Topic: Annotating the blockchain - page 2. (Read 2855 times)

Why would I want to do that?  I received the money in a legitimate transaction, presumably in exchange for something else that I no longer have.  Why would I turn around and give it to someone else?  Exchanges of currency in real life don't work like that.  Odds are that one of the bills in my wallet was stolen from someone at some point, but that doesn't mean that, if I could track down the original person it was stolen from, I should give it to that person.  I received these bills from bank, which gave them to me because my job deposits money into said bank.  I don't owe them to anyone else.  Likewise for Bitcoins.

I'm attempting to build such a tool (gradually as I get time) in bitnot.es (http://bitnot.es)

i'm submitting more and more addresses as I find them each day (examples: http://bitnot.es/a/1vc3ZU4ae2cF6ZxqE44j5Ak3wfsZqybtb and http://bitnot.es/a/19QkqAza7BHFTuoz9N8UQkryP4E9jHo4N3) and hope others do too.

i think if it's built up it will make a good detective tool later. and for that purpose, i plan to add search features to it, so you don't need to know an address, you can just search for 'mybitcoin' for example and find any addresses/blocks/transactions that have been tagged as such.

lots of work left to do obviously, i've only just built the site a few days ago.

for more info, please see https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.437346

The fact that you have unclean coins does not mean that you are a scammer, it means that the scammer is somewhere between you and the victim. If you end up with unclean coins, the website will allow you to get in touch with the victim of the scam/theft.

Wat?

Wouldn't this be very vulnerable to scamming in itself though?  It's trivial to, say, parse the top 10,000 receiving addresses from the blockchain that hold the most value at this moment.  What's to stop a scammer from taking a coin that's marked as "stolen" and transferring a single satoshi to each of these top 10,000 mostly valid addresses?  Wouldn't everyone just be marked bad at that point?

Remember, there's no way to "deny" a transaction.  Anyone in possession of coins that had been annotated as bad could go on to cause lots of trouble for other people very easily.

AFAICT, Bitcoin was intentionally designed in order to make it impossible to double spend bitcoins, or create more than 21 million of them. Satoshi's paper does not say anything about favoring money laundering.

And I do not suggest any "regulation" of Bitcoin. I suggest a voluntary tool that would facilitate the tracking of fraudulent transactions.
If there is misplaced confidence, it is the confidence that Bitcoin is anonymous.

So you accept Bitcoins from someone, and because their inability to choose the inputs for the transaction they send to you, you end up with some coins that were "unclean" a few transactions ago. Or maybe you don't realize this, because you don't happen to subscribe to the arbitrary group watchdog that monitors this shit - until you go to spend those coins and someone who is subscribed calls you a scammer.

The recent allinvain and mybitcoin thefts have been terrible news, and the latter has strongly eroded confidence in Bitcoin. In addition, the SEPA bank accounts of at least two exchanges have been closed, not because banks are trying to destroy bitcoin, but because they are concerned by money laundering. I think we should try to stop this as soon as possible, before it gets too bad. We need to build collective tools that would allow us to detect and prevent laundering.

What I have in mind is an improved version of the blockexplorer website, where users would have the possibility to annotate their own transactions. Users would be allowed to annotate an address or transaction only if they can sign their message with the private key corresponding to the bitcoin address they want to annotate.

The site would allow users to report a transaction as fraudulent. In order to prevent abuses, a police report would be requested by the operator of the website in order to flag a transaction as fraud. Then, the website would allow all users to check if the bitcoins they receive have been involved in a fraudulent transaction. This could take the form of a webpage where users upload a list of bitcoin addresses, or it could be integrated directly to the bitcoin client with an API. A user receiving a positive answer could get in touch with the person who reported the theft, and the police would be able to start an investigation of the chain of intermediaries.

If such a tool was available, it would be easy for exchanges to detect and report thieves cashing out, because they know their real identities. If an exchange was unwilling to do so, its users would know quickly, because they would receive dirty money directly from that exchange.

What do you think ? If we, as a community, were able to unmask a bitcoin thief, I think the current lack of confidence could be reversed.