Topic: Mike Hearn, Foundation's Law & Policy Chair, is pushing blacklists right now - page 4. (Read 84410 times)

You guy really need to read the senate testimony.  Not one law enforcement agency or regulator blamed bitcoin the protocol for anything.

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knuckleheads...

The Task Force, which launched in August, is not solely focussed on child exploitation. It has developed working groups that aim to combat a range of illicit activities, to safeguard human rights and to encourage inter-agency coordination and law enforcement.

The report detailed how criminal and terrorist organisations have turned to digital currency to reap profits from drug trafficking, prostitution and the dissemination of child abuse images.

Steve Rubley, managing director, Government Segment for the Legal business of Thomson Reuters points out that the digital economy provides a plethora of new opportunities and is central to how business is conducted but there are also "dark corners" where drug cartels can easily launder money and human sex traffickers operate in near obscurity.

But I don't find them malicious, just incompetent.

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knuckleheads...

This is fantastic news. I was expecting it for a long time, actually at the Amsterdam conference last week I was talking to a member of the Dutch police who had taken part in a panel, and mentioned I was waiting for DPR to show up in a US court at some point. I didn't think it'd happen a week later, but this outcome was eventually inevitable.

The point I made to Niels (the police guy) was that DPR had way too much confidence in the technologies he was using to keep him safe. I said I understood Tor and Bitcoin very well and there's no way I'd treat either of them as a silver bullet. And that's assuming NO mistakes. I didn't even know how I'd cash out. The best some people listening in could offer was "find someone who would help you cash out that's not an exchange". But where would you find someone capable of sinking non-trivial amounts of Bitcoins for dollars, outside of an exchange?

It's hard to tell from the documents to what extent he cashed out. Perhaps those details will come at trial. But given he was living with flat mates I guess his lifestyle was cheap and he probably didn't ever cash out into dollars in a big way - obviously lacking any fake IDs he didn't have any way to use the exchanges. This is also very good news. It is a strong argument that Bitcoin is not some super trivial way for criminals to make wild profits - despite the huge sums being quoted by the FBI agent, those are theoretical amounts of dollars he could have obtained if he'd had some way to do so, not amounts he actually made (given the tiny size of the Bitcoin economy).

By the way - I'm amazed at how many people are surprised that a drug dealer with extreme anarcho-capitalist tendencies turned out to be not a swell guy! Imagine that!

+1^^. Why don't dollars get 'blamed' for illicit activity?

Eventually everyone will understand it's a law enforcement issue, not a currency issue.

This is how you fight Cryptolocker, Mickey:

http://malwaremustdie.blogspot.de/2013/11/tango-down-of-44-cryptolocker-cnc.html

(Hint: No need to change Bitcoin.)

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If you aren't whitelisted, the merchant can't accept you.

666 anyone?

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Send your "dirty" BTC to a non US based exchange, buy LTC/PPC/XPM/whatevercoin, send you whatevercoins to an other exchange, sell it for BTC, withdraw you shiny clean BTC, then Mike, the Foundation, and the Land of the Free can roll up their lists tightly and use it as the most convenient for them .

... If you work for a corporation, your choices are going to be different to the guy running black markets and doing p2p trades. You just both value different feature sets and the software optimised in a different way.

From this article: https://letstalkbitcoin.com/the-regulation-of-bitcoin/

Mike Hearn is a modern Trojan Horse and/or Ephialtis - remove him from core devs asap!

"If development is too centralized, with a small core infrastructure, then businesses will put real pressure to have features that destroy the integrity of the Bitcoin network. The excuse will be to protect themselves from liability. Self-censorship.

And what they demand does not have to be protocol changes. They will demand features in the software they use. Software which remains compatible with the network, but works against the interests of individuals, small businesses and the black market.

The possible malicious scenarios are endless. Stuff like p2p blacklists to create a ‘legitimate’ walled garden, or tracking technologies like large databases of IP addresses to triangulate where transactions came from. At the other end of the spectrum, is putting development effort into diversifying the ecosystem to protect against censorship and proxy relay nodes, anonymizing mixers, small privacy tweaks and other technologies. That’s where developers who believe in Bitcoin should devote time to. Corporations are powerful enough. To developers: serve your community."

You are highly uninformed, mixers don't help:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3634390