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

[User705]

This isn't even remotely close to being true.  Miners do not vote on rule changes.

One of the recent videos Vessenes in one of his public talks said people should mine because it allows them to vote on protocol changes. 

Kill all (centralized?) mining pools and that might be true. Right now it's like the fake democracy that plagues most western countries. 5 or 6 clowns to choose from with only 2 having a real chance of winning. Pick your poison.

There's always litecoin. 

[Valerian77]

And for the last time I don't give a fuck about Bitcoin's legal status, and neither should anyone else. In fact, we should assume that's illegal and make sure our infrastructure is robust enough that it doesn't matter.

Engrave this in stone. Somewhere stony.

Being simply ignorant of all these changes will end you nowhere.
You can bury your head in the sand and pretend nothing happens, until your pretty ostrich ass is fucked hard.

I do not think we will have to care on anything. Look at this:
https://blockchain.info/de/nodes-globe?series=onlineNow

You will see the two biggest nodes in Russia and in China. Even they do not care about US blacklists.

[rocks]

The Bitcoin Foundation: Because if there's one thing Satoshi Nakamoto approved and endorsed, it was private forums protected by pay walls participated in by easily identifiable individuals supporting institutional bureaucracy and false authority to the detriment of all bitcoin stakeholders.

He would be so proud.

Satoshi's vision was to re-establish the rule of law by creating a technology based system that enforces a set of fixed rules everyone agrees upon. He saw how in the current system the rules were constantly broken and rewritten by those in control and the rule of law (which the US system was originally based on) had failed. The establishment will try to break these rules and restore the ability to make up new rules as needed.

It will be interesting to watch if these efforts are successful or if the original properties of Bitcoin hold. It will also be interesting if early adopters (such as the devs) will continue to fight for Bitcoin's original purpose, or if they will be co-opted by the establishment (after all doing so makes their BTC holdings very wealthy).

IMHO the easy part of Bitcoin's growth is over.

[User705]

In the long term of course a truly free bitcoin would be worth a lot more then a government co-opted one.  But publicly identified large holders and especially devs would certainly see an easier way to wealth by joining up with the powers that be.

[Loozik]

I would like to start a discussion and brainstorming session on the topic of coin tracking/tainting or as I will call it here, "redlisting". Specifically, what I mean is something like this:

Consider an output that is involved with some kind of crime, like a theft or extortion.

I would use the mechanism for blacklisting / tainting the coins which were stolen or extorted by the people doing business as ''governments'' or ''states''.

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I wouldn't like to see the tainting mechanism introduced in Bitcoin (Bitcoin should not be messed up with).

There should be a new crypto asset that I would like to have the tainting of coins incorporated on the protocol level: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=313151.0

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If the tainting of coins is a good idea (I think it is - it would protect the users from unknowingly using coins previously extorted / stolen by the so called governments or the so called states), then Mike is an ideal candidate to start this new crypto coin project. I would like to see Mike Hearn creating such new, taintable (competing against Bitcoin) crypto coin.

[coinft]

...

I wouldn't like to see the tainting mechanism introduced in Bitcoin (Bitcoin should not be messed up with).

There should be a new crypto asset that I would like to have the tainting of coins incorporated on the protocol level: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=313151.0

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If the tainting of coins is a good idea (I think it is - it would protect the users from unknowingly using coins previously extorted / stolen by the so called governments or the so called states), then Mike is an ideal candidate to start this new crypto coin project. I would like to see Mike Hearn creating such new, taintable (competing against Bitcoin) crypto coin.

It would be a disaster rather than a good thing.

Redlisting not only reduces fungibility, it also removes finality of transactions (or their worth), even if they have a high number of confirmations. Taint doesn't appear magically at the moment of a crime, it is applied afterwards on complaints. So it can happen at any time to any coins, including coins you got in a perfectly legal way, while they were still clean. Any clean bitcoins must be regarded as hot potatoes to be spent fast, to reduce risk to future taint exposure. There goes the store of value. There goes the usefulnes of bitcoin.

If that's not enough, I believe a new type of fraud will spring up pretty fast: blackmail to not taint. A past holder of bitcoins can threaten all future holders to apply taint, and no amount of confirmations or number of transactions will mitigate this. This is actually worse than CryptLocker, because it can hit everyone, and keeping good security and backups of your data is no defense. There is no defense which does not invalidate the goal of redlisting to start with.

-coinft

[Valerian77]

My recommendation: blacklabel all Bitcoins hold by the US goverment and forget about this nonsense. I propose a tool with WEB interface which replys a simple output for an input:
0 - the given address is clean
1 - the given address is holds US coins

Anyhow - the whole thing is completely ridiculous. After one transaction coins are clean. The idea behind this nonsense is to break up the blockchain . But it can only work if the majority of Bitcoin users cooperate. If nobody cares for then it will not work.

[NewLiberty]

Only criminals use cash. The rest use plastic.

the highest tiers of criminality just use are the regular, recorded banking system. They evade law enforcement agencies through being connected to corrupt high-level banking types, as well as to corrupt politicians.

