Topic: Mike Hearn, Foundation's Law & Policy Chair, is pushing blacklists right now - page 16. (Read 84410 times)

Come on... Ransomwares are old story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS_%28trojan_horse%29

Seriously, this is just anecdotal.

So it's a very serious problem which I think people on this forum are underestimating. Cryptolocker could destroy Bitcoin just like the blacklist can.

Ok, re-reading it more calmly Mike isn't proposing it or taking any stance he's looking for ideas on any aspect of it. It already exists, it can be done using the just the blockchain so I'd guess discussion should be as much about possible ways of preventing tracking as about ways of implementing it. That works both ways, making it hard for a government to track coins and extort 50% of your holdings also makes it hard to track the those extorting coins out of the little old granny with cryptolocker. That makes it a lot bigger issue than it seems, tracking can already be done but for now its restricted to specialists.

It doesn't matter who creates the list.  If the list is trusted by enough people, and governments mandate that businesses register or only accept from "verified" bitcoins on some approved list, then you get the same thing.  Again, it doesn't matter if everyone's complaining prevents the Foundation from implementing something like this, because there's really nothing that can be done to prevent somebody from doing it and from governments from legislating for it.

I agree with the use of the Bitcoin identity protocol. That should be what they push and not this coin taint stuff.

Its different. If a average joe creates such a list on its server it doesnt matter. But if the bitcoin foundation changes the official wallet and shows tainted coins it will have a bad effect.

Countries A,B,C,D are adversaries. A steady stream of tainted coins flows from adversaries to neutral countries who then spend them back to adversaries who have little choice but to consider them whitelisted just through the nature of separation. Run simulations through your mind.

That steady global stream should be plenty enough to keep the bloodhounds occupied for a long, long while.

Pot is legal in how many countries? Well guess where the green coins are flowing? Those countries deal with neighbors. Those neighbors, willing to whitelist

For something truly despicable? Maybe some international cooperation that would be just as transparent to individuals as it is to government, no hiding for the hiders with bitcoin.

Have there not been many debates since bitcoin has been traded about individuals following the chain? It is inevitable as has been mentioned above. Throw government a bone, you know they are going to take it anyway.

Global government because of bitcoin? BRING IT. The entire world would be the audience every single step of the way with cooperation, survival and sustainability regulated transparently and malintent identified and crushed.

Or am I hallucinating?

my amature opinion - everything is a buying opportunity even if the price just flattens out...

I opened a new topic on the Bitcoin Foundation's forum:

Deep concern about the foundation's chairman of Law and Policy (Mike Hearn) pushing for coin taint

Me, and many others in the bitcoin community are deeply concerned about Mike Hearn pushing for coin taint.  We feel that if the Bitcoin Foundation is even going to consider mentioning this in the upcoming government meeting, that we can no longer stand behind them.  This is serious.  Coin taint is even worse than increasing the 21 million limit.  Since the chairman of Law and Policy is involved here, I would like to call for a vote against this, and a clear stance from the Bitcoin Foundation.  I know many of the board members are supporters of mixing coins even more, so something like this can never happen again.  It would be a good message to the bitcoin community to confirm that the foundation supports keeping coins anonymous, instead of going in the opposite direction.

Well, education in good practices using computers and the internet is the best solution to ransomware. It's never happened to me.

Stolen funds can be very effectively dealt with by encouraging a culture of well designed hardware wallets. This increases the required sophistication of an effective attack enormously, a talented hacker would have to work hard, and any successful efforts would only be useful against a single hardware wallet firmware (which should be update capable to fix any exploitable bugs).

Merchants that choose to insist on linking purchases to an identity can use the future Bitcoin Identity Protocol to do so. These ID's could be the most powerful identity information tool conceived, and when I say that, I mean powerful to the user, not to those that want to track your identity. Whole other topic, but I am impressed by the proposed scheme.

Mike Hearn knows and explicitly advocates for all these approaches, apart possibly from the solution to ransomware, but who could honestly say don't endorse that.

