Topic: I entered the police station as a suspect. When I left the officer loved Bitcoin (Read 12924 times)

The answer in this case it to turn the funds over to the government; if you can not find a way to return them.

I am thinking of trying to convince Canada's Receiver General to post a public Bitcoin address. One sticking point I forsee is that he who controls the private key could steal the funds. However, I worked out how joint Bitcoin accounts can work as well (but have not implemented it in code yet).

Stance of an individual worker should never be associated with the company he works in.

This is beautiful, however I feel that if the greatest benefit he sees is no creditcard fraud then its a bit besides the point. Thats not its greatest feature at all!

In the case of politicians' requirements to not accept "dirty money", it may be that it is not considered theirs until it is put to use. or that it would be a lesser offense.

Perhaps in a similar way to that of the misdemeanor crime of "joy-riding" becomes "grand theft" when you switch the license plates or otherwise attempt to change the identity of the vehicle making it less identifiable as belonging to its rightful owner.

I think you have to verify the identity of the users of your exchange or you can have lots of law isssues

Not exactly, it's more like a certificate-like protocol, similar to SSL, something that would allow strong authentication of addresses. This is an essential infrastructure brick if you want to have a decent level of security. If you don't understand why, please learn about it before opening your loud mouth.

Cool story.


I think this is actually a very stupid idea. Let amazon get a vanity address the normal way if that actually makes any difference (it doesn't). Otherwise what, a dns system for Bitcoin? Get out. Literally get out. If you think Bitcoin should be changed into something less to be easier for Joe Blow you don't belong anywhere near it, please leave now. The only acceptable solution is for everything to change to accommodate Bitcoin, and that everything includes "clueless customers". Nothing less and nothing else.

Splendid! The power of fact with abundant details cannot be resisted.

interestingly, some banks will block transactions with 'bitcoin' in the reference field.

the method of verifying a customer account by depositing a small amount to their account is something several e-wallet sites already implements.

very serious.

a complete lay person can read "for buying bitcoins" and go "okay this transaction must be for buying bitcoins".

on the other hand, anyone seeing "bitcoinnordic" might need to go to google and/or bitcoinnordic's website and find out what they're all about.

i for one had never heard of them until this thread.

Seriously?
Sending money to a company whose sole purpose is to sell Bitcoins is already "proof beyond reasonable doubts" that you're buying bitcoins.

no, "BitcoinNordic" is vague

"for buying bitcoins" is explicit

Come on. I haven't read the entire topic yet, but are you seriously implying that his service has any amount of guilt in this? That OP has something to "solve"?

People should simply learn not to send money to unknown types on the internet without escrow. Either you verify the other party reputation or you use a reputable third party, specially for meaningful amounts.

Financial privacy should not be thrown away simply because some are irresponsible with their money.

That said, I don't doubt at all that he might be required by law not to respect people's privacy, as you say. If that's the case he doesn't have much choice anyway.


They're already sending money to BitcoinNordic account anyway. Unless you're talking about owners of joint accounts who don't want the other owner to know where the money is going to (fishy), for everything else that matters it's already "written" in their statement what they used that money for.

I do agree that is a problem with the software. But it's an easy fix: just maintain a list of transactions that you received knowingly and only consider those transactions as candidate tx inputs. Any other transaction is simply ignored and never spent, nor does it have to be shown in your internal accounts. If you use a unique address per payment, which you should, this is easy to do. If you really want you can return unwanted transactions as well by simply resending them to one of the input addresses, or want, ask for a request signed by one of those addresses.

I think the more fundamental issue is that Bitcoin makes it publicly known that you can spend the funds. A "counter-sign to accept" protocol still has that problem, because you could simply publish the first part of that counter-sign proposal somewhere, and again, just like the blockchain, the recipient would be able to access the funds. The advantage of course is that it is less obvious, the real issue legally speaking. What you'd need to really lock things down is define your transactions to have an additional two steps: receiver signs an intent to accept, then sender signs the intent. Now transactions are forced to be interactive. In any case, Bitcoin can't and never will be able to support this mode of usage because it will always support non-interactive transactions.

The problem with both of these examples is that there is nothing tying the funds to my organization. In the first case, even if the key was only shared between the two of us and hadn't been posted on a public forum, ownership is still joint--we both have the key. In the second case, everyone has access. I presumably have a list of accounts which belong to the organization, and neither of these is on it. They are indistinguishable from any other anonymous Bitcoin account. The issue is money suddenly and inexplicably showing up in an account known to be associated with the organization, and which the organization needs to account for. Unwanted access to accounts created by others is a separate matter.

If you ran a business, and someone made a sizable anonymous deposit into your business's general fund, don't you think that would result in a lot of extra paperwork? The lack of payee endorsement when funds are transferred between Bitcoin addresses makes that easy to pull off. And what about the idea of "tainted" coins? I don't approve of it myself, but others do, and there is currently no way to prevent "tained" coins from being mixed in with your "clean" ones. You could easily end up party to an investigation just because someone decided to lay a false trail by transferring funds to your addresses.

Even better, I just took that money (which was at 1BgGZ9tcN4rm9KBzDn7KprQz87SZ26SAMH) and moved it to 3MaB7QVq3k4pQx3BhsvEADgzQonLSBwMdj, which is a P2SH address that can be redeemed by anybody using the script OP_TRUE. So I just sent everybody in the universe money, and they can't refuse it!

The existence of Bitcoin may change the way people think about how money is owned (since money can be jointly owned in interesting ways with multisig or even more exotic scripts), and it might take a while for law/courts/society to adapt. Interesting to see it slowly happen bit by bit, in ways like this story tells.

No, that is incorrect. The funds are transferred as soon as the transaction is signed by the payer and included in the block chain. At that point the first transaction is "complete" in that the payee controls the funds, not the payer. The payee can choose to ignore the transaction, of course, given a suitably modified client, but so far as Bitcoin is concerned, those Bitcoins belong to the payee whether the payee wants them or not.

In the latter case--for example, if the payee cannot legally accept the funds--there needs to be a way to either ensure the transfer does not take place, or to reliably and provably return the funds to the actual payer (which may not be the same as the originating address); otherwise the payee is left with more Bitcoins under their control than they can legitimately account for, which is sure to cause problems in the event of an audit.


I agree that the courts need to understand the issue, but involuntarily receiving the key to an account created by someone else is not really the same as being unable to prevent funds from being deposited into your own account. For one thing, importing and using a private key from an external source is a deliberate act, but users do not generally get to pick and choose which transactions to use as inputs among their existing accounts; all unspent outputs which the client has a key for are candidates when sending funds.

I e-mailed him to inform him about our policy update along with general Bitcoin information.

I concur,

why not show the amount as pending when you revive it and than make a transaction of a view random cents back to your customer with you website as message like 4K7ut3 or something. The exact amount of cents and the message are required to get the BTC.

Scammers would have a hard time explaining their victims why hey need that info. And no BTC history on the Bank account.

Yes, refuse incoming payments from new customers without the message.

The text message is available to us at the same time as the transfer is visible.