Topic: Announcement Regarding State Rep Mark Warden's Bitcoin Strategy - page 2. (Read 5933 times)

My guess is that it's going to be prohibitively difficult cost-wise for any government to do that.
By the time they recognize Bitcoin as a currency (they have to do it if they want to regulate it) the authorities won't have enough coins to hire needed amount of people to monitor everything.
Right now they can print nice green papers out of their a$$ and pay CIA, FBI, NSA and others to spy on you.
With Bitcoin they will have to come up with a better way to spend their precious coins.
Libertarians will be the ultimate financial power in the world due to Bitcoin early adoption, so no worries here.
Fasten your seat belt and enjoy the ride!

//Inspired by: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XxWGBjGMco

Actually this kind of features of bitcoin scares me a bit. Some here see it as a mean for tax evasion but with monitoring committees it can lead to only monitored funds to count as bitcoin.

How does a politician proof he is not accepting illegal donations? You showed it. Watching only wallet at the authorities.
How does a company proof it is paying its taxes? Just the same way. Watching only wallet at the authorities.
How is a private person proofing to pay taxes? Just the same way. Watching only wallet at the authorities.
Next step would be to accept donations to the US politicians only from wallets registered with the US authorities because only these are clean coins?
…

Yes I like it for the political campaigns but you see what I'm scared of.

Please post comments&objections to the return-to-sender advice I posted (at the end of the first page of this thread).  I think it is a really important concept to iron out.

But I am not just bumping this thread, I wanted to propose a top-level CONOPs (concept of operations) I proposed to Mark's campaign via email.  Additionally, I have recommended my own program (Armory) for this recommendation, because no other program currently supports deterministic wallets and watching-only wallets and has an intuitive user interface for them (am I wrong?).   I'd appreciate if some other Armory users provided some independent feedback about Armory, so this doesn't look like just a shameless plug for my own software.  In reality, this will become the norm in the far future, but Armory can uniquely enable it right now.

• (1) Arbitrary political campaign creates a deterministic wallet, offline.
• (2) Campaign creates a watching-only copy of the wallet, registers it with an oversight committee
• (3) Potential donor accesses the campaign website, commits their personal details, and gets a donation address
• (4) Donor can put the address into the website of the oversight committee, which will confirm it is one of the officially-registered addresses
• • (4a) If it's not, the donor can report the campaign for shady campaign financing practices
• (5) Donor sends money to received address
• • (5a) Donor sends the final tx ID and amount to the campaign website/email (maybe not necessary, since the donation address was unique)
• (6) Once every X months, oversight committee aggregates the list of donations sent to that wallet, and requests the identifying information for each one (they have the watching-only wallet, so they can see every donation)
• (7) Campaign submits the appropriate documentation for each donor, or issues a return transaction back to the sending address for ones they can't identify

This process seems like it would not only satisfy the spirit of campaign financing laws, but might actually improve transparency.  Donors can verify that the address they are donating to is a monitored address, and the oversight committee can see every donation without actually having spendable access to it.  Even better, donors don't need to use Armory, only the campaign and the oversight committee.

While I think signing messages with a particular address for the purposes of identifying one's self is a great idea in concept, I don't see how it's currently possible (unless everyone was using Armory).  Last I saw, the message-signing interface in Bitcoin-Qt was weak -- it's not easy to communicate exactly what you were signing, and it's not easy to verify a signature.  The person can send you the message they signed, but it won't work if they accidentally added an extra space at the end, or forgot a punctuation mark.  I made progress on this by creating "signature blocks" in Armory, but it isn't compatible with any other program.  I was waiting for Bitcoin-Qt upgrade theirs so I could help design a cross-client implementation.

However, I still believe this is a valid, useful use-case, so I'd love it if the core devs would make this feature easier to use, and then I would make it compatible.  The specific recommendation I was making was that you not only sign a message, but you have a signature block that clearly identifies the signature and the data that was signed.  In Armory, it looks like this:


You only have to copy that block into the Armory message signing dialog and click "Verify" and it will pop up a window like this.  I pushed for this a long time when I first made it, but there was little interest in it.  Maybe this is an excellent time for bitcoin-qt to implement something like it so that high-profile use cases (like campaign financing) can leverage it.

It seemed there was a lot of dissent in this thread about that advice.  I wanted to make sure that dissenters understood the basis of that advice, and either confirm it or make further recommendations about how to address the concerns I put forward.  These are legitimate concerns, and I think it's critical that it's done 100% right, for this first swing into the open political scene ("right", from a legal and accountability standpoint).  I'd rather some Bitcoiners be inconvenienced, than have Mark accused of shady campaign financing practices.  Obviously we'd like to avoid both, if possible

Thanks for all the help, etotheipi, it's been invaluable. My understanding is that all funds have been returned to the originating addresses. We're still working on integrating a better system into the contribution page, but that should be up very soon.

