Topic: Freezing BitCoin addresses by regulating miners - page 5. (Read 16509 times)

Sigh. Seeing as you reopened this long-dead thread from 2011 for apparently no reason, I'm pretty sure you're the one who is trolling me.

You aren't getting my point. Forget it. Go ahead and refuse to talk to anyone who isn't "ideologically pure".

But here's a question to ponder. If the NSA came along and offered to run a few thousand Obelisk servers, what would you tell them?

Are you trolling me? Lets work together says the guy that promoted the angle that I'm not a developer to the community and tried to have my participation censored.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-09/13/digital-economy-task-force
"Bitcoin, Tor and Gates Foundation join task force to prevent child exploitation"

Don't tell me it's just about talking to the police. I'm sure you can rationalise it however you want. It sure starts that way. That's what people who run education seminars for the NSA or DoD tell themselves when you ask them. But they get paid for something.

Companys that want to deal with dedicated mining on such large scale, will settle their mining operations in countries that are open to Bitcoin. They are not crazy to loose their investment.
Why loose investment? Well, pretty much same moment they decide to freeze someones assets, BTC is dead. It is no longer free and open. What will happen is that BTC will fork to version that does not allow such actions (probably change of algorithm) which would render all huge miners useless, which would make em loose their invested money.

EDIT: Oh man i just replayed to topic that is 3 years old? Damn....it's like walking dead....zombies!

I will explain Bitcoin and how it works to anyone, regardless of whether they're the police or not.

After all, I'm the one who taught you about Merkle trees back when you didn't understand the difference between a branch and a tree, remember? I gave the most popular talk at the conference you organised. Now you attack me for being willing to talk about Bitcoin to people who don't have the same opinions as you. Where's your commitment to spreading knowledge gone?

Amir, these sorts of random personal attacks are getting really old, but I've met you and I don't doubt your good intentions. The war on drugs is terrible and divisive. I would like to see it end. I think the way to end it is through democracy. The moment the majority of Americans started supporting legalisation, the laws started changing. But even if you think the right way is to support online black markets, you have to make a decision - given that lots of people don't agree with you on that, are you going to focus on the 80% of things where agreement can be found and working together is possible? Or are you just going to continue starting fights for no reason with people who would otherwise be happy to write code and get things done with you?


If your idea of dark is people writing about what ideas they're exploring in public forum posts over a period of many years, then I hate to know what your idea of light would be. Mind-reading machines?

Good question genjix, with three possible answers:

- in public we will say: "No money, I won't rat bitcoin users to feds, I SWEAR, please believe me"

- in reality he says: "cool, sure I love to help identifying the target and make up evidence, but the thing is, I am a public person, community is watching me, we have to disguise this money thing, give me a consulting job or I hold some seminars for police offers and write big bill, to obfuscate the real reason for payment"

- if we would be honest we would say: "you don't have to give me money, I am also an LE agent, reach out to my engagement officer at NSA, so he can put me on this case, as part of Dutch Mutual Legal Assistance Agreement with U.S.A."  



:-/

How much money would you take from the dutch police to help them arrest a buyer of DMT from Silk Road, and so help clear up Bitcoin's image?

I would suggest first viewing Andreas M. Antonopoulos' presentation to the L. A. Bitcoin meetup in its entirety. He explains why blacklists, whitelists etc as is being proposed in this thread will destroy Bitcoin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTPQKyAq-DM

This proposed fork together with "Coin Validation" belongs in the trash heap.

Edit: Will Zerocoin work for the large number of coins the US Government holds?

The above is a verbatim copy of my reply to this thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=412041.0;all It applies equally to this other proposed fork. Regardless of whether it is the state trying to freeze coins or those who hate the state trying to seize the state's coins the answer in both cases has to be NO.

In order to make it almost impossible to even attempt to implement coin lists everyone should use coinjoin.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/coinjoin-bitcoin-privacy-for-the-real-world-279249

I am 100% sure Mike Hearn is send from and paid by US agencies to destroy Bitcoin.
Like they send agents to protocols and formats working groups to prohibit secure crypto or unbackdoored software.

Looks like the other leading members of this Bitcoin Faildation either don't care, have no gut to stand up against it or they also are agents or paid for corperation.

Total bullshit.  Mike has been crystal clear all along if anyone was paying attention and could understand the concepts and constructs he's described many of which are technically challenging.  This thread is one of many of the reasons I make this statement.  I personally disagree with some (maybe almost all) of his apparent philosophical constructs and goals, and he himself has said that these have been evolving, but he has been one of the most forthright people around in my opinion.  I do hope this persists.

Mike has also been one of the most prolific and effective in dev-land.  There is a pretty fair chance that Bitcoin would have withered on the vine a year ago but for his spearheading the database re-implementation.  I'm quite confident that we would not be where we are today without this work, and not sure that anyone else would have gotten around to it or pulled it off (even considering the rather embarrassing bdb issue which point up how questionable Bitcoin QA was (is?).  That's my read on things.

As for the 'secrecy' about the blacklisting conversation, I consider it mostly an artifact of the structure of the Bitcoin Foundation.  That's just one in a long list of lamentable features the BF displays.

The reason is that Mike Hearn is still a dick, and doesn't like his agenda to be exposed.  The dark hates light being shed on it.

Brilliant discussion. Thanks for illuminating me on how dynamic the blockchain can get

So, miners should be regulated to enforce blacklists, eh? Don't know how that could be achieved in a practical way worldwide. Mike was even more idealistic in his younger days!

Perhaps he just wished to showcase the remarkable degree of prescience and understanding exhibited by some of the more capable persons associated with the project, and from a relatively early date

Is there a reason you suddenly dug up this thread from 2011, genjix?

That wallet would be some sort of software? Or an online/web wallet? In latter case, you don't really control the coins, yet. In the first case, your wallet can be a target since it is connected to the internet.

Could a wallet be created that would automatically send bitcoins to a new public address every (pick a time frame). In this way, unless a deterministic wallet was used, a bitcoin could always outrun the freeze order? I suppose the path the coins take could always be tracked. But wouldn't auto send feature render the freeze order impotent...
like hopefully all forms of regulation against bitcoin. 

This technically is possible if someone invent an efficient SHA256 preimage attack.


This statement is false. There will not be any split. Loose miners will still try to prolong longest chain made by dictator.

The first thing target miners would do, if threatened, is disconnect. Their hash power is now unavailable to be abused by governments.

The top thing most miners would do to prevent such things from happening, is to hide. No large miner will disclose his farm's location, because that would be dangerous to the miner.

Finally, black lists will have to be updated all the time. It just won't work. Any attempt of trying to black list any single address will be met by multiple spends with higher than minimum transaction fees, and then spent again and again until it's so diluted and all over the place. Or at least that's what I would do if my address ever got on a list.

This would destroy Bitcoin. More control and surveillance. I don't think this is what Satoshi envisioned.