FTFY

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-02/hsbc-judge-approves-1-9b-drug-money-laundering-accord.html

US$670 Billion in money laundering unmonitored.  In just that one bank.  And their fee is less than 0.5%, a lower fee than we pay for trading on an exchange.

Bitcoin is legitimate, but if it weren't, and even if there were zero non-money laundering use of bitcoin and was only used for money laundering, it could barely make a dent in the way the big bad guys play.

[Cyberdyne]

Every time someone asks "Why do we need [altcoin] when we have bitcoin?" I'm reminded of the disturbing bitcoin-related proposals like blacklisting. If bitcoin goes down that road, and [altcoin] doesn't, I can see a lot more people making the switch.

[jedunnigan]

Every time someone asks "Why do we need [altcoin] when we have bitcoin?" I'm reminded of the disturbing bitcoin-related proposals like blacklisting. If bitcoin goes down that road, and [altcoin] doesn't, I can see a lot more people making the switch.

As of now, none of the altcoins implement protocols that would protect them from such blacklists, so any sort of safe haven would only be temporary or otherwise imagined.

[freedomno1]

The Senate Committee conversation today definitely was interesting this seems almost like a moot topic as the government itself is still working on Guidelines

[AnonyMint]

Seems most are breathing a sigh of relief thinking that the hearing added no push for new regulations or laws. What they said was the existing AML and KYC is sufficient for now.

Hello? KYC means what? Know Your Customer.

That means merchants required to know who you are. That means reporting to the government.

Electronic currency on a public ledger means they can ramp up these existing laws to require e-file reporting on smaller and smaller transactions.

The NSA is mopping everything. Soon the FinCEN or DHS or... will be mopping up all transaction identities.

If you aren't whitelisted, the merchant can't accept you.

666 anyone?

Don't be so naive. These transformations move slowly enough that you boil like a frog.

[AnonyMint]

The bottom line is that right now today, with no changes to anything, if you end up with coins bearing an interesting history, you take the risk of someone becoming interested in you.  You cannot prevent this risk.  You cannot mitigate it.  If you ditch the coins, you are still part of the chain, and you may get a knock on your door from people wondering how they came to you.

Correct:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=338909.msg3634918#msg3634918

Widespread mixing, if and when it arrives, will hopefully muddy the trail of every transaction, maybe even to the point that most investigations become futile.

You are highly uninformed, mixers don't help:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=333824.msg3634390#msg3634390

[NewLiberty]

You are highly uninformed, mixers don't help:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=333824.msg3634390#msg3634390

Mixers can hurt. (and don't mean getting hands caught in the spinning blades)
Computers are pretty good at sorting things, dontchaknow.
It is like going to a party with some shady folks, when the party gets busted, everyone gets questioned.

Am in a situation that can benefit from what you contemplate.  I am not anonymous at all, but I know (socially) a great many who are deeply anon, and we can't really do business together other than just to talk and hang out, so am looking forward to see what comes of this.

[AnonyMint]

Martin Armstrong must have read my email:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/11/19/congressional-hearings-on-bitcoin/

[dewdeded]

This is how you fight Cryptolocker, Mickey:

http://malwaremustdie.blogspot.de/2013/11/tango-down-of-44-cryptolocker-cnc.html

(Hint: No need to change Bitcoin.)

[genjix]

The risk is bigger than you realise. It isn't even overt mailicious features that don't require changes to Bitcoin itself, but small corruption of Bitcoin in deep underlying hard-to-perceive ways.

It's not only bugs but the values of the programmers and how they mold the software. For instance there are deep issues in the protocol where the decision is not always clear (and the community is ignorant of them). If you work for a corporation, your choices are going to be different to the guy running black markets and doing p2p trades. You just both value different feature sets and the software optimised in a different way.

From this article: https://letstalkbitcoin.com/the-regulation-of-bitcoin/

"If development is too centralized, with a small core infrastructure, then businesses will put real pressure to have features that destroy the integrity of the Bitcoin network. The excuse will be to protect themselves from liability. Self-censorship.

And what they demand does not have to be protocol changes. They will demand features in the software they use. Software which remains compatible with the network, but works against the interests of individuals, small businesses and the black market.

The possible malicious scenarios are endless. Stuff like p2p blacklists to create a ‘legitimate’ walled garden, or tracking technologies like large databases of IP addresses to triangulate where transactions came from. At the other end of the spectrum, is putting development effort into diversifying the ecosystem to protect against censorship and proxy relay nodes, anonymizing mixers, small privacy tweaks and other technologies. That’s where developers who believe in Bitcoin should devote time to. Corporations are powerful enough. To developers: serve your community."

Blacklists from both the merchant and the miner (prefer to build off blocks with txs containing whitelisted addresses) will push Bitcoin users towards monitoring. We need a strong hard push against this stuff right now. We need to be vocal and build tools for black markets. Pretending we are friends of the NSA is not helping our cause.

[klee]

Mike Hearn is a modern Trojan Horse and/or Ephialtis - remove him from core devs asap!

[ShadowOfHarbringer]

Mike Hearn is a modern Trojan Horse and/or Ephialtis - remove him from core devs asap!

Oh, I think that nobody outside the foundation trusts or likes him anymore.

[dewdeded]

I agree.