Topic: Spending and Receiving Stolen Coins. - page 2. (Read 8056 times)

+1

Yes, I can agree it is ok to try to trace the coins. People do it for many reasons. People even do it with IRL dollars: http://www.wheresgeorge.com/ I can also certainly understand wanting to get your coins back. You know, I once left my physical wallet on a bar once. I went back to get it and low and behold, it was gone. There was about 200 dollars in it plus all my id. Do you know who I blamed the most?  ME, I was an idiot. Did I want to get it back? Yes. Did I expect to get it back? No.

But what if I saw a guy exiting the bar with the wallet in his hand? Is he the thief? Or did he just call the police and was walking outside to give it to the officers?  (Just saying that 'self help' from an un-objective person usually has bad results.)

So, yes do all the tracing and tracking that you want. Try to find out what happened and prevent it from happening again.

There was someone here that lost 100 BTC from some unknown reason from his computer. He immediately tried tracking the coins but didn't seem to care how the coins where stolen. He deleted his drive and started fresh.

This doesn't mean I don't want to stop thieves. I don't want thieves getting away with theft. There are just two methodologies to stoping them.

1) Make it easy to track and retrieve the coins from thefts. (The unintended consequences of this will destroy the whole community)

2) Make it impossible for the thieves from stealing them in the first place. (Can't see a flaw in this one and the encrypted wallet is along this line)

You know what attracts me to BTC? The fact that I have Wallets that can't be stolen to a mathematical certainty. NO, virus can get them. Absolutely, no one can get them. Utilizing a shared secret, there are wallets that I can't get unless others agree to let me get them and they can't get them unless I agree. (Defeats the Rubber Hose Decryption Methods).

The whole point is don't keep BTC in a hot wallet or even on a computer connected to the internet that you can't afford to lose. Hell, don't even keep them on a computer that can get stolen.

Bitcoin is an almost perfect safe deposit box. Stop giving people the keys to the boxes.

Plus business that require a float, could certainly have an insurance fund for loss of the float. IF it takes 18K for a float, then have 18K in a cold wallet just incase.

Amen to that.

Quite, money is an information technology, and like all technologies is amoral.

Requiring bitcoins to have a moral status is ludicrous, and belies a fundamental misunderstanding of what money is. Best leave moral judgements up to the conscience of the thieves and the God who watches over all and don't place such an impossible requirement on bitcoin.

Where is frglr in all this drama, we need some graphs!

This is the coolest shit ever (Note: Thief in Red)-----------V

You won't need to taint coins for law enforcement to do this. all they need to do is trace the blockchain.

Isn't the person who committed the theft (or other crime) the one who's tainted, not the bitcoins? And what is a bitcoin but a record of a transaction? What would you expect to happen if someone stole your bitcoins? What if you had a fraction of a fraction of a tainted bitcoin in your wallet, among thousands of non-tainted coins, and law enforcement confiscated your entire wallet because it contained a tainted coin? Do you expect them to understand or care about the finer distinctions of bitcoin or monetary science?

Yes, the flaws are so immediately and glaringly obvious you almost have to consider ulterior motives may be involved whenever this is brought up.

Trace away. The blockchain is public.

But how exactly will the thief be positively identified? Is the intent to simply finger and prosecute the first person in the chain with an identifiable address who won't (or can't) give a "good" explanation as to how he wound up with "stolen" funds?

I can't believe there are prominent members of the Bitcoin community promoting this nonsense yet again.

This whole thing is moot, or even a can of worms too large to deal with, since we don't even know Bitcoinica had their coins stolen. So, for me, I'll start taking this talk seriously when the advocates of this "tainting" business give proof that coins were ever stolen in the first place.

But they know they can't.

Because Bitcoinica can't.

They can't prove that they themselves didn't just take the coins for whatever reason. They can't prove they aren't in collusion with the alleged thief. They can NEVER prove that they don't have the private key that the bulk of coins eventually gets sent to, to be stored away for 10 years and finally retrieved after this is long forgotten, and Bitcoin 2.0 has been developed to hide the source of a funds transfer.

That's not to say that no theft occurred. Nor is it to say that the alleged thief is guilty of no crime. And it's certainly not to say that asking money from some yokel claiming it's stolen has no moral implications.

But it's outright nonsense to take the position that anyone discovered to have bitcoins traceable back to a "theft" address needs to send them to whoever claimed they were stolen, or else suffer some consequence. If you take that position, you clearly don't realize what you're advocating.

Alright, how about a change in terminology?  Forget about the "tainted" coins, it's a disturbing idea with potentially disturbing consequences. Can we agree that it's okay for individuals to invest efforts into tracing allegedly stolen coins, simply for the sake of getting closer to identifying the thief?  If some day someone decides to actually report a theft (has this even ever happened in the history of BTC?), and this is taken seriously by the law enforcement and courts, wouldn't these tools prove useful?  Are there any problems with this idea?  The way I see it, victims of BTC theft have vested interest in defeating the (pseudo)anonymity of Bitcoin. That's all.