Guys,

I just want to repeat the advice that I gave Mark via email, because it appears that there is a disconnect about returning funds.  I believe it is absolutely critical that:

(1) Funds be returned to exactly one of the addresses it was received from
(2) A large warning is posted on the donation page, notifying that that is the policy and no exceptions will be made

This is in Mark's best interest.  There are two serious issues with returning to different addresses:

(1) With addresses being semi-anonymous, returning to a different address looks suspicious.  It could have been Mark claiming to return the funds to someone, but actually siphoning them off to a secret address he created for himself.  I'm not, in any way, accusing Mark of doing this.  But there's no way to prove that he didn't do that.  The only way for an oversight committee to know for sure that the coins were actually returned is if it goes back to the same address

(2) There's all sorts of money-laundering issues with returning to a different address.  I know it doesn't make much sense for someone to do it, but theoretically someone wants to pay their drug dealer $10k BTC, so they make an invalid donation to Mark's campaign, then has Mark return it to his drug dealer's address.  Mark was now unknowingly an accomplice.  While the possibility of that happening is pretty low, I think there's actually a greater risk of someone setting up something like this in order to blackmail and/or discredit Mark.  

It's just not worth the risk.

If someone donates from an online service, then I still recommend it be returned to the sender, and Mark can send that person the TxID of the return transaction.  Then the user/donor can go sort it out with the online service, on their own time.  They will recover the funds, it just might take some work. EDIT:  Mark's campaign can even provide a signed message to be given to the service that says "Transaction with ID: ... is a return transaction for the following user: ...".   This will make it much easier for the user to recover their funds.

I would suggest just returning to a sender address. It's not a good idea for people to be using large shared wallets longer term, not only for these reasons.

Incidentally, the original thread with the notice that donations were being accepted:

 - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/representative-mark-warden-utilizing-bitcoin-for-campaign-donations-99968

I think you should ask Mark what he would do if the law commanded him to fly to Jupiter every morning. Sometimes laws make no sense or are impossible or silly or wrong to follow. You can either keep your head down or fight it and he doesn't seem inclined to keep his head down. So (and it doesn't impact me at all so take it for what it is worth) it's time to fight, leave the address, people will broadcast whatever tx they want to the network and there is nothing you can do about it. A fight about this would be great imo, finally politicians talking (probably nonsensically still) about something interesting.

If the law really commands that you can't accept bitcoin donations without gathering identity data then you have to be careful never to associate yourself with a bitcoin address or else risk being donated to against your will and have no ability to return or decline them.

Just because you send the coins back to the address they came from is not equivalent to returning them to their owner...as others have pointed out, if you withdrew from your brokerage to the campaign address, sending it back to the broker doesn't truly reverse the transaction.

What good are they to him if they don't convert USD?

VOTE FOR MEEE I HAZ BITCOINZ!

I'm no lawyer but I would be shocked if non-monetary donations weren't regulated in the same way as monetary ones. Otherwise, someone could donate a yacht or heck even gold bars to a campaign.

Good points, Stephen. I'm going to talk with Mark, as it's now apparent that the coins can't just be returned the originating addresses. The signing is a great idea, too.


The rules apply to anything of value that is contributed to the campaign, so I think it's pretty clear that they apply to the Bitcoins received.

Just a thought - at this moment bitcoins are not recognized and regulated by the government as a currency. Unless the campaign fund converts them to USD, no laws can be violated. It's just digitally signed messages stored in a public ledger. If anyone claims laws have been violated, they are recognizing bitcoins as currency, or at least a commodity. On a related note, how are non-monetary donations treated by the state and federal authorities? Can I donate an oil painting? Can Mark Warden sell it afterwards and use the proceeds in the campaign fund? Whose name, address, and citizenship are then taken into account - mine, yours, or the buyer's?

Probably the approach necessary will be to have anyone that wishes to have the funds refunded send to you a signed message proving they truly are the owner of that address.  The bitcoin-qt client suports this -- you simply pick one of the adresses that the transaction was from and do Sign Message.  Anyone can then verify.  And if they do that, you might as well just ask them for identity and just keep the payment if that's provided.

For any donations you do not get a refund requrest from then should NOT be returned, as is described above -- many refunds will not likely go back to the intended recipient (the person that sent the funds in the first place).

The options for those unclaimed funds might include donating them to some charitable or apolitical purpose then.  But returning them to the sender's address, without that sender verifying ownership, will cause a number of people to become surprised with the free bitcoins that land in their wallet, and the rest of the coins will be commandeered by the EWallet operators as they have no intended recipient.

The rules regarding campaign donation was established before you started accepting bitcoins.

Bitcoins cannot always just be easily returned, the sender may have used a one-time address ?

The problem is easily solved though.

1. Write on your web page that all donations will be forwarded to the Bitcoin 100 (http://bitcoin100.org/) unless the donator e-mails you stating the details of the transaction and giving his/her private details.

That way you'd comply with the current law AND contribute to charity.

Can companies contribute more than 1000 USD, is that limit only for individuals ?

May I suggest that the money donated thus far sits for a week and allows people to reclaim their balances to a BTC address they specified, with the remaining sum going towards advertising Bitcoin through a trusted third party.

Great question! There were two donation addresses. They are:

1B39L3wqnbVpRa9oHMWY2F6FsZJJAgJQX6
1GYKza1DDdBFTwHD1Hr1hYLd5csRGDvqVZ


I'm not the web master, but this was definitely brought up as an option, and I'll bring it up again.

They should consider using the service from BitPay.

At the time we collect the donation, we can also collect any Name, Address, email address, phone number, etc that the donor requires.  That information is provided on the receipt to the donor, and on the Account Summary for the recipient.  We have been doing this for about a year now.

https://bit-pay.com/charities.html