Topic: A Warning Against Using Taint - page 2. (Read 16323 times)

Well, Sir,

you are free to reject tainted coins as much as I'm free to use an anonymizing service to pay you.

Let's do business.

The failure to distinguish between following a good idea yourself through self-discipline and coercing everyone to follow it through legislation is a major problem.  Everyone should have a code of conduct, but no one should be forced to follow anyone else's code.

The root of the long term mess doesn't lie in reasonable-looking ideas, but in the failure of individuals to implement them personally (that is, following good ideas on their own through self-discipline, not forcing others to follow them), and the popular supposition (often supported by government propaganda) that things would be better if only everyone followed them.

It may be true that things would be better if everyone followed a particular good idea, but forcing them to do so will more than negate the benefit.  That coercion is the root of the mess.

I suspect remarkably intelligent statist apologists would be the ones to strenuously object to a good idea on the grounds that it may lead to a long term mess without addressing the coercion that creates the problem.  The strategy is two-stepped - first, prevent voluntary solutions through such objections, and when the problems they'd solve are bad enough, introduce the coercion that statists love.  But others get suckered into the same pattern.

I second that. Why is this fact being so persistently overlooked still?

This has been happening in almost every aspect of life. Just look at tax return forms.

Remember the good old days "A tithe of your harvest, or your head off!"? Then somebody complains and a slight exception is added that is meant to make it a little fairer for somebody. Then somebody else complains and another exception is added, and so forth. Until a perfectly functional system is over regulated to a complete waste of time. And you end up with a million fucks in the country sitting in office buildings doing tax evaluation instead of selling candy or rubbing my back.

Regulation is almost like cancer. You let it get its foot in the door and it'll grow until you go bald.

I'M SO FURIOUS RIGHT NOW!

(Somebody keep an eye on MtGox..)

(Didn't read the entire thread)

But I could never sleep well if I had to worry about where each one of my pennies came from. There's more enjoyable things in life than that.

Using anonymizers is fun too, and I don't care about the 1.5% fee that comes along with it.

So are you going to contact blockchain.info and ask them to remove the analysis?

I think any time there are assholes, and they get treated like assholes, some of them will point out that nice people are being treated like assholes, and also claim to be one of those nice people.  The first part of their claim is probably right, just because there are always people who err on the side of treating too many people like assholes instead of too few.  But if it is an asshole making the claim, the second part is dead wrong.

I bet there are some would-be pirates who gave up because the copy-protection frustrated them.  But I also bet that the net effect has been to worsen the problem of piracy, and it certainly frustrates people who try to back up the stuff they buy.  Copy protection, however, is generally an alteration to otherwise normal media that makes a common activity more difficult.  Taint requires an actual human mind to translate it into making a common activity more difficult.  As I've already pointed out, every capability and piece of information that can be used to penalize others has the same potential.  I will always argue against keeping people as incapable and stupid as possible in order to prevent them from penalizing innocents.  Wouldn't you?

But with taint all the nice people will be treated like assholes and the assholes will find ways to avoid the taint. Taint is like copy protection. It never hurts the pirates.

The answer is in the thread.

Thanks to Stephen for bringing this thread up again.  It's still fun for me to read.

If you look up a BTC address at https://blockchain.info/, you get a "Taint Analysis" button which will then show the % of funds received by an address that can be traced back to other addresses, or if you reverse it (drop down top right), the % of funds sent from an address which passed through other addresses.  It's fun to play with.  It was added around 6/24 this year.


So are you mounting any effort to get blockchain.info to remove that feature?  The address to which the Bitcoinica heist went is public knowledge, so the potential is there, I guess.  On the other hand, every capability and piece of information that can be used to penalize others has the same potential.  I don't think the answer is censorship, but rather education and decentralization.

I'm glad they added that tool.  It should make my investments in mixing services do well, and also discourage thieves.  Exactly what I wanted!  Has anyone suffered from it?  Gotten an email from someone they paid with BTC, asking nosy questions?  Perhaps so, but are they willing to bring it up?  I guess it's kind of like admitting you've been mugged or raped.  Personal decision, I suppose.


Ok, but I run a competitive business (selling my programming skills) and I charge assholes more than I charge nice people all the time.  Same thing goes when I sell stuff at garage sales.  I suppose it might leave me with less cash at the end of the day, but I feel better about myself and the world in general.  So for me, everyone's dollars are certainly not equal.  The indiscriminate nature of your view on selling seems a bit creepy to me.  But I think you extrapolated a bit too far:

The dollars themselves are equal, but they are a medium of exchange, which requires two parties making an exchange to be useful.  I imagine that the view each party takes of the other reasonably has some influence over what they demand in return for what they offer.  I think your description extrapolates the equivalency of the medium of exchange to the equivalency of the parties.  That seems a lot like the propaganda subtly  imposed on us in public school, that we are all the same, just interchangeable consumers, non-individual and unimportant pawns.  That is the propaganda I recognized and rejected when I realized that different prices for different people makes sense.

Why is the title of the thread "A Warning Against Using Taint" and then you proceed to recommend a system to give a measure of taint?

The government still needs a way to pay for their off the books "contractors" too. If they weren't actually corrupt, they would have probably banned possession of over a certain amount of cash by now. After all, why do you need cash if you're a law abiding citizen?

There would be so much less demand for cash if you couldn't break the law with it. Value would absolutely crater.

The other day, I had the thought that if I was the Federal Reserve, I would have high speed scanners and a computer system that tracked the movement of the money coming in and going out. We know that bills are checked for wear and damage before they're placed back into circulation. Completely feasible, and I wouldn't doubt if they were already doing it.

