Topic: . - page 3. (Read 9762 times)

Indeed. Taint removes one of the key properties of an ideal money from bitcoin: fungibility. If bitcoins became un-fungibile in practice, I'd seriously have to rethink the benefits of bitcoin, both as a transactional unit, and a store of value.

Generally I think it's a good thing when bitcoin businesses do what they can to be as mainstream as possible, including complying with regulatory bodies, etc. But this taint issue is important to get right.

That said, don't tainted coins move rapidly through the economy, such that everyone pretty much has tainted coins (like cocaine on $100 bills)? I've never studied this, but recall reading it a couple times here... So if that's true, maybe it'll just prove grossly impractical for organizations to refuse tainted coins anyways.

Mathematics are irrefutable, people are extremely gullible, stupid and are not programmatic, they could probably bribe Gavin to update bitcoin-qt in the download section with any code within their personal whim. Every man has its price, given the opportunity (almost) everyone would rather relax in some fancy hotel on a tropical island instead of endangering their family.

a very significant shill, perhaps? (o' Satoshi, give me the strength to continue)

Nobody of much significance to the Bitcoin economy would participate in such a scheme let me assure you. It makes no sense.

I think it's plausible to assume that new companies based out of China, Russia, and even Latin America would emerge to take up the slack.

Of course, the existence of those companies probably wouldn't do much good for the Bitcoin users still stuck in the US...

Let me explain.
Bitcoins can be tracked.
A centralized list, participated in by Bitpay, Coinbase, MtGox and the other major exchanges, and a select few other major companies would greatly reduce the value of coins that were tainted. Here we have a big portion of the market saying "We won't accept these coins; they aren't worth anything to us since in the past they were sent through a mixer or allegedly used for "illegal" activities."
It's harder with the USD because people aren't accustomed to checking serial numbers. But if wallet clients and online wallets started including taint-check plugins that checked coins with a centralized taint list, it would be easy to tell which ones you couldn't sell at an exchange, which ones you couldn't use at a bitpay-accepting site, which coins it'd be hard to pass off to anyone who participates in the centralized taint list. It's already happened; MtGox does its own taint tracking and in the past, locked some coins that came from Tradehill because they had originated from a known scammer.



Well, if MtGox, Bitpay, and a few of the internationally used companies participated, it would affect more than just the U.S.

You do realize a currency can't be devalued with "taint" don't you? That defeats the whole point of a currency. This is the same reason the dollars in your pocket likely have trace amounts of cocaine on them. It's not the fault of the currency unit what it was used for. Likewise nobody would be expected to check and not honor currency units that are singled out for some reason.

You can track U.S. dollars by serial number and put them on a taint list now. Why do you think that hasn't been done?

...in the United States.

You can't calm down the Nazi Party by agreeing to work with them. You don't join the Nazi Party to crush them. You can't destroy them using their rules. You must change the game and rig it in your favor. Bitcoin does this naturally. The Nazis don't see a way to defeat it using their current armament so their looking for a trusted scientist to defect and turn the tide. Don't do it!

You guys are missing the point... This means COIN TAINT.

It is not "self regulation" it is a central Bitcoin Taint Organization that tracks which coins were used for illegal activities and puts them on a centrally-controlled taint list. Most large Bitcoin companies will participate.

Say Dude A sells some pot on Silk Road. He receives the BTC and sends them to a mixer and then to Dude B via IRC-OTC after selling them for a wire transfer or something. Dude B sends them to somebody else. Eventually they wind up at Bitcoin100 Charity where they are sent to "Starving Kids in Moojoombo Village, Congo Fund."

Representative of SKiMVC charity visits the kids and says "www.bitcoin100.org Bitcoin100 just donated $1,000 to us, so we have enough money to install a village well and you won't have to walk 5 miles a day for water anymore!" Yayy! Everyone cheering, people dancing!
Next day, representative visits again, this time with sad look on her face. "Sorry, Bitpay wouldn't pay us for the Bitcoins, they just returned them, saying the Bitcoin Taint Council tainted them. We looked into the possibility of selling them on the black market OTC to people who didn't mind the taint, for lower than spot value, but our attorney advised against it saying we could be subject to massive fines or loss of our NPO status. Sorry, no well."

Why were they tainted? By the time they had been sent to the charity, the council's blockchain explorer had tracked them and discovered they were (1) Used for Pot sale, which is illegal in some countries. (2) Sent through a mixer, all coins sent through mixers will be tainted. (3) Sold on IRC-OTC which violates AML/FINCEN regulations.

I can think of a thousand scenarios where we could be screwed, including for "crimes" which are not really crimes. The War on Drugs will be extended to Bitcoins. Just like paypal, anyone who does not align with the subjective morality of the Taint Council will have their "account" frozen via blacklist. ALL miners will have their coins tainted unless they are registered as a FINCEN "money transmitter" and pay taxes. There will be a whitelist for mined coins.

This isn't tinfoil hat worst-case scenario bullshit. This is what is actually being proposed by people high up in the Bitcoin World. Peter Vessenes warns that there will be no grandfathering of coins. So if any of your coins were used by PirateAt40 or a silk road pot-selling teenager in the past, they will be unspendable for 99% of merchants/receivers. This could be 1% of your stash or it could be 59%.

Oh, who wants to make a bet? The Supreme Coin Taint Council will have a buyback option where you sell your tainted coins to them for 50% of spot. Then, they untaint the coins and release them back in to circulation.

This is just what Paypal does. This is just what government regulatory agencies do. Most U.S. dollars have cocaine residue on them but I can still spend them just fine. Now we're trying to make BTC worse than the USD? Worrying about whether coins are tainted every time I receive them? What do you think this will do to the price of BTC if they can be randomly tainted with no prior notice?

Beware of any "self regulation" talk because I can guarantee you they are talking about COIN TAINT. And if large businesses/organizations in the Bitcoin world start operating from a centrally controlled Taint List, I will sell all of my coins into other cryptocurrencies as well as precious metals - you should too, because that would be the end of bitcoin.

A shill, perhaps?

Translation: The commandant is looking for a few good kapos.

Likely a reasonable thing for some of the U.S. exchanges to do, to make sure they are in compliance. I suspect the rest of the world will ignore them.

Correction: they can close down US exchanges or US businesses. The United States != the world.

It sounds like they don't know how to incorporate Bitcoin into any other regulating agencies. With voluntary regulation, they have a point of contact to harass when something happens they don't understand. Who would be willing to stick their neck out like this? It would be better to wait for a sovereign nation to adopt Bitcoin. Then FinCEN would have little to say about it. They would either outlaw it and remain in the 20th Century, or embrace it and join the globalized economy.

Of course they do matter.
They can close down exchanges, they can close down business, and while this won't outright kill Bitcoin, it will make it much less useful and easy to use.

lol gg

Ruck fegulations!

Things have been screwed up, which is why we should work to un-screw them. America is still great place to live though.

tl;dr
fu you. 

I think I already self-regulate my bitcoin usage. When I say:

Fuck DC
Fuck FinCEN
Fuck Bitcoin Foundation

...it's because I know they're full of power-mad psychopaths that would like to control bitcoin for themselves, and I want them to know I don't fear them at all.

I don't need permission from them to trade USD<->BTC, nor will I ever. They can jerk themselves off talking about regulations all they want, but they're just going to look dumb when none of it matters.

Haha, sad but true.