http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/11/13/sanitizing-bitcoin-coin-validation/Its based on significant misunderstanding about bitcoins value proposition - destroy its fungibility and the costs float up to meet credit cards and paypal.
It is also a ridiculous approach. If they want to certify users, they should do that as optional KYC, AML certificates that regulated merchants in respective jurisdictions can request, which could be attached to wallets/identities, not to fully fungible coins. The certificates should be non-transitive they attest to the identity of the user, not the coins. They should be optionally sent - if the recipient does not request it, it is privacy destructive and a security risk to send identifying information to unregulated businesses and individuals.
Their technical representatives of Coin Validation should be ashamed. How can someone who doesnt understand a concept as basic as fungibility and its relation to transaction costs, and the difference between identity and coins hope to exist in this ecosystem.
What they are proposing so far at least as explained by the Forbes article is stupid, dangerous and just wrong.
I am also incensed frankly that someone would step into the market with such a muddle-headed thinking, and attempt to sabotage or destroy the core bitcoin feature that gives its value, where the value has been created by Satoshi and a cast of millions of man-hours of contributions of the community and technical wizards developing it mostly on volunteer time. I am not someone prone to swearing, but this is astonishingly stupid and dangerous. Please stop now. In the article it is claimed they sought advice from the Winklevoss twins, if the twins value their estimated $30million bitcoin holding they should advise them to stop: if fungibility is destroyed bitcoins value as a transaction currency is impacted.
I encourage anyone with technical skills to put their thinking caps on to find ways to increase fungibility in the short term like CoinJoin, coin control in wallets, helping less technical people migrate to better wallets, educating people about privacy practices that defend fungibility. And longer term privacy technologies like zero coin, homomorphic encrypted value and committed (hidden) transactions.
I encourage all bitcoin businesses to shun Coin Validation unless we see some major U-turn or corrections. If your business depends on the success bitcoin, it depends on the fungibility of bitcoin, and Coin Validation seem to be set on destroying both.
You can quote me on that.
I welcome Coin Validations corrections of the claims in the Forbes article. Tell me you were misquoted.
Adam
ps For people who have no idea who
http://cypherspace.org/adam/ I am
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.237167 , my small part in bitcoin is I invented distributed mining in 1997
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hashcash (you can find the reference in Satoshi's paper) and worked on opensource ecash & crypto currency research & implementation for about a decade alongside Wei Dai & Hal Finney & others.
Correct. I fully agree with you Adam..
If Bitcoin will be not fungible than it is like forking it in more parts.
When the USA makes his blacklist, whitelist, redlist, greenlist, then China and Russia will do it also.
Then we must look for each coin that could be:
USA - black, China - white, Russia - red
USA - white, China - red, Russia - green
Than you must check every time where we pay in what country is and on what list are the coins in this country.
That could be even worse. This lists could be hidden so you transfer your coins and they will be confiscated.
This coins will be then used to confiscate new coins and to finance drone killings in sovereign countries or to finance secret operations to overthrow legitimate governments.