Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 451. (Read 2032286 times)

 - grandfather all UTXO at a point in time.
 - validate UTXOs from then forward by the simple metric: 'do we know who is responsible for them?'

This is as simple as the filter for general cryptography which we are likely to see:

 - packet has a govt back-door?

These things are really very simple.  If you want to sooth yourself by imagine them as complex, suit yourself, but don't whine and bitch when you lose your ass.


Formulating a spend from select UTXO's is a _very_ simple problem.  It's not often needed these days (though it's been done to try to deal with the dust problem) but it's uncommon because it is not very useful rather than because it is difficult.

As for identifying a UTXO as validated or not (to decide whether to spend it) that is not possible because there is no validation service at present.  Here again, it does not mean that it is a difficult problem.

I do suggest that you brush up on how to formulate transactions from abstract UTXO's in a desired way before the USGavincoin alt is pushed out.  You can thank me later.


OK.

To try and get back on topic, I'd like to own some gold. I've been picking up silver lately to add to my collections, I'd like to add gold as well.
What I'd really like is one of the bitcoin coins in silver and gold each with 1 bitcoin loaded on them.

There is no precedent for that. Property of all kinds involved in various illegal activities and most especially the drug trade is routinely seized, auctioned, and the new owner gets a clear title.

Returning could possibly be argued, if there was no evidence that was part of illegal activity (I understand there was some small amount of legal trade on SR). That would of course only be a tiny minority of cases. But there is no precedent for destroying otherwise ordinary property that is otherwise legal to own (as opposed to illegal drugs for example). Seize and sell is the norm.

I have no strong opinion the feasibility of tainting, whitelisting, etc. but putting that aside I certainly believe the government can seize tainted, partially tainted, etc. coins and sell them as clean untainted, whitelisted, whatever coins under existing law.

i know how the gvt couched this situation.  my point is that there are alot of ppl in the community who think they should have returned the coins to the owners who left them on SR or flat out destroyed them.  by selling them off under their own interpretation of the law, the gvt risks eroding faith in its sense of fairness in that application of the law.  b/c of that, there will be alot of ppl transacting despite any attempt of gvt to "taint" coins.  and then it becomes a matter of whether or not the gvt can trace what they've deemed tainted, hence the debate btwn tvbcof and me, as to whether or not they will be able to do this from a technical and politically correct way.

It's not super simple. There is a reason why you do not pay tax when you buy firewood from your neigbor. He and you say no. There is a reason why they can not say: You to can not have sexual intercource, how could you think that, here it is WE who decide who is to have sex and not to have sex. But the people says no, no way. There is a reason they can not say that you have to go to church every sunday. Everybody say no, no way, basta! This is also what people will say to the blacklists or the whitelists. They will say, no, not a chance, basta, the coins are mine. Mine! Get out of my face. That is what everybody will say. Not super simple at all. Without support, they can do nothing. Whitout you giving them resources, they have no resources. Bitcoin will make that clear to a lot of people.

that's assuming you or anyone else has the ability to determine whether or not a UTXO has 100% cleanliness.  i'd say it depends on who is doing the analysis.  you yourself admitted, after i pointed it out, that you might indeed have stolen coins from allinvain in your wallet.  should we lock down your coins?

if it's so trivial, tell us how splitting out UTXO's works technically.  wallet software follows a particular logic of UTXO selection when assembling for a specific tx which i've not been able to get a good sense of and i'm sure you haven't either.  there's no such thing as "UTXO control" like there is "coin control" for addresses, afaik.  tell us how you would construct a tx to select or exclude certain UTXO's that you'd deem tainted.  from what i do know, the wallets select the most suitably "sized" UTXO's which when combined together fits the tx amount so as to minimize splitting and efficiently packages the tx at the least cost in terms of fees and data requirements.  furthermore, for a UTXO that has 0.15% "taint", tell us how you'd split that out practically.  stop pretending that Coinbase has a way to do this when you don't know that.

what you're proposing is "possible" is mostly likely not possible and certainly is not "practical".  i've never seen any wallet with the ability to allow users to spend certain UTXO's.  what would be the point except to satisfy your socialistic mandates?

It is written into the law that seizure auctions clean the title, same as with seized cars, houses, etc. If anything that might be one reason for strong interest in these auctions. If you are a buyer with repetitional concerns the only two ways to buy known untainted coins are from a government auction or direct from a (reputable and verifiable) miner.

WTF are you talking about?  If you want to send me a transaction consisting of 100% validated UTXO's, I'll except them at 100% face value.  If you want to throw in a fraction which are unvalidated I'll discount them accordingly.  If/when unvalidated UTXO's cannot be mined or take a long time I'll stop accepting them altogether or accept an accourdingly deeper discount.  This is utterly trivial.  Coinbase will do it automatically which is why I'll just accept payment from you through them.


Not hypocritical at all.  You bought some coins at the auction?  Register and validate them.  No big deal.

