Mike Hearn, Foundation's Law & Policy Chair, is pushing blacklists right now

[molecular]

Well speaking of it being a lost cause... any response to this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfeA94BedQI

urgh. The speculative bubble argument and the scalability argument. This guy even says "fixing" scalability would require a degree of centralization. That's a strong claim and it's off-topic to discuss here. For a potential solution that doesn't break decentralization see this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=359582.0.

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[Justin00]

Maybe if you and your friends didn't steal bitcoins we wouldnt be having to have this discussion.

But I don't find them malicious, just incompetent.

... corrupt lovers of power and control freaks.

That has not been my experience. I'm sure that many elected officials have that mindset, but my family members in the FBI for example are more like boyscouts. They want to do good. Sometimes it does not work out though. Take the disastrous drug war. Which has caused so much suffering.
I approach such problems with engagement. And I see it working in places like Colorado and Washington state. Don't fight the government, make it do your bidding.  

I've had many many experiences with police. 80% are just doing a job to pay rent (so was Hitler's SS) and 20% love their job, going way beyond the call of duty to enforce laws and get at 'bad types' they don't like (sometimes bending or breaking the law). They break into houses, arrest people for assault, beat people up (off camera), follow and harass you, ... they are not all good people and I don't support their work which is mostly being a pawn of powerful interests that collaborate with wealthy groups to fuck you.

Here's 3 PRISM slides from the NSA:







I don't know what more kind of proof people need that the police are corrupt, and we don't need to help make their work easier with applying law to bitcoin (in their own interpreted way).

you know the blacklist in the UK which was originally only for child porn and now blocks 'hate speech', copyright infringement, 'bad porn' and the pirate bay was originally formed as a consensus amongst ISPs after the metropolitan police put pressure on Demon internet. the same steps are now happening with bitcoin and it's looking semi-legit with people justifying it. but even a cursory look at internet history will show you what the slippery slope this is and we must fight hard against this tooth and nail. not later, but now. now is the time to fight for your freedom, not later once everything is compromised.

[manuel]

Well speaking of it being a lost cause... any response to this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfeA94BedQI

I watched that last week and got thinking about the problem, I can think of a fiew ways to solve it* so it is back to rose coloured glasses for me. (I meant to post it to reddit but forgot. It is worthy of discussion)  

* 1) a business idea all rights reserved
   2) a number of fundamental protocol changes
   3) an unprotected free market solution.

Only number 2 sounds like a real potential solution but you haven't given anything of substance WHAT PROTOCOL CHANGES?

[manuel]

Well speaking of it being a lost cause... any response to this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfeA94BedQI

urgh. The speculative bubble argument and the scalability argument. This guy even says "fixing" scalability would require a degree of centralization. That's a strong claim and it's off-topic to discuss here. For a potential solution that doesn't break decentralization see this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=359582.0.

Tell me more about how every regular user is going to run a 10 or 20 terabyte storage array just to support their individual copy of the blockchain?

[AnonyMint]

Without assured anonymity, the entire house-of-cards that is Bitcoin will come crashing down.

It isn't FUD.  

It's real, alipay and the other payment providers and financial institutions are not allowed to deal with the bitcoin exchanges anymore.

I told you guys the legal document was open for interpretation.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=358368.0;all

Financial institutions deal with currency, and the Chinese government wants to keep it that way.

Bitcoin Exchanges and related companies deal with Bitcoin, and the Chinese government wants to proceed this way.


It's only clarification of separation between THESE businesses, not Bitcoin in general.

Agreed. A big part of the motivation is probably to stem potential capital flight out of China via bitcoin. Not there was likely much of that going on, but the gov probably wants to get out ahead of matters. Which means eliminating layers of financial intermediaries that could obscure identity (hence why "payment processors" might not be allowed to interact with bitcoin exchanges, but banks are ok).

All in all, it will probably indeed dampen the mania to some degree, but it's by no means as hostile as many are making it out to be.

Bingo!

Good to see you all are starting to understand finally.

For the record, we can fully expect governments everywhere to demand the equivalent of AML/KYC, which is more or less what this China action likely amounts to (though more rigidly). That AML/KYC status-quo permeates the global financial system; not just the US.

Yes and they will collect capital gains and/or VAT taxes on Bitcoin appreciation as an investment even if you are trying to use it as a currency (medium-of-exchange), thus it can not be a currency.

But developers of altcoins will rise to the opportunity and create truly anonymous coins. Anoncoin isn't it. Bitcoin isn't it. I will soon publish a whitepaper to explain why.

In short, you need to understand that Chaum mix-nets (e.g. Tor) are vulnerable to timing attacks, and even honeypotting given only 3 hops. They NSA and spy agencies in each country are likely still able to track your identity much of the time. And VPNs are likely all controlled/backdoored/hacked/rooted by the NSA. And exchanging through mixers and altcoins does not obscure your IP address no matter how many times you do it. Also even across these proxies, your identity is tracked in other ways such as browser plugins trojans, cookies, patterns of internet uses such as favored search terms, facbook et al tracking the way you type, etc..

