Topic: A Warning Against Using Taint - page 5. (Read 16246 times)

Can someone explain how they'd fork the blockchain?

For all you know, half the people you've traded with in the last month already have a special client with a blacklist/whitelist in it.  How would you identify them so that your client doesn't let them back on the "taint-free" fork of the blockchain?  I think you might have a good answer to this, but it will be one which demonstrates a misunderstanding of the original proposal.

I've received at least one personal request to continue developing this idea from someone who suggested that the information in the blockchain will probably be an important part of the future of private justice.  That is, in fact, why I came up with the idea.

No one has yet pointed out explicitly that if a thief were on this discussion, that thief would make every effort to discourage people from even thinking about the proposal.


This is an interesting perspective.  I only meant that anyone, regardless how they feel about fungibility, can compile a list of all the address that currently hold coin that was in an address that contained allegedly stolen bitcoins.  So perhaps "taint" is the wrong word for westky to use in describing this fact.

To confuse the issue even more, I have developed a theory (silly, if you want to call it that) that the reason no reward has been offered by the victims of heists is that they weren't really victims:

• A large dealer creates a hidden (fake) member
• The fake member "steals" bitcoin
• The dealer "loses" all the records indicating who they owe.
• The dealer announces that they will reimburse all customers who can prove their claim
• Less than 100% of the customers prove their claims
• The dealer reimburses claims using the stolen bitcoin (after mixing it up enough to avoid suspicion)
• The dealer ends up with some stolen coin that didn't get reimbursed to customers who failed or didn't bother to prove a claim - customers who have abandon bitcoin because it's too insecure.

Anyone can do that if they have the marketing power and the lack of morals.  But they're in danger if we start analyzing the blockchain more closely.

Given the vehemence of the responses to the proposal, I've become ambivalent on the likelihood of this theory.  I asked Gavin for advice in setting up Python so I could enhance his BitcoinTools to do this backtracing, but he hasn't answered.  So, large dealers who are unethical thieves, you might want to pressure him into ignoring me, and perhaps removing the tools lest some other curious soul use them to demonstrate that my theory is true.  I sure hope to hell it isn't.

I have no problem if its an external white/black list that simply plugs into the client voluntarily like adding an app to your phone or a greasemonkey script for your browser. Any attempt to actually include it in the client or the project is another matter entirely.

If I had such scheme in my client I'd use it to see if I received some coins from that famous pizzas (numismatic value).

And, since the possibility is already there, yes, out of curiosity, I'd keep track of the famous heists too.

I'd keep track of how old my coins really are, if they are freshly mined etc.

Don't need a fork to do this.

The true is that bitcoins are not fungible like metals (Jules Rimet Trophy melted down by thieves in Rio de Janeiro - 1983), and it's easier to track than cash.

What force? Please, think before you speak.

You are perfectly free to implement what the OP suggested and fork the blockchain but on the other hand if you should manage to introduce these rules into the current client, we who disagree are perfectly free to fork the blockchain and then we can see who's going to be more popular and successful of which this thread gives you a nice little hint for. And there's no force involved in any of this.

If you need to ask what a persons morals are before you trade with them you've already lost. May as well use cash which doesnt care that drug dealers or other "criminals" have stolen it from a bank at some point in the past

GREAT IDEA.

I find it highly ironic that the forum's "libertarians" are the ones that are most opposed to a personal blacklist. By public ridicule, and by threatening to attack the block chain, they seek to impose their academic hypothesis of fungibility on all bitcoin users. Why do you think you are allowed to use force to prevent me from implementing some scheme on my own client?

This begs the question as to the true motivation of the anti-taint thugs. Why are they attracted to the bitcoin cryptocurrency? Because it makes sense to them personally, or because they are confidence artists and believe the irrevocable nature of transactions will help them defraud more people?

We have a perfect record of every transaction that has ever occured in the economy. Why not use it?

I encourage the sympathetic readers of this post to stop thinking about bitcoin as "cash" and start thinking in terms of a distributed file system containing a perfect accounting ledger. The idea is much more sophisticated than "cash" and will lead one day to a system that will allow us to keep track of our debts to each other in terms of personal economic value.

But you own the private keys for your bitcoins. Only you have that private keys.

Have you ever tried not paying federal taxes? By that logic, you don't actually "own" anything. But I (like most people) define "ownership" to mean "right of property", regardless of whether such rights can be revoked at the whim of the government.

