Topic: If MtGox can ident the Bitcoins, why not fix it? - page 2. (Read 11621 times)

Oh, bold and red font.. Must be legit.

You should realize that this means all BTC you own and all the gains you accrue can be clawed back from you in the future.

Theft of BTC is very widespread even without the exchanges and with the Mt.Gox fiasco (and more to come because the government + banks can bankrupt all the exchanges with regulations, fines, placing holds on funds, etc, or even send in secret agencies to steal the keys).

For those readers trying to rationalize away the contract between accounts holders and Mt.Gox, you have no legal standing. Bitcoin is not legal tender. So many governments have spoken on this already and declared it to be a commodity. Clearly we are looking at a big legal mess with Bitcoin which the government is going to have to solve holistically. Now you see I was correct from the very beginning in Bitcoin : The Digital Kill Switch.

All you Bitcoin millionaires are going to be Bitcoin jailbirds and destitute.

For those who are rationalizing away the chain of ownership (I explained upthread) due to that the lack of physical nature to Bitcoin, you don't have any chance of winning that argument. If it wasn't owned, it wouldn't have value that can be exchanged. Even if we are trading fungible tokens in a pool, the tokens are still owned. Cripes, are you guys totally ingenuous or ignorant.

The 744,408 Bitcoins left via many one-of-a-doubled transaction so one or both of those illegal transactions point to an address that was controlled by computer, whether private or public, that left an identifying trail with regard to the date and time location and perhaps right down to the MAC address of the corresponding machine(s) and even if effected using TOR it would be a question of tracking that would be technically possible - caveat that's my opinion.

Paragraph 2 - good ideas.

Paragraph 3 -yes, the idea was suggested by the Japanese this morning.  Their suggestion should be given more than typical weight given that perhaps the MtGox location in Japan and Bitcoin itself posed as a creation of a Japanese whether true or not both of which lent to MtGox a higher potential trust by depositors.  I point to the quality of US automobiles versus Japanese automobiles as helping to form opinion.  If MtGox was posed as developed and financed by a Wall Street broker or brokerage house the public trust of it would be quite different.

Who is saying any of this?

You are addressing the right of Bitcoin to exist.  I do not dispute the right of Bitcoin to exist.  I do not accept that the Bitcoin economy has a "right" to promote or facilitate criminal activity be it theft of Bitcoins from MtGox or movement of profits from of illegal drug sales out of the country or as that muckraking US official said at the Senate hearings, to be used to buy and sell children.

Why do you believe that to be so? A bitcoin isn't a thing, and it doesn't have a unique identifier. The general use over time of Bitcoin it it's own mixing service; by the time any court orders are issued to seize the Bitcoins withdrawn from Gox they most likely won't just be sitting around in some wallet. They'll be distributed in small fractions in a huge number of wallets of a correspondingly large number of people.

Again, even if you came up with enough consensus to get the Bitcoin protocol changed to allow the invalidation of coins and reissuing those sums to people who say they had them stolen, how do you decide what coins to take? Do you just based on a percentage of taint? What do you do when you successfully get your X Bitcoins taken back from people who had previously withdrawn them from Gox, and then they in turn have to sue you in Bitcoin Court because after all, most of them were probably just people who'd deposited in Gox and now are out their coins, same as you were.

Besides the technical challenges, who do you propose runs this court that you want to get everyone to agree on? The US Government? The Japanese? The Bitcoin Foundation? Some kind of consensus voting through the blockchain? The biggest draw of Bitcoin is that there isn't a central despot who can unilaterally choose monetary policy.

This doesn't make sense and I don't think any court will hold this. Imagine if they did this for dollars and the guy who holds "your" bills just withdrew them from an ATM. The bank would not have delivered "title" to the money, and so the bank would be liable to the guy who withdrew. This would make modern banking essentially impossible. See, for example, SEC v. Better Life Club of America. I don't see recission theories working either, since they don't apply against innocent third parties either, just counterparties.

Whether coins have numbers or rfid is not relevant in any way: this is exactly what I was trying to show by modifying the mugger-example... With most things property ownership is the most important value so your expectation holds: you get the exact stolen item back even if it means that later trades that were made with best intentions have to be canceled. The crucial exception is money and several things like it: When money is stolen, your property rights are _not_ the most important thing, security of transactions is the most important thing. This means if the mugger used your money to buy things at the store, you cannot get that money from the store: you need to get the mugger to give you the same amount of money instead.

It's possible that bitcoin will be considered a commodity in some court (I wouldn't bet on it), but I really doubt that applies in your situation. MtGox had the bitcoins, not you.

Those are general clauses listed in the preamble - they give no power. You should be looking at Article I, Section 8. The Federal government has only the enumerated powers expressed here and like a few others. The Federal government is also not granted a monopoly on currency, nor the power to forbid others from making currency, or using other currencies, or to require that private currencies are made according to certain rules. In fact, it only has the power to coin money from gold and silver (which never was traceable) - what you call the "dollar" is a counterfeit irredeemable paper ticket (i.e., a bill of credit). It is illegal for the federal government to issue bills of credit. What we call the "dollar" is illegal. So, you may be right that it could be a good idea, but the federal government just doesn't have the authority to do it - unless it could somehow put serial numbers on gold and silver coins, which would be very difficult, but not necessarily uncoinstitutional.

Hard to believe I am talking to someone on Bitcointalk who does not understand this already.

