Topic: Mike Hearn, Foundation's Law & Policy Chair, is pushing blacklists right now - page 19. (Read 84410 times)

His urge to react to Dark Wallet thread(-d+t?) compared to his urge to defend his ideas here sure looks dubious.
I sure hope silence can be explained because he's preparing a sensitive plea.

And not because he's trying to find who, in holy BF, leaked this...

What's his game plan then? He hoping to be the admin of this central redlisting service with a nice little 'coin cleaning' service fee directly payable to his wallet?

Not the first time Mike Hearn has broached this topic.

Gregory Maxwell gets it the Foundation should be nothing more than a privately funded public lobby and leave development to the community.

Oh silly Mike Hearn, what a terrible, terrible idea.

By even floating this in a serious way, you have instantly lost all respect from the community and singlehandedly damaged the Foundation's reputation, probably beyond repair.

Suffice it to say I will not be entertaining any future suggestions from Mr. Hearn, nor will I be supporting the Foundation in any way, shape or form.

10+ years ago I went to Peru to go kite surfing with a friend.  We got searched on the way home.  Nothing was found of course.  For this travel I got "redlisted".   At that point, I had traveled internationally exactly twice in 20 years.  This "redlisting" meant I was unable to use curbside checkin.  And a manager had to be called during every normal checkin -- he would show up eventually and clickety-click for another 5 minutes sometimes talking on the phone before letting me through.  My bags would be searched EVERY TIME.  This went on for YEARS.  Even when I traveled with my wife and 2 young children.



FOR YEARS



Finally, when Congress forced the TSA to clean up the list due to searches of 12 year old girls, etc this treatment magically disappeared.  I am an American citizen, and not recently arrived.  One of my ancestors founded a town in eastern Massachusetts.


There is no possible way Bitcoin will survive redlisting.  Redlisted coins will RARELY be cleared.  Its easy to redlist someone/something, but its a career ending move to clear the wrong person.

A hidden, secret NSA redlist is not good and we should use technologies to promote fungibility... the Snowden revelations have shown that our constitutional rights need to be enforced via technology because they are not being enforced by due process.

But a notice appearing in your wallet is death to Bitcoin.  (Judge asks: surely you SAW the notice why did you ignore it).  It is ILLEGAL to knowingly spend stolen money, buy stolen goods, etc.  If the wallet says the money is stolen and you spend it you are an accessory (IANAL).  And a notice is a very small step away from automatic enforcement.

Of course Bitcoin will instantly fork.  But the existence the "blessed" version will encourage lawmakers to make the other one illegal (or exchanges illegal anyway).


P.S.  I think Mike Hearn must have sold :-) he's looking for a good entry point

That still hurts fungibility;
- http://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fungibility.asp

You mean value the tainted ones more? I suppose that's possible, but I have little confidence that would happen. You'd need a majority/large group of people but most will want to be "clean".

Yes but others may value non-ID'd bitcoins more than ID'd ones, and reject the ones that have been ID'd. It cuts both ways. It's just another market dynamic, consistent with bitcoin's freedom and decentralization.

Okay, let me rephrase it. Any measure that causes a person to view some coins as more or less legal/suspect than others.


Whatever the end unit it will have a discounted market price. There is high probability some people will value it less or reject it entirely, which inhibits its ability to function as money. People will start demanding wallets that filter/reject such coins; the more people do this the less value any of those units have, regardless to whether the spender/holder is a crook or not. It's the acceptance spiral of value Bitcoin is now experiencing done backwards. That's how money works.

Wait,

This whole gig was supposed to be decentralized and free so boardroom bastards couldn't apply stupid idea's like this. Did I miss the email that said we changed all that?

+21 million at everything conspirosphere.tk said

Respect!

yes, he does. Burn him at the stake!


Many, if not the most, are into BTC just to be out of the governments' ways. But yes, "they" could track "evil" coins and catch you when you spend them on an exchange or a shop under their control. So ppl will possibly resort to black market transactions only. Or to more anonymous cryptocoins. Whatever it will be, it will be good. The genie is out of the bottle.


NO. Let them do what they want. Like the war on drugs. That worked marvels.
It's time that "the decision makers" are us.


The political scene is a crime scene. Allow me to opt out of it.


if you "oppose" them, you reckon them, implying to legitimate their pwning of you. Can't you see it? Just ignore them and opt out of their control.


everyone is entitled to discuss whatever he wants with everyone until he does not try to represent anyone else without a written mandate.


choose freedom

Any measure that involves treating some coins differently than others.


Any amount. Imagine our dollar system now. Bills are already able to be marked/tracked by serial number. If I hand you a bunch of fivers and one of them has a red "government" line drawn across it you will say, politely, uh no thanks please exchange this one. That's human nature, self interest.

Between two evils I would rather have our dev team working on a system than some shady government agencies who might put in a backdoor
Make the code do what it does and nothing else

How draconian can taxation enforcement policy get when listing is accepted by the Bitcoin community? Imagine refusing to pay the door-opening tax, and getting your life savings blacklisted?

Thanks.
I guess I have to take a closer look at how this really ticks

Just FYI, this isn't a proposal to make any protocol changes.

This is an external system and a UI change.  The goal is to provide a point of contact as close as possible to an event that may require investigation.  If someone pays a ransom, for example, they can provide details to the service.  The service tracks those coins, and hopes that they end up in the wallet of someone that subscribes to the service and cares.  Now if law enforcement is investigating the ransom event, they can go talk to that person and ask them where they came from, possibly tracking back to the criminal.

Doesn't seem quite as sinister in those terms, does it?

Now consider the reality of today.  The NSA sees all and hears all.  Some major incident has a bitcoin connection, and they track the coins moving around from key to key.  Eventually they land in a wallet that the NSA knows is owned by a US company.  A national security letter shows up, ordering the company to divulge the info on that transaction.  The FBI starts watching the customer involved, and eventually raids their home and/or arrests them, and the interrogation reveals basically the same information that could have been provided by a volunteer in the other scenario, just in a much less civilized way.

The notion of coins becoming tainted by their history is silly, just as silly as dollars becoming tainted by the drug deals they've been through.  But don't fool yourself into thinking that there won't be a lot of time and effort put into tracking important coins just the same.  How long do you think it will take for judges to come around to bitcoin?  How many silly warrants are going to be signed until then?  How many innocent people are going to meet the SWAT team along the way?