I anticipate that as things are rolled out probably every single UTXO will be considered clean by default.  Nobody is stopping you from validating any of them so you've got no complaints...unless you are a criminal or whatever and don't want to register...

the concept of taint is all or none.  either coins are spendable or they're not.  for a UTXO that has 25% taint, is it spendable or not, bro?

you still haven't answered my question about how the US gvt could get away with the hypocrisy of auctioning off the SR coins while at the same time tainting others drug coins.  that is more of a political question and i already know your answer.

this is exactly the sort of drivel i'd expect from your socialistic mindset.  "i'd just mandate it be so".

notice that there is no depth to your assertions as they just represent your lips flapping once again.  let me spell it out for you.  the working assumption here is that there will be mass disobedience of your pronouncements as most ppl who are even remotely familiar with how the protocol works understands that it is impossible to "taint coins" as there is no such concept in reality.  the trick for you is how to enforce your pronouncements.  there are just inputs and outputs which get split & joined constantly giving "coins" that are ever lessening shades of grey as time goes by.  and w/o a mechanism to identify owners of whatever unit you choose to monitor be it addresses or UTXO's, there is plausible deniability at every hop.  the only way to prove someone guilty of a theft is to catch them with the private keys on their computer used at the time of the theft.

Adam still posts, he posted an update on a ring signature cryptographic scheme yesterday: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.10842017

Here's their repo: https://github.com/Blockstream

whitelisting is dead on arrival. The technologies already exist to partially if not mostly obviate any such mis-guided efforts, it is only a matter of time for refinement, usability, improvements and probably even better fundamental advancements.

At this stage, I would say bitcoins are about as good as cash. If someone robs a bank and gets away with a bag of loot they cannot just go around spending that in size at will. It might be left to go mouldy under the ground somewhere or divided up into hundreds or thousands of smaller parts. Bitcoins are similar, you could sit on "hot" coins for years or divide them up, wash them through Cayman's accounts. But being programmable money those features will inevitably be improved upon. Law enforcement needs to look ahead and start making plans for when solving crime is not as simple as "follow the money", which was always a bad idea anyway since it ushered in the police state of money and took away basic freedoms.

Yifu was specifically interested in identifying in pinning individual identification meta-data to that which exists in the blockchain as I recall things.


We've been through this years ago.  Of course you taint UTXO's and summate them to characterize a wallet (as if it matters.)  It's not only possible to have a percent taint, it's relatively trivial.  It's also fairly trivial to associate UTXO's to other metadata and flags.  That would be the heart of a validation service, and it is very far from rocket science.

You are trying to say that Bitcoin has no scaling problems and because there is no danger of to many UTXO's (which pretty much will always need to be in fast access (which is, parenthetically, a long ago solved problem for large players who operate football field sized datacenters)) and at the same time that the UTXO set is so complex that they could not be analyzed even though the entire system is highly deterministic.  Which is it, bro?

People who use multibit-type clients will probably not even know any difference.  Let the server to the heavy lifting.  Just push the 'upgrade' button and a nice little 'percent taint' is a new addition which rapidly becomes one more feature.  The handful of ancient dinosaurs who run a full node can easily check transactions against my government chartered service as needed.  In fact, for PR reasons, I'll even make this free.  This will allow folks to call Bitcoin a 'peer-2-peer' system if they can stifle a chuckle when doing so.

Iirc, Yifu's idea was to white list addresses, not UTXO's. So your idea is to taint UTXO'?  How do you do that given they can be split, joined ad infinitum?

I just checked their blog and it hasn't changed from when Iast looked a some weeks ago.  That's a little disappointing.  I've not really even researched things enough to know if they have some public code repo.  That's often a way to tell something about the activity of a project.  Lastly, I don't really out very often on troll-talk these days and don't know of any active conversations like the enjoyable one we had with Adam a few months ago.   I should follow things more closely for personal financial reasons, but I've been more interested in other things lately.

Just make people register.  That was Yifu's angle as a principle at CoinValidation.  UTXO's which are not registered to a known user or entity (e.g., Coinbase or blockchain.info) would halt a transaction from being valid.  Very easy to justify in the name of 'fighting terrorism and child exploitation' and whatever.  You can go before congress and argue all kinds of economic mumbo-jumbo about fungibility and freedom and what-not if you like.  Good luck with that.

Sharp eyed viewers might notice that if one does not register, one cannot pay one's taxes.  And there are well established ways to make people pay their taxes in almost all but the most failed of states.  I'll register my stash the day I'm mandated to do so (which is why my conception of the best strategy is to avoid a mandate ever being practical rather than to resist compliance after it is been mandated.)

As a function of my Coin Validation service, I'd also run a service for miners so that they can ensure that they don't waste their time mining unvalidated UTXO's as inputs and their transaction set thus remain clean.  If the choice is between taking this easy and popular step of using my government chartered service, and facing shutdown of their network support and confiscation of their gear, it will be a fairly easy decision in most cases.  It seems to me that the new inverted bloom filter thing it could be remarkably efficient for a miner to ensure that they are not wasting their time with transactions which are going to be legally invalid because they contain unvalidated inputs.  A side benefit of using a sorted transaction set.

I also find your suggestion that the likes of Russia and China are going to change their policies and welcome crypto-currencies with open arms to be laughable.  And in case you have not noticed, piss-ant countries without nukes pretty much do what they are told by whoever's sphere of influence they fall under.  Sure, there is a chance that your rosy dreams about totalitarian countries suddenly discovering the joys of individual freedom and geo-political power politics will come to pass, but I'm not betting a huge percentage of my financial statement on it.

Decentralized exchanges will destroy any fungability worries because there will be no way to choose what kind of coins get traded to you or that you can trade to someone else.

Speaking of, any recent news from Blockstream?

tv,

Would you mind telling me exactly how, from a technical standpoint, you would even white or black list BTC?

Given that there is no such thing as a coin but just a series of inputs and outputs, what do you taint and how is that sustainably identifiable throughout the life of a "coin"?