Topic: Mike Hearn, Foundation's Law & Policy Chair, is pushing blacklists right now - page 17. (Read 84366 times)

Your premise is flawed. You imagine you can stop crime by regulating a tool. You can't.

Money is a tool. Guns are a tool. Neither of them commit crimes. People do.

Criminals intent on some action will find a way to carry it out, whether or not guns are banned, or whether or not there is KYC/AML in place. You can't completely protect yourself from terrorists and criminals unless you give away all your freedom to those that will protect you. Then it becomes pretty easy for protectors to fight terrorists (any real or made up). The problem is it also becomes easy for them to fight and limit you to keep/increase their power.

If you want to stop/limit crime look at the economic conditions, psychological conditions etc. that lead to it and work from there, while also taking steps to protect yourself. Same for terrorism. Look at which political ideologies aggravate it. You don't go after the tools and freedom and crack down on everyone with one gigantic suffocating dragnet. It's a bit like killing a flea with a sledge hammer. You'll get collateral damage.

It's not a protocol change, not a client change, not a wallet change etc etc

If you must look at it this way, then this is happening because the software is remaining exactly as it is, not because of any change. Public transactions in the blockchain are being used as a tool against us.

molecular said:

Mike said :

If the quotes are correct, and if molecular is correct, what does it mean?
That we'd have to upload ID and bills to errr... The Foundation ? for verification, before we can even use a wallet?

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

I need to find the London video where I told him exactly this would happen and he was like ,
"Nooooooo that won't happen!"

Remember that there are shades of gray for this issue as well. A redlist for highly tainted hot coins is not the same as expanding the redlist to include tainted coins in general. Hot coins have already been blacklisted by exchange before - for a while at least. I don't like the idea of a redlist but it's not like I would love to receive really hot coins from someone.

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.

Nice troll Mike ... now cut it out and get back to your real job, these high bitcoin prices must have given you too much time on your hands?

Me too. In fact I just did.

nail .. head .. ....

Schindler had a list.

Hearns suggestion for discussion is to use those redlists against cryptolocker. What to we do to make redlisting against cryptolocker ransomware criminals obsolete, then? Improve Windows security?!?

BF must be terminated asap.

Why wait? That fact that this is being advocated, whether for the protocol, for wallets, or for third-party "validation" companies (talk about doublespeak) is proof enough that the very possibility of this needs to die, right now. I'll certainly direct whatever I can, including my coins, toward any development that ends this talk of "redlisting."

This actually has me willing to donate to Dark Wallet.

I don't have the background so I ask - what if we use a Mastercoin Exodus like concept so we can migrate in another coin with desirable features? Anyone who wants can send his coins so he will not lose anything and we start from ground zero.

Not sure about the mining issue here (maybe use PoW?) and if the pseudonymous/tainted coins send to the 'Exodus' address will continue to haunt you.

He can't be. He's a smart guy. I think maybe...

I'm sorry to insist, but could anyone explain to dumb Kouye how redlisting coins, as Mike presented it, could help against ransomwares?

I don't see any problem with the "privately funded public lobby" kicking some funding to development. ... even if, because various political pressures, they can only fund work which is "boring" in certain respects. There is a lot of boring work to get done. All that means that the question of supporting development is not answered by just the foundation.

I think Bitcoin is and must be a big tent that calls to people of all sorts of motivations and politics. We should welcome the confused people who think that privacy is bad to also use our money, but at the same time we should take care of our own values and make sure that their use of Bitcoin doesn't take away the freedom of others who do not share their politics.

The essence of crypto-anarchism is that one does not generally need to fight oppressive systems of social organization directly, instead we use technology to make those modes of organization obsolete. Regulation serves a useful purpose, but it often comes with very high (often indirect) costs: The crypto-anarchist says: One does not need to regulate a bank which cannot steal, and in that statement we side-step a bunch of political mess... we don't need to debate the harms proposed regulation creates when we can use technology to provide the benefits without it.  If too much of the Bitcoin ecosystem continues to rely on trusted systems we will be unable to resist being reshaped in the mold of the centralized systems which came before.

I'm not sure I agree, in two respects:

First, systems with absolute fungiblilty have significant technical costs— including the risk that the bleeding edge crypto behind them is inescure— which probably remove their viability for the time being. Heck. Until two weeks ago we were down to under 4000 reliably reachable bitcoin full nodes (we're up to maybe 5500 now), from over 40k at the peak people have moved to web-wallets and thin clients: It's not clear that _Bitcoin_ is technically viable in the long run, some system with substantially higher operating costs probably isn't.

Second, I don't think we need absolute fungibility to thoroughly break efforts to destroy Bitcoin's fungiblity. We just need enough of it embedded in the common practices to make efforts to break the fungibility swimming up stream every step of the way.  Some regulation paranoid bitcoin business will willingly lose 10% of their customers to some stupid blacklisting, but they won't tolerate 95% loss. From things like coinjoin and miners depriortizing address reuse we can make things substantially more private and harder to blacklist/whitelist without scraping the system and replacing it with a much more operationally expensive one.

Didn't you read what he proposed: you can wash your bills clean by registering your identity.

NOT proposed as an addition to the client/wallet software and to the protocol.

That's what makes this very backdoor and insidious in it's approach, the idea is to start a third party database of various coloured lists, and not to add this information to the blockchain, or make it interact with the client through an API.

If you send dirty money to someone who checks the lists, they can notify the listing agency, and legitimately refuse to furnish whatever good, service or debt absolution you were seeking from them.