Topic: Freezing BitCoin addresses by regulating miners - page 2. (Read 16509 times)

I'm somewhat hopeful as well, but I see it as almost inevitable that people will need to be jarred out of their slumber by something pretty ugly and we so-called 'freedom loving people' (for lack of a better term) are destined to have a rough patch.  Whether it is permanent or not is hard to say, but breaking out of it will require a good set of sharp tools.  I have a bunch of personal goals for Bitcoin some of which are mutually exclusive and one of them is to get rich.  I think it really is the case, however, that an important role I see for distributed crypto-currencies would be to provide a tool for two-moves or so in the future and a way to dampen and complicate certain power grab operations on the part of our adversaries.

I hear you. However, the longterm trend in mankind's history is toward greater awareness and freedom, and that is accelerating exponentially thanks to the WWW.  So I am quite hopeful.

Another nail in Bitcoin XT coffin.

Doing so will primarily just get you tagged.  More people love big brother at a fairly deep level than don't, and much effort and research is put into making that be the case.  It's easy-ish at this point to accomplish this reality, and especially in rich countries which can provide a good quality of life for their people or at least the pools of people who matter very much.  The engineering task of leadership is to adjust these pools to maximum effect with the resources available.  Your run-of-the-mill software engineer has every reason to prefer the status quo and support those who would preserve it.  For now.

If regulators feel like ignoring Bitcoin's basic principles, then they are free to use cash only, and we are free to circumvent having anything to do with them. No reason to regulate something one doesn't even care about, just because.

As for blacklisting measures, they will never work. It's a rough job tracking down all addresses associated with an ill-intentioned party, there might be addresses that are unknown to be linked with those types of people and they can simply tumble/mix their coins, or use a huge quantity of addresses.

Hopefully we'll be smart enough as a community to publicly discredit people like Hearn
who don't respect Liberty.

In Mike Hearn's world it doesn't matter about what is "fair or reasonable" it only matters that the *state* can dictate what they want to.

So in his view no one can be innocent unless the *state* says so (this is actually the modern political dynamic that we live in - guilty until you can prove you are not and we'll prevent you from trying to even prove you are not - just follow what is going on in Australia in regards to "boat people" to get a taste).

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What constitutes jurisdiction over bitcoin?

Let's say for example there was a country that has given bitcoin complete autonomy, with no government interference, no taxation,
etc. Let's say this is country A that advertises itself as a bitcoin haven, and you can "store" your btc  via hosted wallets in that country. If you define bitcoin ownership as the geographical location of the btc wallet, then other countries have to defacto honor country A's btc regulations. However if another country which is not very btc friendly, country B, (for which example btc owner resides in), does not legally believe that btc haven Country A does have jurisdiction over your bitcoin, because the blockchain is a global entity, then Country B has paradoxically lost its argument over jurisdiction. Add to the fact that your bitcoin is anonymous to the extent that your identity is not revealed. There is no clear way to define ownership of btc other than a btc address and it only takes a millisecond to create another address. In its current form, I just don't see how bitcoin can ever be financially regulated. Maybe at the point of exchange for fiat you can regulate it..but then only in a regulated exchange...versus free unregulated exchanges like localbitcoin.

If bitcoin is ever altered to accommodate a certain government's regulatory oversight, there are plenty of alt coins in the wings ready to carry on btc's original vision.

More and more I see it likely that Bitcoin is going to become "the worst nightmare we could have ever imagined".

Mike Hearn is one of those that will be remembered as a person that "paved the way to hell with good intentions".

As a person I actually have found him to be okay so it is disappointing that he just doesn't seem to see what it is that he has decided to support (which is complete totalitarian control over everyone's finances).

In the future I predict we'll miss when we had "cash".

I think it fair to say that in a totalitarian environment nothing is legislation-proof period.  For that reason, and since I feel a significant risk that we'll see such an environment at some point, my favored course at this point is to work toward a system which is as cumbersome to regulate as possible and plan on a (hopefully limited) period of time when various cracks and fissures are able to be exploited in order to remain viable.