Currently 1 BTC can only be split into 100 million pieces.

More importantly, if a system is put in place to determine coins tainted and reclaim them from vendors and exchanges, what happens when BTC are declared 'illegal' buy governments or institutions?

They now have methods of taking the coins away.

As far as making untraceable coins, it is already being done. Where are all the Casascius coins?  Where are they recorded in the Blockchain when traded? Trading of wallet.dat(s) when properly secured by non-forgable methods will be huge. You don't even need to check on the internet for the casascius coins still being there. Anyone with a copy of the blockchain can do it.

Making coins of similar or better can be done by almost anyone. So there isn't even a central supplier of the coins.

And in reality all the blockchain does is show transfer of funds, it can't show the intent or purpose of the transfer. Is it a donation? a payment for legal services? a payment for illegal services? a kickstarter? a winning raffle?

Please make this 'tainted' business go away. It will harm the community. I would think that the people trying to enforce this 'tainted' business know the flaws to it. So, I tend to start thinking on why they are supporting it. It raises questions as to the reasons for their support of it.

I'm not supporting hacking by any means, nor do I support the idea of "tainted coins". It's not necessary. Why not trace all the coins that are known proceeds from illegal activities label them as "criminally active" and if any point the address can be traced to an individual, then assume they're guilty and let them try to prove their innocence.

I've always preferred the "assumed guilty until proven innocent" model myself. Work ok in medieval times, didn't it?

Seriously though, I do see this becoming a problem when bitcoin becomes large enough for law enforcement to take it seriously. It's not hard to trace coins. Especially with laundering, law enforcement types might just be happy to assume you're guilty even if the only thing you're guilty of is withdrawing coins from GLBSE. Making coins tainted won't stop this from occurring without agreement from not just all parties but from all bitcoin clients. And even then some would make it into the population before they're reported. And how do you report it? What level of evidence is required? What happens to the poor buggers that now find their 100btc are worthless?

See, you might not have that option. If you have used 1 address publicly or even privately ( the private person might make it public), they 'Anyone' could just send you coins. You don't have the option of refusing to accept them. The Blockchain accepts them on your behalf.    Now, you are in a position of proving you didn't know that you weren't expecting them.

i.e. YOU have been FRAMED for something you did not do. Try telling people that someone just gave them to you.

BTW: I have at times randomly just given coins to people without their knowledge that I was going to send them coins. This can be fun. It can mess with statistics, financial reports, reporting of losses and gains. I do it to try to get people to realize some fallacies in the accounting and use of addresses. Am I harming anyone? No, I think not. I'm just giving them BTC, it's not my fault that they have used faulty methods for accounting.

To my knowledge, none of the coins have been 'tainted'.

You do realize that 1 "tainted" BTC is actually 100,000,000 Million tainted coins if separated and sent properly.

It is your choice to have glass windows and doors that open with pocket sized keys.  Anyone can have a house built without windows, in fact it should be cheaper. 

It's your choice whether you want to make your virtual belongings accessible remotely through the Internet. Anyone has the capability to simply pull the plug, and totally secure their virtual belongings from being accessed through the Internet. This is not the case with your physical belongings.

Yes, if I expect you to believe my claims of that sort, I'll need to at least report the crime to the police and let you know what the details are.  And most of us are aware that falsely reporting a crime is, well, a punishable crime.


Yes, I was saying "knowingly."  People on IRC yesterday come to mind. They were even confirming that transactions "seemed legit" as they were receiving stolen coins. I agree that we don't know for sure these came from Bitcoinica hack, or that such hack has happened at all, but most of courts in this world would, I believe, conclude from the logs that the recepients believed the coins were stolen, and still provided their addresses.


Again yes, this is a problem. In my unqualified opinion, in most jurisdictions owners of Bitcoinica could require holders of stolen goods to return these to the rightful owner. These people can then sue the "Bitcoinica Hacker" for damages, although it probably wouldn't work: this person has not even deceived them regarding the nature of the merchandise: they knew it was stolen, and that they were not engageing in the transaction with the rightful owner.


Innocent victims will only be those who unknowingly accepted stolen coins - and perhaps they should look into a class-action lawsuit against the hacker. And no, I wouldn't know if I have some of the stolen coins in my wallet, but I do know that I wouldn't accept a donation of any kind from someone claiming to have stolen whatever is being donated.


Again, if the courts cannot prove (usually "beyond reasonable doubt") that you knew the goods were stolen, you are not subject to criminal prosecution.

They could have decided *not* to entrust their coins to a bucket shop that just had 40k BTC stolen from them through lax security practices two months ago. That would certainly have prevented it.



ha, +1 

This is true for both. The level of security implemented is 'usually' a direct correlation to the value of the item(s) being protected.

So if you leave your running Ferrari in Detroit unprotected, don't be surprised it is stolen. If you leave your running Ferrari in Detroit with a Tank protecting it, you might be surprised if it is stolen.