Even if you are one of the lucky few who manages to keep your anonymity assured by careful mix of the above methods, the point is the majority will not. And thus it is very simple for the government to make your anonymous coins practically unspendable and useless. The government simply sends a tax bill and put criminal liability for all activity on a coin since mining until present, until those non-anonymous coins holders (or former holders) can provide the identity of whom they bought from and sold to.

Thus all users will become afraid and only accept coins and sell coins from those who provide their complete identity. Thus only a coin with widespread assured anonymity would be able to become a currency and remain immune to government control.

So clearly you can see that you never will have anonymity with Bitcoin nor any current altcoins. Thus Bitcoin and the current altcoins can never be currencies (unless the governments take them over somehow and make them legal tender), and the government will essentially control them.

Note one means anonymity I proposed thus far are a new way to do physical crypto-coins.

[speedtrader]

Remember that there are shades of gray for this issue as well. A redlist for highly tainted hot coins is not the same as expanding the redlist to include tainted coins in general. Hot coins have already been blacklisted by exchange before - for a while at least. I don't like the idea of a redlist but it's not like I would love to receive really hot coins from someone.

[Sheldor333]

Well if they do manage to realize this I hope everyone moves away from bitcoin to some other cryptocurrency.

[tvbcof]

Well if they do manage to realize this I hope everyone moves away from bitcoin to some other cryptocurrency.

Most people lack the combination of interest, time, and understanding to care a whole lot.  And a large fraction of ordinary people are pretty nervous about the concept of individuals not being under some sort of control.  Other individuals for sure, and even themselves to a surprising extent.

I hypothesis that most people are born with a predisposition to consider themselves subjugants of a leader.  A society with 100% leaders and 0% followers will not last very long because they will not be very functional and thus competitive.  So the ratio of humans with a natural inclination to look to higher authorities for guidance about how to live tends to be fairly high.

The key to population management is to recognize this feature of human populations and use it to design policy.  From a monetary perspective, it is sufficient to point out the mischief that some 'free' individuals can achieve in order to foster a more controlled exchange medium.  Natural human brain functions can do the rest of the work.

[molecular]

As a monitory system like that

If that was a freudian mistake I'm not sure what to think of you

If it was intentional: cool word you made up, bro. Will use.

[tvbcof]

As a monitory system like that is less more or less inevitable and, initially, stands a good chance of being beneficial to a society. Unfortunately it doesn't follow societies natural selection of leadership, power corrupts but society will change its leadership as conditions require. Money doesn't allow for change of leadership, royal families all through history have shown the extremes of powers corruption and for a large part the power of money delayed the necessary change of leadership. In just the same way as we're beyond the threat of full blown war (mutually assured destruction) we're also coming to a point where we're beyond the ability to change leadership due to the power of money.

That is the reason why distributed crypto-currencies captured my interest so intently.  While I've more or less lost hope for Bitcoin proper, it's success in demonstrating the general concept has been remarkable.  The next move from TPTB will have to be better control over freedom of association, and it will be a tricky needle to thread.

As an aside, I'm not as convinced that the threat of MAD is behind us.  With excessive population sizes, and particularly populations which are restive, MAD could have some new-found utility.  I'm just not convinced that the pool from which our leaderships are drawn don't contain sufficient evil to go for it.

[BitLoverz]

Mike really should be ashamed of himself

[NewLiberty]

Mike really should be ashamed of himself

Why?  For raising a question for discussion?

As a Bitcoin Foundation outsider, I have little insight into the machinations there, but I suspect that there are BF folks watching this thread.

As part of the charter of reaching out to the broader community, I'd be curious as to whether and what form the follow up to the Senate hearings are taking.
Senator Tom Carper is still looking for input from his staffers.  What has been drafted by the BF for their consumption.
We have the US Senate looking for input on whether and how to regulate, what are we giving them?


Is there a thread on this that I've missed?

[Mike Hearn]

There is no thread yet and you're right that Sen Carper has submitted questions to the Foundation as followup to the Senate hearings. AFAIK the answers haven't been written yet, the deadline is end of Jan, iirc.

At some point when the followup answers are submitted, I hope they will be public (can't think of a reason why not).

[NewLiberty]

There is no thread yet and you're right that Sen Carper has submitted questions to the Foundation as followup to the Senate hearings. AFAIK the answers haven't been written yet, the deadline is end of Jan, iirc.

At some point when the followup answers are submitted, I hope they will be public (can't think of a reason why not).

Thank you for this response.  Carper seems reasonable on the matter and likened it to internet early days in an interview aired this morning (when fear mongers were chanting child porn over and over).  He pointed out that while they certainly worked against such things, the internet has brought much more benefit than harm due to a reasoned policy debate.