Years ago I took a course on computers part of which included doing the math that an 8088 processor did in its process.  Then they explained how those processes changed with larger processors.  One could get a sense of the incredible depth of the machine process.  On a similar vein I looked into network management protocol.  It's empirical and the tree starts with the DOD, which makes sense as the internet started as a US department of defense information sharing network.  Every motherboard ID, every video card ID, every ethernet MAC address is part of that tree.  It was apparent that identifying information of all kinds was being crunched within the CPUs and as a result is part of any contact with the internet.  Can I do the math of a quad core Intel processor?  No.  Can every satoshi of those missing Bitcoins be traced?  I'd bet that would be a yes. 

duties of the US government:  establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity

Making money 'trackable' is good business and makes sense and would probably come under the first three of the above.  If it didn't make sense Las Vegas would have left their casino chips untraceable but no, they realize the RFID identification and tracking of casino chips makes good sense for them and offers a level of protection they need.

You can to some extent, its still nearly impossible in most cases. If someone robs a bank you can trace where it was spent.

My other point was: "So what that it can't be traced?" Why should the government have to be able to trace money? Why should they even have the power to do so? At one time, there were many different currencies floating around, including gold and silver coinage which could not be traced. Just because something can be done doesn't mean that it should be done or that doing so is legit. Government requiring money to be traceable isn't legit.

We need to change the system back to the way it was prior to the government trying to track everything. Its not a fault of bitcoin, it is a feature that it can be difficult to trace.

Cash you can, since each bill has a serial number.

My understanding is that it's more like water. In my example, when the first guy sends 1.5L(BTC) to 1AAAAA, that address now has a bucket of water with 1.5L in it and you can trace the history of that bucket. When I send 2L there, 1AAAAA now has two buckets of water, each with individual histories. When 1AAAAA spends that water to someone else, he's pouring 3L into a new bucket for 1BBBBB and 0.5L into a new bucket for 1CCCCCC. You can tell that those two new buckets were made from the output of the two input buckets, but you have no way to say what water in 1BBBBB or 1CCCCC's buckets came from which input from 1AAAAA.

With more complicated with more inputs and outputs. If Gox did a transaction with 20 inputs (one of which are your coins), and 100 outputs, which of those 100 outputs are yours? Who can you go before the judge and say "that guy got my money"?

I don't see why it is an issue. You can't trace cash either - you couldn't trace any money prior to electronic payments.

I'll post this again here, as the general discussion on this goes against my understanding of how Bitcoin works.
"If you send 1.5BTC to 1AAAAA... and I later send 2BTC there, when the owner of that key later sends 3BTC to 1BBBBB... and 0.5BTC is change to 1CCCCC, which Bitcoins are yours and which are mine?"

AFAIK, there is no chain of possession of any individual Bitcoins, there are only transactions for amounts from inputs to outputs. If you deposited at Gox and those Bitcoin went into a cold wallet (without a separate key for every transaction), even if you contend that the Bitcoin is still yours and you don't just have a promissory note I don't believe establishing a chain of custody is possible in the physical way that some here are suggesting.
Please correct me if I'm wrong on this.

I hope readers can start to comprehend why coin taint is the most serious Achilles heel of Bitcoin.

On Friday, 2 BTC were stolen from me. I am considering reporting this to law enforcement. This means that anyone who receives BTC which derives from my stolen 2 BTC will be liable to return them back to me.

Perhaps the thief pushed them through a mixer such as Bigcoinfog.com

Thus that mixer will be liable to provide records. If it can't, then it will be liable for the 2 BTC.

So you can't you see you are playing with fire by mixing your coins through a centralized mixer.

And can't you see that without widespread anonymity (and decentralized mixers!), then crypto-currency is absolutely useless except to a government which wants a ledger from hell to track everything.

Cant believe this stupid thread is still alive !

MtGox has an internal record? really?? and how am I to believe such a record has not been tampered with or generated two days back? ?

We really need a Like button.

Not sure what the demo dat rule is.  Perhaps that there is a uniqueness to the stolen property?  I see that dollars have serial numbers and now so do casino chips.  So if the demo dat rule doesn't apply to seralized numbered dollars it doesn't apply to casino chips even tho now they have rfid tags internally (saw it on CSI used as evidence) so maybe the demo dat rule does apply to serialized numbered dollars.  It likely applies to serialized numbered dollars having been marked with an explosive dye pack from a bank robbery.

Coins get spent into Mt. Gox's pool, so there is clear chain of collective ownership of the pool.


This depends on the contract with Mt.Gox. Most banks have a clause which says that deposits are unsecured creditors and not allocated nor unallocated storage. Whereas most other vaults/accounts in the world are allocated or unallocated storage.

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http://dollarvigilante.com/blog/2013/11/04/plans-in-place-for-a-us-bank-bail-in.html


Mt.Gox was not a bank. Did they have a banking license to take deposits? I don't think so.


Not any more! Read what I quoted above. Now the banks can give you worthless equity in the bank instead.


That depends on the contract Mt.Gox had with its account holders. In any case, the court can apply the demo dat rule on behalf of Mt.Gox.

A copy of the Terms of Service is available on way back archive. Looks like you made the wrong assumption:

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Because the government needs for legal tender and checks to be fungible, as it is the government's (i.e. banksters') money and banking system. And very rich (banks) need the casinos to launder their drug money (did you forget about HSBC recently).

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Bullshit. It is quite clear a judge will rule that Bitcoins are property and not creditors to Mt.Gox.

At least do some research before you spout off your often wrong mouth.