Paper currency has serial numbers.  That data isn't collected so it is of little use currently, but cash has the capacity to carry taint and thus be less than fungible.  The drawbacks to doing that outweigh any benefit so that's why even the technology to start tracking that data will not be implemented.

Bitcoins can be transferred from one address in a wallet to another in the same wallet, and at that point it becomes less than 100% certain that they are still held by the original party.   Any recognition of taint then potentially penalizes innocents and thus cannot be allowed, regardless of the opportunity to do whatever good is intended.  Fungibility trumps all.

No, they clearly are not. We wish bitcoins were fungible, but they are not, each bitcoin has a unique, identifiable number (and a string of previous transactions) associated with them, stored in a public database.

Cash is still king, until crypto-currencies nail the strong-anonymity problem natively (that bitcoin is deficient in).

This was just learned again today after this:



Those were bills stolen in a robbery from a Bank of America.


 - http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/09/police-still-investigating-cars-suspects-after-bizarre-bank-robbery.html

If the serial numbers for those bills were known, then the solution is simple right?    List a database of the stolen bills, and any of these tainted bills that end up at a bank get turned over to the secret service.  The person that deposited them loses those funds, as they were stolen property and thus they had no right to them in the first place (should have checked to see if they were tainted first!)

Now of course, this is absolute lunacy.  Cash is cash.  It is fungible money.

Bitcoins are the same.

You've given me information here that I wouldn't have there.  I will pretend to not know it...

You've set up a website for me that I wouldn't set up.  However, the changes would only make it more difficult for this to be messy, so I'll stick with your description.

Not sure what you mean by "traced all the way back" - am I getting BTC straight from an address that MyBitCoin's alleged theft put BTC into?  Or has this 6.2091 BTC remained undivided traveling from address to address?  Is MyBitCoin offering any reward for information or help?  Those questions would factor into my thinking, but...

I'd send an email with what I discovered, in an effort to uncover all the information you've provided in this post that I wouldn't have yet.  I like to explain my chess moves to my opponent.  You'd be able to sway me toward one side or the other.  If you asked for a refund, I'd give it immediately.  If not, I'd be more likely to send the widget.

Is my assumption correct that you wouldn't do anything any differently no matter how closely related to the MyBitCoin theft your counterparty appeared to be?  Suppose it was a friend of yours instead of MyBitCoin?

These are fun mental games to play around with, but your answers to the same questions wouldn't affect me much and I don't think my answers should affect you much.  It's the aggregate behavior that I trust, assuming everyone has all the information that's important to them.  The "chaotic" nature of how BTC users would apply or ignore taint (or any information that suddenly appears to be a lot more accessible than they first thought) will help keep everyone more honest.

It seems a bit like the second amendment argument that if gun ownership were very common, violence would be very uncommon.  I buy that argument.  Do you?

Right, sorry, my fault

...

Let's say I don't visit the forums. I have an older version of Bitcoin that I consider more stable and trustworthy, and the "bitcoin community" I get my info from is a small circle of friends and Bitcoin Magazine. We've not heard about "tainted coins."

Let's also say you have a website selling widgets. 50 BTC each, including shipping. But you have a small disclaimer at the bottom of the page saying you don't accept tainted coins, with a link to your blacklisted addresses. I don't see this disclaimer (or perhaps I just don't get it, since I'm not a thief, and no one I associate with is,) and send you 50 BTC for a widget.

6.2091 BTC of that transaction comes from an input that can be traced all the way back to the MyBitcoin.com nastiness. Your software (whether an extra program or coded directly into the latest Satoshi client) catches this.

Do you:

1) Send me the widget I paid for?

or

2) Ask for an address to refund my 50 BTC?

Here's a link to a story on it.
I guess they mean the strategy of identifying each person along the way in order to get the identity of the next person back.  I hope that is impractical.  I'd much rather trust the community than the authorities.  Let each account holder decide on their own what past addresses matter to them.  The proposal allows anyone to filter for whatever addresses are important to them (personal black/white lists) and then do whatever they want with that information.  Beating the authorities to a resolution (maybe it did - see below) would be an excellent feather in the cap for anarchy.

It looks like MtGox has already stopped ("Bitcoinica no longer wishes to pursue this case"  MtGox, at least according to the reddit user - whose account has been deleted).

I wonder if Bitcoinica's wish to pursue the case was costing them anything.  Why else would they not wish to pursue it?  Perhaps the taint-tracking was effective enough for the thief to quietly beg for mercy and return enough of the proceeds to get the authorities off his trail.  That is the end I'd like to see for all BTC heists.  It would make a good cover story in case something more nefarious was going on.

The fundamental purpose of money is to give you a means of trading with other people without having to worry about whether you happen to have what they want, because everyone wants money equally. If some people don't want money under certain circumstances, the whole system breaks down. Though, as a general rule, refusing to accept money which is accepted by your competitors is pretty damn stupid, regardless of whether it's technically viable.

That prices should be the same for everyone is not an assumption, it's a basic economic fact stemming from the fungibility of money: If everyone's dollars are equal, then everyone's prices should be equal. To suggest that prices should not be equal for everyone is to suggest that everyone's dollars are not equal, which is not only absurd, it's downright stupid if you are in a competitive business. (Note that things like loyalty discounts are no exception to this rule, since the customer to whom the discount applies is providing a service (namely, their continued patronage) to the store which is of equal value (in the store management's opinion) to the discount received.)

I admire your optimism, but unfortunately assuming that people aren't idiots always ends badly.

So what if Apple makes a Bitcoin app and only allows "Apple Coins" approved by Apple to buy Apple approved products and services from Apple vendors in Apple Land? They would call any non-Apple coins "tainted" and will void your Apple Health Insurance and send you to Apple Prison.