You dont actually own your own house. Have you ever tried not paying local council rates ?

No, it's completely different. The blockchain is more like a title deed, giving property rights to certain individuals, who can sign over all or part of their ownership to anyone else in a publicly witnessed manner. While it is true that nobody "owns" the blockchain, the rights that the blockchain provides (namely, the right to spend one's own bitcoins) are genuine property rights, and to suggest otherwise makes about as sense as suggesting that the deed to your house is worthless because you don't really own the piece of paper it's printed on.

SecurityTheatreCoin 

Given the extent to which coins are "tainted" on the basis of little more than unsubstantiated claims, I can see legitimate businesses choosing to avoid taking Bitcoin altogether rather than having to go through the hassle of dealing with potentially tainted coins which may be difficult to offload.

Does anyone remember the coin lolcaust created that had a massive premine and its aim was to create a money laundering fund ?

Enforced?  By whom?

It matters not.  Because it is so easy to mix coins, all you need are enough people willing to throw their 100% untainted coins into the mix and your approach fails miserably.

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all."
 - Mario Savio



Ok, good.  So there will be no code in the client that will try to load your no-fly list.  That's fine then.


Have you been shopping on Silk Road?

I would be boycotting that business if that's the case. Like finding out my ISP is limiting p2p traffic I would find another one.

It can work *in a more mainstream setting* - because it's viral in nature, and if your local supermarket subscribes to a particular taint-list, it's in your interests to have wallet software which *understands* the taints that this supermarket subscribes to and the (initially small) penalties(taxes) it is enforced to enact.




Hows that? Mostly irrelevant.  Tainting will work in a world where the core bitcoin.org software *never* implements any taint-aware code.
It'll be locally applied, and thus people will be locally incentivized to have taint-aware wallets - even if they hate the whole idea.

No, the complaints are saying it won't work.  And unless you come up with a new reason why it might, we just keep going around in circles.



Ok,  how's this.  If anything in the open source Bitcoin.org project for taint were to be added I would help towards getting going a fork of that project where there would be no such concept or recognizance of this concept referred to as taint.  I would do what I can to help beat this idea into the ground to which it belongs.

I think the negative responders to this sort of proposal are largely failing to recognize that such a system would be:
a) highly automated
b) smarter than they seem to give it credit (e.g various levels of 'taxation' at popular brick and mortar government-audited points)
c) viral

Alternatively - they do understand this and they're resisting it in perhaps the only way that *might* work: overwhelming popular rejection/distaste + playing down the practicality of it.

I asked this question on stack exchange a while back:

Is there any way the Bitcoin network could resist a viral tainted-coin tagging system implemented by regulators?
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/2119/is-there-any-way-the-bitcoin-network-could-resist-a-viral-tainted-coin-tagging-s

The answer seems to be, technically no, politically/socially maybe.

I feel confident that some government somewhere will try it if Bitcoin ever goes mainstream.
If they are 'heavy handed' in applying taint - then the more tainted coins (and the higher taxed they are), the larger the split in fungibility.
If they produce a massive split in fungibility this way - all they succeed in doing is creating a subset of bitcoins which are largely used for blackmarket transactions.
If you end up with a chunk of tainted coin.. you then have an incentive to spend it on 'blackmarket' goods and services (rather than reporting the source or paying the audit-point taxes to spend it cleanly)  - increasing the size of the blackmarket economy the taint system is supposedly there to control!

Because of this - I think that although such taint systems are inevitable, they'll be largely self-limiting and only effective if applied judiciously to the worst of the worst.

Most of the complaints here seem to be of the sort: "I don't like it!!!"
Well duh.. but can we move beyond that and look at what might happen whether you like it or not!?

I'm not convinced that it's as big a problem as some think (due to self-defeating effects if too heavily applied).. and I'm also not convinced that just naysaying it will stop it from popping up. Better to model a light-touch vs heavy-touch taint system and try to get a feel for how it might play out.

No, it was not already there.

"Taint" exists only in the minds of people who think fungible goods can be stamped with some moral seal of approval.

Thief steals $10. The money changes hands. Eventually some of it winds up in the church offering plate. And from now on, by the power of fungibility and through the magic fiction of "taint," every check that church writes is rendered unclean... sorry, "tainted."

I don't even know where to start with that.

At least you stopped defending the proposal.

A good choice.

It just isn't right to take from some random user because some other user stole from another user. Nearly anyone would get behind something the could take back from the thief, but that's not on the table as a possibility.