This is what I thought too, but now I am looking closer and it appears that Forbes may have misrepresented the tech. Read Alex's reddit posts from the previous day:
http://www.reddit.com/user/alex_waters :
He probably is spinning PR or focusing on short-term implementation plans to avoid discussing the longer term plans discussed in the article. If you read it with the PR-interpretation mindset its not so good.
Whatever his intentions, he is not thinking through the implications or just selfishly doesnt care for quick buck reasons, I dont know him so I cant tell. Either way I think this will not end well. I've been in the privacy tech / crypto business for 15 years, its quite common to encounter and have to navigate around people of all stripes: well meaning, neutral, dont care, and anti-privacy. Even the ones that are neutral or well meaning often dont think about the long or even mid-term implications of what they are doing. Thinking about implications is complex, requires concentration, deep understanding across many fields, and may conflict with short term objectives (ie rush something ill-thought-out but "pragmatic" to get something out the door). Sometimes making a buck even conflicts with user interests, or even the survival of the system. Some of these people might even show concern and genuine remorse afterwards when it predictably blows up (to their genuine surprise because they didnt think more than the first chess move.) Most probably though they'll be onto their next venture and pretend it never happened or more likely not even make the connection between their actions and the outcome.
The technology space is littered with implications from ill considered decisions. Eg web pages are not signed, and jscript is not signed; a single server key is used for combined tunnel auth/encryption but no transferable signature on the content. So people can hack servers and modify and replace code and steal eg jscript bitcoin wallets.
These things matter because architecture defines the internet.
“We don’t want to be the sheriff of the Bitcoin community. We just want to create an ecosystem of clean addresses.”
So first they want to identify clean addresses (from the forbes article).
Please stop confusing "clean coins" with KYC'd Bitcoin addresses.
And then they want to distance themselves from clean addresses (from reddit).
So whats a clean address? Its one that according to them has not got taint on it according to some threshold they decide against some blacklist. Seems squarely what we are talking about.
Thats my interpretation. Waters or the other people at CoinValidation are welcome to clarify.
It is beginning to sound a bit more like what you proposed Adam.
The KYC part yes, the clean coins I am not so sure - they really do seem to think longer term that tracing coins is somehow a useful thing to do, which can only harm fungibility. We may need a priority deployment of CoinJoin option into multiple clients before they get far with that.
DarkWallet could probably do with some funding help also.
Adam
Thank you for that thoughtful analysis. There are clearly mixed signals being sent; given their limited response it appears that they may purposely disseminating varying information to create a smoke screen while they speak with the
DHS.
Either way, like you I am deeply concerned and the community response to this will make or break this moment. Interesting times ahead; this is good that this is happening now, we need to face these hurdles.
. Because he may as well be, the reality is that we can innovate our way out of whatever corner the government tries to paint us into, the discussions that have come out of this listing business have convinced me of that.
