Topic: Should miners collude to steal funds from wallet confiscated by US government? - page 4. (Read 12919 times)

Thanks for explaining this to us Mr Dinosaur and welcome to the forum for delusional lunatics. I hope you can educate us more on how the world works.

Not every activity labeled ''illegal'' is morally bad. There were times when owning gold in North America was illegal. While you certainly could call owning gold illegal, you wouldn't call it morally wrong, would you?

Another example: it is morally wrong for you to kill in cases other then self-defense, but it is legal for you to kill if you a dressed in green costume with a sign ''US military'' or a blue costume with a sign ''police''.

Yet another example: it is morally wrong for you to steal someone's bitcoins, but it is legal for you to steal them if you wear a cap with FBI letters on it.

I hope you are getting differences between morality and legality.

Yes.
I wan't suggesting this was a good idea, just what a logical extension would be
Money gets passed around, once it has passed from the 'tainted' source to someone else, it makes no sense to continue to consider it tainted.
It is just money. If money ceases to be fungible, it erodes its value as money.
How could you trust accepting money from anyone, if later it could be declared tainted and unspendable just because of something they had done with it before it came into your possession?

Sort of like the way we burn huge piles of currency if we find out they've been involved in illegal activities?  Perhaps we should start doing that, too.  Just test every piece of currency for drug residue, and if it tests positive, we should burn it, because that dirty money can't be trusted.

(Hint:  Virtually every piece of currency in the U.S. is "tainted" with drug residue.)

And if Bitcoin is to become maintream, they will be more and more marginalised, and pushed out of the picture by people with more 'normal' approaches.
Bitcoin can either:
a) be a super-secret crypto-anarchist tool for conducting illegal deals and sticking one to the man, or
b) be the future of money transfer around the world
It can't be both.

Hmm. Seems like if Bitcoin does become mainstream, this is more likely to become:

The protocol of this new asset should envisage in cases when coins are linked to illegal activities like drug dealing:

a) a mechanism for tainting the stolen coins (if you are a moral human being you wouldn't deal with such tainted coins, you wouldn't buy them, their market price would be lower), or even
b) a mechanism for making the stolen coins unspendable (thus screwing the drug dealers - a crime should not pay!), or even
c) a mechanism for making the stolen coins retrievable by law enforcement (to remove the proceeds of crime).

Something in me screams "YEAH, take them!"

...but it wouldn't be a smart move. Wouldn't hurt the US government, but it would hurt Bitcoin.

You must be new here, because a ton of them really wish that was the case. As soon as you try to start a business, or even just deal with bitcoin in any significant way, you run into a ton of regulatory questions and issues, to the point that some of these people are actually leaving USA or actively blocking US customers from their sites, just so they can avoid dealing with those issues. Yes, right now we are all forced to interface with fiat, and submit to KYC/AML and all the other crap, but I'm pretty sure everyone who supports bitcoin wishes that won't be the case eventually.

Do you think that bitcoin should always be used in conjunction with fiat, and that bitcoin should be subject to AML/KYC and other financial regulations too?


Yep, you're new here. Those lunatics have supported bitcoin the most from the start, and are still it's biggest supporters (hint-hint, those lunatics include people pretty high up and well known in bitcoin businesses)


Businesses do want their finances and often inner workings to be anonymous, and customers want to be anonymous. Businesses also don't want to be forced to collect every little bit of information about their customers if they don't want to. And no one likes having to pay fees, taxes, or submit to costly and unneccesary regulatory requirements.


No, I think I know everything because I have high level degrees in finance, economics, and business, and have a ton of experience working in business finance, as well as a bit of experience running my own business, and also because I haave experience with virtual currencies and bitcoin. You think you know everything because, despite just recently discovering bitcoin, being as rightcheous as you are, believe you know better.


Ok, you claimed this three times now. Please explain to me how those bitcoins sitting in FBI computers are "evidence," or how they can be used to help prosecute DPR? If you can't, stop calling them "evidence."


My job is to count numbers and balance spreadsheets, not to talk politics or be a representative of whatever. Seriously, no one gives a crap what I think. Also, like I said, if I do lose it (and I do the very minimum required of me here), it won't bother me. I don't actually need the job here any more, and only keep it for the extra income and cheap health insurance.

Why?



