How do "they" tag BTC (from gambling, mixers, dark markets, etc.)?

[moni3z]

If you remember legendary scammer 'pirateat40' the SEC had completely tracked every coin he spent and detailed how they did this in their court filing, look it up

[bearexin]

Exchanges marking bitcoins as tainted, or whatever they say it is, is totally wrong and is just a way for them to steal money. I know it might be possible with some help of some software to identify an address that is owned by a criminal, but it’s impossible to identify when the coins has been sent to an innocent person. There are people who buy their coins peer-to-peer, like some of my friends who send and receive bitcoins among themselves.

So, assuming that one of them was involved in a criminal activity and their coin is tainted, and they send it to another friend who is completely innocent, so the receiver will then have to suffer for something they have no clue about? Well, I know they are just doing all these things to keep the market safe.

[Killrbit]

I know it might be possible with some help of some software to identify an address that is owned by a criminal, but it’s impossible to identify when the coins has been sent to an innocent person. There are people who buy their coins peer-to-peer, like some of my friends who send and receive bitcoins among themselves.

So, assuming that one of them was involved in a criminal activity and their coin is tainted, and they send it to another friend who is completely innocent, so the receiver will then have to suffer for something they have no clue about? Well, I know they are just doing all these things to keep the market safe.

This is exactly what i fear. The thing is Bitcoin today is still just a drop in the ocean retaliative to the financial world. And i could very well imagine that as it starts to have a greater footprint in the financial world, at least large enough to make a government feel threatened, u could start seeing them taking increasingly arbitrary actions like this as a way to discourage the little guy from using/ adopting Bitcoin. (And yes while there plenty of precautions one can take to avoid a scenario like this how, how practical would that be to do for an everyday user who simply wants to buy a cup of coffee )

Now that's not to say how effective or feasible such arbitrary measures would be once Bitcoin proliferates in the hands of enough people (or with the implementation of privacy features) which is why i thought maybe they would try and target wallets containing more then a certain threshold of tainted coins.

But history is on our side here, with governments time and time again trying to curtail a popular technology only to inevitably fail with massive blow-back. The printing press comes to mind.

[o_e_l_e_o]

And yes while there plenty of precautions one can take to avoid a scenario like this how, how practical would that be to do for an everyday user who simply wants to buy a cup of coffee

It's probably worth pointing out that the entities freezing accounts or seizing coins are, to date, only centralized exchanges and centralized payment processors. I have spent bitcoin directly from mixers and from coinjoins at countless websites and physical merchants, and never once encountered a problem with where my coins came from or even been asked the question.

In terms of the "cup of coffee" scenario, then long term this is likely a payment which would be being made over Lightning as opposed to on the main chain. Onion routing would solve this problem completely, as the merchant wouldn't even know the source of the coins, let alone whether or not they are tainted.

target wallets containing more then a certain threshold of tainted coins.

Provided you have not handed out your xpub or linked your addresses together in the same transactions, then it is impossible to even tell which two addresses belong to the same wallet.

But history is on our side here, with governments time and time again trying to curtail a popular technology only to inevitably fail with massive blow-back.

Bitcoin is designed to be censorship resistant. They can blacklist as many different addresses or UTXOs as they like. Nothing can stop people from trading peer to peer.

[Reatim]

In past gambling sites are very common place where people use to mix their coins because of different addresses and masking their identity .

But nowadays gambling sites Will hold your account if they're Logs triggered by something close to mixing activities.

and also there are Mixing company that has been closed or freezed by authorities because of this kind of activities.

Having more strict rules and tools will prevent this from happening though sites is gaining really big on this.