To say the truth, one of the biggest hopes I have for distributed crypto-currencies is to provide a tool to help escape from a more global and totalitarian environment that has not yet occurred but which very well could under a range of plausible scenarios.  A sober analysis of the world indicates that there is a lot of effort and money working being put toward a scenario that many people visualize as a utopia but I suspect will quickly become a total nightmare for most of us.

Freezing a number of bitcoins and using that freeze to activate a set number of coins on an alternate blockchain isn't enough to solve this problem. Any governing body that passes a tracking and identification law is going to make it broad enough to encompass any and all types of crypto transaction ledgers. Nothing using a blockchain type ledger will be legislation proof.

This push toward tainting and increased control is entirely predictable.  It is one of the driving forces behind my wishing to have one layer of abstraction sliced horizontally vs. vertically (sidechains vs. treechains.)

A PoliceStateCoin sidechain could have all of the identity and tracking stuff that big brother wants.  I would use it day in and day out just as I do Visa, PayPal, etc today.  The big difference is that if it could possibly maintain a peg to a free backing store (such as Bitcoin if it remained free) I could have some hope of swaping out of it as needed.

Of course it is true that a totalitarian regime such as the one Mike Hearn and Peter's friend in the mainstream financial system long for, sidecoins could be outlawed on simply the basis of being backed by a free reserve.  It would, however, be one more hurdle for the fascists to jump through both legally and operationally.  It would also make chain analysis to the individual level highly impractical.

From a system design point of view, a solution involving subordinate chains which can come and go creates a 'whack-a-mole' problem that can evolve quickly to take advantage of niches and adapt readily to threats.  The one thing that needs serious focus is keeping the backing store itself as well defended as possible.  Even then there is are some significant advantages:

 - If the backing store came under attack and was damaged for periods of time, the subordinate chain systems would keep right on functioning in probably a degraded capability form to serve daily needs (depending on implementation.)

 - If the backing store completely failed it is likely that it would be replaced by something else with something less than a full loss realized by the subordinate chain users.

Most likely their would end up being two versions. A legal one for the USA and the real one for the rest of the world.

Very sad but not altogether unexpected. We need to resist allowing Bitcoin to become just another surveillance tool for big brother or decide to abandon the project and let corporate America have it to use as just another payment system. Giving up is easy, people need to fight very hard to keep their civil rights. I would never use it again if they passed that law.

The U.S. government is stepping on personal freedom and civil rights so much now that we are quickly becoming the very thing we fought against in WWII.

This assumes that bitcoin would fall under a country's legal jurisdiction... but the blockchain is global.

So how could this ever possibly be enforced let alone have any legal precedence?

FWIW I've run into a lot of regulatory people who have pretty clear views that Bitcoin mining should be regulated such that addresses are blacklisted or even whitelisted. Obviously that's a goal, not necessarily what they'll succeed in making happen, but that's what the long-term intent is. For instance, one regulator I talked to a few months ago at a conference was *very* clear in her view that the Bitcoin protocol simply must be changed to add verified digital identities to the protocol itself, and mining blocks with transactions without valid identities and/or extending blockchains with non-compliant transactions should be an illegal activity that's prosecuted.

They were talking about a proposed blacklist but it applied to "tainted" coins themselves, not addresses. Any coin that has been proven to changed hands illegally, through theft or scam, could be tagged and refused by miners. Problem is user one could send blacklisted coin to another in exchange for w/ever but user two would never receive the coin as it would be rejected. Also the holders of the blacklist could use it or exploit it to their gain.

Check page 13 of this pdf for more info (middle of pg 13)

http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/15-015_2ef1a2dd-633d-494e-b47c-86cdc1dcad04.pdf

There's a entire white paper about blacklisting coins but I can't find it.

Anyway, the idea seems to have too many holes. I don't think it's viable to blacklist addys because crooks will just use new wallets every time...

that's a provocative question.  Seems the ideal answer might be "who cares as long as we have many Bitcoin implementations, of which XT is only one."

Credible? We'll see.

Re: benevolent dictator, nah, we don't have one of those - maybe Wladimir.

Yo, Pete:

Who's the guy who is making a credible threat to subsume Bitcoin under his personal project and is for all intents and purposes the acting 'benevolent dictator' of Bitcoin at this point?  Oh right...Mike Hearn.  Who could have predicted that and assigned status as appropriate???