technology is good enough fundamentally to actually make the US eventually want to use it to maintain an upper hand in world finance. perhaps as backing for the USD. |
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Looks a lot like the psychology changed from "sell the tops" to "buy the dips".
Yes, ignore all news good or bad. The trend has changed. |
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Thankfully my coins are clean so whitelisting for me would only be a disaster insofar as it would destroy any reason whatsoever for anyone to used Bitcoin and thus the solution (and my stash) would eventually die. I'd either cash out before it dawned on people that Bitcoin was useless, or hope that a following system would start out where Bitcoin left off vis-a-vis a value base. Probably some combination of both.
i'd bet you have a few of MyBitcoins theft in your stash: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=548508.0Most people likely have MyBitcoin stuff (I've not read the link yet.) I personally probably have a fair number of BTC which are closely linked to the allinvain (purported) heist. Word is that these were up for sale on Tradehill-I at the time that I was doing some significant acquisition. But I also have the records of my interactions with Tradehill, and the records of my interactions with the IRS when I paid my taxes. When tainting pops up it will probably be in the form of white-listing and will probably afford the benefit of the doubt to hodlers. Especially old-timers. As long as Gavin does his job and Bitcoin can be controlled, there will be no reason to destroy Bitcoin and many reasons not to since it is actually quite useful to people from all over the spectrum. And if the (false) idea that Bitcoin has any particular value when it has become a less convenient PayPal can be preserved it could also serve to detract from interest in real solutions which do have value. the thing is, the gvt is not going to get involved in a situation where drug dealers steal coin from other drug dealers and then try to sell them off on an anonymous exchange in Bulgaria. they only care if they themselves can get their hands on the BTC which in this Evo case, they cannot. so they'll just let the community shoot it out and the final result will be just like every other theft in Bitcoinland since Day 1; nothing. |
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That's just a bunch of FUD. Tainting coins has not worked once in Bitcoins history. That depends what you mean by worked. If the reports of a blockage of btc-e transactions are correct (I'm not really sure) then people were inconvenienced by the mere attempt to sort through tainted coins, whether or not that attempt was successful. As long as people believe BTC has taint then maybe that perception itself is a problem? This is not the first and won't be the last time we've heard about the concern. there have been multiple attempts to taint BTC's over the years. all have failed. to be clear, i don't condone theft in any way, but the fact of the matter is that Bitcoin IS fungible for all the reasons i've stated above. it has to be to survive. just like USD's are fungible. sure the gvt can issue warnings for certain serial #'s on dollar bills but that is a limited and a non-scalable act (probably purposely). tainting just a few BTC would eventually taint the entire supply of existing BTC as demonstrated in Taras thread i linked to above. it is scalable and therefore dangerous to Bitcoin. tainting is not practical either as just a few hops obfuscates ownership quite effectively w/o extreme degrees of detective work: http://trilema.com/2014/guidance-there-is-no-such-thing-as-bitcoin-taint/any gvt that subscribes to the notion of tainting will only exclude themselves from the growing Bitcoin economy as there will always be gvts somewhere that will allow those coins through either b/c of better understanding of how distributed systems over the Internet work or b/c of greed.
In any case, I have to agree with iCEBREAKER that LTC is irrelevant and the more interesting question is other coins that are actually different from BTC in meaningful ways.
i disagree. when the #2 cryptocurrency goes down that sends a big message. this assumes of course that Bitcoin is "good enough" or that it can be adaptable in the future. |
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