What can they do?  There's not much anyone can do about things like this.  As Carlton has already pointed out, this isn't a protocol change.  Tracking coins and creating whitelists/blacklists/redlists/bluelists is possible and open for anyone to do due to bitcoin's (and all other cryptocoins) design.

All previous addresses that received the coin are listed on the public blockchain ledger.  From what was said I believe Coin Validation plans to look at the history of the addresses associated with coins.  If your coin was used 10 transactions ago by a silk road user, (eg seen entering the silk road address) then likely implications are you will not be able to spend your coin on any site using their system.

They hope it will be viral, ie because you dont want to hold coins you cant spend, you may also refuse to accept coins they do not white list.  Having them validate your coins will not be free and the uncertainty arising from not knowing if your coins will suddenly become less spendable will create fungibility problems.

There are costs associated with the fraud tracing validation, blacklisting and payment revocation.  eg its bad for merchants too, they cant rely on receiving money they can spend themselves.  This is why credit cards are expensive for merchants (3-5% + 30c).  This is one thing that makes bitcoin attractive for merchants and users - the fees are close to zero in comparison.  Coin blacklist/whitelistng (just different names for the same trend) damage the underlying  irrevocability which enables low cost transactions, and pulls bitcoins transaction cost up towards credit cards and paypal.

The problem is when fungibility degrades because everyone is mutually scared of accepting blacklisted coins the utility of the coin goes down, the cost of using the currency goes up and so its price falls.  It might literally collapse if the feedback loop picks up momentum as people sell non-white listed coins at steeper discounts in a race to the door.

This makes as much sense as a $100 note in your pocket disabling itself because 10 previous holders ago, someone stole it from a convenience store.

Someone posted on reddit about a 17th centur scottish court case (cant find the link now), where a bank was able to prevent legislation that would've had that implication - if you're left holding a stolen note, you lose it.  The court rejected the case based on the argument that doing so would be unfair and also destroy the fungibility and value of the currency.  Coin Validation want to reopen that 17th century mistaken (but defeated) court case.

Adam

mikes idea is not acceptable of course. it will be interesting so see, what the devs of Litecoin will do...

It's all just a bluff. Hearn is just going there testifying that he can serve bitcoin up on a platter for the sitting mob to control and manipulate... and they will believe it... and they'll finally feast on some of the lies they've been serving up forever... consider it a vision.

I opened a new topic on the Bitcoin Foundation's forum:

Deep concern about the foundation's chairman of Law and Policy (Mike Hearn) pushing for coin taint

Me, and many others in the bitcoin community are deeply concerned about Mike Hearn pushing for coin taint.  We feel that if the Bitcoin Foundation is even going to consider mentioning this in the upcoming government meeting, that we can no longer stand behind them.  This is serious.  Coin taint is even worse than increasing the 21 million limit.  Since the chairman of Law and Policy is involved here, I would like to call for a vote against this, and a clear stance from the Bitcoin Foundation.  I know many of the board members are supporters of mixing coins even more, so something like this can never happen again.  It would be a good message to the bitcoin community to confirm that the foundation supports keeping coins anonymous, instead of going in the opposite direction.

I'm disappointed that Mike Hearn would advocate for the use of blacklists, tainting and reduced fungibility of bitcoin . As one of the significant members of the The Bitcoin Foundation, he has the ability to make this kind of scheme a reality. For someone who just went on a rant against the NSA for violating Google's privacy, this kind of betrayal of the bitcoin user's privacy is really heinous. Who will dictate what constitutes a crime? Who will dictate when a bitcoin will no longer be listed? I doubt that he's given much thought to such questions beyond "whatever the police say", which, in this current political climate, is a very ignorant stance. I suggest those who want to keep bitcoin a viable and fungible currency let Mr. Hearn and all of the The Bitcoin Foundation members know that this idea should not be implemented and produce policy positions rejecting it.

Why are those who claim to be protecting free markets so passionate about shutting down the experimentation of other parties? What is the problem with private companies compiling publicly available information and voluntary contracts? Again, this doesn't involve any change to the bitcoin code whatosever. The witch-hunt mentality seems more consistent with totalitarian tendencies than free markets.