Topic: Mike Hearn, Foundation's Law & Policy Chair, is pushing blacklists right now - page 12. (Read 84386 times)

Really scary what seems to be popping up lately ... with the "Coin Validation" crap and now this.  Makes me really glad I didn't join the foundation.  Really looking forward to Dark Wallet and mature CoinJoin implementations!

Besides all that, I really believe such systems wouldn't work; what if I had a "white-listed" address tied to my identity and bought some discouraged things or services with it?  "Oops, someone must have stolen my private key.  Didn't look at my saving wallet for some time, so thanks for pointing it out to me.  Really sorry for all the rest of my nice coins in there!  Damn hard to secure your system it seems."

Coin Validation strikes to the heart of what Bitcoin is and that is who really owns your money/coins/assets.  The Bitcoin method which is anathema to the modern financial system requires no third party to validate your ownership rights.  It can be said that with such validation you don't truly own your money/coins/assets which benefits the current money controllers elite at the expense of users.  This proposal is a veiled attempt disguised as crime prevention to bring Bitcoin back down into the current system.  Not a surprise.  Bitcoin is either a monetary revolution or a ponzi trading card fad.  If it is a revolution then it is simply incompatible with the old system.  Jim Crow laws were separate but equal too.  I guess colored coins is an appropriate moniker then.

How would you feel not if but when this happens to you?

You saved up about 1,000 BTC.  One day, a group of local police shows up on your door.  Mr Richy, we looked into  your BTC Transaction history and learned that you have 0.00001 BTC from the Pizza heist.  We are here to serve the search warrant to take all of your computers, smartphones, tablets and external drives and even the PS4 game unit.  Oh, by the way, we seized your BTC Wallet Address for further investigation.  We will let you know when you can claim your stuff back.  

(not to be mean, but please expect about a year or two of the wait.  By the way, we will send you a Tax Due Letter on your Total Bitcoin Value.  You can come up with all the transaction logs and may be able to claim some tax deduction, but you need to hire an accountant to do that.  Have a nice day!  Oh....  Sorry, that Toyota parked in front of your house, we are impounding that car because it appeares that you paid a portion of that car with the BTC Wallet that had a tainted BTC fro the Pizza Heist, so when you prove you didn't do the heist, you can come to the police station to get your car back, ut until then, your car is held by the POLICE.)

Oh, one more thing, we only accept cash for the impound fee from you because we seized your local bank account and the stock trading account and the retirement accounts because your wallet had the tainted BTC and therefore, we suspect you committed the financial crimes.  )

A week later, you'll get a few phone calls from the criminal defense lawers trying to sell you their service but ask for Cash or some discount via BTC.  You retain them with $25,000 USD.  3 months later you get everything released to you except the computers, tablets, cellphones and the hard drives.  By then attended a few court hearings and legal bill exceeded $80,000 USD.

After $150,000 USD later, you were offered a petty offense/crime deal for possessing the portion of the stolen coin.  2 years of probation/supervisory release.  Have to attend meetings, piss in the cups, blow in the tube every few days, work in the chain-gang for a few weeks.

A few years later, at your son's wedding reception, he apologize you for borrowing his BTC account to view some porn and he returned 0.1 BTC he used to pay for the porn site, he made enough BTC via ads clicking/BTC Faucent and paid him back with some interest.  Dad, than you for not giving me up to the police for borrowing your BTC for a few months.

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Or a mom with 3 little kids at a local Walmart buying some milk and cheese.  She sees and hear another young mother trying to buy food in the next cash register was short of $20.  Nice lady helps this poor mom, in return she was offered 0.1 BTC just for helping her out at the cash register.  Exchange the coins at the register via smartphones.

3 months later, big bangs go off in and outside of your home at 5:45AM in the quiet middle class neighborhood.  You could her dogs barking and loud voice saying Federal Agents/Police.  Someone is running into your bedroom while you are butt naked, ordering you to drop on the floor and hands above your head.  Male Officers pat you down and handcuffs you naked while your kids crying.  After everyone looked at you naked, you could hear them screaming where is the computers? (You don't own any computers & anything close to it would be just 1 Samsung Galaxy.)

You were receiving the child support or out-of-court agreed monthly child support via BTC from the father of 3 children.  Police takes your cellphones.  Seize your BTC Wallet Address, and you get charged associated with a 4.1 Millions Doller theft from one of the Chinese Exchange Market.  Police said 2 BTC you received last month from your EX was traced back to the Exchange Heist in Hong Kong and you were investigated for possessing and using the stolen BTC (RED LISTED BTC.)

May not happen this way, but just a thought...

It's difficult with such a long thread too see the full context of everyone's comments.

