I'm not following.  Are you saying that one should be held responsible for further activity of the output of a transaction, after it leaves the receiving address that is not attached to your identity?

That's the point of using a unique private/public key for each address in the transactions.   On the block chain, there's no way to determine if the transactions belong to the same wallet or not (unless they are done from the same non-shared IP, or very close together in time - which would be circumstantial evidence at best)

Think of the analog of with a cash transaction.   I get a marked $20 bill from the bank. (Wallet A)  I spend it at the store. (Wallet B)  Someone later gets it in change for a hundred (Wallet C), and pays a friend that he owes money to.  (Wallet D) That friend uses it to buy drugs.   Drug dealer gets busted, and find that $20 on him, are they gonna convict you on that?

Sure, if most every $20 that you ever withdrew from the bank is found with the drug dealer, then LE may have some circumstantial evidence that may make you a person of interest.

Sure, your bank knows that you withdrew a $20 bill from the ATM, and may even record the serial number.   But if a drug dealer is later caught with it, does that prove you bought drugs?

Maybe AnonyMint's black-magic, omnipresent, map-every-IP-address-in-the-world-to-a-person NSA can.

You sound like the character Hopper in A Bug's Life before he was disposed of.  We 5 year olds love that movie.

Yep.   It's about a 1.5% chance that a block will be orphaned, about 1 out of 67 blocks we find.  The pool could toss out the orphaned block earlier, since noone ever chained to that block, but I suppose there's something to be said for holding out for a miracle.

For a targeted person of interest under surveillance, sure -- the G-men might eventually get you.   But to imply that the NSA devotes hundreds of gigabytes of storage for the internet traffic of every internet user in the world to be used for later analysis in hard thing for any reasonable person not wearing a tinfoil hat to believe.  Sure, they've got every text message I've ever sent or received, but I have a hard time believing that they have the resources to transmit and store the 200-400 GB of my monthly internet traffic for later analysis, while not being a person of interest.

The reason I say that is that if the NSA has the network and storage capability to transmit and store all of our internet traffic, this is a horrific waste of resources (paid for by taxpayers) that would be better served for actual real, economic activity.

Besides, today I put funds that I just received on a paper wallet while eating at a deli that had public wi-fi.  It just worked out that way.

24 seconds too late, apparently.  Nothing in the pipe. 

Definitely use a mixing service when doing something that may be considered shady.   But if I use a wallet with unique pub/priv keys, it really can't be tracked that I put a BTC into a paper wallet that's now in my mattress vs. giving it to a homeless veteran.   Reusing a public key is what gives away anonymity, as it is exposed when spent and can be attached to your identity.  If the money is transferred to a new address with a new public key, the blockchain isn't going to tell the government that I really own that address; that it was simply an internal transfer of my own assets instead of actually being spent and given to someone else.


I realize that.  I'm just waiting for him to somehow say "Nazi" so I know that I won the argument.   Oh crap.  I just lost.

Do you have a reference for this?  It sort of defeats the purpose of owning bitcoin if you can't own it or use it.

To anonymize usage, it's as simple as using a wallet that generates a unique public/private key for each address, and never reusing an address after it is spent.  

The idea is as silly as the IRS sitting down with me and demanding me to account for the whereabouts of USD 100 bill with serial number LF72648054A which I withdrew from a bank 6 months ago.   Sorry tax man, I think I gave it to a homeless veteran that lost his leg fighting for freedom that looked like he needed it.

That's a rather dim view of your fellow humans.   For bitcoin to have value and to work like a currency rather than a volatile commodity, it needs to have a larger user base to provide inertia.   

When I can walk to my corner store and buy a pack of smokes and a can of Monster with bitcoin, I'm going to be really happy.

If you want a secret cryptocoin, use one of the other bitcoin imitators with a silly name that no average person has heard about or will ever hear about.  You and your friends can trade them for Magic the Gathering cards, or whatever you're into.

I'm just not seeing that a bank-like institution continuing to use ancient Cobol software that was last updated in 1999 to prepare for Y2K for bitcoins.

I'm not seeing this happening.  A sales tax might be enforceable, but subject to a lot of cheating just like a cash business.  But to seize bank assets like Cyprus or USA's 1933 gold seizure is not really going to be possible with bitcoin.

I'm not sure what you mean by adjust the difficulty.  That is determined by the bitcoin network.  If you mean adjust the amount of work you get, just power down your rig for part of the day.

There's not much economic leverage over Russia by the USA because Russia imports nearly nothing from the USA.   However, the rest of Europe is dependent on Russian natural gas, and means to ship natural gas from the USA to Europe in significant quantities are years away.  The USA is war-weary, and can't make a credible military threat.  

The only tools that Obama has left to deal with the Russians are token economic sanctions.  If the issue isn't solved by next winter, I predict Europe will capitulate to Putin when it starts getting cold.

Bitcoin isn't big enough for Russian oligarchs to use to get around the sanctions.   However, it shows that VISA/Mastercard will use politics to determine the validity of transactions going through its system.   Banning Wikileaks donations was just the beginning.

Functionally, how would this even be possible?   If I put some bitcoin on a paper wallet and stuff it in my mattress, how would the authorities seize my asset without conducting a door to door mattress search?

The authorities could tax at the point where fiat and bitcoin are exchanged, but this would encourage the affluent to use offshore exchanges out of the taxing authority's jurisdiction, and the less affluent to use unlicensed street-level exchangers.

I think that the bitcoin protocol enforces the rule that a mined block can't be spent until after 100 confirmations, that is, a transaction using the output from a newly mined block isn't valid if the number of confirmations is less than 100.   

So, a mining pool can't pay for your efforts before the 100 confirmations, unless they extend credit.

That makes as much sense as saying "kilometer" is too unwieldy of a term in describing terrestrial distances, therefore we should start calling kilometers "meters".

Small b bitcoin describes the protocol and a word attached to the value, big B Bitcoin will be a rare unit of measurement, such as the volume of trading at Bitstamp today was 16,000 Bitcoins, or that the Winklevoss Twins collectively own over 40,000 Bitcoins.  Regular people will spend 150 mBTC paying a monthly cell phone bill, or buy a new laptop for 1500 mBTC.

Using the term bitcoin in the plural form should become rare.   Just like you don't go to the ATM to withdraw some monies, or get a drink of waters from a water fountain.


A milliBTC is going to become a common unit, since it is going to be more or less scaled to similar amounts of USD or EUR.   If you want to want to use a word for a milliBTC that does not have a current definition, more power to you.