[solved]Possible to "trade" blocks?

[casascius]

I highly doubt this scenario, since the majority of drug sales are small transactions.

Small transactions which add up to big transactions when the mailers/dealers/manufacturers end up with lots of BTC and few ways to spend it other than to either drop it on the market or buy lots of anonymous web hosting, coffee, alpaca socks and VPNs.  The thing is, BTC's nature is likely to attract black market activity far faster than legitimate business so the need for them to cash out into fiat currency is inevitable.

aside from that.... Lets say that some major distributors come online, and there is a sizeable wholesale trade (I see this as a bit more likely). The vast majority of cash *IS* used in drug transactions, right now. It may not be the majority of the markets that its used in, but, the actual dollars themselves, nearly all of them, move through drug transactions at some point.

Every few years the news media rehashes the figure of what percentage of US money tests positive for just cocaine....and its really most of it (I forget the percentage they toss around).

If there were some website where agencies could trace every dollar serial number, where it's been, and what other dollars it has touched, then that would make the analogy more accurate.  There's a big difference between a hunch that "this could have been drug money" based on a whiff, versus tangible public evidence that can positively establish that the guy who just dropped 45kBTC at XYZ exchanger is a drug dealer, "let's go take him down".

[moneta]

From a new block, there wouldn't be a history.  Nobody would know whom to ask where he got his BTC.

Compare to BTC acquired from a reputable exchanger.  It might be possible to tell what exchanger the BTC came from based on other transactions it was combined with.  Someone goes and gives their real name to a KYC-following BTC exchanger thinking they are buying "anonymous money", and then they go do something terrible with it thinking there's no link to the BTC purchase, but there is.  The BTC he bought may very well have enough traceable history that would lead to the place he bought it, there is just no way to know for sure.

At least if he got BTC from a new block, that risk would be greatly lessened, because one could be sure there was no public information available about where the BTC came from.

Yes, I understand that.

I was arguing that transferring the coins from the new block to a new address (provided by the buyer) and then using them for whatever shady goal one may have in mind is just as anonymous as using them from the unspent block. They would show one more transaction in their history, but as long as they are not mixed with any other coin there would still be no one to interrogate.

Of course the "not mixing" part may require some attention, and possibly a patched client, but it will still be easier and safer than sharing private keys for the block.

So, I would say that if anonymity is what you are interested in, simply transferring the newly mint coins to a buyer's address is equivalent to actually transferring the block. Or am I missing something?