I really liked the example of DPR's stolen coins.  Indeed, some people will feel that taking someone's coins by force is significantly worse than providing a useful (albeit illegal) service to consenting individuals.  So there is really no sensible and universal way to black/white/red list.

If you even have to do this in some jurisdictions, then Bitcoin has lost its fungibility, which is harmful to the value of all bitcoins in all countries.

I must've missed the "don't accept" button in the client that rejects unknown transactions.

Oh, wait...

Also, if the matter is serious enough, they won't be asking your permission to come in, and their only knock will leave your front door on the floor of your front hallway.  Please go read my first post in this thread.


It turns out that privacy and security are hard.  I believe that a couple of guys are rotting in holding cells right now because they couldn't get privacy right, and they had very good reasons to try, what with every law enforcement agency in the world trying to find them and all.  And unless you are collecting bitcoins to swim through like Scrooge McDuck, there will always be a link back to you.

Exactly

Two consenting humans trading $ for BTC is shady??

There is something wrong with playing Satoshi Dice???

This outlines one problem with white/black/red lists.  They require moral judgements that are culture-dependent instead of universal.

Whether they have a warrant or not, these days they will invariably be a SWAT team who will break down your door instead of knocking. Either you end up with your face on the floor and some asshole's knee in your back as they ransack your house, or you get machine gunned because one of them thought you might have had a gun. Either way, if you have a dog, it gets shot.

Don't underestimate the irrationality of the federal government. They could always then claim everyone using Bitcoins which are tainted are guilty of a crime and then force everyone to use freshly mined coins or coin which have been purchased in a clean way with KYC etc.

To keep bitcoins fungible and valuable everyone with a stake in bitcoin should accept and redistribute tainted coins as much as possible, e.g. using CoinJoin. When everything is tainted, nothing is.

If I sell something and accept redlisted coins for it, then the bread crumb trail leads to me. I sure as hell wouldn't accept coins that could lead law enforcement to my doorstep, and nobody else wants law enforcement harassing them because they're suspected of being the person who illicitly gained the coins. Therefore, everyone will refuse to accept redlisted coins as soon as law enforcement starts getting search warrants against people who end up with them.

Its called Bitcoin, not USAcoin.

We can't. But we can do what we can to protect privacy and security of the user. We can make all lists voluntary. Part of that means we have to keep pseudo-anonymity because without that anyone who doesn't like you from anywhere on the Internet could put you on a "scam" or "hack' list. Law enforcement is no better and they could target people for political reasons like with Aaron Swartz.


if an intelligence agency wanted to hack Bitcoin they could infiltrate with malware. Why would they even have to make it known? They might always have backdoors. I'm sure if you're using closed source Windows that there could be a backdoor since you didn't inspect every line of code and can't trust Microsoft.

Bitcoin could be infiltrated upon compilation. It's not really possible to stop the NSA when you're using pre-compiled software. If you compile it yourself then you have to trust the source. This is why Linux repositories have public keys.

We probably need something like this for Bitcoin service businesses too. If you deal with a business in a trusted network then you're alright. If you take your chances then your take your chances. And the list should be compiled by the community of which businesses to trust and why.

And no we wont agree on who makes each list. There will probably be lists of different businesses which are trusted by one faction of the community or another for various reasons. Trust is critical and so is reputation for business. I suggest an open wiki.

Yeah, that's how lists work. 

Seriously, how do you expect to prevent other people from making lists?  For all you know, I have a list.  Maybe you are on it now.


If the protocol had a mechanism that prevented spending of listed coins, there would be no point in notifying users.

But first, how would you convince people to use the fork with enforcement?



The bottom line is that right now today, with no changes to anything, if you end up with coins bearing an interesting history, you take the risk of someone becoming interested in you.  You cannot prevent this risk.  You cannot mitigate it.  If you ditch the coins, you are still part of the chain, and you may get a knock on your door from people wondering how they came to you.

Widespread mixing, if and when it arrives, will hopefully muddy the trail of every transaction, maybe even to the point that most investigations become futile.

https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/43e315a525dade2bb23e8071619677caf58ecb381a56019fb740a23bf6a8f211/analysis/

So if we do nothing about security then we cannot even mine without worrying about viruses hidden in the miner. Of course you can be a security snob and say compile it yourself but at some point we need trusted sources.

And no, a really good virus writer wouldn't be caught. It would be undetectable.

Don't forget that Mike Hearn works for G$$gle, which allegedly has close ties to NSA/CIA.
NSA's one known attack vector is to infiltrate protocol development committees and influence their decisions to compromise security.

It's actually on topic, that Chris Larsen is also present at the hearing maybe why Hearn has to practice doublespeak.

Oh no please no more Ripple! Ew!

Or you could rather say: what Ripple implements is just some trivial features that can be done on the Bitcoin network easily.