If the pencils have been sharpened even further since the response to the California nonsense was drafted, it promises to be very good reading.  Curiosity is peaked.

The internet was a tax-free zone in the US for quite a while.  That model worked strongly to US advantage and this point may resonate with Carper.

If I were to offer anything further to that it would be to as strongly suggest as possible that since every transaction (not within an off-chain service provider) is public and unencrypted, there should be no need for money-transmitter registration so long as all transactions by a potential registrant are done on the public block chain.

[Mike Hearn]

I think that is already the consensus - peer to peer transactions between two entities directly do not involve money transmission. As far as I know that's not even being debated.

The problems start when there's a third party sitting in the middle who (temporarily) gains control of your money and takes it as a deposit/could run off with it. In a perfectly decentralized world such entities would not exist at all, of course in reality our money starts out in banks so you need to use an exchange to get it out of there.

This is an issue because money transmitter laws (in the USA) work on two levels; the federal level via FinCEN, where registration requirements are not that hard (fill out a single online form) and the compliance requirements are basically to keep records, ID your customers and tip off the government when you see suspicious transactions. Even very small companies can manage that. The problems start at the state level, which is actually justified on the grounds of consumer protection rather than fighting crime - the idea is that if you move money around on the behalf of other people, you might be tempted to steal it, gamble with it, lose it through incompetence, whatever. Hence all the paperwork showing you the CEO's have never been convicted of a crime before, taking fingerprints, posting bonds and so on.

Whether these rules actually in balance do help consumers is rather debatable - it ignores the cost of all the killed startups that could have innovated, but you can see how politicians arrive at such rules, especially after scandals in which money transmitters collapse (search Greg Gonzales).

Fortunately for purely P2P payments in Bitcoin there is no risk of the money going missing, so the only consumer protection issue becomes what if you buy something and it's not properly delivered, which can/will be addressed by dispute mediation/multisig contracts in the protocol. We did a presentation at the FTC on this topic recently.

[BCB]

Any follow up questions and answers should be published to the original Committee Hearing web page (unless they are issues of "National Security" or involve confidential business  trade secrets ).
http://www.hsgac.senate.gov/hearings/beyond-silk-road-potential-risks-threats-and-promises-of-virtual-currencies

And a final transcript of the hearings including submitted testimony which is often more detailed then the spoken testimony can be found on the US Government Printing Office Website at
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/search/home.action  by searching

"Beyond Silk Road: Potential Risks, Threats, and Promises of Virtual Currencies"

I wouldn't expect to see the published testimony before sometime in February.

[NewLiberty]

I think that is already the consensus - peer to peer transactions between two entities directly do not involve money transmission. As far as I know that's not even being debated.

The problems start when there's a third party sitting in the middle who (temporarily) gains control of your money and takes it as a deposit/could run off with it. In a perfectly decentralized world such entities would not exist at all, of course in reality our money starts out in banks so you need to use an exchange to get it out of there.

This is an issue because money transmitter laws (in the USA) work on two levels; the federal level via FinCEN, where registration requirements are not that hard (fill out a single online form) and the compliance requirements are basically to keep records, ID your customers and tip off the government when you see suspicious transactions. Even very small companies can manage that. The problems start at the state level, which is actually justified on the grounds of consumer protection rather than fighting crime - the idea is that if you move money around on the behalf of other people, you might be tempted to steal it, gamble with it, lose it through incompetence, whatever. Hence all the paperwork showing you the CEO's have never been convicted of a crime before, taking fingerprints, posting bonds and so on.

Whether these rules actually in balance do help consumers is rather debatable - it ignores the cost of all the killed startups that could have innovated, but you can see how politicians arrive at such rules, especially after scandals in which money transmitters collapse (search Greg Gonzales).

Fortunately for purely P2P payments in Bitcoin there is no risk of the money going missing, so the only consumer protection issue becomes what if you buy something and it's not properly delivered, which can/will be addressed by dispute mediation/multisig contracts in the protocol. We did a presentation at the FTC on this topic recently.

Codifying that consensus would then not be too onerous.  Focusing on the justifiable constraints of regulatory activities will be a win.

In contemplation of FinCEN's request vs Casascius.  It is perhaps a fine line.
It is MTB because Caldwell arguably could still have the private key, and there is not a mechanism for him to provably not have it?
Thus the requests for trustworthiness?

[eldentyrell]

Mike really should be ashamed of himself.

If this is true then I have lost all respect for Mike Hearn.

Mike Hearn shouldnt be on the foundation, Edward Snowden should be.

+1

[Rampion]

Time for an update. How is that red-black-yellow-whatever listing going, Mike?

[Cryddit]

FWIW; if you happen to be American, you should write your congresscritter about a National Medal of Freedom for Edward Snowden.