Coins are coins, except some of them are tainted (by the will of the person who was robbed). I wouldn't willingly accept a payment with tainted coins. I would pay more for non-tainted coins (to have a clean conscious).



It would take satoshidice's developers a few hours to build in their service an option for punters not to accept tainted coins. Some would accept tainted coins, some would not.

Sounds like a terrible idea. If coins aren't coins aren't coins, then what happens if I go to, I don't know, satoshidice, and get paid back with the goddamn tainted coins?

The judgement system is not needed. In your client you would specify that if your name appears on Google with words like ''arrest, confiscation, etc.'' your coins get automatically tainted (unless you revoke it or something) or if you do not log into your client for more than 2 weeks then your co8ins get tainted or .... a mixture of user-specified conditions.



There are a lot of brainiacs in this forum. They can figure out the problems and find ways to mitigate them

This sounds like an oxymoron: stealing from a thief  


I have an idea for a new type of crypto-asset:

The protocol of this new asset should envisage in cases when coins get stolen / extorted by people doing business as ''governments'':

a) a mechanism for tainting the stolen coins (if you are a moral human being you wouldn't deal with such tainted coins, you wouldn't buy them, their market price would be lower), or even
b) a mechanism for making the stolen coins unspendable (thus screwing the thieves - a crime should not pay!), or even
c) a mechanism for making the stolen coins retrievable by the victim of the theft / extortion (in case the human that was attacked gets freed in some point in future).

Why?  It's been reported that they used blockchain.info wallet.  Even if that's incorrect and it's simply a cold storage address how are they keeping the private key.  One place?  Maybe a few high level agents have it?  How much of a trip would it be if the coins get moved because someone lost the key or just decided they need a personal retirement fund.

No need. Just find an example of a court case where seized money or things like cars and houses were presented in court as evidence of crime. I may be wrong, but that sounds ridiculous. At most, the prosecution might say, "We seized $10mil from suspect, which we suspected was drug money, and we have this other evidence to support that claim," but I don't think prosecutors have ever hauled millions of dollars into court to prove their point. Is stealing seized money from the FBI illegal? Of course! But I don't think they have a right to that money to begin with.


Luckily, my private conduct doesn't affect my job. If they do let me go for whatever reason (and I really hate my job here), it won't bother me. Though I suspect my department will collapse...  


Ironically, I think it's the other way around: things like government and FBI will become more and more irrelevant as Bitcoin and business becomes more and more anonymous, and government services beck,e easier to replace. The venture capitalist videos I've seen typically complain a lot about government and regulatory abuse, and can't wait to not have to interface with the fiat and regulatory system any more.

How do you prove ownership of a bitcoin account number? ( insert wharrblgarbl about private key here )

It's not a tangible thing. There's no door to open, no physical goods to steal. It's intangible.

If you have the private key, you own the coins.

Did you read my post? The evidence is in the blockchain, not in the address balance. And you can't tamper with the blockchain.


So do car manufacturers, alcohol and beer brewers, pharmaceutical companies, cleaning product manufacturers, etc. What's your point?


I heard the person wasn't even real. But regardless, what does that have to do with whether the money owned by his customers is in the FBI's hands? And what does it have to do with his customers' money?


sure. But unlike stealing money, where the transaction is traceable, all you have to do to get Bitcoin out is steal the private key, and broadcast it from anywhere. Also, HAHAHAHAHA, when was the last time the FBI, or any government security agency, returned anything they seized? They themselves claimed that they will simply liquidate the money.


1, doubt it, as speech is not crime, and no one cares, and 2, again, I'm not advocating tampering with evidence. Do you seriously believe that if those bitcoins were moved elsewhere that DPR will go free due to a mistrial?  


Since I don't know what you look like, and don't know whom to look out for, could you please stay away from every Bitcoin event instead?

If you're able to guess the combination to my safe and you take all my money is that theft?

What if you guess the password to my bank account?

If you guess my credit card number?

ok, so just a question.

Lets say someone guessed the private key of the Silkroad BTC stash and cleaned it out. Is it theft?

How can that theft be proven in law today?

If someone were able to randomly guess/combine enough bits to create a h264 of the next blockbuster movie without access to the original film, is that copyright infringement?

Not to mention the bitcoins you stole would be worthless.  If this were actually possible, bitcoin would be dead.

They were all later arrested and are now sitting in Guantanamo Bay.